Greater Mideast Roundup

As we teeter on the cusp of 2014, I realize that it’s been a while since I’ve commented on core Middle Eastern issues. So herewith a whirlwind and partial summary, not so much on what’s been happening lately, which anyone can read in the newspapers and the other information sources we have to hand, but on what it means. 

Libya:  Yesterday’s New York Times ran a Pulitzer-nomination scale feature by David Kirkpatrick on the September 2012 Benghazi episode. It’s based on interviews and apparently some painstaking analysis. While there are flaws in the story—of which more anon—it’s definitely worth reading if you care about this sort of thing.  The key conclusions (which ring true): Yes, that incendiary video made by a rightwing Copt did too play a role in the Libyan events as news of it seeped through from Cairo; no, the attack had nothing to do with al-Qaeda, but was locally inspired; and yes, U.S. intelligence failed because it focused overly much on al-Qaeda and ignored local dynamics, despite having a pretty large CIA and DIA presence on the ground; and yes, Ambassador Stevens and others had a deeply flawed understanding of how intelligible and pliable a post-Qaddafi Libya would be to American influence.

I was gratified to see this analysis because it vindicates points I made at the time and thereafter. (We bloggers welcome vindication.) Some readers took pleasure in pricking me with criticism after it seemed to be the case that the video had played no role in the Libya episode. Well, prick right back at you.

The analysis in the NYT is deficient on two major counts, however—not for what it says, but rather for what it leaves unsaid.  First, like all of its coverage (and not just its coverage), it fails to peel back the onion to March 2011, when the United States help start the war against Libya. It talks about how the Administration messed up on process issues close to the September 2012 incident, and how the Republicans got it wrong as well—all true; but it ignores the fact that none of this would have happened if we’d left Qaddafi alone in his sandy cage.

Second, if you read the account all the way through you’ll see that Kirkpatrick spends a lot of time talking about Ahmed abu Khatallah, who’s been discussed in this space many times. (You’ll even see that the NYT analysis states specifically that SOCOM had a shot at this guy, but the White House prevented the SOF guys from pulling the trigger at State Department behest, because we were still imagining that the Libya government, such as it is, could arrest this guy, and of course we didn’t want to humiliate or harm the government in the eyes of the Libyan people. I was very gratified to see this, because it’s exactly what I suggested had happened in an earlier, May 3, post.) But it also talks about other militia leaders, and gives accounts of what they were doing before, during and after the attack on the U.S. compound. If you read the account carefully, you’ll be struck as I was by the ambiguity and vacillation of these leaders’ statements and actions. But Kirkpatrick gives the reader no key to explain their behavior.

Alas, the words “Cyrenaica” and “tribe” never appear in Kirkpatrick’s article. These guys all knew each other, Kirkpatrick tells us, from being in prison together and then fighting together against the Qaddafi regime. What he never mentions is tribal affinities in Cyrenaica. These guys in Benghazi have been dealing with each other as representatives of sometimes allied, sometimes antagonistic tribes, clans and families for their whole lives. They calculate whom to help and whom to oppose based on these protracted relationships of balanced opposition, which are in one sense very stable but in another very fluid. I’m no expert in Libyan tribal networks, intermarriages, business and land-ownership relations and the rest, so I cannot reverse-engineer for you other militia leaders’ precise relationships to abu Khatallah as they existed on September 11, 2012. But that’s the right drill if you want to figure out allegiances and behavior at a moment like that.

Finally on this point, why does the American MSM almost never mention tribes, except occasionally as an afterthought, and never speak about how countries like Libya are organized socially, and how that affects their politics? There are so many examples of this that it cannot simply be a coincidence. This is not the place to go into detail, but it comes down, I think, to a form of political correctness that tacitly prohibits any mention of what might be taken even to imply that Libyans (or Yemenis or Syrians or Egyptians, or Pashtuns, or……) might in some way be pre-modern, as we understand the term. (Actually, they’re less aptly described as pre-modern than simply as different, but lowest-common-denominator Enlightenment universalism is very bad at acknowledging the dignity of difference.) That kind of appellation is considered just this side of racist in the higher etiquette of American Enlightenment liberalism, deeply dented, as it has been, by the nonsense of anti-“Orientalism” regnant now for more than a generation in academe. Yes, it was at university where our elite press reporters and their august editors learned this stuff.

As long as our elite press censors itself in this manner, an objective socio-political description of these (and other) countries will remain impossible, and a distorted understanding will inevitably feed misbegotten policy adventures like the Libya war. I would like to be able to assure you that what ails the academy and the press does not afflict the clear-eyed professionals at the CIA and the State Department and USAID and the NSC and the officer corps of the uniformed military. Yes, I would like to……but a lot of these guys went to those same universities.

Afghanistan: While yesterday’s NYT front page focused in on Libya, the Washington Post instead aimed its gaze at Afghanistan. A new NIE, we’re told, predicts a “grim future” after the U.S. withdrawal, especially so—and much faster—if we cannot manage to agree with Kabul on a follow-on security arrangement.

It sounds strange to say, maybe, but it’s actually refreshing to hear such pessimism from the intelligence community. I prefer clearheaded pessimism to goo-goo-eyed fantasy, which is mainly what the Obama Administration and U.S. military spokesmen have been feeding us lately. And indeed, the WP article cites several Administration sources, all anonymous, who think the intelligence community’s assessment is too dour.

