Our sins and our debts ...

... are often more than we know, or so runs an old English proverb.

Linking to a post by Fabius Maximus, I recently pointed out the heavy level of societal indebtedness in America, especially household and consumer debt. The developing economic downturn will probably be an international episode, lasting part or all of a decade, like what Japan went through in the 1990s, the so-called "Lost Decade." (The recession proper might be short, but not the subsequent stagnation.) Post-bubble, the name of the game is deleveraging, working off debt, renegotiating debt, and (in some cases) defaulting on debt. The need to undo some of this indebtedness (the dead hand of the past) will put a definite crimp in everyone's style for at least a while, now and in the future.

The so-called "credit crisis" we've just passed through isn't really a "credit" crisis so much as a "creditworthiness crisis". If you have good credit and can prove it, you can borrow, even though the terms will be tougher. What has lending markets paralyzed is distrust of borrowers in unknown financial condition. Many are fine, some are struggling, and some are bankrupt. Helping bankrupt actors (banks, businesses, individuals) continue to borrow is a big mistake; it just prolongs the crisis and sends good money after bad. We have ways of dealing with bankruptcy, including deposit insurance for bankrupt banks. The right thing to do -- and what was done in the savings and loan crisis of the early 90s -- is to let the bankrupt go bankrupt, compensate depositors, collect and sell assets, and allow the non-bankrupt to prove their creditworthiness. Once everyone's financial state, both good and bad, is clarified, lenders will start lending again.

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Friends keep asking me if (especially if Obama wins) we'll get a new New Deal. The answer is no, we won't. The New Deal did not cure the Great Depression, but undoubtedly prolonged it. The world economy is far too interconnected to allow such economic experiments today: socialism requires, among other things, a closed economy and a fairly closed society. We're moving farther and farther away from conditions that made such maneuvers possible.

It is possible that reckless politicians could launch a trade war, fueled by demagoguery about globalization and alleged "deregulation." Investor concern about this, here and elsewhere, is one of the reasons for the big drops in stock exchanges worldwide in the last month. If it starts to develop, it must be stopped dead in its tracks. It would leave the world a less secure and poorer place, impacting the poorest countries the most.

But there are reasons closer to home why we won't be seeing a new New Deal, and that is that governments are no longer in the strong position vis-a-vis their economies the way they were in the 1930s. Western governments today are among the world's biggest debtors. Given the global economic integration we have now, inflating away the debt (by printing money) is not an option, and governments cannot raise taxes much, if at all. Both options would cause investors to flee and a much more serious credit crisis. The remaining possibilities are deflation (which I think we're definitely heading into in any case, central banks being unable to stop it) and a higher probability of government debt defaults. I don't think the US federal government is in that situation, but a number of states and municipalities are.

In a sentence: governments will not be counteracting private retrenchment; they will themselves be retrenching.

Deflation will bring some good things, the most important being the undermining of "commodity dictatorships" like Russia, Venezuela, and Iran. Commodity prices are sensitive barometers of demand. With demand slackening off, all such governments are and will remain in serious trouble.

Although I strongly doubt the conventional wisdom that the Democrats will gain in Congress -- given Congress' unpopularity, they're more likely to lose some seats in the House -- my recommendation is to sit back and let an Obama administration go about its wrecking work. Voters will quickly suffer a shattering disillusionment once the Candyman Messiah is discredited. The real question is whether an effective conservative movement can be rebuilt from the wreckage of the last ten years. What we're seeing now -- a Republican administration looking the other way in the face of government-enabled bad debt, effectively nationalizing banks, extending government credit far beyond anything ever conceived, and so on -- is what happens when you don't have a conservative party or effective conservative politicians.

A culture is a terrible thing to waste

Here's a lesson in cultural decline. Consider one of the greatest natural scientists ("natural philosophers") of the Arabic-Persian golden age, Alhacen of Basra, who lived in the later 900s (see here and here). Then contrast with this flat-earth theorist of present-day Iraq (video clip requires WMP).

What a difference a millennium makes.


This may seem like just shooting fish in a barrel. But here's a serious point: in the West, we're used to progress - the future is better than the past. In our conceited arrogance, we even think progress is automatic, like getting on an UP escalator.

In fact, progress is anything but automatic. It needs the right conditions. We've had those in the West since the late Middle Ages, with some occasional, if terrible, interruptions. The right conditions are always under threat from ideologues, fanatics, and people with obsessive fixed ideas.

Now imagine you live in a land of regress: the past is better than the future. The regress may have been going on for so long - say, seven or eight centuries - that it seems automatic. Of course, that's not right either. But in your land of regress, there are people - including some important and powerful people - with a vested interest in decline. Turning things around seems threatening to them. To make their point, they even get violent.

Good czar, bad czar

Something very bad has happened in Russia in the last eight years: the rise of Vladimir Putin and the new Russian mafia state. Contrary to myths still repeated in the West, this period has not seen Russia become more stable or a nicer place: on the contrary. The Russian state has prospered, because it's seized control of Russia's oil and gas wealth. It's now become another petro-dictatorship. The decline of Russian society, arrested in the 90s, is accelerating.

But there's also a whole army of bagmen (consultants, lobbyists, etc.) out there who've clouded the issue both here and especially in Europe. The West lacks the clarity on the issue that it had during the Cold War, even though Russia is causing problems in Iran and is about to in Kosovo. This is not the 90s "holiday from history" any more. And there's no good czar - Yeltsin - to deal with.

Bad - bad - czar - bad - bad.

More on resurgent conspiracism

PRE-POSTSCIPT: Follow the saga of the Saudi-sponsored school in northern Virginia by starting here. The Washington Post, normally sensible on such questions, has inexplicably gotten lost on this one. They ask, what about parochial schools? Indeed: what if Catholic schools didn't just teach Catholic doctrine, but advocated religious war against Protestants or forcible conversion of Jews? Or if Protestant schools taught that Catholics should lose all of their civil and political rights?
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First, a follow-up to the earlier posting on Walt and Mearsheimer's book, which reviewers have mostly panned. What's amazing is that the book fails to even mention the Saudi lobby or the effect of oil money in buying influence in Washington. Having now looked at the book myself, I also cannot believe how much it uses recycled mythology about Israel and its supporters pushing for the Iraq war. Walt and Mearsheimer themselves register these facts in their book, but it strangely leaves their argument unchanged, showing how disconnected from reality they are (and from Israel's real concern, Iran). Clearly, they're in the obsessive "Jews-on-the-brain" zone, à la Pat Buchanan. Whether you want to call that "antisemitism" is a fine semantic point up to you.

Remember: the 9/11 and other al Qaeda attacks - from 1990's assassination of Rabbi Kahane in New York City through the two attacks on the WTC, and on down the list, including the present mayhem in Afghanistan and Iraq - could and would not have happened without Saudi money, Saudi pressure for accelerated normalization of travel and visa requirements, and Saudi wacko ideology. Saudi Arabia is the cause of those attacks in two senses, for you Aristotelians out there: "first" cause (the basic driving ideology) and "efficient" cause (enabling the means).

For a book to seriously discuss these effects without mentioning their cause is a farce.

