Disgruntled

Some wag once defined the word disgruntled as what happens to a pig when it loses its voice. Very funny, but not really what I want to talk about right now. I merely feel the need to unburden myself of a wide range of small to medium-sized thoughts that I simply haven't had time to put to paper in recent weeks. If I do that, I might feel less disgruntled. The truth is that I've been unable to avoid thinking about various Middle Eastern issues, simply because that's what I grew up professionally doing. So let me in terse and telegraphic terms get it off my chest.

First, Iraq. The U.S. exit from Iraq is very likely to catalyze political violence of significant magnitude, and soon. It's already starting. It might even lead to a full-fledged sectarian and ethnic–based (if one considers the Kurds) civil war. Since a similar spasm of violence could very well be in the cards in neighboring Syria, this would make for quite a telegenic few weeks or months.

Everybody who's been paying attention knows that the Obama Administration wanted to keep a larger number of troops in Iraq––something on the order of ten thousand at the least––but no status of forces agreement could be worked out, and we pulled the plug on the negotiations and booked for the exit. As best I can tell, the Iraqi government is so disorganized and at odds within itself that it could not make a decision on anything. This is the kind of government with which we have left the Iraqi people. We like to call it a democracy, or a democracy in the making, and, to be sure, it has many of the trappings of an electoral democracy. But is it is a democracy with very few democrats. All of the social and attitudinal prerequisites for genuine democratic government, not to speak of liberal democratic government, are frail in Iraq, and some are downright nonexistent. I have gone through this list many times before, but very few people seem to have paid attention or to a bothered to think through the matter on their own, so I will just list them briefly again.

First comes the idea of intrinsic authority in a polity. If there is no sense that the people are sovereign, then authority has to come from outside the people. In Iraq, as in most of the Muslim world, political authority is presumed to be extrinsic––it rests with God and his revelations. This concept produces a monadic political system, one in which the very idea of doubt is heresy, and one in which the concept of a loyal opposition therefore makes absolutely no sense. It causes political life to import a model bearing the syntax of religious logic, and in that syntax there can only be one god, one truth, one true emissary, one legitimate party.

Second is the idea of equality before the law, which we call in shorthand the rule of law. Western ways in this regard are highly abstract. We have a concept of citizenship that derives from the myth, benign though it may be, of primordial individualism. In Iraq, as in most of the region, law is personal and communally contextual. The state is weak and the institutions of the state are weak, so that it is the individual only with his web of family and extended connections that defines his status, not the abstract qualities that attach to any official post or position. It would simply not occur to a judge in any traditional Muslim society not to take into consideration the personal nature and context of both defendant and plaintiff in any court case. Our idea of equality before the law exalts the law and not the person, but that depends in turn on a notion of egalitarianism that is simply nonexistent in most of the Middle East. The idea that a twenty-four-year-old young woman who is illiterate and from a minority ethnic or sectarian community should have a vote that counts as much as that of a scholarly a pious male from a prominent family strikes most people as absurd. Perhaps nonexistent is too strong a term. Times are changing. But they are changing slowly, the twitterati notwithstanding, and there is an enormous burden of historical inertia to overcome.

Third, for the idea of elections to make sense under the rubric we take for granted in the West of majority rule, there has to be an expectation that elections are institutionalized;in other words, people have to be able to view the function of elections in a broader context of institutional legitimacy. In traditional societies, there are various ways in which consensus building works as a means of making decisions, and these ways are deeply if less formally (by our standards) institutionalized. In societies with weak states that are defined by endogamous marriage patterns, communal identity trumps individual identity. When the elders of families get together to make decisions, they engage in what amounts to a continuous process of negotiation and informal litigation. They make deals. They adjust as necessary. The idea that one should have an election at an arbitrarily fixed point in time, the result of which is that the person who gets the most votes gets not his proportional share of the power but one hundred percent of the power until the next vote, when the leadership may or may not alternate to some other group, is not a natural concept to say the least. That someone who wins, say, 57 percent of the vote should get 100 percent of the power for an extended period of time strikes most people as simply crazy, and also very unfair. It almost never occurs to Americans to question that other peoples might have a different way of thinking about the process of making decisions and choosing leaders. Most even well-educated Americans are intellectually very insular in this respect and, knowing so little history, very unimaginative.

