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.


The Latest News from the Muddled East

August 26m 2014:

In a post penned on July 29, after a particularly noxious display of U.S. diplomatic malpractice related to the still-persisting Gaza War, I wrote that, “when the U.S. government loses the ability to influence Israel, those Arab parties that want something to do with Israel—but not too much in public—lose interest in Washington. Thus ditto U.S. influence in Cairo and Riyadh, and probably in Amman and Ramallah, too.” Clearly, I should have added Abu Dhabi, because today’s news that the United Arab Emirates and Egypt teamed up to bomb elements of a Qatari-supported Islamist militia in Tripoli—without first even informing the U.S. government—proves the case almost beyond any fiction I might have invented.

If more proof were needed, Mahmud Abbas announced yesterday that a new PLO initiative designed, he said, not to make war but to save the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, would be soon forthcoming despite the fact that the United States would not be informed beforehand of its contents, and would probably “not agree with it.” Moreover, the initiative, we were told by Deputy Prime Minister Ziad Abu Amr, would dispense forever more with the U.S. role as prime mediator between the parties in favor of an international conference approach.
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As if on cue, right next to the front-page New York Times story about the UAE-Egyptian bombing of Libya, was the headline “Obama Approves Air Surveillance of ISIS in Syria.” One might have thought that, given the circumstances, U.S. air surveillance over Syria had been approved long ago. Maybe surveillance of a different sort had been, and no doubt there is a lot of competition nowadays for intelligence platforms, what with flames shooting out from eastern Ukraine, the South and East China Seas, and elsewhere. Still, if the President ordered successful air strikes against ISIS to help the Kurds and others well over a week ago, and if ISIS is operating in Syria as much or more than in Iraq, why did he wait until this past weekend to connect the dots and give the order? It is this picture of risk-aversion producing such painfully guarded slowness that, together with John Kerry’s general cluelessness, has persuaded just about every leadership cadre in the Middle East that the United States can be safely ignored when its principals make threats or promises. We shall see, it seems likely, whether a substantial U.S.-led military campaign against ISIS can change that perception. It needs to.

But it won't be easy to pull off, and the military aspect is the least of the challenge. The Administration will not coordinate its effort with the Assad regime, and that is wise, but it still risks, as my friend Fred Hof said the other day via a New York Times quote, running into a political ambush. But there is no mystery in now to handle the problem: Bomb Assad regime assets simultaneously with bombing ISIS assets. That should make the point clearly enough.

Beyond that, coalition management both outside Syria and inside it will be hellaciously complex. For example, one of the countries mentioned publicly as a potential member of an anti-ISIS coalition is Qatar. This Muslim Brotherhood-supporter makes for a strange bedfellow in an anti-Islamist coalition, to say the least. Same goes for Turkey, although the proximity of Turkish air bases and the need for Turkey to tighten its border are critical for long-term success, so one swallows hard and does what needs to be done. As for inside Syria, there are many anti-regime groups that are also anti-ISIS, but the geometry of the conflict is highly muddled. It shifts from locality to locality, personality to personality, and even from day to day. It would be best to establish one internal chain of command with which to liaise, as former U.S. Ambassador to Syria, Robert S. Ford, suggests; but it is not clear that this is possible at this point.

Clearly, what’s going on in the region is not easy for the average Joe or Jane America to understand. It’s a muddled up mess out there, and Americans like their foreign conflicts crisp and plain, with only two sides, good guys and bad guys clearly distinguishable. When the heinous Assad regime fights the heinous ISIS, and the heinous ISIS is also fighting the heinous Jabat al-Nusra al-Qaeda affiliate, and all of them are fighting the Free Syrian Army, which may not be heinous but may be pretty feckless, most Americans can't help their eyes from glazing over.

And the muddle hardly stops there. Just to take one example, is Turkey an ally of the United States or not? Well, it’s a NATO member and its general orientation toward the Kurds has shifted in a potentially positive way in recent months. It also threw in years ago with the general aim of getting rid of the Assad regime in Damascus. But, along with Qatar, it supports Hamas and its leader is perhaps the most prominent raving anti-Semite of our times. Turkish policy was also instrumental back in 2011 and 2012 in feeding the monster that became ISIS, or ISIL, or the Islamic State, or whatever it’s calling itself today. It did this through the aegis of its intelligence chief, Hakan Fidan, who out of sectarian affinity and an ambition that far exceeded his talents allowed jihadi fanatics to use the Turkish side of the border with Syria in ways that resembled Peshawar viz Afghanistan in the 1980s. No doubt the Turks have since realized their mistake, but allies should not make mistakes like that.

Speaking of Qatar, now there is a muddled story most peculiar. Back in that July 29 post I referred to Qatar as a “troublemaking little pissant of a country”, but I did not long dwell on all the various ways that the Al-Thani pisses on its neighbors. That its neighbors do not exactly appreciate Qatari policy—and their ire goes way beyond the constant irritation of their sponsoring Al-Jazeera—was illustrated back in early March by the withdrawal in protest of the Saudi, UAE, and Bahraini ambassadors from Doha.

Why’d they leave town? Because the current Qatari Emir made common cause with Turkey to support the Muslim Brotherhood region-wide, whether in Egypt or in Palestine via the Palestinian branch of the MB, known as Hamas. The neighbors also suspected Qatar of running a pro-MB regional intelligence operation. And of course the Al-Thani plays host not only to Khaled Meshal, the political head of Hamas, but also to Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the rabid 87-year old Egyptian cleric in exile whose broadcast sermons are, or cause, often literally life-and-death events back in Egypt. More recently, Qatar reportedly also urged Hamas, via Mr. Meshel in Doha, not to agree to any truce in Gaza with Israel, delaying a firm ceasefire for more than a month, with all the additional and needless destruction and death that entailed. The Saudis, deeply fearful of the MB and dismissive of the Morsi government—and further moved to generously bankroll al-Sisi’s Egypt in part to enable it to ignore U.S. advice—were naturally displeased with the upstart Qataris pissing in their foreign policy soup.

Less important to Riyadh and the other GCC capitals in March, the Qataris continued to meddle in Libya. Back in 2011 the Qatari government aided jihadi groups in and near Misurata. The UAE and others helped less ideologically oriented tribesmen from Zintan. Both groups of tribesmen eventually converged on the capital and, as the country’s weak center began to dissolve into wan rhetoric, violent clashes became more common and more highly fire-powered. The Gulf patrons poured in aid and the tribal battles in Libya gradually took on the character of a proxy war between Qatar and the UAE especially. So when UAE fighter jets struck near Tripoli recently—twice according to the reports—through use of Egyptian air bases, the aim was not only to help the Zintan militiamen but to shove one up Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani’s you-know-what.
Arab states bombing other Arab states, with still other Arab states (not to mention Turkey and Iran) actively playing the odds on the side, is the kind of thing we have not seen on this scale since the Egyptian intervention in the Yemeni Civil War in 1964--or, come to think of it, maybe ever. So as news goes, this is, well, news.


So is, to circle back around to U.S. policy in the region, the Obama Administration’s reaction to the UAE-Egyptian strike. Of course, to be blindsided by two countries whose order-of-battle is almost entirely of U.S. origin is a bit irritating, to be kind. (You do have to give the New York Times credit here for humor scriptwriting with this line: ”It was unclear if the planes or munitions were American-made.” Really? Unclear to whom?) But even that does not excuse the sheer gall with which Administration spokesmen tagged the attack as counterproductive because the United Nations and Western powers are trying to broker a resolution to Libya’s internal strife. (That’s right, you heard me: the United Nations…..) According to Administration fantasists, a competent and democratically elected Libyan central government exists and is in basic control of the country—excepting maybe a little militia kerfuffle, you know—so outsiders should not be dropping ordnance on warring groups so that the United Nations can work its diplomatic magic. The truth is that Libyan government authorities, such as they are, can’t even keep their own international airports open. Will Obama Administration officials next claim to have sighted flying lipsticked pigs over Tripoli?