A book-length counter to the myth-spinning of Walt and Mearsheimer is Abe Foxman's new book, The Deadliest Lies. (Foxman is the head of the Anti-Defamation League of the B'nai B'rith.) The ADL is a problematic organization and routinely misses the mark in their strategy by not understanding the real purposes of antisemitism, wrongly thinking that it's fundamentally about the Jews. (The ADL's serious flaws are a topic for another day.) Nonetheless, the book is on target with its analysis of the archetypical antisemitic fantasy: secret cabals, the secret cause of wars and financial panics, etc. The patterns of Walt and Mearsheimer's book and its cruder cousins are striking and, to any student of classical antisemitic theorizing, very familiar. Yale University's Charles Hill blurbs Foxman's book this way: "Conspiracy theories are a measure of a society’s mental health; when on the rise, trouble lies ahead. In The Deadliest Lies, Abraham Foxman diagnoses the ‘Israel Lobby’ conspiracy theory and reveals how sick it is." Even in the 1930s, people had a vague sense of conspiracism as a mental disorder, but we're more sharply aware of this now and have fewer excuses for tolerating it.

Finally, the new issue of Foreign Affairs contains an important review by Walter Russell Mead. He points to one of the realities that Walt and Mearsheimer keep colliding with but never understand: the ways in which foreign policy elites intersect with broad democratic norms and the assumption, natural to American political culture, that broad democratic norms should influence foreign policy - an concept alien in most other countries, even other democracies. And Mead perceptively identifies the way in which Walt and Mearsheimer use classical antisemitic tactics, including the attempt to put American Jews in a bind over criticizing their book - so they can appear outraged that American Jews should be provoked by what is so clearly intended as a provocation. As Mead says, Jimmy Carter is the past master of this tactic, but Walt and Mearsheimer give Carter stiff competition.

But Mead also lets his fellow academics off the hook too easily, in my view. It's hard to believe they're unaware that most American Jews voted against Bush both times and that most American Jews (and most American Jewish organizations) were neutral on or opposed to the Iraq war. The recycling of discredited mythology is only superficially about pseudo-facts; such myth-spinning always serves some other and normally unstated purpose. And while they might be naive about American politics, they are not naive about the Middle East. Like many so-called experts, they hide much of what they really know, even from themselves, and peddle oil-realism as a higher morality. Walt and Mearsheimer cannot not know the truth about the Middle East, its oil regimes, Islam, etc. They also cannot not know the truth about the Arabs of Palestine, an important topic to consider next.

POSTSCRIPT: Regional cooperation in the Middle East is possible, once you get outside the context of the UN and spectacles like the ridiculous Ahmadinejad. Israel and Oman just marked 10 years of cooperation on regional water conservation.

Mahmoud, we hardly knew ye

He stayed too long, but not long enough really ....

SNL does it again, this time with Andy Samberg's love-note music video to Ahmadinejad. Unfortunately, the video was yanked from the Web because of a copyright clearance snafu.

Ahmadinejad spoke in September at the United Nations and at Columbia University in New York in person and at the National Press Club in Washington DC by teleconference. See these summaries here and here.

Columbia, like so many universities these days, disgraced itself. Or maybe, it was a superb opportunity to let the students and New Yorkers off campus to show up the ridiculous administrators and faculty. The students and New Yorkers acquitted themselves well.

Not enough Said, I guess. For a wackily surreal sidebar on Ahmadinejad's visit and more evidence of the decline of American universities under the reign of political correctness, check this out. Anti-colonialism apparently now includes beating up gay men. I guess none of these bozos have ever read any medieval Arabic or Persian love poetry.

Is it just me, or is something completely off the rails here?

Which leads to the final comment, from funny man Andy Borowitz.

POSTSCRIPT: It's not all bad news from the Middle East. Some Israeli doctors are examining Iraqi children in Jordan for heart conditions that can be treated at the Wolfson Medical Center in Israel. See here.

Update on the Iraq war

So how goes it?

Better, but still not great. The "surge" has worked as advertised, in a limited sense. But it remains a temporary solution and cannot be sustained beyond next spring. Chatter about the "surge" deflects attention from the fact that the US needs a longer-term strategy, and it's fairly clear what that is.

That strategy is reducing the troop level to something much lower (30,000 say) and reshaped for pure counterinsurgency, without the typically long and massive American logistical trail - the one that winds through the fast food joints in Kuwait and ends in a military warehouse back here in the States. The keys to successful counterinsurgency are:

• Using the minimal force necessary, not the maximum force possible
• Keeping the politics to the fore and the military aspect to the rear

The political constraints should be the following. It's not in American interests to intervene military in purely internal Iraqi conflicts. That's not to say the US can't do conflict resolution here; it just shouldn't involve military intervention. The reason is simple: get involved militarily in the Middle East and, no matter how hard you try, you'll end up being viewed as "taking sides" and "dishonoring" or "shaming" someone (viz. Lebanon in 1982-83).* OTOH, if something in Iraq involves al-Qa'eda, its affiliates, or their Iranian-Shi'ite counterparts, then indeed the US has a real stake in the regional and global implications and military involvement is absolutely justified - like in Afghanistan, in the same way and for the same reasons.

Al-Qa'eda's military and political fortunes in Iraq have plunged in the last year and a half. Whether this reversal will stick depends heavily on whether al-Qa'eda can regroup and regenerate itself, like in Afghanistan. That in turn depends on the presence of outside sponsors and sanctuaries - like the case of Pakistan vis-à-vis Afghanistan.

Supporters of the Iraq operation also need to face a by-now fairly obvious American political reality. Many of them have wrongly fused support for the Iraq war with support for Bush (or vice versa). In the last year, that fusion has become no longer tenable. It's not "Bush and Iraq," but "Bush or Iraq." The combination of Bush's "true believer" stubbornness and incompetence, his now-almost complete reliance on military people who understand things better than he does, and the remains of BDS (Bush Derangement Syndrome) among liberals and Democrats makes separating Bush from his Mess-o-potamia essential, if we're ever to straighten the latter out.** Bush will no longer be president after January 2009. The Iraq mess, and even more, the Iranian threat hanging over it all like a dark cloud, will still be there.

POSTSCRIPT: A politically- and militarily-savvy synopsis, and a somewhat different point of view, from the San Antonio Express-News.
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* Thus, under no circumstances should the US intervene militarily in a Kurdish-Turkish conflict. There's a lot of other things we can do to help stop or contain such a conflict; military intervention isn't one of them.

** This has a powerful added bonus for the 2008 Republican candidates. As Bush and Iraq are peeled apart, the powerful anti-Bush obsession among Democrats dissipates. There's little else to the Dems these days except BDS. They're still as bankrupt now as they were in 2004.

Shanah tovah in Baghdad

Yochi Dreazen is the Wall Street Journal's occasional Baghdad reporter. He spent Rosh Hashanah 2007 at a US army base near Baghdad and wrote this moving account. This version is published by Point of No Return, a very interesting blog about the forgotten Jews and Jewish refugees of the Middle East.

POSTSCRIPT: Here is an interesting article on that Iranian fictionalized television drama of the Holocaust, loosely based on the life of the Iranian diplomat Abdol Hossein Sardari. Several analysts reviewing the Farsi original have traced out clear anti-Zionist themes and several standard tropes of anti-Israel propaganda, and a disturbing implication of Jews as corrupt.