Fourth there is the general question of representation. We have no problem in this country, or anywhere in the Western world, with the idea that one person in a legislature can represent a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand others. Because we have this egalitarian ideal, and because we place the law about the person, it makes perfect sense that one person can stand for the interests of many others, as expressed through the process of election, first in wards, then in primaries and so on. That is the essence, to some extent, of democratic political theory. Kids experience it in first grade when they put their heads down on their desks and vote for class president.

But we don't take to heart very often just how abstract and really unnatural an arrangement this is. In traditional societies the concept of representation is much weaker. Because of the presumption of social hierarchy, those higher in rank are presumed to be able to represent those lower down, but this is not a generalized phenomenon. The old can represent the younger, the men can represent the women, yes. But to cross lines of family and gender, this is much more difficult for people to accept, and to cross lines of sectarian identification in mass societies is also a stretch for many people. How can a woman, for example, say, in the Egyptian parliament, represent thousands of other people, most of whom are men? How can any woman represent a man? Everyone "knows" that women think differently from men, the young from the old, the heathen from the believer. It is very difficult to conceive of how democracy on a national scale can truly be legitimate in the minds of most citizens if the very idea of representation is so sketchy.

Now let's take this general analysis back to Iraq. To simplify matters, most Iraqis don't understand or credit the idea of intrinsic political authority, most do not have an abstract impersonal and egalitarian-based concept of the rule of law, most do not really understand elections as a way to choose leaders and solve problems, and a large number don't really feel comfortable with the idea of interchangeable representation that mixes sectarian, ethnic and gender categories. And what does this mean? It means that in the absence of the American babysitter, these Arabs, and Kurds, are going to literally and physically rearrange the artificial constructs left by the American occupation until they re-create a social and political dynamic that suits their culture. Put another way, Iraqi democracy is wafer thin, and it sits on top of ingrained traditions and attitudes miles deep. I wish there were a nonviolent way for this rearrangement to proceed, and there might be. But I doubt it.

Now let's talk about Egypt. About a year ago I warned that most Americans, led by the true idiocy of the American media, were making two very serious mistakes in their assessment of what was happening in Cairo and beyond. What happened with the ouster of Hosni Mubarak was not a revolution or even a regime change. It was an internal coup within the military that ousted a leader who was clearly to a point of rushing senility and illness that he was more trouble than he was worth to the military bureaucracy that controls the country. And what was going on in the street was not a democracy movement, and it certainly was not a movement that represented the majority of Egyptians. Just because people go out and protest their government doesn't mean that their principle objective is to establish a Western-style process democracy. Some of the younger set did want that, and there are many liberals in Egyptian society who are conversant with Western ways and to speak Western languages, or at least read them, and there are more of these younger people than there used to be and they are networked socially with new technology and, yes, all of this matters. But it does not represent a fundamental reversal of the social facts of Egyptian life. Egyptians had very good reason to be pissed off at their government, and when they expressed their displeasure the manifestly brittle quality of their government encouraged them to want to bring down the whole filthy, corrupt edifice. But that did not mean that the protesters had firm ideas of what they wanted to replace the status quo with, or, more important, much of anything in the way of means to bring it about, even had they known what they wanted.

When all hell broke loose in Egypt last year, therefore, anyone who had even a passing familiarity with the country saw the threat that the only truly organized force politically outside of the military, namely the Muslim Brotherhood and other, smaller even more radical Muslim groups, stood to gain the most from the fall of the Pharaoh. Everything that has happened since has confirmed this understanding. The liberals did not, as some American commentators have asserted lately, lose control of the revolution. You cannot lose control of something you never had in the first place, and of something (a revolution) that never actually happened. (And there is nothing much that the United States could have done to make a significant difference in the outcome so far, so please let's skip the blame game.)

I suppose I should know better by now, but it has astounded me that the American press could possibly express surprise and disappointment with what was obvious and inevitable from the start. But they have, in spades. You'd think they would be embarrassed to admit how little they understood, but they are too ignorant to know that others might have known better. Indeed, their ignorance and lack of curiosity in gaining any real knowledge of the country appears to be without limit. What is worse, their failures reinforce the ignorance and lack of curiosity in the American political class. Into the vacuum of that ignorance pours the unself-aware projection of assumptions natural to American and Western social and political life, and these are utterly misleading as ways to understand or think about Egypt or any country in the region. But there we are.