The UAE-Egyptian mission may not have been militarily effective, but if so it was probably because it was not muscular enough. Besides, the reason Libya has fallen apart, and has become a failed state spreading misery to Mali, Northern Nigeria, and beyond, is because the Obama Administration started a war there and then, along with its feckless allies, failed to stick around to ensure postwar peace and reconstruction. For a bunch of people who had criticized with alacrity the Bush Administration’s failure to take so-called Phase IV planning in Iraq seriously, this was a breathtakingly irresponsible error. People who make errors of that magnitude might want to maybe shut up once in a while about what other actors might try to do to rescue what they can of a deteriorating situation.

Joe and Jane America can, however, get the big picture right without too much straining. Muddled though the region is, the basics are fairly simple. Iranian influence through Assad and his thugs in Syria, through Hizballah in Lebanon, and through the hopefully retiring Nouri al-Maliki in Iraq, has widened and radicalized sectarian conflict in the region, and the growing weakness of most of the Arab states in the face of this multi-year offensive has led to rogue groups like ISIS taking up the slack. When a government essentially murders going on 200,000 of its own citizens, most of them Sunnis, it is irrational not to expect some kind of reaction among co-religionists when Sunni Arab governments in the region—or anyone else—fail to respond.

This also puts into perspective the offers of first the Iranian government a few weeks ago to put aside other disagreements and help the United States battle ISIS in Iraq, and yesterday’s offer via Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem for the Assad regime to help the United States battle ISIS in Syria. What can one say when arsonists impersonate firefighters? One can start by saying “no”, and to its credit, as already noted, the Administration understands that any appearance of cooperating with the Assad regime or Iran would dash all hopes of leveraging non-jihadi Sunni power, such as it now is, to end the multiplying Levantine wars breaking out in the still-trembling shatterbelt of the fallen Ottoman Empire.

But this whole business of leveraging non-jihadi Sunni power is a sore and embarrassing point in another way. Pentagon Press Secretary Rear Admiral John Kirby said yesterday that Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was “looking at a train-and-equip program for the Free Syrian Army.” Umm, didn’t Secretary Kerry strongly suggest some months ago, just a short while after the second Geneva meeting on Syria had fallen flat on its face in late January, that exactly such a program had already been vetted? In June didn’t President Obama ask Congress for $500 million for exactly that purpose? So why is the Pentagon talking like it thought up this possibility just yesterday? Could it be that all that has gone before was just so much persiflage and outright deception, designed to shroud the President’s determination to do nothing in a haze of appearing to do something?


Joe and Jane America might have one more set of questions, if they’ve been reasonably attentive to the lay of the land in the Muddle East. “Let’s see now”, Joe might say to Jane, “the Saudis, Egyptians, Emiratis, Israelis, Jordanians, and the Palestinian Authority, too, are all opposed to the kind of jihadi militants that applauded the 9/11 attacks, but the Obama Administration is on bad terms with nearly all those parties.” And Jane might respond, “Yes, Joe, that’s right; but our Secretary of State is welcome in Qatar and Turkey, whose governments support Muslim Brotherhood militants, not to exclude Hamas, and even more extreme groups besides as far away as Libya, all of whom hate the United States.” “Wait”, answers Joe, “doesn’t the United States have a significant military presence in Qatar, as well as a major naval presence in Bahrain, putting us under the sheets, so to speak, with both sides of the GCC spat?” “Gosh”, exclaims Jane, “that’s right; but if the United States has a lot of military assets in Qatar, can’t we use our relationship with the Qatari authorities to get them to stop doing such bad things?” “That’s a good question, Jane; we should find an expert who can give us an answer.”

Well, Joe and Jane, here I am. The saga of U.S.-Qatari military cooperation goes back to 1991, when the two governments signed an agreement in the context of Operation Desert Storm. Then, in April 2003, when for all sorts of good reasons the U.S. government finally decided not to keep significant U.S. military asserts on Saudi soil, the United States moved its regional air operations to Qatar. The Qataris offered the land for what became Al-Ubeid Air Base, and its sister camp called As-Saliyah, for free, and provided both a substantial chunk of change for us to develop the base and local force protection for it. Of course, the fact that the United States based its 5th Fleet nearby in Bahrain meant that we were actually protecting them, a Gulf Arab tradition of sorts going all the way back to the Portuguese in the early 16th century.

Al-Ubeid is a large and important base. It can conduct air operations all over the region and all the way out to South Asia, not to exclude coverage of Pakistan and Afghanistan (and of course Iran). The way we have played it, or allowed ourselves to be played, the base gives Qatar leverage over us, not the other way around. The U.S. need for the base, and the substantial expense and inconvenience of having to move it, enables the Qataris to make mounds of trouble far and wide without fear that we’ll do much of anything about it.

This is not good. In my view, we should bite the bullet and move the base, preferably to the UAE or maybe to Oman. We should also, in my view, leave Bahrain and the Al-Khalifa family to its own smarmy devices, or at the very least stop anchoring two or even one aircraft carrier battle group nearby. Our presence provides Iran with a rich set of soft targets to take hostage in the event of hostilities, and the carriers themselves are plain old-fashioned sitting ducks. There is nothing we can do from Bahrain that we can’t do just about as well from over the horizon, since U.S. standoff weapons capabilities are vastly superior to those of Iran, or of any other regional power. Joe, Jane, I’m serious: We need to get our butts moved out of there, but not in a precipitous way that suggests a tail-between-legs exit posture. We need to free ourselves from the rentier leverage we’ve provided to our unworthy hosts.

Now, those announcements, if they ever happen, would make big news. I'm not holding my breath. Meanwhile, we’ll have to content ourselves with the new Emirati-Egyptian tag-team combo busting Qatari clients in the chops in Libya. That's got to be more interesting than the forthcoming PA initiative from the fast-fading Abu Mazen.

Monday, August 4, 2014

Malice or Incompetence?

Published on July 29, 2014
U.S. MIDDLE EAST POLICYMalice or Incompetence?
John Kerry’s ceasefire proposal for Gaza has probably destroyed what remained of the United States’ influence in the Middle East, at least for the duration of this administration’s tenure.