You might wonder where that "Zionism is racism" garbage, as well as the more subtle attempts to divide Jews from Jewish nationalism, come from. The first is a legacy of three+ decades of Soviet propaganda, unabashedly anti-Zionist and antisemitic. The second is a standard theme of both far Left and Islamic-oriented propaganda. An upcoming posting will explore the origins of these and other antisemitic concepts in the long, unique, and now defunct experiment of the Jewish diaspora, which created a distorted and untenable combination of simultaneous achievement and survival with exceptional powerlessness. Antisemitism and Jewish powerlessness coexist in symbiosis. But attempts to end that powerlessness and normalize Jewish life also provoke frenzied resistance from certain quarters, including some Jewish ones.

Not what you thought

I'll let the Wall Street Journal do the talking:

Every Monday night at 10 o'clock, Iranians by the millions tune into Channel One to watch the most expensive show ever aired on the Islamic republic's state-owned television. Its elaborate 1940s costumes and European locations are a far cry from the typical Iranian TV fare of scarf-clad women and gray-suited men.

But the most surprising thing about the wildly popular show is that it is a heart-wrenching tale of European Jews during World War II.

The program has an undercurrent of very mixed messages regarding Jews, Judaism, and Israel. (They're still struggling with the fact that Zionism is not imperialism, just a nationalism.) It also has a funny allusion to Descartes and his skeptical "I think, therefore I am - but I'm not sure about anything else" line. In the context of Iran's theocracy, that has a clear implication.*

You can watch part of the first episode here. It's in Farsi, but has English subtitles.

POSTSCRIPT: For more about Iran, read the irrepressible Michael Totten again. His work is getting more exposure in the conventional media, which is a Good Thing.

A somewhat different point of view is provided by Abbas Milani, professor at Stanford and Hoover Institution fellow. A counterforce strike against Iran might yet prove necessary. But no one should be under any illusions that it has any other purpose than just that. It can't lead by itself to political change. Counterviolence can stop or prevent violence. It cannot produce constructive change by itself. Other forces have to be at work.
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* Not that there are no sources of religious doubt and philosophical skepticism in Iranian history. Just read Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, written about nine hundred years ago, but banned in Iran after the 1979 Islamic revolution. The West has a long history of such things, but surely no monopoly.

Look on the Sunni side

And a belated happy Fourth!
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Outside the narrow orbit of neoconservatism, the conservative debate over Iraq continues. The June issue of the American Spectator presents a perfect - if perfectly depressing - article by William Tucker, with the perfect image for Bush's current situation:

Right now President Bush is lurching around like a drunk in a barroom, ready to fight anyone who comes along but with no clear recollection of how he got here or how he intends to get home.

Perfect - except for one thing. Tucker recommends the Baker-Hamilton idiocy as a Nixon-Kissinger-type "realist" move, like opening up to China.* What feel-good diplomacy with Iran and its sidekick Syria is supposed to do remains a mystery. Even from a crude power-play point of view, it makes no sense.

1. Iran and Syria have nothing to offer in Iraq.

The current mayhem in Iraq is largely a Sunni problem, not a Shi'ite one. The insurgency is mainly local Sunnis (Iraqi Arabs), but with a significant minority of Sunni al-Qa'eda-style jihadists - suicide bombers and the like. To the extent that foreigners are driving the insurgency, it is driven by money and ideology exported from the conservative Persian Gulf states and Pakistan, not Iran or Syria. To the extent that it's local, it's simply due to the Iraqi Sunnis' rejection of their now-marginal position in the post-Saddam Iraq. After all, they're 16-17% of the population and dropping.

2. Iran is the looming big problem in the larger Middle East, not Iraq.

One of the main reasons for reducing our overstretch in Iraq is precisely the better to be able to do something about Iran. More generally the point is to sideline the democracy obsession and move to the top the issue of stopping jihadism, which is in full control of a Middle Eastern state only in Iran. Ilan Berman's article on Iran in the same issue of the American Spectator does get it right - it gives a typical Israeli and very sound view of the issue.

Readers should also be reminded of past disasters directly traceable to the Baker-Scowcroft axis. The first was the Lebanon debacle of 1982-84. At the behest of Baker and the Saudis, Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon to interpose between the Israeli army and the PLO. The Marines should have been pulled out as soon as the PLO left. Instead they remained as sitting ducks and were attacked by an Iranian-backed truck bomber, killing over 240 of them. Shortly thereafter the US and French embassies in Beirut were blown up and a large number of American, French, and other Western personnel were taken hostage by Iranian- and Syrian-backed groups - leading in turn to the Iran-Contra scandal. As Secretary of State, Baker gave the green light to Syria in 1990 to complete its takeover of Lebanon, in exchange for Syria's completely useless support during the Persian Gulf war. Saddam's 1990 invasion of Kuwait happened in part because the same "realist" clowns (Baker, Hagel et al.) were telling us what a wonderful guy Saddam was to work with. Only an ignorant, amnesiac, and braindead press corps - mindless flunkies really - could treat the Baker-Hamilton diplomatic advice seriously.

Throwing in the towel on Iran would destroy America's fragile credibility as an opponent of Islamic radicalism - this after much effort has gone into getting the Europeans to see the threat - and it's more of a direct threat to them than it is to us. We have a disturbing long-term track record of treating allies and friends worse than we do enemies. And people rightly criticize America's incoherent reaction to the support for Sunni jihadism coming from its Persian Gulf "allies"; can you imagine what the reaction would be if we embraced the present regime in Tehran? It would be less Nixon-Kissinger and more Chamberlin-Daladier giving Hitler a warm bear hug. It's completely daft.

The correct analogy is right under Tucker's nose. A diplomatic "opening" should be extended to the Sunni governments currently alienated from America. Saudi Arabia aside - it has to be treated as sui generis - the Sunni Gulf States support through private money much of the violence now transpiring in Iraq. Only they are in a serious position to stop it. Meanwhile, Egypt and Algeria, corrupt and repressive as they are, have done an excellent job of suppressing jihadi groups in their countries. After all, it is the Sunni countries which have already gone through the disillusioning wringer of pan-Arabism and Islamic radicalism. They are like China after the Cultural Revolution and the death of Mao. The problem is that these Sunni governments, once they've quashed the jihadists at home, are happy to let them operate elsewhere.

Which raises another important point. Democracy cannot be at the top of the agenda right now; the most pressing need is stopping religious fanatics. After that, encouraging the development of non-political personal liberty and civil society; only then, democracy in the sense of elections and political competition. The Middle East, above all, is the one region of the world where having democracy now probably means the triumph of jihadist parties. Not because they're all that popular, but because they're well-funded, well-organized, and well-motivated.** Certainly, the experience of Algeria and Turkey in the early 1990s and more recently of the Palestinian Territories has proven this. Iraq hasn't seen the triumph of a single Islamist party only because the country is so fractured. It's more like Lebanon, the Arab world's last attempt at multisectarian, multitribal democracy. The weak civil society of the Arab world at present cannot support electoral democracy; it will lead to either theocracy or civil war. The best bet right now for decent government in most Arab countries is semi-liberal tribal monarchy, like Morocco or Jordan.