This does not mean that Egyptians or Iraqis or Arabs in general are morally depraved or inferior human beings or barbarians or any other vulgar nonsense to that effect. (I have to say this because my experience has taught me that stupidity in America as regards the Middle East is not limited to the liberal leaning stupidity of the press; it also extends to the stupidity of know-nothing, para-racist right.)

It also doesn't mean that Islam as a theology is inherently incompatible with democracy. Aside from being not true this is a category mistake. Theologies do not rule in any Middle Eastern country, not even in quasi-theocratic Iran. A religious civilization is far more than a theology, and is a religious civilization in several variants that we are talking about. The proper analog, if anyone wishes to really understand this properly, is Islam to Christendom, not Islam to Christianity. (Of course, to understand that a person has to know the difference between Christendom and Christianity, but I have time and patience to peel other people's onions back only so far.) While Islam as a theology is not incompatible with democracy, the experience of Islam as a civilization over roughly the past few centuries, really going back to medieval times, to the Ibn-Rushd/al-Ghazali disagreement, is incompatible with democracy. This can change. It is changing. But it is changing slowly.

Now let me address the broader geopolitics of the region, and also how Israel fits in. Academics like to refer to regional subsystems. Academics love the words system and subsystem. An old professor of mine once asked, way back during my graduate school days, "Class, what is a system?" Various students volunteered this or that esoteric definition. The professor collected these in gratitude and silence. Of course, most of these definitions were bullshit, just substitutions of new vague language for other, older vague language. At last the professor taught, "Class, a system is something very large, that we do not understand." He paused, and then he said, "Class, what is a subsystem?" He did not wait for responses but simply answered his own question: "A subsystem is something smaller, that we also do not understand."

I will never forget this lesson. When people talk about the Middle East as a subsystem they confuse themselves. Of course there are things about the various countries in the region that are held in common, and they are by no means trivial. But when you actually do a transactional analysis, you find that there is much less exchange of all sorts among Middle Eastern states than there is between many Middle Eastern states and those outside the so-called subsystem. The world is not as sealed off into physical, geographical units of space as it was a hundred and certainly a thousand years ago.

All that said, it still makes a certain simple and not entirely futile sense to think about the region in terms of geographical proximity--as long as you keep the limits of the exercise in mind.

One of the things we can count on, I think, if we do a subsystem thought experiment, is that Egypt will be, if not wholly absent, then receding in regional significance for several years while it works out its internal convulsions. These convulsions have caused an already frail economy to spin into near freefall; Egypt will not be able to afford much of a regional role. In the vacuum that the recession of the largest Arab country creates, Turkey wishes to walk, and is already doing so. It wishes to do so for religious reasons, national reasons, important economic reasons, and delusional personal reasons that attached to addled imaginations of the current Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Turkey.

In some ways this is not a bad thing. I am not one of those persuaded that there is a generalizable Turkish model for anything in the Arab world. Arabs don't particularly like Turks, and Turks don't particularly respect Arabs. These biases have a long history. Nevertheless, Turkey does feature what is at least for the time being a democratic system with an Islamist ruling party. There is at least a chance that this ruling party respects democratic procedures enough that it will give way if it loses an election, though I am not particularly reassured about that. Perhaps Arab countries in search of some model that reconciles democracy with Islamic civilization will copy aspects of the Turkish arrangement. That would be very interesting, for it would give them an option between insane Islamist fanaticism and dysfunctional military rule. That is what they need to grow out of their political stasis.

But looking at this geopolitically, first from the American point of view, it is clear that Turkey is no longer the kind of ally we grew used to during the Cold War. Its government today has deep social roots, the result of generations of Turkish society's coming to terms with modernity. There is a deep reluctance in the United States and Europe to recognize the very deep roots of the current Turkish political arrangement. Things will not go back to the way they were. I believe that this reluctance is a function of flat out ignorance. Just as most Americans and even most Europeans are ignorant of Arab society, they are almost equally ignorant of Turkish society.