After a hectic day yesterday spent in large part seeing off my son, daughter-in-law, and two-year-old grandson on a two-year sojourn in Berlin, I hastened this morning to my keyboard to comment on perhaps the most noteworthy piece of U.S. diplomatic idiocy in the Middle East that I’ve witnessed in several years (which is really saying something). It had been on my mind since expressing the essence of the matter to Richard Aldous on TAI’s weekly podcast in the morning, and repeating it privately over the telephone to a fellow editor (of a weekly) who is not an area expert and so has been calling me episodically but regularly over the past decade to get my take on various matters. So, thus rehearsed, I was ready to let fly at 7:30 AM when, to my shock, I found that I had been beaten into print by, of all people, David Ignatius.
Why do I put it that way? Because in recent years I have rarely agreed with Ignatius’s take on just about anything. But in today’s “The big mistake Kerry made” I find little to criticize. He’s got the essence:
Kerry’s error has been to put so much emphasis on achieving a quick halt to the bloodshed that he has solidified the role of Hamas, the intractable, unpopular Islamist group that leads Gaza, along with the two hard-line Islamist nations that are its key supporters, Qatar and Turkey.  In the process, he has undercut not simply the Israelis but also the Egyptians and the Fatah movement that runs the Palestinian Authority, all of which want to see an end to Hamas rule in Gaza… Any deal that reinforces Hamas’s stranglehold—rather than building a path toward change of government, elections and eventual disarmament—is misconceived.
Given Ignatius’s exquisite cultivation of sources inside Democratic administrations, he is no doubt relying on documentary evidence and assistance in knowing some details of recent goings-on not readily available to me. Who—in the White House would be my guess—provided Ignatius his catalysts I’d rather not speculate about; suffice it to say that competitive intra-administration leaking, that venerable Washington political sport, is alive and well—which is why I often tell out-of-town audiences that Washington is one of the few cities in the world where sound travels faster than light.
Now, there are a lot of people who wrongly believe that the Obama Administration, not to exclude the President himself, is resolutely anti-Israel and pro-Muslim Brotherhood. The Middle East and South Asia are not the only places where one can find brain-addled conspiracy theorists, after all. But Ignatius doesn’t think Kerry’s mistake is born of malice aforethought toward Israel, so that leaves us with what can only be called incompetence (though Ignatius does not use the term… must protect that access). I agree that it’s not malice, but it is incompetence of a kind and on a scale that tars John Kerry as the dumbest Secretary of State in my lifetime.
Let me elaborate just a bit, and try to provide some perspective here. As Ignatius notes, Kerry went first to Cairo in his quest for a quick ceasefire, but found that the Egyptians could not budge Hamas. Why this surprised him I can’t imagine: Doesn’t he know that this is not Mubarak’s Egypt anymore, where a long-standing double-gaming gambit once provided some indirect U.S. entry into Hamasistan? This is post-Morsi, al-Sisi Egypt, and the Egyptian double game is over. That’s good in that it makes Egypt and Israel effective allies at weakening Hamas, but the drawback is that Cairo can no longer serve as an effective transmission belt for the insertion of U.S. sticks and carrots.  So chalk up that flight as a waste of aviation fuel.
Then it got worse. By ministering to Qatar, where the head of the Hamas political wing lives at the invitation of the Al-Thani, Kerry strengthened that troublemaking little pissant of a country. If you thought U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia—which in this dustup is a tacit ally of Egypt and Israel—could not get worse than they already are, you goofed: They just did. (But if you want to hear anti-Qatari venom that can singe the hair on your chin, better to go to Abu Dhabi or Dubai.)
Then worse still: Kerry ministered to arguably the world’s foremost anti-Semite, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. (Richard Cohen’s piece today, “Erdogan’s anti-Semitic fetish”, also leaves me bereft of criticism in the face of another Washington Post columnist who also regularly irritates me.) There are rumors that another Gazan flotilla will be launched, this time with the Turkish Navy as guardian. I hope this isn’t true, because no good can come of it.
And then worst of all: Kerry presents Israel with a draft of a ceasefire agreement that puts Hamas on the same level as Israel, and demeans Fatah and the PA, with which Israel is bound up in a legal if highly imperfect relationship; that would give Hamas the politically life-sustaining prize it seeks in the form of an “open borders” concession it can characterize as helping the people of Gaza; and that would prevent Israel from finishing the work of destroying the deadly tunnel network under the border.
A ceasefire under those terms would enable Hamas to resupply its war machine, bringing in unlimited numbers of missiles and mortars—and concrete, too, to rebuild and expand the tunnel network. It would enable Hamas to begin the next phase of conflict, in which it targets Israeli civilians while using Gazan civilians as human shields, at a time of its choosing. It would mean that all the IDF killed in this conflict would have died in vain.
Now, I have never been a particular fan of the current Israeli Prime Minister or his party, but no Israeli government could have stomached an outrageous document like that. That such a document, encompassing such a wildly wrongheaded view, could ever have been produced, let alone submitted to the cabinet in Jerusalem, effectively puts an end to U.S. influence on Israel for the duration of this Administration. What little trust endured after the blunders of the first term and the misconceived “peace process” initiative of the second term is now gone. And when the U.S. government loses the ability to influence Israel, those Arab parties that want something to do with Israel—but not too much in public—lose interest in Washington. Thus ditto U.S. influence in Cairo and Riyadh, and probably in Amman and Ramallah, too.
Think what this means in historical perspective. In past post-disengagement crises over Gaza, the U.S. Secretary of State was the big guy on the block. U.S. influence relied on our having the money and the biggest guns, true—and we still have those. But it relied more on having suasive reputational power with nearly every actor on the regional diplomatic stage. It relied as much or more, in other words, on the highly efficient and effective shadow of U.S. power, to quote Acheson, than on the power itself. We may have used Egypt’s table a few times in the past, but it was our game that was being played on that table. Now John Kerry, with Barack Obama’s fulsome help, has reduced the U.S. position to that of a message carrier for Hamas via Doha and Ankara. We have fallen from being the undisputed master of ceremonies to creeping around the region as a second-echelon go-between—and a failed one at that. (At a time like this a former State Department employee can barely resist quoting Elmer Fudd: “Oh, d’hawwah.”)
The disaster that is this Gazan War is not entirely, or even mainly, the fault of the Obama Administration, however. The nadir of U.S. influence reflects significant changes in regional realities as well as its own vast diplomatic malpractice. It reflects, for example, the fact that recent Israeli governments, by accelerating land grabs in the West Bank and raising new and, one suspects, deliberately obstacular demands on Palestinian Authority negotiators, have pushed ever more Palestinians into immoderate desperation. Insofar as U.S. policy is guilty of causing the present distress, it is the George W. Bush Administration’s doing, not the Obama Administration’s. Why?
Because it was the Bush Administration, flush with the willful delusions of the “forward strategy for freedom”, that sanctioned Hamas’s participation in the 2006 elections, even though those elections were predicated on the framework of the September 1993 Oslo Accords, which Hamas has always rejected outright and completely. Hamas only won those elections with plurality, not majority, vote counts because of Fatah’s political incompetence, true; but it never should have been permitted to participate in the first place. Then followed a slow-moving multilateral plot to dispossess Hamas of its victory, but Hamas preempted the plot with a bloody coup—and that’s what got this murderous, vicious bunch of fanatics ensconced in Gaza in the first place.
Please understand the main point: Hamas’s present position was contingent, not necessary and certainly not inevitable. Since U.S. policy had a significant share in causing this problem (along with others, yes, of course), which has paralyzed every attempt to make political progress among the protagonists as well as sired horrific violence, we arguably have some responsibility for solving it—for getting rid of this scourge. So why is John Kerry doing precisely the opposite?
It is a sad day when I applaud the failure of an initiative by an American Secretary of State, just as it’s a weird day when I applaud David Ignatius.  It’s just one of those days, I guess.

Why is This Gaza War Different From All Other Gaza Wars?

Published on July 24, 2014
THE MIDDLE EASTWhy Is This Gaza War Different From All Other Gaza Wars?
Though there are some important differences this time around, the solution to this recurring nightmare remains the same—and remains unlikely.