And Baker-Scowcroft-Hagel-etc., with their excellent oil-money connections in the Sunni countries, can put their skills and experience to better use there.

Iran should be theocratic but non-nuclear, or nuclear but non-theocratic - but it shouldn't be allowed to be both. Of course, Iran in many ways is the most important country in the Middle East, and it has legitimate national interests and aspirations to be a regional power. What cannot be accommodated at present is those interests and hopes entangled with Shi'ite theocracy and fanaticism. Iran is an ancient country and civilization; it won't cease to be an important country. What can and should cease is its theocracy.

Mutatis mutandis, the same holds for Saudi Arabia, that other great font of jihadi ideology, influence, and money. It can't be treated the same way as the other Sunni countries, because it is so much part of the problem - the same with Pakistan.

POSTSCRIPT: The same issue of the American Spectator also presents an article by Michael Novak on the global ebb and flow of liberty and the fate of the Wilsonian project in the 20th century. Novak too easily confuses "liberty" with "electoral democracy" and doesn't grasp how much the Middle East violates the globalization-democratization paradigm. He needs to read Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom. It's amusing to read a Harvard-educated Indian Muslim explaining to an American audience something their great-great-grandparents (and their British cousins) would have understood without a second thought: some countries aren't ready for democracy, and some countries should never have been countries in the first place.†
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* At least Nixon's opening to China is the good historical model, and not détente with the Soviets. The latter was a questionable episode obsoleted by the rise of Thatcher and Reagan and then Gorbachev. Opening to China was a smart move, although since the end of the Cold War, it has lost its strategic rationale. Of course, today's China is utterly different from 1973.

Tucker also wastes space and attention on misplaced Vietnam analogies, which American political elites cannot seem to let go of, no matter how irrelevant or misleading. The Sunni insurgency is not winning in Iraq; in spite of all the death and destruction it has wrought, they're losing. A full-scale civil war in Iraq would lead to Shi'ite triumph (although not without a lot of bloodshed first) and Sunni refugees - in fact, the current mini-civil war has already led to almost a million Sunnis leaving Iraq. If Tucker is looking for an analogy to the Vietnamese boat people fleeing the triumphant North Vietnamese army, he's got it bassackwards.

** A good analogy is the Russian Civil War (1918-1921), which immediately followed the Bolshevik coup of November 1917. Of all the Russian parties of the time, the Bolsheviks were the smallest (contrary to their absurd name, which means "majority"). But they were the best-organized, the best-funded (by Germany, whose secret funding continued through 1920), and the most ruthless. Their much more numerous opponents, on the other hand, ranging from Anarchists to czarist generals, were badly fractured and poorly organized. The biggest battalions don't always win.

† The title of a translated Spanish interview with Zakaria gets to the point even more quickly: La Democracia No Es Sólo Elecciones, or "democracy isn't just elections." Iraq provides a textbook case: the Sunni insurgency-cum-civil war there accelerated only after the January 2005 elections made it clear how large the Iraqi Shi'ite majority is (63-65%).

Iran: What is to be done?

A recent issue (April 23) of the New Republic contained an excellent overview of Iran, its regional ambitions, and its nuclear program. Unfortunately, it's behind their subscriber firewall, so you have to find a print copy. But it is well worth it. Four authors contributed to it, but two especially - former ambassador Dennis Ross and Iranian-American author Azar Nafisi - should be listened to.*

The Iranian problem is headed towards a dénoument in the next 18 months, so it's important to understand what's happening. Condeleeza Rice has made it her final almost-impossible task in office to prevent a nuclear Middle East. Everyone should wish her success - failure (which is likely) means the end of nuclear non-proliferation and a regional military-nuclear competition. The first countries under threat are Iran's Sunni neighbors, followed by Israel. Rice is working to some extent at cross-purposes with her boss. Bush and Cheney have clearly given up trying anything more about Iran and now simply want the crisis to happen after they leave office. It's the final, rotten fruit of an administration that never had much interest in policy or much time horizon beyond the next election.

Nafisi indirectly comments on this trend:

The most important weapon in the U.S. arsenal is not its military might but its culture. Vigorously defending and promoting those values the United States was long thought to represent - freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of conscience - will do a great deal more than any missile to neutralize Iranian radicals. And, though this wide-ranging task is probably beyond the capability of American politicians, it is not beyond the capability of America.

How did we go in twenty years from achievements like ending the Cold War, with giants like Reagan and Gorbachev, to a political landscape overrun by pygmies?
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* Of the other two, Robert Kagan is a little disconnected from reality, and the New York Times' Laura Secor is an example (sadly, not unique) of reporter-turned-apologist.

More about Iran versus Iraq

A friend took me to task for being too pessimistic in a recent posting about the prospects in Iraq, and for implying something not true about the neoconservatives.

My point about the neocons is not that they were clueless about radical Islam before the Iraq war. A few were even conscious of it before 9/11 (many were overly obsessed with China back in those days). My point was the misguided attempt to connect the new post-1991 trend of radicalism in the Middle East to Saddam. The fact that Saddam was making nice with some Islamic radicals only proves my point - he was cozying up to them because they (not he) were in the drivers' seat. It's like when he put Allahu `Akbar on the Iraqi flag after the Guf War. It was clear which way the wind was blowing, and he was trying to keep up with the latest. He was a trend-follower, not a trend-setter.

The major countries incubating Sunni radical Islam are clear: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and (to an extent) Egypt. A few other countries (like Algeria) playing a tag-along role under the influence of the more important ones. It's rather unfair to lump Egypt and Algeria together with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan on this score, because the Egyptian and Algerian governments have been tireless in their efforts to squash the radical movements. (In Egypt, there has been some compromise between the government and the radicals.) But the Saudi and Pakistani governments have a long-standing role in promoting radical Islam - on the world stage, since the 1970s, even before the fall of the Shah. Pakistan in particular suffers from an identity and legitimacy crisis, and that makes radical Islamic movements attractive because they're politically useful. Countries such as Afghanistan and Sudan have ended up as test laboratories for the Sunni radical movements to try out theocracy and take in jihadis, all with Saudi and Pakistani sponsorship.

The other axis of jihad is Iran, with its little brother, Syria, and its Shi'ite laboratory in Lebanon. Like its Sunni sibling, the Shi'ite version of radicalism took off in the late 70s, after the decline of secular ideologies in the Arab world set in and the fall of the Shah.

Iraq is not on either list.

At a high level, the neocon goal of promoting constructive political change in the ME is a good idea - no, better than good - necessary. Carried through consistently and subtracting out their obsession with Iraq, it would involve cooling relations with Egypt somewhat, sharply cooling them with Saudi Arabia and Pakistan (even to the point of issuing them ultimatums), and engaging Iran with peaceful but unceasing pressure towards serious political change. The model should be Reagan in the 1980s, with Iran taking the place of the Soviet Union, and America's erstwhile "allies" - right-wing authoritarian governments then, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Egypt now - subject to a serious push towards reform and opening up. Even a liberal revision of American policy - thought through its logical conclusions - wouldn't look that different. The stylistics and atmospherics might feel otherwise, but not the substance or goals.