Now, as I’ve pointed out before, optimism is inherent in government work of this sort. It’s your job to make the policy work, and if you don’t believe it can succeed, you can’t really do you job properly. That’s why, as they say in that old song, “the one who cares the most is always the last to know.” (Well, sure, the song is really about something a little less policy-oriented, but you get the idea.) Still, at some point the penny hits the bottom of the well and even the most optimistic toiler must acknowledge the bad news.

Actually, the NIE seems to be somewhat off point, as best I can tell from a declassified summary. In a sense, it’s not pessimistic enough, or rather it’s pessimistic for the wrong reasons. If you’re a loyal TAI reader, you already know this. The U.S. government still has not come to terms with why the Afghanistan “surge” failed: It failed, as Frances Brown brilliantly pointed out in the November/December 2012 issue, because of our own incoherent bureaucracy working at cross-purposes with itself. And as Pauline Baker argues in the current issue, it’s a mistake to look at Afghanistan though a counter-insurgency or counter-terror lens, as the NIE apparently does; we need instead to look at it through a failed-state lens, because that is what U.S. policy, from the Bonn conference on, has inadvertently created. When we pull the plug on this over-centralized, money-soaked monstrosity of a governance structure, one that was never suited to Afghan history, ethnography or experience, the whole flimsy whim of a would-be state will collapse in a heap.

I can barely wait to find out how the post-collapse narrative will go here in the United States.  The “who lost Afghanistan” story is destined to be a wild and wooly one, if earlier China and Vietnam and even Iraq episodes are any guide. Democrats and Republicans will blame each other. Civilian and military types will, too. We will blame the locals, and the locals will blame us—but they’ll be right. It will not occur to many Americans, least of all the people who were most deeply involved in the policy, that the foundational assumptions of the policy going in were simply wrong, and they were wrong partly because of a blinding political correctness that prevented us from appreciating the real contours of the society into which we were intervening.

Iran: Today’s news carries a report that the technical groups aiming to implement the P5+1/Iran agreement from November 24 are meeting again today in Geneva. This time the Iranian chef negotiator is optimistic that details will all get ironed out by early next year. This strikes a very different tone from the earlier sessions, in which the Iranians characterized themselves as pessimistic, and then staged a walkout ostensibly over U.S. actions (Executive and Legislative Branch actions] related to sanctions.

There are at least a half dozen ways to read these particular tea leaves. Maybe the Iranians tried to extract more concessions via a white-knuckle delay, and now they’ve changed their tune either because they succeeded (in ways not public) or because the Obama Administration held firm on the sanctions and the Iranians now know they can’t get any more cheapies from stock histrionics. Or maybe the political mood changed in Tehran. Whatever the case, it still strikes me as passing strange—and not at all a good idea—to have announced agreement to such flourishes on November 24 without having actually finished the negotiations. That disproportionately puts pressure on us, the open democratic society, to close the gap to get to agreement. Why do that, unless you’re desperately and incompetently looking for a bright and shining headline?

As to the agreement itself, assuming it can be implemented, I’m still ambivalent about it. Judging just by what is within the four corners of the text, the deal, if carried out, is probably more likely to lead to an Iranian weapon than not. Why? Because of a combination of two aspects: It allows enrichment on Iranian soil, spitting in the eye of seven UNSC resolutions, and it bears an expiration date. The Iranians can make lots of progress and then toss out any constrains on further progress when it suits them—unless we exert ourselves to pay for the same horse a second, third, and fourth time over.

The only way such a flawed deal can be remedied is by recourse to developments outside the four corners of the text. If the agreement presages a real change of Iranian attitudes, and is a harbinger of a useful if tense normalization of relations with the United States, then the benefits of major changes in the context of the deal could possibly trump the deficiencies of the deal.

That, of course, remains very much to be seen. If and when it is ever seen, it will have to involve a dissolution of the false and untenable divide between the nuclear-program business and all the rest of Iran’s mischief-making in and beyond the region. Normalization, if we ever get close to that with Iran, will have to face the whole range of issues on which we mutually engage. How likely this that? There’s no way to know, but diplomatic history is not entirely bereft of rapprochements.

Now, in the give-and-take that would inevitably be required to produce a U.S.-Iranian rapprochement would Sunni Arab interests suffer? Yes, but so what (from a U.S. interests point of view)? Would Israeli interests suffer? Maybe but not necessarily: Remember, Iran, along with Turkey and Ethiopia, were part of Ben Gurion’s original periphery strategy. The Iranian Revolution arguably upset Israeli strategic well being even more than it did that of the United States. It may take a generation, and the road may be very rocky and perilous, but the idea of an eventual normalization of Israeli-Iranian relations, pioneered, so to speak, by the United States, should not be dismissed out of hand. Stranger things, after all, have happened (Nixon went to China, Sadat went to Jerusalem…..). So we wait, we watch and, of course, we worry.

So do I want these technical discussions to succeed, thus allowing the deal to begin actual implementation? Or would I prefer them to fail? If they succeed, we get to find out if there’s a future without some kind of war over this issue. If they don’t, the chances of some kind of kinetic outcome go way up. So I hope they succeed.