Whether one is some shade of pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, or even if one is without a favorite side to support or loathe, it is tempting to see what has been going on between Israel and Hamas in Gaza over the past two weeks as just another Mideastern example of George Shultz’s definition of foreign policy—not one thing after another, but “the same damned thing over and over again.” Clearly, we have all been here before—in a big way in 2008-09’s Operation Cast Lead, when Israel launched a land incursion into Gaza, and in smaller aerial doses both before and after that, most recently in November 2012. You can tell because of all the commentary entitled “Eyeless in Gaza”; who’d have thought that Samson, of all people, would be quoted so often in the 21st century?
The repeated clashes have made some Israelis regret Israel’s ever having removed itself unilaterally from Gaza in August-September 2005, under the direction of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. But those who remember the way things were before the disengagement—particularly those who had to do miluim (reserve duty) in Gaza or were parents, relatives and friends of such people—are of a more divided mind. There was not a really good choice then, and there still isn’t now.
Certainly there are many similarities this time around with times past, and that’s one of them: no good choices. Like any responsible government, the Israeli one cannot stand by while hateful enemies attack the civilian population with rockets, mortars, and platoon-scale infantry attacks launched out of cross-border tunnels. But since airpower alone—at least on the scale Israel is willing to employ it—cannot silence the source of fire, boots on the ground are necessary. The problem is that soldiers are then vulnerable to being wounded, killed or kidnapped, and the inevitably collateral damage of major attacks in a very densely populated area invariably bring forth an orgy of international condemnation that, over time, erodes Israel’s image and standing in the world. (One should not exaggerate the seriousness of that latter problem, however; Jackson Diehl’s recent Washington Post column on the matter gets it exactly right.) Israel’s going kinetic also invariably diverts attention away from other more strategically portentous issues—say the disaster that is Syria, a disaster arguably about to get even worse as ISIS and the Assad regime square off for a face-pounder over Aleppo.
In this case as before, Israel only entered Gaza on the ground when it was clear that airpower could not stop the rocket attacks, which this time have reached far enough north to force millions of Israelis—something like two-thirds of the population—into shelters. (Tourists usually don’t know what it means when they come upon a sign in Hebrew on what looks like a kind of manhole cover that transliterates as “bor bitakhon”, but every Israeli native knows what it means.) That is new by degree this time around, and Hamas’s ability to land a rocket near Ben-Gurion Airport, causing the temporary suspension of many flights into and out of the country, is unprecedented and ominous.
Israeli planners know something else they don’t like to discuss publicly: If Hamas has rockets of such range launched from the south, and Hizballah has similar missiles that can be launched from the north, it puts the entire country within range of deadly fire should those two non-state actors ever act in unison.
Some Israelis think the government waited too long this time to go in on the ground; almost none think it acted too soon. It’s bad for morale and for the economy for the population to be placed under siege, and Israelis expect the IDF to be able to lift such conditions expeditiously. It’s one thing to be assaulted by a hostile state, as when Ba’athi Iraq attacked Israel with Scuds in 1991, another by what had generally been thought to be a ragtag group of mostly incompetent fanatics. Some think that now that Israel has gone in, its objectives—to destroy Hamas’s armament and its tunnels—are too limited, and that it should reoccupy Gaza altogether and destroy Hamas root and branch. But that would entail killing, jailing or expelling many thousands of people. As of this writing, a broader ground offensive looks likely, if Israeli Defense Minister Bogie Ya’alon’s remarks last night are more than negotiating tactics.
Also not new is Israel’s reluctance to go all-in in Gaza for fear, as well, of getting stuck there without an exit strategy. Suppose Israel does reoccupy Gaza and extirpates Hamas; then what? Israeli leaders are justifiably reticent to cause a complete collapse of governance in Gaza upon yet another exit. They know that Israel will get pinned with both the blame and the responsibility, at least in part, for humanitarian remediation. No good choices.
The same goes for Hamas. As has been made clear in the news coverage on the conflict, Hamas acted out of desperation. With the Egyptian government hostile and the Rafah crossing closed, Iranian patronage vanished over the fallout of the Syrian civil war, and Hamas political leaders increasing unpopular among the population as their patronage cash coffers ran dry, the only option left was to do what Hamas does best to garner support: kill Jews.
This is why when the Palestinian “unity” pact was initialed back in early June, and most observers condemned it as helping Hamas and shaming Fatah, I and a few others speculated that the deal instead demonstrated Hamas’s weakness and portended a likelihood that Mahmud Abbas would gain from the arrangement. That is precisely what happened, at least until Hamas’s plight convinced its military wing to break out of Abbas’s tightening headlock.
This was not a good choice for Ismail Haniyeh and his associates. Hamas political leaders always lose decision autonomy to the military wing when lead flies, but they faced what looks to have been a coup from their own colleagues had they resisted. They know Gazans in their vast majority resent Hamas for the suffering they cause, not least the diversion of scarce resources to built tunnels and make war instead of govern. And this time—unlike the past—they had to know as well that under current circumstances replenishing their stocks of weapons during the next ceasefire would be very hard. Nevertheless, they tried to start a war by kidnapping and murdering three Jewish teens; when that did not do the trick, they escalated their bid by launching hundreds of missiles toward Israeli civilians, thus breaking a nearly unblemished two-year ceasefire during which Hamas suppressed attacks from other Gazan factions. This was merely the least bad option, according to their calculations. They had no good choices.
Also the same this time around has been the bleating of moral illiteracy from most of Europe. No European country would countenance a neighboring territory being used as a launch pad to murder its citizens, and every single one of them would make haste to silence the source of fire, whatever it reasonably took. And yet every time Israel does the same, the post-bellicist crowd bows down to the altar of proportionality, accusing Israel of dissing that sacred principle. But would the Eurosheeple really like it any better if Israel responded to Hamas attacks with exact proportionality, by, say, deliberately targeting Palestinian kindergartens and school busses?
Which brings to mind yet another similarity to Operation Cast Lead. In that conflict Hamas deliberately placed weapons amid schools and hospitals, hoping to protect them from attack by an Israel concerned about both counterproductive collateral damage and international condemnation. The Israelis made a difficult but ultimately necessary decision then not to allow Hamas to establish that kind of precedent, gaining from it prospectively the ability to attack Israel from such sites more or less without fear of retaliation. It is doing so again this time. Last time Israel had to suffer the insufferable Goldstone Report. This time it will no doubt suffer similar distortions and lies, but this is a small price to pay for nullifying Hamas’s attempt to establish what amounts to immunity from Israeli attack.
Also like last time, casualty counts are very unreliable on the Palestinian side. In 2008-09 Palestinian dead came to about 900 in a three-week campaign, and the commonly accepted truth then was that around 75 percent were civilians.  But Hamas “militants”, as the MSM invariably calls them, don’t usually wear uniforms, so many missile-launchers and other combatants get counted as civilians when they get killed. The same thing is happening now. The press reports about 625 dead so far, and gives the usual 75 percent civilian statistic. That’s a highly unreliable number; Hamas has an obvious interest in exaggerating the number of Israelis killed and minimizing their own combat loses. That’s one reason they lie out loud about Israeli deaths. As to the truth, no one knows and we are not likely ever to find out.