It's a mistake to think of the Bush foreign policy as being neoconservative, because much of this agenda has not been translated into policy, only the obsession with Iraq - the one neocon idea that remains the flimsiest. Much of that can be attributed to personnel and history, not ideology. Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith were all central in the Persian Gulf war, and Bush Jr.'s fixation on Iraq is obviously mixed up with Oedipal father-son issues. The Iraq obsession got translated into reality by Bush because it resonated the most strongly on a personal level with key administration figures. There's been no coherent reconsideration of policy towards Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, or Egypt. Iran has been faced as a problem only very recently.

The course of policy in Iraq has been on the whole poor in design and execution since the summer of 2003, with some bright spots here and there, especially in the Kurdish north. It's also been politically costly. But my earlier posting is really about Iran - Iraq is a secondary point. My pessimism about the Middle East might not be justified in the long run. There are positive trends, like the bloggers. But an overall positive direction of change is a hope and an assumption, not a proven fact.

Postmortem on the Israel-Hizbollah media war

Sentient people nowadays don't need a lot of reminding of the political bias and limitations of the mainstream news media (MSM). But a distinctive event well-defined in time and scope can be a moment for some systematic research that captures these issues more thoroughly than just impressionistic snapshots during the event.

Such an event was last summer's month-long war between Israel and Hizbollah, the Iranian- and Syrian-sponsored Shi'ite militia of southern Lebanon. A new study (PDF) from the Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School of Government (Harvard) captures perfectly the MSM's combination of ignorance, clueless bias, and gullibility. The authors are Marvin Kalb, formerly of CBS and NBC and now a Shorenstein fellow, and Carol Saivetz, an associate and lecturer at Harvard's Davis Center for Russian studies. Their most fundamental conclusion is that the media is no longer an independent observer, nor is it an advocate in its own right. Instead, it's become an unconscious or conscious propaganda tool - a tool almost always better manipulated by groups such as Hizbollah or dictatorships like Iran than by open societies like Israel. As they say at the Pentagon, it's now part of the "battle space." Another bad omen for the future of press freedom.

But there's a bright side: bloggers! Today, when the MSM messes up, they get fact-checked and carefully sifted in ways unimaginable even 10 years ago. All the more reason why we need to remember that First Amendment freedoms are individual rights of everyone, not corporate or guild privileges.

The coming war with Iran

It's usually bad a idea to stick one's neck out like this, but the coming crisis with Iran requires it. There will be war involving Iran by the end of 2008. The next president's first crisis will be this, not Iraq. See here for the skinny (requires subscription). An immediate consequence will be the end of the nuclear non-proliferation regime in place since the late 1960s, with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and others crowding in to get their nuclear weapons too. This is a certainty if the US can no longer demonstrate an ability to shield its "allies" (read: dependencies).

The latest idiocy on this issue emanates from the usual places and postulates a détente with Iran. Apparently, the chattering classes don't yet realize that détente with Iran has already come and gone - the faux-reformers of a few years ago are without influence in the era of Ahmadinejad. The original détente, with the Soviets in the 1970s, made a limited sense then; although in the long run, it was no more than an interlude. With the present Iran, it's loopy. The real problem is that by getting ourselves into Iraq with little preparation for the cost and consequences, we're now hobbled in dealing with a much more serious threat from Iran. The Iranian problem would have happened anyway, but the Iraq war has accelerated it. Bush has not used the Iraq war in any advantageous way against Iran. He clearly needs to be replaced by someone - of either party - who knows what he's doing.

What were the neocons thinking in the 90s? Some of them did correctly emphasize Iran, but that's not what got transmitted into policy. What got into policy instead was an undeserved obsession with a country - Iraq - effectively neutralized in 1991 and a lot of dubious, fuzzy ideas about how the Middle East was "ripe" for constructive, Western-style political change. Nothing could show more clearly how little connection neocon theorizing has with Israeli views than this. The Israeli political, military, and intelligence establishment shows rare unanimity when it comes to Iran: since the early 90s, they have viewed Iran's quest for nuclear weapons as their biggest threat. OTOH, they regarded Iraq as defanged, a spent force. And Israelis would have laughed themselves to death at the neocon fantasy of "democratic transformation" of the Arab world.

OTOH, the fantasy of "realism," as it's played itself out in the last year, largely consists of conventional wisdom recycled from 10, 20, or 30 years ago. They include myopic denunciations of American policy as being "too tough" on Iran - when in fact, it's more likely too little, too late. Here's a really real principle of realpolitik the chatterboxes in the news media might consider - if they're not distracted by Britney Spears' latest underwear malfunction: peacemaking negotiations are possible when there isn't a powerful player able to block peace. E.g., Sadat kicked the Soviets out of Egypt in 1974, moved towards the US, and was able to make peace with Israel. The end of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Iraq in 1991 made the Oslo process and the Israel-Jordan peace deal possible. When a hardline rejectionist state like Iran is on the ascent (helped by a large, sustained jump in crude oil prices), peacemaking becomes much harder. When Iran gets nuclear weapons, peacemaking will become history.

Iran's insistence on butting into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and using it as an inflammatory rallying cry for Islamic radicalism means that a new "warrant for genocide" is being assembled before our eyes - that was the real meaning of the Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran. While the academic liberals and leftists bellow on and on about "never again" - meaning, never again the Nazi Holocaust in 1940s Europe - the next one is being prepared. The left in particular has played a disgraceful role in paving the way for the next crisis - as apologists, rationalizers, and liars - just as the isolationists and Nazi fellow-travellers did in the 1930s. Along with Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton, they will be remembered - if they are remembered - as the Chamberlins and Halifaxes of this generation. The media will be remembered - if they're remembered either - as having helped the crisis happen - just as the media of the 1930s did.

And it's not just Iran that keeps dragging Israel into the region's problems - for some never-clear reason, so do a lot of other people. What the Shi'ite revival, the Iranian missile threat to the region or to Europe, or the near-destruction of Lebanon by Hizbollah, Syria, and Iran have to do with the Israel-Palestinian conflict is a mystery. Really, they have little to do with each other, except perhaps indirectly. In any case, how Israel is supposed to negotiate seriously with a Palestianian quasi-state now at war with itself is a further mystery. The fatal obstacles to the formation of a Palestinian state come from Arab governments and the Palestinians, not from Israel.

The Bush administration's expensive fiasco in Iraq also has nothing to do with Israel, except in the fervid imaginations of certain people. The driving impulse, as far as we know from the people who did it, came from the desire to finish the Persian Gulf war in a different and more decisive way. It would have been a good idea then, and you can thank Baker & company for that not happening. But, after the 9/11 attacks, this predominantly neoconservative view failed to see that the rising threat in the Middle East comes from radical Islam. After the Persian Gulf war and the end of the Cold War, secular nationalist tyrants like Saddam have become yesteryear's failed idols. Such men - starting with Nasser and proceeding to the late Assad père and Qaddafi - have clearly had their day. The new, rising, cutting-edge radicals who replaced them are the bin Ladens, the Ahmadinejads, the Nasrallahs, and so on, with a new ideology and a new base.