Egypt: A TAI colleague sent me a buzzfeed article the other day featuring an unnamed U.S. diplomat complaining that the Obama Administration doesn’t have an Egypt policy. The gist was that day by day the Egyptian government is ramping up its authoritarian muscle, including the formal designation of the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization, while we in Washington go merrily on repeating the empty mantra that the “restoration” of Egyptian democracy is on track. The “road map” is being traversed, the State Department insists. Oh, where have we heard that one before?

The unnamed diplomat also complained that the terrific ideas of U.S. diplomats expert in Egypt and the Middle East are not being heard in the Oval Office—the State Department in Washington isn’t letting them through to the NSC, and/or the NSC staff isn’t letting them through to Susan Rice and the President. Well, there’s another old story for you.  Maybe these diplomats have good ideas, and just as likely they don’t. But they certainly think that “their” part of the world is critical like no other. Again, that’s part of the job in a way. And it’s so easy to complain anonymously to an omnivorous gossip-seeking press. In recent decades that’s become part of the job, unfortunately.

And it’s true: Since pointlessly sequestering a smidgen of Egypt’s military aid some months ago, the Administration has kept pretty quiet about Egypt. Every once in a while Secretary Kerry will make some preposterous remark about how good things are going, amid a feckless verbal wrist-slap here and there, but that’s about it. What’s going on here? Do we really not have a policy?

We might not.  One can easily adduce an argument that between the President’s lack of interest, the Secretary of State’s obsession with other Middle Eastern portfolios, and the deterioration of the policy process under Susan Rice (compared with Tom Donnilon), a combination of apathy, distraction and incoherence has resulted in a “policy” so removed from reality that it’s either no policy at all (if you’re in a generous mood) or an out-and-out embarrassment (if you’re not).

Adding weight to this interpretation is an assumption, taken on by some, that the President is operating under a theory of the case in foreign policy that sees too much U.S. activism as preventing the coalescence of a natural ordered balance in the world’s regions. Our interests, while real, are not vital in Egypt or anywhere else in the greater Middle East, and a new regional balance can take care of them well enough, if only we stop acting like a bunch of control freaks.

Maybe. But there is another way to think about this. Maybe the President, the man who assiduously avoided the “c”-word back in early July, is not entirely bent out of shape that General al-Sisi is running the show. We may think al-Sisi unwise for being so illiberal as to bring on or worsen the problems he seeks to outrun, but President Obama, however mysteriously inconsistent he has been on these matters, has never seemed to me at heart to be a dyed-in-the-wool democracy promoter. Maybe, just possibly, his evocation of Reinhold Niebuhr wasn’t entirely a speechwriter’s flourish.

President Obama seems instead to be a semi-detached photo-opportunist on these matters. So when the Egyptian generals decided to throw Mubarak & Son over the side, we were there for the photo op. When it looked like Morsi was going to be elected president, we were close by for that photo op, too. When about a year later “the people” routed Morsi, conveniently using the Egyptian Army to do so, we refused to call it a coup, and the President sent his Secretary of State to Cairo pretty soon for another photo-op.  (Same in Syria, by the way: When it looked like Assad was a goner, Obama called for his fall; when he looked like he was not a goner, we made a deal with him through the Russians. The cameras whirred, click, click, click.) Maybe the best way to describe this is postmodern foreign policy realism: flip or flop, juke or jive, as the moment demands, all the while having faith that no one will remember what happened or what was said two weeks ago anyhow.

Ah, but there’s a bit more to a hypothetical policy of let-Sisi-be-Sisi than that. We are in one helluva spat with the Saudis, and it concerns Egypt as much as it does Syria and Iran. Our influence in Egypt has been outbid by the Saudis, and even as distracted a White House as this one has to understand that by now. For all the enthusiasm in some quarters for fracking, it’ll be a long time before Saudi energy policy becomes a trivial concern for us, so this is one of those relationships any President has to pay attention to, at least episodically. Having “no policy” toward Egypt—which means in practice having no harping and futile pro-democracy policy—is therefore conducive to ameliorating the deterioration of the relationship with Riyadh. That’s not no policy. It’s just a policy some State Department Arabists either don’t understand or don’t like.

So do we have no policy toward Egypt or do we have a quiet, minimalist policy the less spoken about publicly the better, for the time being at least? Unfortunately, the President does not confide in me, so I’m really not sure. I’d like to think that the folks over in the NSC machine room know what they’re doing. Let me go on thinking that for a while, please.

Syria: Today’s news also carries new information on the effort to implement the CW deal. When I left off talking about this, back on December 2, I was mystified by the Administration’s decision to detox 1,000 tons of mostly obsolete chemical gunk aboard U.S. Navy ships, since no other government would agree to do the job on land. Did we even have such a capability, I wondered? (I know a fair bit about the U.S. Navy for a civilian, having ship-ridden two vessels in international waters, and I knew of no such capability.) Off whose littoral would we dare do this? How would we dispose of the “safe” gunk left over? What would this cost and who and how would we pay for it and, above all, why, after all, were we doing the Syrian regime such a favor anyway—essentially offering ourselves up as hazmat garbage collectors to a bunch of mass murderers?   