And yet another similarity: Israel’s missile defense system, the Iron Dome, is working well, even better than in 2008-09. Its success rate is reported to be about 90 percent. Lest anyone think this means missile defense generally can easily be made to work anywhere for other purposes, note that technology and geography combine to make all Hamas launches what are called “depressed trajectory” shots in ballistic missile defense lingo. That greatly diminishes the challenge of target acquisition for the defender. Missile defense elsewhere, under other circumstances, can work—just not as easily in most cases.
So it’s the same now as before, as several wits have summed it up: Israel tries its consistent best to use missiles to protect its people, and Hamas tries its consistent best to use people to protect its missiles.
If all that is the same this time around, what’s different? We’ve already noted a few differences:  extended rocket ranges and being able to shut down much air traffic into and out of Israel, Egypt’s enmity toward Hamas, and the diminished prospect of Hamas replenishing its arsenal. But there are several others.
First, while Israeli military intelligence lapses are hardly rare, in its conflict with Hamas they have been until now. Israeli intelligence vastly underestimated the number and sophistication of Hamas tunnels, which rival the sophistication of the drug-lord underground highways below the U.S.-Mexican frontier. The result of that, and more sophisticated tactics and preparation in the Shejaiyah neighborhood, has led so far to more than 30 Israeli soldiers killed (as of this writing). The number in three weeks of Operation Cast Lead totaled 10, four of which were from “friendly fire.”
Second, in the past Egypt frequently played the role of mediator or go-between in arranging ceasefires. Egypt’s good offices under Hosni Mubarak were not very good, but something was better than more or less nothing, which is what we have now. And under intelligence chief Omar Suleiman, Egypt played a double game in the Sinai that allowed the Sinai bedouin to profit from the tunnel traffic beneath the Egyptian-Gazan border as a way to buy them off—so Egypt was part of the problem then.
Now, for all practical purposes, Abbas is the mediator, to the extent there is one; perhaps Turkey may come to play a larger role somehow, despite Prime Minister Erdogan’s pathological animus toward Israel. But the al-Sisi government is unmistakably hostile to Hamas, Hamas does not trust the Egyptians, and the Egyptians are not going to do Hamas any favors by throwing Rafah wide open to get a ceasefire. Hamas rejected an Egyptian ceasefire bid last week, before the latest escalation, after Israel had accepted it, and did so dismissively and even rudely. Secretary Kerry went to Cairo because, apparently, he thought it didn’t look so hot for him to be “just sitting around”, as he put it. But what he thought he’d accomplish by going to Cairo is anyone’s guess. He has since gone to Jerusalem, where there is indeed something to talk about.
But that’s different too: In the past, the locals listened carefully to the United States, because it had various means of influence and the demonstrated will to use them (some of them some of the time, anyway). We still have the means, but the will has waned—or so most locals have concluded based on the present Administration’s prior conduct. There isn’t much to complain about when it comes to the President’s words, or the words of other senior U.S. principals. They’ve said mostly the right things, especially compared to the Europeans. But no one is straining to listen. Before Kerry can broker a ceasefire he has to persuade the parties that the United States is serious, and to do that the President must be engaged and seen as willing to act.  We’ll see what happens.
And there seems to be another Israeli soldier captured—Oron Shaul. No Israeli soldiers were taken in Operation Cast Lead, although one had been taken earlier, in 2006, as a result of a tunnel operation. So this is both a similarity and not a similarity. Either way, it raises again the debate about Israel’s willingness to repeatedly free hundreds upon hundreds of Palestinian terrorists and murderers to get back one or two Israelis, alive and sometimes not alive (and we do not know if Oron Shaul is alive or not).
Having lived for a while in Israel, I understand full well the rationale behind this policy. You don’t leave a comrade abandoned, and knowing that the entire country has your back is supposed to make you, as a soldier, brave and effective. Fine. But I have never been quite able to reconcile that argument with the moral hazard the policy creates: If you make kidnapped or captured Israel soldiers so precious to the enemy, there will be more of them. Only Israeli nationals have a full right to a “vote” over this dilemma, so I will say no more about it.
So how do the parties get themselves out of this “Groundhogs Day” nightmare over Gaza? I explained how many months ago in a post called “Shock the Casbah.” This isn’t going to happen, however, because it requires a boldness of vision and leadership in Israel, among the Palestinians, and in the United States, Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia that is simply not available.
You can go back and read the whole argument if you like, but in a nutshell: Israel and the Palestinian Authority negotiate a secret peace deal, complete with security arrangements, borders, quit-claim clauses, and the whole business—and yes, if the incentives are attractive enough compared to the plummeting trajectory of the status quo, they can do this; Israel invades and occupies Gaza, extirpating Hamas; Israel and the PA simultaneously reveal their deal, to be unfurled in phases over five years, to the world; the PA is given control of Gaza, with the assistance of Arab League-endorsed Egyptian and Jordanian armed forces, as the IDF withdraws. Additionally, the United States and the European Union endorse and support the deal, and bring Israel into the Western alliance system as an associate member, even as Palestine is brought within the cocoon of an empowered (via Egyptian and Jordanian on-site power) Arab League led by Saudi Arabia. The sovereignty of both sides of a two-state solution needs to be enmeshed at least temporarily in larger associations as both endorsement and protection of the new order from those on both sides who will reject and try to overturn it.
The purpose of the “shock the casbah” idea is to get at the core problem, which is that the Palestinians have never had their Altalena moment. They lack one gun and one voice, and until they have both no peace process can get far enough to matter. (The objection that the Palestinians are all rejectionists who don’t want a just peace is, in its typical categorical form, unfalsifiable so long as there is not peace, which renders the attitude self-paralyzing and self-defeating. The same objection, let’s remember, used to be pinned on Egyptians and Jordanians.) The Palestinians can’t seem to pull off this reckoning by themselves, so the Israelis need to help them; they are the only ones who can, and it is in Israel’s long-term interest to do so. The world will be too shocked by the peace deal to complain about the next, hopefully last big Israeli incursion into Gaza.
As I say, the incursion to end all incursions isn’t going to happen. But unless it or something like it does happen, the present Gaza war will eventually be just one in a desultory series that will go on and on and on for years untold to come. At the very least, all humanitarian assistance to Gaza once this phase of fighting is over has to be fed through the PA. Every effort must be made to prevent the terms of a ceasefire from rewarding Hamas in the eyes of the Gazan population, but rather to hasten its exit from power. But every effort, even including an election, may not be sufficient to push Hamas aside; they are radicalized, disciplined, and they will still have enough guns to intimidate other contenders. The fat lady will probably not sing, in other words. So short of a genuinely bold initiative, round and round we’re bound to go, and where it’ll lead everyone knows: blood, death, frustration, anger, and heartache. Nothing new there.