There is a grand irony in the fantasies of Israeli control of American foreign policy, and it is this: if the United States had been channeling Israeli thinking under either Clinton or Bush, it would have been paying attention to Iran, its radicalism, its terrorism, and its quest for nuclear weapons much sooner. Israeli judgment, even in regards their own self-interest, is not flawless: witness the Oslo process. But the Israelis grasped soon after 1991 that the future major threat to them would come from Tehran, a point that has taken 15 years to sink in over here. They rightly discounted the post-1991 threat from a contained and nearly-vanquished Iraq. We would be in a very different place today had this history played differently: we could be consistently rallying Americans and other countries against radical Islam, undiverted and unburdened by having to straighten out the remains of Saddam's mini-gulag. Of course, we'd still have the Sunni branch of radicalism (al Qaeda) to deal with - a largely Saudi-Egyptian-Pakistani creature. Not accidentally, all three countries are major US allies - we're their protector and sugar daddy and hence a target of those governments' radical malcontents. Some people say the Iraq war has diverted American attention from al Qaeda, and that may be. Nonetheless, the real negative legacy that Bush leaves will probably be, not Iraq, but the failure to do something about Iran.

And naturally, if the Bush and two preceding adminstrations had been on this wavelength, the 2003 Iraq war would not have happened.

Middle East blog ferment

Some of my previous posts on the Middle East have emitted an unmistakeable aroma of pessimism about the place, leaving me wondering if I'm just too damn negative. Are there any positive trends? Yes, there are. I don't know how significant they are, but they are. One of those trends is bloggers and their sometimes-brazen challenge to both authoritarian governments and authoritarian cultures.

The bloggers in question are often brave, in ways that bored and pampered Americans can't even begin to understand. Many must use pseudonyms or noms de blog. Here's a partial list (partial in multiple senses), a taste of what the Middle East has to offer. Whatever my serious doubts about the future of the Middle East, I hope these bloggers prove me wrong!

I've organized the list by country/region and picked the ones I know the best. But that's just my experience and bias. Many of these sites have links to other bloggers, who shouldn't be missed. Be adventurous. Notice also that many of them, like Kavanna, are housed by Blogspot/Blogger. It's Google's mitzvah, whatever else they might do right.

North Africa: I couldn't find many here. These are two I've looked at a few times.
* The Moor Next Door (Algeria)
* Winds of Change in Algeria (Algeria, mostly in French, some English)

Egypt: Largest and most important Arab country, with small but active blogging culture, not as conservative as the Gulf countries (see below). Nonetheless, the Egyptian government can move slowly but effectively against bloggers it doesn't like.
* Big Pharaoh
* Mona Eltahawy (blog by a well-known professional journalist)
* Sandmonkey (Abdel Kareem Nabil Soliman - now the best-known Egyptian blogger, because he was recently sentenced by the Egyptian government for his blogging)

Lebanon: Very active and varied blogging culture. Played an important role in covering the March 2005 protest movement against Syria and the Hizbollah war last summer. Israeli bloggers (see below) and Lebanese bloggers communicated via blogs even as the missiles and bombs were dropping.
* Lebanese Political Journal (important multi-blogger site)
* Lebanese Bloggers (clearinghouse for many individual blogs)
* Daily Star (Lebanon's most important newspaper, in English)

Iraq: In spite of all the violence in and around Baghdad, Iraq has a significant and very informative blog culture. It's a useful corrective to the inevitably misleading conventional media coverage of Iraq.
* Salam Pax (the famous pseudonymous "Raed" of pre-2003 fame, who went off the air in 2004 - he has a book out)
* Iraq the Model (best-known and most important Iraqi blog)
* The Messopotamian (Alaa is the pseudonym - life in Baghdad)
* Iraq Pundit (an Iraqi exile comments from afar)

Perisan Gulf: The most conservative part of the Middle East, outside of Talibanland, dominated by the Salafi (Wahhabi) school. These bloggers have to tiptoe.
* Silly Bahraini Girl
* Saudi Jeans
* Arab News (the most important English-language Saudi newspaper)

Iran: The largest and most active of Middle Eastern blogging cultures, apart from Israel. Bloggers there play a complicated cat-and-mouse game with the Iranian government. There are too many blogs for me keep track of. Here's a partial list. If you look at only one, look at this one:
* Hoder (Hossein Derakhshan - he has a Persian blog too)

Israel: Israeli has a large number of blogs, some more active than others; some highly political, others mostly personal. Ones I look at:
* Israpundit (multi-blogger, with an excellent linked list of other blogs)
* IsraellyCool (Australian and Israeli - check it out)
* An Unsealed Room (Allison Sommer's sharp-witted diary from a Tel Aviv suburb)

Another newspaper I should mention is Al Hayat, the London-based independent, Arabic-language publication. They have an English edition. And all serious students of the Middle East must keep up with MEMRI (Middle East Media Research Institute), which bridges the language gap between Arabic-, Farsi-, and Turkish-language media and English.

Finally, anyone who thinks or writes about the Middle East these days is indebted to the indefatigable Michael Totten, who has without question the best English-language blog on the region. In a just world, his lengthy postings would be articles in the New Yorker or Atlantic. When you visit his site, consider donating via PayPal. I don't think he has any other regular source of income right now.

Opportunities like this rarely knock

So when they do, someone should pounce: see Robert Satloff's recent article in the Baltimore Sun about his visit to Cairo and speech there on the Holocaust and Holocaust-denial. The Sunni fright of Iran is deeper than I realized.

There have been disastrous events for the Jewish people, like the outbreak of World War I and the Hitler-Stalin pact, which made World War II possible. But then there have been positive breakthroughs like Sadat's 1977 visit to Jerusalem and Gorbachev's arrival in the US in 1988. This is more like the latter.

It didn't happen, and they're here to finish the job

UPDATE: And then there's stuff like this ....
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Wasn't it surreal, that Holocaust denial conference in Tehran? It had all the air of a malevolent witch-doctors' convention, and I don't mean to insult witch doctors :) What is it about this subject that brings out all the kooks? Anti-semitism is a kind of mental disorder; when it becomes widespread in a society, especially among its elites, it signals a societal or civilizational crisis. Anti-semitism is usually not about Jews, but typically about something else, and that "something else" is the real clue to the crisis.

The world's most important Holocaust-denier/minimizer is David Irving, the British historian who wrote a semi-respectable book in the 70s on World War II from the German point of view, but even then drifting over to the dark side; then in later decades showing up at neo-Nazi konklaves and the like. He claimed that Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt libeled him, sued her in the UK, and lost his case. Irving was just released from jail in Austria and served in absentia as the star of the Tehran conference.

Several countries in Europe have criminal or civil laws on the books banning Holocaust denial. These sorts of laws, from an American point of view, seem like an out-of-bounds infringement on free speech, even offensive or ridiculous speech. However, Americans aren't used to having large fascist/racist parties in their political culture. Anti-semitism in American society has declined dramatically since 1945 and is now a fringe phenomenon - plus America has never had a movement of political anti-semitism. Not so in Europe: certain European countries, like Austria, Germany, and France, do have such parties - and had them far worse in the recent past - and so Europeans might be excused for having such laws. Nevertheless, such laws are a misguided approach to the problem. Malevolent misinformation needs to be answered with more and better speech, not a ban.