So what’s the news? Not an ounce of Syria’s CW has yet been moved since September 26, when the deal was inked. Not one atom even—and the deadline to get this stuff out of there is tomorrow. The Russians have reportedly supplied armored vehicles for the trip to Tartus, in Latakia province, and Norwegian and Danish ships are on hand to transport the first 20 tons to a U.S. Navy vessel anchored in Italy. There is also reportedly a naval escort ready to escort these ships courtesy of Norway, Denmark and, I swear this is what I read, China.

So far there is no information on what U.S. Navy ship this is and how it is decked out. There is no information on where this operation is going to take place. There is no information on what, if anything, we’ve told the Italians. If environmental studies have been done, there is no mention of them. Where will the resultant “safe” gunk go? Who’s paying, how much, out of what budget? Zero information about any of that, at least that I’ve seen so far. Does the press think these questions are too boring to bother with? Just wondering.

Meanwhile, insofar as there is any other news about Syria—aside from more gruesome atrocities or signs that civil war is spreading into Lebanon—it’s all about Geneva. Unless the rebels decide to give up—and who could blame them at this point, really, given how we and others have diddled them?—Geneva will accomplish nothing. It will only lead, very predictably, to more dead bodies as all sides try to improve their battlefield situation in advance of the conclave. Indeed, it’s already doing that. A lot of clueless American liberals may not understand that diplomacy cannot achieve things that reality outside the negotiating room will not abet, but no one involved in the Syrian civil war is a liberal, so they’re real clear on the relationship.

If the rebels do give up and Geneva produces some sort of transition that isn’t actually a transition to anything so long as Bashir al-Assad remains in power, then the entire region will read the result as a win for Iran, Russia and bestial-level brutality, and as a loss for the United States. And the U.S. government should agree to be complicit in such an outcome because……why? Well, no one ever claimed that garbage collectors are, in the main, all that bright.

Tunisia: Finally some good news, though not good news easy to find in the American MSM.  Not too many days ago the Ennahda government fell and was replaced by a non-Islamist coalition led by Mehdi Joma’a, a former Industry Minister in the previous government—a technocrat, in other words. This is the first time an actually ruling Islamist government (Ennahda is very roughly the Tunisian equivalent of the Muslim Brotherhood, but only very roughly) was voted out of office and left power without notable incident. Only in Tunisia, probably, a country that is truly sui generis in the Arab world (but then they all are, each in their own ways), for reasons I commented on in earlier posts.

So one TAI reader, someone who tries to follow Tunisia closely for professional reasons, contacted me to express puzzlement at the very bland comments of the U.S. Ambassador in Tunis over this epochal event. The Ambassador, Jake Walles, an FSO pro, did not have a lot to say, really. He wasn’t especially upbeat; he just remarked that the U.S. government supports the democratic process in Tunisia and otherwise we do not pick or play favorites. And then the Ambassador went off to have lunch, or whatever it is that Ambassadors do in the middle of the day in places like Tunis. I think my interlocutor was hoping for something a little more energetically anti-Islamist.

My response to him was that I found Ambassador Walles's remarks unexceptional and wise. The only problem, I explained, was that there are too many possible ways to explain them.

First way: We and the Europeans (read: the French and, possibly, the aspiring Italians) have been instrumental in trying to put a non-Islamist government together that will be stable and keep the Ennahda bastards out of power, but because of widespread suspicions in Tunisia that we did precisely that, we want to distance ourselves in public lest we create gratuitous trouble for the new guys.

Second way: It is standard trope to support the democratic process but stay away from partisan leanings, because that is the right thing to do and also the tactically most shrewd thing to do in situations where you never know who'll be on top two weeks from now. 

Third way: We really support the MB types in Tunis, because of some theory that democratization for the long run has to run through the "moderate" Islamists, a theory that makes the least possible amount of sense in Tunisia (and not a whole lot of sense elsewhere, just by the by).

Fourth way: The Ambassador stayed bland because he failed to receive instructions to do otherwise—because there's disagreement in Washington on the third way, or because it was the holidays and no one was around to give instructions. (Don't laugh; I’ve seen exactly such a thing happen before my very own eyes.) 

Fifth way: The Ambassador is enthralled with a classical definition of a diplomat—“Someone who thinks twice about saying nothing”—and wants to be the quip’s new poster child.

Seriously, I think that somewhere between the second and the fourth ways we probably have our explanation.

So, Libya, Afghanistan, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia—and I mentioned in passing Lebanon, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and even Israel. Yes, even Israel. Now watch: Something like 75 percent of all the comments made on this post will be about Israel. Oh, that Chosen People….

"It's Money That Matters"?

Dec. 12:

Icouldn’t help chuckling this morning over the announcement that Stanley Fischer seems to a shoo-in to become Vice-Chairman of the Federal Reserve once Janet Yellen finally takes over the reigns from Ben Bernanke. The chuckle comes from knowing what the fringe anti-Semitic wild-man blogs and websites like JewWatch and so many others will say about it. (They probably already have.) Without having looked to find out yet, I could easily make predictions you could take to the bank, so to speak, about the line they will take, all organized around the unshakable conviction that Jewish money secretly controls the entire world. This will be put in portentously hushed Protocols-type language (often misspelled).