From the American point of view, the disappearance of a reliable and convivial Turkish ally is not entirely a bad thing, because the real problem we face in the region is burgeoning Iranian power. As in the past, a strong Turkey will be a regional balancer against Iranian hegemonic pretensions. This will be true regardless of the nature of Turkish relations with the United States, or even Turkish relations with Europe. In some ways it will be a more effective balance against Iran among the Arabs if it does not have very good relations with United States.

A few weeks ago I tried to explain this general point to a former U.S. legislator, who will go unnamed, and in doing so I mentioned the fact that there is a long historical record of such balancing. I had recourse to mention the several Ottoman–Safavid wars of earlier centuries, and how those wars affected the European state system of the time. This man looked me like I had fallen out of the tree and hit my head. He knew the word Ottoman, I think, but it seemed clear to me from the expression on his face that he had never heard the word Safavid, and he clearly had no idea what I was talking about. Wars? What wars? (This is what wants to make me buy a farm, get off the grid, and leave this insipid city to its own devices.)

From the Israeli point of view, these developments are partly interesting and partly frightening. The key fact in Israel's consideration of its own strategic circumstances is not what is going on in Iraq, and not even what is going on in Egypt, and certainly not what is going on in the West Bank or Gaza or in Jordan or in Syria. The key factors what is going on in Washington. The United States is receding from the region, and fast. Israel is a strong but small state, and the United States has been since the late 1960s the only true friend and protector it has had. The U.S. back-peddling in the region therefore has to be cause for some anxiety in Israel.

It is not just that the United States military is leaving Iraq and will soon leave Afghanistan, although that matters. In regional perceptions this U.S. recession from the region is deepened by the fact that the Administration has proved feckless and clueless throughout all of its Middle Eastern policies. Not least in its record of cluelessness is the way it is tried to handle Arab–Israeli affairs, and no matter one's perspective on the problem, every serious person involved in this business justifiably has a very low opinion of American capacity and judgment over the past three years. So as United States is receding physically from the region it is also receding in other ways. The fact that the United States chose to "lead from behind" concerning Libya has contributed as well to this perception. And so have the facile and unhelpful speeches and comments from the Secretary of State about a pivot away from the Middle East to the Western Pacific, leaving Middle Eastern locals with the impression that we are headed fast and straight out of Dodge. (Just because something is true doesn't mean that a diplomat is supposed to say it. Hillary Clinton is a terrible Secretary of State for this, if not for other reasons.)

But now back to Israel. The Iranians are hostile. The Turks are not as hostile but they are still hostile, except that their hostility is partly tactical in that it is useful in the Turkish effort to ingratiate themselves with the Arabs. Israel and Turkey can still work together, less as friends, as had been the case to some degree in the past, and more as self-interested strategic agents. That is usually good enough for government work. And it is in any event all you can get most of the time.

So as Egypt becomes less important, at least for the time being, and as the United States moves away from the region literally and otherwise, we have the makings, or rather the re-makings, of a regional subsystem. In a simple schematic sense, the Israelis see Turkey balancing off Iran, the Sunni Arabs in support of Turkey, and the Shia Arabs in less firm support of Iran. So the geopolitical balance and the sectarian balance that overlays it interact in very interesting ways. This creates opportunity as well as peril for Israeli policy, and most serious Israelis get this. As best I can tell, however, no one running for President here has the least idea of any of this.

I think it would be fun to go back many centuries, even to the time of the prophet Jeremiah––who ended his life unhappily in Egypt, as some of you may remember, on account of his unpopular strategic advice––and see what there is to be learned about the regional subsystems of ancient times. From the Hebrew Bible and other sources we know that ancient Israel, small as it was, was sandwiched in between ambitious and aggressive empires to its south in Egypt, and to its north at various points in history in Babylonia, Assyria and Persia. One does not get the puncturing, or the penetration, or the "globalization", of the ancient Near Eastern strategic subsystem until Hellenic times, and then of course with the advent of the Roman Empire. In a curious way, the future looks to be in some respects developing a resemblance to the pre-2nd century BCE Near East.

I have tried to interest scholars in pursuing this meditation. I will report back if I have any success; I, myself, do not know enough ancient Near Eastern history to do the job myself.