The conference also marked the emergence of a new and frightening alliance: neo-Nazis and radical Islamists, along with a handful of anti-Zionist Jews and fringe radical left kooks (requires subscription). (I wonder if you can "present" a paper at such "conferences," then put it on your CV.) The burgeoning alliance of these groups has been unfolding for almost a decade. People are known by the company they keep, and we must avoid the false but common liberal assumption that better-educated people are immune to such thinking. In the Islamic world, the elites are especially saturated with it. (Ahmadinejad is an engineer.) They believe in it as an all-purpose pseudo-explanation of what their sorry excuse for a civilization suffers - here is today's relevant clue. The analogy with the German-speaking world, especially after 1918, is obvious: there too the core of the anti-semitic movements were made up of a large number of educated people, and Germany more generally was the best-educated society in the Western world. Evidently, it isn't just quantity that counts, but the quality and content of education. And of course, Germany was saturated at that time with its own kind of baneful "identity politics."

Unlike the European/Western world, where reminding people of the basic facts of the Holocaust and the immense evil it represented is largely preaching to the choir, the problem in the Muslim world is a combination of self-interested denial and simple ignorance. Ignorance is the natural state of humanity, while the denial stems from that mixture (again!) of the post-modern and the medieval: bogus claims of victimhood (unless we count collective self-victimization) and religious intolerance. Muslims, especially but not solely in Arab countries, live in, not so much a civilization, but the collapsed ruin of one; in those ruins, they are subject to a flood of official and semi-official anti-semitic propaganda that the Western world has not seen since the 1930s. There is no generally accepted background of historical knowledge to counter this flood, and its effect, especially on Muslims born since about 1970, has been profoundly pernicious.

That needs to change. The agencies best positioned to fight the flood (such as the Anti-Defamation League and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum) have been misguided and myopic in this area, obsessed with relatively marginal threats in the Western world, and only slowly turning their attention to the center of contemporary anti-semitism, the Muslim world. (A future posting will expand on these failures of Jewish institutions and leadership.) The Holocaust Museum did recently start an overdue program directed at the "new" anti-semitism, engaging the help of one of the most important Muslim critics of the Islamic world, the Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali. She discusses anti-semitism in the Muslim world here (requires registration).

Another striking development is Robert Satloff's new book on the Holocaust in North Africa and Arabs and Muslims who helped to rescue Jews under German or Vichy French rule. Satloff is interviewed here; his book is reviewed here (requires subscription). One of the astonishing conclusions of Satloff's research is that the descendants of these Muslim rescuers in question do not want their ancestors recognized as righteous gentiles or listed at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial. Modern anti-semitism has a long history in the modern Middle East, stretching back to the 1920s or before, but its virulence and spread have jumped in recent decades. That makes developments like this (PDF) all the more understandable and necessary. There are Middle Eastern voices speaking out against these trends, but they are few in number, marginal, and under constant threat.

And while we're at it, we should also keep in mind the persecution and (sometimes) genocide of Christians and non-Arabs in the greater Middle East, from the late 19th century on, from the Kurdish mountains to the Sudan. The Armenian case of 1915-17 is merely the best known; the Darfur situation, just the latest.

The general thrust of these efforts has to include overcoming the deeply ingrained liberal prejudices of white guilt, cultural relativism, and "noble savagery" in connection with the Muslim world. More generally, we should ultimately expect the Muslim world to observe basic decencies that we take for granted in the civilized world. The Islamic world, especially in the Middle East, is a long way from that, but there's no better place to start than with Holocaust-denial, anti-semitism, and genocide-incitement.

Reality and unreality in the Middle East

UPDATE: Maybe the ISG is just a decoy blowing smoke in our faces and the real action is elsewhere. Everybody who's somebody in the Middle East has a sponsor. The Kurds have us, in effect, as their sponsors. Willingly or not, the Iraqi Shi'ites have Iran as their sponsor.

That leaves only the Iraqi Sunnis without a sponsor. Hmmm ... I wonder who could fill that role (hat tip to Reynolds). And there's more ... and this ....
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Tom Donnelly of the Center for Strategic and International Studies puts it better than I can:

It just hasn't worked out the way the punditocracy planned: The "adults" of the Bush 41 administration were supposed to talk Bush 43 off the ledge, get him to give up his dream of democracy in Iraq and return to reality. But the main recommendation of the Baker- Hamilton "Iraq Study Group" - withdrawal by early 2008, covered by negotiations with Iran and Syria - has little value outside Washington, and none in Baghdad or the region.

The ISG report (the Hamilton part) actually has valuable advice, similar to the 9/11 Commission Report, on changing how the US government works. But the diplomatic part (the Baker part) is mostly a fantasy of misguided and/or obsolete ideas. (The funny thing is the early 2008 withdrawal date was the original Pentagon plan - that's how Washington works: you present your original plan as a bold breakthrough and radical departure. :-) The Washington Post's editorial board weighs in cogently on this aspect, and former Reagan-Bush-Clinton diplomat Dennis Ross discusses the Iran-Syria axis at length here in the New Republic (requires subscription). And read this as well. Or, if you prefer your politics in the form of cartoons, US News obliges with this priceless offering: a grim situation can't be made cuter than that.

Iran and Syria aren't friendly or ready to help - they're only ready to deal if they're afraid of us or want something we can give them, as Max Boot explains (requires registration). What happens months or a year or two hence, when we no longer have anything to bargain with, and they're no longer afraid of us? Chaos, that's what - a full-blown proxy war in Iraq, Lebanon, and maybe elsewhere. Lebanon is already feeling the intense Syrian pressure again, as Hezbollah prepares to destroy what's left of the Cedar Revolution.

The ISG report did reach its real audience, the news media, incessantly asking, "Will Bush listen?", never asking the right question: "Will the media listen?" Of course, the media has largely given up on reporting from Iraq. Most of its reporting is from Washington, which makes sense: that's where the main quagmire is.

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The tragedy of the neoconservative democracy crusade is that it's pre-empted real conservative policy possibilities, a "really real" realism based on correct understanding of the Middle East and the conflict were now in, instead of the ever-misleading and now-obsolete Baker-Scowcroft "realism," or the well-intentioned but now-fading-into- history liberal-internationalism.

What we need to recognize is that the policy paradigms of the Cold War era are exhausted and obsolete. "Realism" is dead. The old standbys (it's Israel's fault! start up the "peace process" again! suck up to the Saudis!) will no longer work. (For one thing, the designated fall guys for the US-Iraq mess - Israel and the Kurds - are not lining up to be sacrificed - why should they? That era is over.) What we need is new ME policies reconsidered from scratch with the oil factor and Israel playing no fundamental role. The ME's basic problems have to do with a toxic mix of Islam, political illegitimacy, and religious reaction. The region's dominant and long-indulged groups (Arabs, Sunni Arabs in particular) are largely unwilling to face their own problems and instead obsessively blame outsiders or "deviants." The oil money hugely exacerbates these problems, fueling an extreme fantasy of grievance and entitlement, while flooding the region with the by-products of modern civilization: electronic media, modern weapons, etc., that reinforce the Islamic world's growing reaction and intolerance.