But what’s the point? This stuff is silly, and we all have better things to do. And yet there is something especially “out-there”, more evocative of Jewcentric exaggerations than usual, about Fischer and his likely new role.

Fischer, as those familiar with the biographies of this province of American public policy know, is a towering figure. As today’s newspaper summaries attest, he taught for many years at MIT and has had as his students some of the most prominent luminaries in the field of applied economic and finance today: Bernanke himself most famously, but also Mario Draghi, Greg Mankiew, Oliver Blanchard and many, many others. Not all of these folks are Jewish, and some of them aren’t even Americans; but in the addled minds of the conspiracy theorists, that just thickens the plot from soup to stew.

Why is Fischer’s elevation more Jewcentrically “out-there”? Because more than Bernanke, Greenspan, Volcker and others who came before at the Fed, Fischer is definitely more of a “wandering” type, and more vividly a Zionist, too. He was born in Northern Rhodesia (Zambia today), then lived in regular old Rhodesia as a child (Zimbabwe today). As a kid he was a member of Habonim, spent time on an Israeli kibbutz studying language in an ulpan, and considered going to Hebrew University (from whence he received an honorary doctorate in 2006). Born in 1943, Fischer did not become a U.S. citizen until 1976. Yet for eight years long after gaining U.S. citizenship he served as head of the Bank of Israel. More, he’s a member of the Bilderberg Group, which hangs out a lot in St. Moritz. (FYI, JewWatch dudes, that’s in Switzerland.) And he has travelled the globe extensively, as well, as a high-level employee of both the IMF and the World Bank. To a garden-variety insular American bigot, this is way, way too international, and much too uber-Jew, for comfort.

There’s even more to raise the temperature of the already fevered. According to the New York Times article on the Fischer appointment, President Obama is likely to replace a few other of the statutory seven members of the Fed’s Board of Governors before his term ends. Only one prospective new member is mentioned: Lael Brainerd, a former Treasury Department Undersecretary who used to work at Brookings. She is married (I’m assuming is still married) to Kurt Campbell, who served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asia during Obama’s first term. Yes, she is Jewish.

Now, if Janet Yellen had not been tapped by the President to replace Bernanke, Larry Summers might have been. He is Jewish, too. Summers might have taken counsel from his friend and associate, former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin. Jewish, of course. Summers would thus have had at least something in common with Jack Lew, the current Treasury Secretary, who belongs to an Orthodox synagogue. One can go on, and others no doubt will—as I have predicted. But what, after all, does any of this actually mean?

Well, no one knows for sure, but a lot of people have offered theories or pieces of theories. I reviewed many of these in Jewcentricity. Jerry Z. Muller does so in a 2010 book devoted entirely to the matter, Capitalism and the Jews. Muller’s description of the late-19th century debate in Germany involving Georg Simmel, Max Weber and Werner Sombart alone is worth the price of admission. And I could list about thirty other serious books that have taken a swing at the question if I wished. This is not the place to go into all this, and there is plenty to go into. So suffice it to make just two fairly simple points.

First, other minority and/or diasporic trading-based communities aside from Jews have been just as good at capitalism, finance and banking (Huguenots, Chinese, Lebanese, Omanis, Greeks, Armenians, Gujaratis, etc.) So there’s nothing “genetic” or “blood”-driven going on here. It was by happenstance, not blood, that Jews in Europe had possession of “modern” numerals, and with them the concept of “zero”It was by happenstance, not blood, that Jews in Europe had possession of “modern” numerals, and with them the concept of “zero”, thanks to the Spanish-Moorish golden age centered in Córdoba, long before their gentile associates—and what a huge advantage it provided for keeping sales and inventory records, devising joint-stock and insurance arrangements, planning investments and so forth. (Try doing a division problem with Roman numerals and you will soon see why.) Jews were perfect choices to be customs agents for both the Italian city-states and for various Ottoman provinces of the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, at the dawn of modern capitalism, in part because they could use Hebrew script to keep records and transaction details in confidence. Examples of these mixtures of happenstance and aptitude could be multiplied for hours.

But second, as to aptitude, being good at this stuff, whether as traders in yesteryear or finance wizards in modern contemporary times, requires a certain facility with a particular class of abstractions, of which math is the core. Not all Jews, but enough of them, are particularly good at this sort of thing. There is ample empirical psychometric evidence for this (I mention some of it in Jewcentricity). So maybe some aspect of epigenetics is in play here, by which I mean a process, not well understood, that yokes culturally learned distillations to child-rearing methods to produce a particular intellectual inheritance and, if properly nurtured educationally, facility. I will not speculate further, at least not here.

Then, not to be overlooked, there is a huge yin-yang factor of reputational dynamics involved here. For reasons also too complex and arcane to go into, a lot of powerful non-Jewish leadersthink Jews are especially adept at this kind of thing (in this country think Bernard Baruch, Henry Morgenthau, even Judah P. Benjamin from an earlier time, and I could go on…), and so they end up magnifying the cumulative optic by repeatedly appointing Jews to do money-related stuff. We then get a kind of rolling, self-fulfilling momentum: Jews have a knack for this stuff, non-Jews let them demonstrate it, which increases the attraction of smart Jews for this line of study and work, which produces more capable candidates relative to other groups, which increases the odds that non-Jews will want to hire up their skills, and so merrily on and on we go.