What the Malaysia Air Tragedy Means

Published on July 17, 2014
RUSSIA AND UKRAINEWhat the Malaysia Air Tragedy Means
What has happened today is certainly a tragedy in human terms, but we need not, and should not, allow emotions to misguide us into making it into a political tragedy as well.

Ifound out about the downing of Malaysian Airlines 17 from a Russian colleague, Vladislav Inozemtsev, offering condolences to his American associates in a multi-addressed email for the loss of American lives. I had been out in the yard pulling ivy for a couple hours. You go out on a beautiful day to get a little exercise and do a horticultural good deed, and look what happens? What is the world coming to?
Well, it is certainly a different world today than it was the last time Russian arms were used to deliberately shoot down a crowded aircraft. That was on September 1, 1983, when Soviet jets shot down KAL 007 over eastern Siberia when the plane strayed into Soviet airspace. All 269 people aboard died. (I’ll never forget this because that same day Scoop Jackson, for whom I had proudly, if briefly, worked and with whom I was still in touch, died suddenly of a heart attack; whether he died because of the shock of that evil deed or not we’ll never know for sure.)
Then, uniformed Soviet soldiers shot down what they knew was a civilian airliner. Today un-uniformed thugs shot down what they apparently thought was a Ukrainian military transport plane—so the initial reports suggest. But you’ve got to be very poorly trained to mistake a Boeing commercial jet with an Antonov military aircraft. Or you have to have essentially no chain of command or just not care, or both. The point: The human agents who shot down KAL 007 in 1983 were in a chain of professional military command working directly for the political leaders of a strong state, and the human agents who shot down MaH 17 today were in no obvious chain of military command and were working indirectly for the decision-makers of a weak state: today’s Russia.
Another difference is that if in 1983 a well-known economics professor at a prominent Russian university had dared criticize his own government before an international audience, he could not have done it in the Russian media and he would have been in deep trouble had he done it in any media.  But Slava and others can write pretty much what they want in any press so long as they don’t tread on private bank accounts and related highly theoretical felonies, and thrive well enough to do it again the next week and the next month. (So far, anyway.) So not only is Russia a much weaker state than was the Soviet Union thirty years ago, it is also a much less repressive state lording over an increasingly less passive or cowed citizenry.
Hence, those who think that what has happened is “Cold War”-like in provenance, requiring a muscular Cold War-like response from the United States, are wrong. That’s a lazy would-be lesson blocking the view of a more useful and important one. The most telling thing we ought to learn from today’s tragedy is that weak and weakening states with what are in their own estimation red-line defined defensive interests are prone to risk-taking, lack of executive function, poor control over proxies, and to having a notion that normal, common-sense morality is a luxury they cannot afford to indulge.
There are generic reasons why many states are weaker today than they were three, four, and more decades ago. These reasons affect democratic and liberal states as well as authoritarian and illiberal ones; they also make states that had achieved Weberian levels of impersonal and institutionalized authority more prone to decay, division and dysfunctionality, and they tend to make those that never achieved it in the first place—probably the majority of the UN’s 192 members—prone to multiple outbreaks of political violence and outright collapse. (I discuss some of these reasons in an essay to be published in the next issue of the magazine, the September/October issue). In other words, what has happened does appear to align with a larger trend in international society and politics, but it’s got nothing to do with any return to the Cold War.
Chances are that the people who are plying “Cold War” rhetoric now tend to be those who think the Obama Administration has been jelly-bellied about the seizure of Crimea and the attempt to, if not suborn eastern Ukraine or all of Ukraine, then at least to invest in enough mayhem potential to prevent any Ukrainian government from joining the European Union or, worse, NATO.  It’s too easy to accuse the Administration of being risk-averse here; after all, it’s been risk-averse everywhere. U.S. foreign policy for years now has been akin to a duck-and-cover drill. Some people justify that basic approach on this or that ground, sometimes honestly and sometimes for more or less naked partisan reasons, and others decry it for the same tumble of motives, but the Ukraine portfolio is nothing special. Whether the arrow stings the eye or ear of the beholder depends on the critic’s theory of the case concerning Russian policy in Ukraine.
Some believe the Russian government has maximalist goals: not just to subvert Ukraine and bring it back into a subordinate imperial relationship with Russia, even formally, but by so doing call expanded NATO’s bluff and destroy the Western alliance system in the process—that or err in the direction of catalyzing a nuclear war. I rolled out such scenarios myself some months ago, which is a normal part of assessing pulse-quickening behavior like the Russian seizure of Crimea and where it can lead. But I and most others concluded that whatever Mr. Putin wanted in his heartless void of heartless voids, he wasn’t irresponsible enough to try for the brass ring. Too dangerous; too likely to cause Europeans to actually locate their backbones.
My view is that the European Union, by forcing the former Ukrainian government into a thumbs-up/thumbs-down choice over an association with the EU, did a very stupid thing, and having done so still failed to understand the nature of its own stupidity. The former Ukrainian president was forced to make a choice he could not make without shattering his country’s very fragile modus vivendi. He tried really, really hard not to make it therefore, but even that in the end didn’t work.
We all know what happened next, and my view is that the Russian government has sought in the main a veto over the possibility that Ukraine would align with any Western organization whose basic characteristics include a high regard for democracy, respect for the political rights of minorities (toleration, we call it), and a concern for broad-based prosperity dependent on the generation of real economic growth. The reason is that all these characteristics threaten the Russian political status quo and what makes its leaders broadly popular among the narrowly hewn regime constituencies that really matter. Clearly, no good can come of having a large Slavic-speaking exemplar of all these dangerous characteristics right on your western border.
How to acquire this veto? If you know your own weaknesses, and certainly Mr. Putin must, the cheapest way to get it is not by overtly invading more of Ukraine, but just by “helping” the Ukrainians make a hash of independent governance—not that they’ve needed a whole lot of help since 1991. You stir up trouble and you try to stabilize your assets so as to get some control over them, but you stay far enough away from those assets so as to not to be seen holding a smoking gun should something get out of hand or just flat go wrong—as it obviously has today. You take risks more or less proportionate to your weakness as reckoned by the generally conservative nature of your political objective. Well, the Russians stirred up trouble in eastern Ukraine and proceeded to exhibit the poor executive function of a weakened polity and an extremely narrow decision-making elite, and they not surprisingly demonstrated an evanescent and unevenly skittering  control over their proxies. The result is that smoke is now blowing in their eyes even if the guilty gun is not literally in their hands.
And so they have in Moscow right now at the very least a public relations challenge. What I mean is that they are bound to reject any responsibility for what has happened. They will say, in effect, if they have not said it already: “We don’t control these guys or tell them what to do; they don’t listen to us when they talk to us at all.” We expect that. But that has to be simultaneously a confession of highly reckless behavior. Our line in retort: “If you don’t control these thugs, why’d you give them missiles capable of taking down planes flying at 33,000 feet? That’s like giving a nine-year old boy $300 worth of fireworks and a box of matches and absolving yourself preemptively of any accidents that might occur. If you do control them, then you’re responsible for what has happened even if you’re not directly guilty of pulling the trigger.” (The same way, just by the way, that the Israeli government was indirectly responsible for the September 1982 Sabra-Shatila killings but not guilty of them, so said the Agranat Commission, rightly so—since that’s what usually happens when you let murderers and madmen work as your proxies.)
So the Russian government has got itself in a spot where no matter what it says it will either be lying or confessing to criminal negligence. Actually, of course, it will do both; under the circumstances, Moscow doesn’t have much choice. It will go in for multitasking in the special Russian way we’ve come to appreciate over so many years.
Now, what does the U.S. government do about this? Again, it depends on your theory of the case as to what is going on.  My view is that what the Russians did in Crimea, in particular, was disturbing but probably not all that serious at the same time. It’s disturbing not because of “the thing” but of “the kind of thing”, as Churchill said of the Italian rape of Ethiopia in 1935 (and thanks to my TAI colleague Eliot Cohen for remembering and applying this perfect historical note). In other words, like Ethiopia then, Crimea now is itself strategically insignificant. We’ll see if Crimea is a harbinger of that “kind of thing”, namely, racialist/ethnic-based aggression, anywhere else in the world soon.
I don’t rule it out, and I am a tireless worrier by nature. But I tend to doubt it nonetheless. I think Russian policy is sui generis right now because of the oddities of the Russian political economy and its historical circumstance. Russia is a wounded former great power in the throes of demographic decline, economic strangeness and military weakness relative to the United States to a degree almost unimaginable in Cold War times. It’s hard for others to imitate that combination of pustulant motives.
Besides, look around broadly at what Putin’s Crimean caper hath wrought. As things stand, Putin gave NATO a new backbone, taught the Ukrainians how to fight, marginalized Russia from key international financial markets, revealed the doings of the dirty-EU-money-go-round banksters for all to see, and got himself a new and mostly Russian-speaking population that increasingly wishes he hadn’t. Crimea is now a cudgel we can use to whip the Russians wherever we feel a need, as in now. It’s even forced the Germans to back off their Rapallo temptations, which seem come in every German political assembly kit since 1871. It’s maybe stopped any Ukrainian effort to join the EU and NATO, but Ukraine is not now eligible for the former and won’t be for many years, and it certainly does not belong in the latter anyway.
All in all, then, it’s really not 1939 again, anymore than it’s 1914 again. And this whole thing is not principally about democracy and human rights; it’s about the return of normal European politics after the Cold War thaw in every nook and cranny of Eurasia outside the EU (and sometimes within it). Positing just a bit of historical awareness, this is about as surprising (to me) as rain in springtime.
What has happened today is certainly a tragedy in human terms, but we need not, and should not, allow emotions to misguide us into making it into a political tragedy as well. If we’re not going to go to war over Crimea or Ukraine, we should certainly not stumble in that direction because some nitwit thug in eastern Ukraine mistakenly shot down a civilian aircraft with a weapon he never should have been given in the first place.
If I were advising the President (please try not to laugh too hard) I’d suggest he be as nimble an opportunist as possible. Want stronger EU support for sanctions against the Putin regime so that we allies can remain in Transatlantic coalition and be more effective at the same time? This is a great time to bang that drum. Want the French to cancel the odious Mistral order? Bang, bang, bang. Want to persuade Congress to like the idea of beefing up the defense budget a tad—which under the circumstances can only help the Democrats in November? Here’s your chance, sir. You get the idea. Let’s hope the President does, too.

Mullah Dreams: Not Counting Sheep

Published on July 11, 2014
IRAN IN A HOT SPOTMullah Dreams: Not Counting Sheep
The ISIS offensive has so far played to Iran’s advantage, but poses a strategic nightmare for it in the long run as Iraq continues to dissolve.