The bottom line here (pun entirely intended) is that conspiracy mongering anti-Semites do not actually have to make up all their data about Jews and finance capitalism. They make up plenty, to be sure, but there is also for sure plenty of data available for real. Stanley Fischer is just the most recent significant case, or datum, in point.

Just one final note on this. According to pretty much all accounts, Fischer did an excellent job as director of the Bank of Israel. This was a big deal in a small place. The joke in Israel, before Fischer fixed the mess he inherited, was that if Jews are so good as bankers and advisers at handling other people’s money, how come they can’t handle their own, in their own reborn sovereign homeland? It used to be funny, but thanks to Fischer, and people like Bernie Madoff on the other end, that joke, reeking of Jewcentricity as it did, doesn’t work like it used to. Fine with me but, alas, this won’t impress the conspiracy theorists. They will ever believe when it comes to supposed world Jewish conspiracies that, to phrase it in the fairly well-known song-title of Randy Newman, “It’s Money That Matters.” (Yes, he’s Jewish, too.)

Well-Watered

Today’s front page Washington Post article by William Booth and Howard Schneider on yesterday’s Israeli-Jordanian-Palestinian Red-Dead water deal signing here in Washington sent me reeling. It sent me reeling back in time because this is a piece of an issue about which I wrote not one but three books back in the day. And it sent me reeling because I had no idea this deal was in the works. Just goes to show how out of circulation I’ve been lately when it comes to the nitty-gritty of esoteric-technical but also highly politically relevant secret negotiations.

First, some basic details in case you have not seen the article. Evidently, the two governments (Israel’s and Jordan’s), along with one highly ambiguous semi-government (the Palestinian Authority’s), agreed in principle to build a massive hydrology project relevant to the Dead Sea. The Red-Dead project will bring water from the Red Sea via a pipeline to the Dead Sea, and in the process generate electricity from the falling liquid to be used to desalinate some of the water for agricultural and drinking purposes.

The agreement exists only in principle thus far. (This seems to be a growing habit lately, judging by the much more fraught Iran and Syria portfolios.) The route of the pipeline is not yet set, and setting it could be sensitive between Israel and Jordan (but it would not involve any of the West Bank and hence the Palestinians—just look at a map and you’ll see why). Nor have technical details been worked out in order to prepare requests for proposals from the companies that would bid on the work. Israeli companies, including government-owned ones like Mekorot, would surely play a big role, and so would scientists and their various boutique engineering business associated with the Weizmann Institute and the Technion, because those are the places that have the most advanced desalinization technologies. Neither Jordan nor certainly the Palestinians have scientific-technical capabilities on that scale, but they will need to be and should be involved in various phases of the construction and subsequent maintenance. The heavy lifting during construction will no doubt be the purview of U.S., European and other big companies, maybe from China or India or Turkey. Billions of dollars worth of contracts are soon to be at stake (let’s hope, anyway).

This is basically a good thing both for hydrological reasons and for political ones. Some background is in order here if you really want to understand what’s going on, since nearly all of it is missing from the WP article. Let me make just three points, and I will try to keep them short.

First, about forty years ago or so a small cottage industry of journalists and area specialists sprung up to discuss the relationship between functional problems like water scarcity in the region with political issues. This was not a new subject even at the time; it went all the way back to the Johnston Plan during the Eisenhower Administration, and how it intersected with the then top secret U.S.-UK Alpha initiative (but never mind that for now). But in the 1970s and dripping into the 1980s, this topic basically broke down into two camps: those who predicted water wars, and made the silly claim that the 1967 War and other Arab-Israeli wars had had water issues at their root; and those who predicted that water needs would conduce to cooperation and even peace. It was the usual stuff—glass half empty pessimists versus glass half full optimists.

My contribution to this debate and to this literature, in a 1992 book entitled Israel and Jordan in the Shadow of War: Functional Ties and Futile Diplomacy in a Small Place, was to douse both camps in cold water.  The political impact of water issues, I argued, resembled the shape water takes in any holding basin. So if the political relations at hand are basically friendly, or are trying to be, working on common functional challenges like water stress will support that positive relationship. On the other hand, if the political relationships are conflictual, water disputes would most like make them worse. This, I suggested, was true in the Middle East, and it was true elsewhere as well when it came to the intersection of hydrology and high politics.

The moral of the story: Functional issues could not drive high politics where they otherwise were not wont to go, but they could speed high politics one way or the other to their destinations, whether peace and cooperation or war and mutual nihilism. Thus the fact that Israel and Jordan had cooperated quietly for years on water issues, aided discreetly by the United States, both with regard to dividing the waters of the northern Jordan and Yarmuk, and with regard to mining potash and other minerals at the Dead Sea, meant that the political relationship had potential to improve. It showed that the relationship was mixed: positive because of the cooperation, and not as positive as it might be as signaled by the need for secrecy. And in the October 1994 peace treaty between Israel and Jordan, which was enabled politically by the September 1993 Oslo Accords, that turned out to be the case. Q.E.D.

The fact that Israel and the Palestinians still maintain a basically conflictual relationship suggests that this water deal will not fundamentally change that—which does not mean that the PA’s association with the arrangement has no political significance. It has plenty. It signals that the PA can negotiate successfully with Israel (and Jordan) when it really wants to. It signals Palestinians that the PA can do things that can improve their lives, the implicit suggestion being that Hamas cannot—or just won’t. It promises a huge public works project that will generate lots of jobs. It also seems to suggest that U.S. mediation these days is not entirely futile. All that is to the good. And it means that if the Palestinians decide to summon their courage to make an the historic decision to make peace with Israel, functional cooperation will support that determination just as it did in the Israeli-Jordanian case.

Second, the WP article says that the deal has been a long time in the making. Now there’s an understatement for you. Already in the mid-1980s discussions had ensued about how to save the Dead Sea, which was shrinking significantly by then thanks mainly to the operation of the Israeli National Water Carrier, which opened for business in 1964, and the Jordanian East Ghor (Abdallah) Canal. Two plans were proposed and kicked about at the time: Med-Dead and Red-Dead.

Bringing water across Israel from the Med to the Dead Sea seemed the better idea for technical reasons. It was a shorter distance to build a pipeline than from Aqaba-Eilat all the way up the Arava to the southern tip of the Dead Sea. The dropoff was steeper, too, meaning more electricity could be produced, the better to desalinate more water. Because of these factors, the economics seemed more propitious—smaller upfront investment, bigger results.

But alas, the Med-Dead idea could be accomplished entirely on Israeli soil, and thus would have less of a political impact, and therefore would also probably be harder to finance. The Red-Dead idea, while technically harder and economically less attractive in a narrow sense, could far more easily attract World Bank and other international support, on the basis of the functionalist theory that cooperation would conduce to peace. That was the thinking. After the Madrid Summit in 1991, one of the multinational support groups was about water. After the Oslo Accords in September 1993, one of the Israeli-Palestinian working groups was about water. And during the negotiations that led to the Israeli-Jordanian Peace Treaty of October 1994, a lot of discussion hinged on water-related issues.

So, in light of all this, a lot of people privy to these discussion some twenty years ago were optimistic that, with the Israeli-Palestinian relationship changed and an Israeli-Jordanian peace treaty therefore within sight, an agreement would soon be forthcoming and the danged Red-Dead thing would get planned, financed and built. I remember a long conversation I had at the time, in 1992 or 1993 it was, in Jerusalem with Elyakim Rubinstein, who was then Israel’s chief water negotiator and had been Israel’s secret liaison to Jordan for many years concerning water issues. We both thought things would soon pick up speed.

The U.S. Government was involved as well: Rich Armitage had become a special secret State Department envoy back in 1989-90 to defuse tension over a Syrian stratagem to build the so-called Unity Dam with Jordan on the Yarmuk (this is way, way too complicated to detail here), and he stayed current with these issues for some years thereafter. In the 1993-94 period the relevant bureaucracies were teed up and ready to roll, too—State, Commerce, OPIC, the TVA and some of the national labs, and others not-to-be-named here besides. So the planets were lined up……and then nothing happened.

Why? Long sad story about standard-issue political shortsightedness and plain stuidity, not for telling now.

Third and last, as the WP article points out, this project will only slow the shrinkage of the Dead Sea, not stop it. (I’ll not bore you with numbers you can easily look up yourself.) To stabilize the Dead Sea at reasonable levels, two things have to happen.

There needs to be another “century flood” soon.  Pray for rain, folks, lots of it.

And Israel and Jordan must find technological fixes to deal with the water problem they share, and stop off-taking so much water from the Jordan and the Yarmuk. That causes other problems anyway, like the increasing salinity and shrinkage, as well, of the Sea of Galilee.

Desalination is the main way to do this, and the technology has made great strides over the past twenty years. But the problem has always been and still is one of cost. Israel and Jordan both subsidize water to farmers at prices wildly below marginal replacement costs. Agriculture lobbies are preternaturally powerful the world over, and the Middle East is no exception. So that makes the delta between river and aquifer water on the one hand and desalinated water on the other much larger than it otherwise would be. In addition, better conservation (more and better drip-irrigation, more gray water systems, and so forth) and even new technology (like high-tech bubble barges) for purposes of importing drinking water from Turkey, would help a lot. Of course, these elements of a solution would be enhanced to the extent that the real marginal cost of water is allowed to rise.

Finally, I can’t resist  noting that, at the very end of WP article, there is mention of the fact that some local environmentalists are opposed to the idea. They worry that briny water brought from the Red Sea might have “detrimental affects” on the Dead Sea.

Detrimental affects on the Dead Sea?!

The Dead Sea, boys and girls, (called Yam Ha-Melakh, or Salt Sea in Hebrew, and Bahr Lut, or Sea of Lot in Arabic), is, well, dead. Nothing lives in it, not even any species of stickleback. It is very, very salty (and that’s not all—just taste a tablespoon of it and you’ll soon see what I mean). What living things, what species of anything, could possibly be harmed by bringing Red Sea water into the Dead Sea? I suppose that the mineral balance of the lake might be affected if enough less-salty water were mixed in, and that eventually might have some impact on the mining industries of Israel and Jordan in, oh, about five hundred years.