AJuly 3 Daily Beast column by Josh Rogin has been getting a lot of play over the past few days. Even my friend Michael Doran mentioned it—in order to get at a particularly egregious Tony Blinken remark—in his Brookings piece on Wednesday. Rogin’s main burden is to describe an argument allegedly going on inside the Obama Administration over the most useful attitude to take toward the Assad regime in Damascus in light of the ISIS breakout in Iraq.
The basic difference is simple, as these things go, and as Rogin apparently accurately sketches it out. One side reasons that if ISIS is the more urgent and bigger potential danger right now, whether because it is destroying the Iraqi state or poses a terrorist threat to the United States and its allies, then, according to the standard wisdom that the enemy of my enemy is my friend, the Assad regime becomes our objective ally. This is despite the fact that this would put us on the same side as Iran, Russia and, just by the way, Hizballah. But that’s fine because, as some believe, we need to bring Iran “in from the cold” and, with its current crop of leaders, we have the best chance to do so since the Iranian Revolution. In this view, the Iranian Revolution is ready now for its Thermidor phase, to invoke Crane Brinton’s classic language from 1938, and we have every interest in speeding that nebulous social impulse to political fruition.
The other side reasons that ISIS exists in whatever strength it now musters because of the Assad regime, which has behaved in such a way as to greatly exacerbate sectarian toxins in the region. As long as Assad and his Alawi thugs are there ruling in Damascus, Sunni jihadism will thrive; so he is not an objective ally, but rather he and his allies are the source of the problem in the first place. The solution, however hard to achieve, is to build up the Free Syrian Army and other non-jihadi Sunni opposition forces in Syria to change the battlefield situation so that some kind of political settlement can be arranged providing for Assad’s departure.
According to Rogin, Blinken, the Deputy National Security Advisor, epitomizes and leads the way for the pro-Assad side, which would accord with views Blinken has taken going back at least to 1999, when he served on the NSC staff and tried to persuade Bill Clinton that the Syria Option was the way to crack the nut of Arab-Israeli peace. (Then Senator John Kerry, it may be recalled, nursed a similar view at the time.) Here is what he said—the selfsame remark Doran quoted yesterday: “Anyone calling for regime change in Syria is frankly blind to the past decade; and the collapse of eastern Syria, and growth of Jihadistan, leading to 30 to 50 suicide attacks a month in Iraq.”
It’s not obvious who rallies the second point of view within the Administration, but Rogin quotes Robert Ford, the recently departed U.S. Ambassador to Syria:
The people who think Bashar al Assad’s regime is the answer to containing and eventually eliminating the Islamic-based threat do not understand the historic relationship between the regime and ISIS. [They] don’t understand the current relationship between Assad and ISIS and how they are working on the ground together directly and indirectly inside Syria. . . . The people who think Assad’s regime survival is essential have not explained how his survival would solve the problem of extremism in Syria.
 Like Ambassador Ford, Ambassador Margaret Scobey before him and Ambassador Ted Kattouf before her, and really anyone who has paid day-job level attention to Syria in recent years, agree with this assessment. The Assad regime and its allies—especially Iran, if one is looking at the region in geopolitical terms—are the problem, not the solution. The fact that Rogin could not find anyone in a “higher” line position within the Administration to speak on behalf of this position for the record does suggest that the de facto pro-Assad point of view now rules the Administration roost. But since the policy is still that “he has to go”, it is sort of embarrassing to actually come right out and say this. And if that’s so, then Doran’s argument—that the Administration’s recent announcement of $500 million in aid to the FSA is a cynical “two-step”, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t form of bait-and-switch diplomacy designed just for show—is plausible.
Well, what to make of all this? I myself have mused in earlier days about bringing Iran in from the cold, too. That would be a huge game-changer, and for the better. When Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani says that the United States and Iran can cooperate over Iraq—as he said yesterday to Asahi Shimbun—it gets some people all fuzzy and dream-eyed. The Thermidor thesis might be right, too, and maybe Rafsanjani is its unlikely herald.
But it’s nothing to bet the rent on. Certainly, whenever I hear arguments urging the United States to be delicate and generous in the nuclear negotiations for the far-reaching impact it may have politically in Tehran, I cringe up real tight. That’s a sucker’s argument if there ever was one, and one generally proffered by only slightly veiled propagandists for Iran. It certainly is no way to negotiate the sticky details of a life-and-death scale, tentative agreement over Iran’s nuclear program.
Anyway, as we all know, hope is not a policy. Wanting Iran to be a normal, moderate, non-WMD-possessing actor that can deal pragmatically with the United States and others—maybe even Israel one day—is not the same as being able to have it. Ambassador Ford is right: Assad and his Iranian and Russian allies are the problem in Syria, and that is a problem which now looms over the entire region, radicalizing all politics, militarizing all tactics, poisoning hope for a normal future for the peoples of the Levant and beyond.
Clearly, however, while the Syria problem has bled into Iraq, Iraq’s woes are not entirely or even mainly imported. Even if ISIS’s origins are in the Syrian cauldron, aren’t the real dangers manifest now in Iraq? Isn’t ISIS truly the most dangerous challenge before us, and, if so, aren’t Blinken and his likeminded Administration colleagues right? And shouldn’t we also assume, forced to it by the plain logic of the situation, that Blinken privately agrees with John McCain and others who say we should be attacking ISIS by air in Iraq now, if not also attacking it in Syria?
No, he isn’t right, and his de facto pro-Assad view is to serious realpolitik what “Risk” is to real strategic planning. He’s rarely been right, and the fact that he worked for many years as Joe Biden’s principal foreign policy adviser echoes the fact. When Bob Gates hauled out the commonly spoken Washington line in his recent memoir that Biden has been wrong about everything over the years, he tacitly implicated Blinken as well. (Actually, Biden hasn’t been wrong about everything, only nearly everything…no one is perfect. And his “wrong rate” has dropped sharply in recent years, which is a good thing, seeing as how he is now but a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.)
He isn’t right because, as I have been at pains before to note, ISIS is not a particularly dangerous force, at least not yet. It is barely institutionalized in any form, including its recently proclaimed Islamic State. Even with “acquired” U.S. military equipment and some money from Mosul banks, its order-of-battle is extremely modest. High-end estimates of its troop strength hover around 10,000, but most of those are probably loosely affiliated tribesmen on a romp or common criminals grasping an opportunity. It has shown no capability for governing anything, it cannot think except in a fevered ideological cant, and it is arrayed in tribal alliances that are more fragile than oasis spider webs in a desert dust storm.
The best evidence, perhaps, for ISIS’s weakness is the fact that the Assad regime has actually been cooperating with it against the FSA inside Syria for some time. It has avoided attacking ISIS, and it has even paid money for oil in ISIS-controlled territory. If ISIS is no serious threat to Damascus, the only reason it could be construed as a serious threat to Baghdad is if the chaos there masquerades as an open door. It is Iraqi government weakness, not ISIS strength, we have been witnessing this past month.It is Iraqi government weakness, not ISIS strength, we have been witnessing this past month. If ISIS eventually becomes more institutionalized and dangerous, the U.S. military has plenty of time and plenty of ways to deal with it. If we ever see “the whites of their eyes”, those guys will be in deep, deep trouble.
My view, also noted before, is that the United States cannot save Iraq as a unitary state. It is too late for that, and its dissolution was probably going to happen at some point anyway. True, at earlier decision points wiser choices might have made a difference, in a path-dependency sort of way. For example, I argued, in vain, that we should postpone what turned out to be the “purple finger” Iraqi election of January 2005 rather than hold it on the basis of a national-list, single-district electoral system, because that would embed from the start dangerous sectarian divisions in the society. Better to wait, do a census with the help of the UN and EU-guarding UN census takers, and hold an election based on a proportional representation system that would have diluted sectarian divisions by forcing local communities to come together. Others made a similar argument, but the White House wanted the photo-op extravaganza of a quick “democratic election” for its own political purposes. That’s what it got, even as Iraq got an electoral system that could not have been more ill-suited to its circumstances.
Then, of course, had the Phase IV planning for the war been done properly, or been done at all, there would perhaps not have been a widespread and protracted insurgency that resulted, among other things, in the forced homogenization of ethnic neighborhoods and communities all over the country. That demographic fact has made the contemplation of de facto partition so much easier to swallow psychologically.
Yes, “mistakes were made” (note passive voice allowing no active noun to be named…), and then Nouri al-Maliki and Barack Obama made still more mistakes and it doesn’t matter anymore, really, and here we are where we are and Iraq is what it is—or rather, what it isn’t. And what it isn’t is a unitary state in its ungainly 1920 incarnation, something that only endured through its post-Hashemite history thanks to iron-fisted military dictatorships, and that would not likely have long endured as a democracy no matter the chosen electoral system. (I should note in passing that the loose federal model for Iraq championed years ago by Les Gelb and yes, Joe Biden, and recently re-churned by Mr. Gelb in a NYT op-ed, never really had a chance either, since such a system ultimately would have had to rely on two communities trusting whomever among the third held the gun in the capital; either that or be fastidiously detailed into a confessional constitutional model along the lines of the Lebanese system, probably impossible in Iraq—not that that’s worked so wonderfully in Lebanon either…)
So I repeat that the best longer-term U.S. option in the region is to support and speed, and try to guide and perhaps limit, the ambitions of Kurdish independence. And here the most important and actually quite remarkable development of recent weeks is the very frank Turkish comment that Kurdish independence is something now within the realm of contemplation. The Administration should have been on this portfolio already months ago and certainly, since this message has erupted from Ankara, should now be talking intensely if quietly about the forthcoming Kurdish referendum on independence. The purpose? How the two parties can cooperate to bring about this seismic shift in the region’s geopolitical terrain with the least amount of risk and the maximum amount of mutual benefit. I am very skeptical that the Administration is capable of thinking even that far ahead—the referendum will probably be held in September—because this is a White House-driven and dominated operation and the White House is in total reactive mode.
Beyond the Kurdish aspect to U.S. policy, we must stop thinking about Iraq as some sort of end in itself, or as some sort of clinging moral obligation. There are many thousands of Americans in Iraq working as NGO “saints” and not-so-saintly private contractors; there are many personal American-Iraqi governmental relationships, military and civilian, built up over more than a dozen years in some cases, in pain right now, too. Tough; sorry. Iraq must be considered from a U.S. national security point of view right now primarily as a one huge potential counterterrorism theater—period and full stop. (Same as Afghanistan, tentatively. Again tough; sorry.) There is no room here for bitter-sweet nostalgia or weeping guilt to play any major role in policymaking. Whatever happens to Iraq as such is not an existential problem for the United States. As for reputation, well, so much crockery has already been broken that it’s hard to imagine much of an inventory left to break—besides which, the Obama Administration has pinned the crockery bill on its predecessor, and while that’s only partly fair, it’s nevertheless a useful optic.
We do have important secondary obligations flowing out of Iraq to local allies—Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and a few others—and making good on those obligations is very important for its own sake and for the future of the U.S. reputation in the region and beyond. And we have a tertiary interest in keeping Iraqi oil on the international market. But these are normal foreign policy dilemmas, not existential crises. We do not owe Nouri al-Maliki anything; his sins are his own to pay for. We certainly do not owe the Iranian regime any assistance is trying to prop up Maliki’s Shi’a rump statelet. Rafsanjani’s seemingly generous statement to Asahi Shimbun is, to my way of thinking, just short of risible. It’s as if he’s saying to some Western naïf in a souk, “Hey friend, want to buy a carpet, cheap?” If Iranians want to die for Nouri al-Maliki’s political adventure, with which they have long been complicit anyway, let them do it without us. If the Balkans were not worth a single Pomeranian grenadier, according to Bismarck, Iraq is not worth a single American pilot, according to Garfinkle.
If we must stop thinking about Iraq with too much feeling that puts us way behind the curve on an onrushing reality, and if, as I argue, Iran with its Syrian ally is the source of recent Levantine misanthropies, then it behooves us to conclude on an analytical angle pointed toward Iran.
Now, I noted that if Iran’s Thermidor is nigh, that would be worth encouraging for all sorts of reasons. The question is, however, how do we best encourage it—by propitiating the current Iranian political elite, or by busting their heads against the wall? Should we help Khamenei and his emissaries muddle through in hopes of a positive future political evolution, or should we force failure on them—Rouhani and Zarif, too, because they’re not really so much our friends—the quicker that the bringers of Thermidor can find their way to power?
One can never know for sure when contemplating a less-than-transparent decision system—and the Iranian one certainly fits that description. But forcing failure seems to me the more promising approach.
How do we do that? Well, an easily developed list is at hand: Do not go soft in the P5+1 negotiations, do not erode the sanctions regime further, and be prepared to build it back up if Iranian behavior warrants; keep repeating the determination that Iran will not have nuclear weapons and that all options remain on the table to prevent it; prepare multi-level economic warfare plans short of kinetic strikes, not to exclude naval blockades; intercept Iranian arms shipments to insurgents in the region and, perhaps, once unloaded, sink the ships; reveal Assad’s chemical weapons declaration to have been bogus; quickly and significantly aid the FSA to do real harm to Iran’s Alawi allies in Damascus; and, above all, use the current ISIS crisis to harm Iran for the longer term.
What do I mean by that? The ISIS phenomenon has played to Iran’s advantage in some short-term ways. It has rallied all non-Sunni constituencies to see Iran as an ally of one kind or another. After all, objectively speaking, even the Al-Saud has coincident interests in Iran’s fighting and harming ISIS in Iraq. But in the longer run, what is happening is liable to turn into a strategic nightmare for Tehran. Let us count the ways.
First, conflict between the Shi’a and Sunni parts of what used to be Iraq could go on for a long time. In the near term, Iran could be forced to intervene on the ground to stop an ISIS surge toward Baghdad. It seems to be possessed by a local version of the Brezhnev Doctrine: once Shi’a, stays Shi’a. Even well short of that, if Iran gets enmeshed in defending a client Shi’a rump state over time, it will likely be pushed by Iraqis to regain the Sunni lands now under ISIS and tribal occupation. If it rises unwisely to that task, whatever the temptations of weakness espied to the north, Iranians will bleed for months and years and almost certainly will do so without success. Persian-Arab antipathy will wax the longer such an uncomfortable liaison lasts. The Sunnis cannot take and hold Baghdad, let alone Basra, but the Shi’a cannot retake Falluja or Ramadi or certainly Mosul. We have then before us, on balance, a stalemated situation. If Iran gets sucked into it, it will suffer grievouslyWe have then before us, on balance, a stalemated situation. If Iran gets sucked into it, it will suffer grievously, particularly as the Sunni world rallies to prick and pinch it at the margins from every front it can penetrate. Good.
mapSecond, Kurdish independence will undermine Iranian security, potentially big time. Kurdish independence will irritate Baghdad, of course, but there is nothing practical Baghdad can do about it. Maliki’s fulminations against the Kurds in recent days are just that—fulminations that foul the air but do little else. Same with Syria—Syria’s Kurds are on their own now, in the midst of trying to sort out their loyalties and disloyalties to other Kurdish organizations and clans in Turkey and Iraq, but this will get sorted out in due course likely without much practical interference from Damascus. Turkey is on the verge of historical decisions regarding its own Kurdish community, and if the AK era provides no other lasting positive service to the country, its rapprochement with the Kurds will have made it all worth it, if that effort can be brought to a reasonably and relatively happy ending. Only Iran is put at real long-term risk by the rise of an independent Kurdistan.
Again, let us count the ways. There are about 7 million Kurds in Iran out of a population of around 76.5 million. Most live in the northwestern parts of the country between what used to be the Iraqi state and the Azeri-populated parts of Iran. In other words, the territory of the Kurdish Regional Government, soon to be an independent state, is directly adjacent to Iranian Kurdistan, and that border is for practical purposes impossible to seal. (The Special Forces guys reading this are licking their lips about now…)
Iranian security forces also have to go through Azeri-speaking territory to even get there, and while that is not problematic now, the example of rising and successful Kurdish nationalism could set off kindred feelings and movements in the other non-Persian parts of Iran—among Azeris, among Baluch, and among Arab-speakers in Khuzistan province. Iran is not and never has been a modern nation-state; it is a quasi-imperial multi-ethnic state run by Persians. (Why hasn’t the MSM told you that, you wonder? Ask them.) The unsettling of Iranian Kurdistan could touch off very expensive and difficult state-maintenance problems for the mullahs, who are even less popular in most non-Persian communities than they are in Persian ones. Right now, Iran is one of the few states in the region that can boast effective control over its national territory. Change that and you change a lot.
In short, between the potential swamp-like entanglements awaiting in rump Shi’a Iraq to the west, and the rise of the Kurds to the northwest, the dissolution of the Iraqi state bodes far vaster and longer term problems for Iran than for the United States. So, as the Beatles once said, “Let it be.”
Add to that the likely chaos awaiting to the east, as fanatical Sunni Taliban duke it out with Tajik, Uzbek, and Pashtun warlords in a post-U.S.-withdrawal Afghanistan, and things don’t look so peachy for Iran. It’s enough to make Baluchi restiveness along the border with Pakistan, and Iran’s long borders with Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, look positively serene by comparison—and serene they ain’t, just by the way.
Don’t misunderstand me: The collapse of the Iraqi state is not something we should like or have longed for. A lot of innocent people are being harmed by it, as is of course also very true of the collapse of the Syrian state. But, as they say, if all you have is lemons, you make lemonade. If what we have is a real mess, it behooves us to tilt the table so as to sluice it on our adversaries. Some who are trained professionally in this sort of business could count the ways to do just that.
Just a parting PS, if I may. For all I know, Josh Rogin sketches the intra-Administration dispute referenced at the outset accurately enough, but beyond his role as a reporter he is not to be trusted as knowledgeable about Syria, Iraq or the region. Here is just one reason why: “Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and Assad are both Shi’ites; ISIS is Sunni”, Rogin wrote.
Well, no. When you’ve seen one “Shiite” you have not seen them all—apologies to Spiro Agnew. Rogin apparently doesn’t know the difference between a Ja’afari “Twelver”, an Ismaili, an Alawi, a Druze and a Hello Kitty doll. Just because all of these are not Sunnis does not make them all the same. Good grief; will American journalists ever get a clue about this part of the world?