So does that mean that some environmentalists now put the pristine character of the Dead Sea’s incapacity to support any life forms whatsoever above increasingly desperate human needs for fresh water? If it does, well, there I go reeling again.

Diplomacy Update

This morning brings news, clipped news thus far so perhaps not wholly accurate, that the U.S. government has taken responsibility for destroying Syrian chemical arms stocks—since, predictably, no other country could be found to agree to undertake the toxic task. That means, I’m assuming, that the U.S. government will also foot the bill. I’ve heard that we intend to perform these operations on ships at sea.  The mind boggles.

As noted in previous posts, most of the roughly 1,000 tons of Syria’s CW stocks are obsolete, which does not mean denatured and safe. It means they have been superseded by better munitions. Way more than 90 percent of Syria’s stocks are militarily superfluous and useless—but very expensive to dispose of. These are the stocks mainly in the declared sites, not in the 5 or 6 undeclared sites; that’s where the “good stuff” is.

Syria has never built any such disposal facilities. In the past, its leaders probably counted on the USSR, and later Russia, to manage this problem for them, since that is where the program and the stocks mostly came from (even by indirection, since there is some reason to think that some Iraqi stocks were transferred to Syria, likely through Russian aegis, during the lead-up to the March 2003 war). So thanks to the latest juke of the Administration’s juke-and-jive ad hoc diplomacy, we get stuck with the job and the bill, and of course the civil war itself goes gruesomely on, with all the stakes involved, notwithstanding this diplomatic “success.”

How long will this take and how much will it cost? No one can possibly know. To my knowledge, we have never tried to neuter large stocks of CW at sea. I would be surprised if we already had sea-borne facilities—physical and trained personnel—sufficient to do this. So any cost estimate, or time estimate, would be a guess. Is Congress going to be asked to approve more money for this operation, or is the cost going to be ripped from existing O&M budgets—presumably mostly from the Navy’s O&M budget? What about the environmental risks involved in a sea-based operation? Has anyone carefully studied this? (I doubt it.)  Where at sea are we going to do this—in other words, nearest which nations’ littorals? In the Med? In the Atlantic? Could that be a sensitive decision? I can’t imagine that it wouldn’t be.

Moral of the story? Well, one way to put it goes like this: If you impulsively or desperately jump off the lee shore with enough momentum to carry you from exposed rock to rock, you’d better keep moving if you don’t want to fall into the drink. And you better hope those rocks keep appearing within leaping distance until you reach the windward shore, because the more jumps you take the deeper the water’s going to be if you do fall in.

Now Iran. When I wrote about the November 24 deal on November 25, I made a faulty assumption about timing issues.  Sorry.  I assumed that with the P5+1 and Iranian government signatures, the deal went into effect—just as Cold War-era agreements did. Those old agreements were never signed until all technical issues had been resolved, even if sometimes they were not really resolved so much as papered over with unilateral “agreed statements” written into indices and sidebars. (Those who used to be in this business will remember well what I am referring to.) So I thought the interim accord would expire on May 24, 2014 and the aspirational one-year final accord completion date referred to November 24, 2014. Silly me.

I first became aware of my error when a colleague pointed out an astute question asked of State Department spokesperson Jan Psaki a few days later. Psaki for the first time, to my knowledge, acknowledged that the accord would not enter into effect until certain technical discussions had been completed. “Aw, oh!”, my brain involuntarily offered my consciousness. I know the model whereby the sherpas, technical and otherwise, bring the principals to the summit in order to toss ink on paper, but I never before heard of a model wherein the ink stays wet until the sherpas do their jobs post hoc. Gotta love all this change…….

So, so what? Well, in a Reuters dispatch dated 4:30 AM yesterday, we find out “so what.” It seems that Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi said in a television interview that Tehran considered the November 24 deal not yet legally binding and Iran had the right to undo it if the Western powers failed to hold up their end of the bargain. “The moment we feel that the opposite side is not meeting its obligations or its actions fall short, we will revert to our previous position and cease the process”, the Iranian news agency Fars quoted Araqchi as saying. He added: “We are in no way optimistic about the other side—we are pessimistic—and we have told them that we cannot trust you.” The Reuters dispatch then noted that an unnamed senior Western diplomat described the implementation phase of the deal, slated to start next week in Geneva, as “extremely complex and difficult.”

What does this tell us? Does it mean that internal Iranian dynamics have shifted in the past week or so, so that the Supreme Leader has had a change of heart about proceeding with the deal? Does it mean that the President and Secretary of State misled us about all this, claiming to have in hand a done deal when in fact many of the tough but critical details had not been locked down?  It’s true that Obama and Kerry did not make outlandish Pollyannish claims about the deal as did some others, but where was any specific statement from either of them or their spokesmen about the need for technical talks to come in order to bring the agreement into force?  I sure didn’t hear one.

Dean Acheson once said, without a hint of irony, that “things are not always as they seem, but sometimes they are.” Well, here is a case—two cases, actually—where, depending on your perspective, both of Acheson’s possibilities are true simultaneously! These deals concerning Syria and Iran were evidently not what they seemed, unless you’d already become inured to this Administration’s amateur-hour grasp of policy process, in which case they were.  One can only wonder with anxious amazement what comes next.