The resulting conflict is a clash between civilizations, but also a clash within a civilization, giving rise to a series of wars (Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan, Somalia, etc.) that are not "civil" in the strict sense - they do not respect national boundaries, because Islam denies the legitimacy of the nation-state. The conflict is a composite of smaller conflicts, between Sunnis and Shi'ites, between moderate and extremist Muslims, between Arabs and non-Arabs, and between Muslims and non-Muslims, all simultaneously. Superficially, these wars are just internal tribal and sectarian conflicts. But when you look closer, you discover that in Iraq, as in Lebanon, local conflicts are blown up and made much more difficult by the sponsored-proxyship phenomenon, a classic feature of the modern ME "dark ages", inflamed by the honor-shame system. The sponsors here: Iran and Syria (sponsoring the Shiites and even helping the Sunnis) and private parties in the Gulf sponsoring the Sunni jihadists allied with al Qaeda. As with Israel and the Palestinians in the 90s, attempts like the Oslo "peace process" to move towards conflict resolution are defeated when the most extreme parties can look towards hardline rejectionist states like Iran and Syria for support. Local conflicts become swept up in global jihad and are transformed from difficult to impossible.

Meeting these challenges means breaking with classical American and Western policy, largely driven by the need for oil, protecting oil supplies and oil regimes, and recycling petrodollars through contracts. (The resulting corruption-for-oil-$$ needs to be seen for what it is and so often isn't. See here, for example. Unlike the ludricrous "blood-for-oil" lies of a few years ago, the oil-$$-realism-sucking-up-to-the-Saudis/ Iranians/whatever phenomenon is very real.) In the case of Europe, important additional factors include a non-fatal but persistent anti-semitism and the weird combination of prejudice against Muslim immigrants while pandering to the worst elements of the Islamic world, especially a factor in France.

This kind of cynical "realism" seems, well, "realistic" - workable at least in the short run. But we've outlived the short run and today live with the consequences, like al Qaeda. "Realistic" policies like this are myopic and destructive in the long run. And remember: we're living in that long run now.

The wrong-headed thing called "realism" today (the Saudi-Egypt-Kissinger-Baker- Scowcroft axis) is superficially like the real 19th century thing, but at a deeper level, has little connection with reality. Today, we're faced with a clash of civililzations even farther from 19th-century balance-of-power realism than the 20th-century clash of ideologies.

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There are real barriers to implementing better ME policies. The oil-$$-corruption factor plays a large and insidious role here, as it is not only in play among Washington power brokers, but also fuels "radical" "Middle East studies" in academia. It is rarely reported in the American news media, unless a catastrophe like 9/11 happens. Notice how the issue came up after 9/11, but then faded away. The news media returned to "the" ME conflict, which is supposedly just Israel and the Palestinians. The news media almost never register the truth: there is one big meta-conflict (jihad, or violent political Islam), made of up lots of smaller conflicts, of which Israel is a piece.

The news media itself is a major barrier to better thinking. It endlessly recycles obsolete and wrong ideas and policies, if they fit its dimwitted and warped view of the world. And since there is so little shame in public life any more, people associated with policy and intellectual failures get to peddle their wares endlessly too, long after they've overstayed their welcome. They're never kicked out of the public square and can clog it with no end of distractions and junk. Only the better-educated editorial writers and experienced commentators can act as a counterweight to the flow of political detritus through the "news" and "news analysis" (read: BS) columns.

POSTSCRIPT: A remarkable and prescient essay (in French) "Towards a New Foreign Policy" appeared in 1992 that (fourteen years ago!) predicted the decline of traditional realism in the post-Cold War period with a startling clarity that elites all over the Western world haven't yet caught up with. The anonymous essay in particular dwelled on the obsolete and destructive Arabist policies that de Gaulle inaugurated in the mid-1960s. The pseudonymous author is reportedly now a highly-placed French diplomat. His essay is discussed and quoted at length (in English) here.

Yet more unreal realism

UPDATE: The realists' influence on Bush is growing, even as their views increasingly disconnect from reality. Jim Hoagland of the Washington Post explains why, with the Middle East, there's no going back to old illusions and policies.
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The real source of the Bush administration's coming policy changes in Iraq and elsewhere is not the new Democratic Congress, but the Baker commission. Baker in some ways is already a shadow Secretary of State. Bush is falling back on Daddy and Daddy's friends to bail him out of a tight spot.

Baker and Bush Sr. are supposed to be "realists," yet they demonstrate the same sort of delusional thinking that realists exhibited at the time of the Persian Gulf War or the Suez Crisis. Now we hear that Baker wants to involve Iran and Syria in patching up Iraq and drawing down the US presence there. Remember the Pentagon's original plan was five years, entry in 2003, exit in 2008. We're sixteen months away from March 2008, and that's the (rough) deadline. But involving Iran and Syria will only guarantee a generation of civil war in Iraq and turn that country in a larger version of Lebanon. The Shiites will fall into orbit around Iran. The Sunni "insurgency," supposedly "just like Vietnam," will actually lose - badly - to the Shiites. America's Sunni allies (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, etc.) are now in a panic. Many Iraqi Sunnis will be begging the US to stay, not to leave, once they "get it" - that is, get what's going to happen to them.

Don't expect Nancy Pelosi to understand any of this, of course. Sunnis and Shiites are not liberal pressure groups that donate to the Democratic party, so she's not interested. The Democrats in Congress are incompetently led and will be badly divided in any case, on any number of fracture lines, so their effect will be: not much. There's little the congressional party can do, except inflict a McCarthyite moment on the rest of us: bogus hearings, "I have a list" demagoguery, and tiresome conspiracy theories.

The Democrats do have an historic opportunity, with their new "blue dogs," to change the orientation of their party. But keeping Pelosipalooza in charge will just remind everyone of why they've been voting Republican for the last 25+ years in the first place. If the Democrats don't take heed, they will be rudely reminded again in 2008 by another voter rebellion. Signature liberal positions on gay marriage, gun control, and eminent domain continue to be pummeled. And remember what happened to Clinton in 1994: a serious misreading of a volatile, populist-leaning electorate by a liberal president and establishment media.

Kavanna returns

I've been "off the air" for two weeks of vacation, attending to life, and fixing some technical problems with the blog.

As a follow-on to my posting on the clash of civilizations (Islam versus everyone else), read this perceptive essay by Martin Amis from the Guardian. It is based, in part, on the Paul Berman's fine book, Terror and Liberalism. "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity" (Yeats).

More soon.

UPDATE: Don't miss these postings on Khatami's appearance at Harvard and the protests it inspired, from PubliusPundit (with help from HamsaWeb), Teresa of Technicalities (who got lost in Cambridge, but who doesn't?), and Miss Kelly.

What IS wrong with Harvard these days? The decline and fall of American academia: that deserves a few postings all by itself ....

Hey, you, off of my cloud

Middle East: case study: the tribal world of power-challenging. Nasrallah and Hizbollah threaten to throw Bin Laden and al-Qaeda off the jihad popcharts (requires TNR subscription). This has a sick-comic aspect to it, as JihadWatch explains.

EXTRA: To sign a petition to the US State Department to deny Iranian chief cleric Khatami a visa into the US, click here.

LATER: Oh well: Khatami got his visa. More about the Shia and their contemporary role in the Islamic world and the Middle East from Naval Postgraduate School professor Vali Nasr at BookTV (C-SPAN2).

At the bookstore recently, I again encountered Yale law professor Amy Chua's fine book of a few years ago, World on Fire. It explains why democratization and marketization of countries not ready for either is a really bad idea, a point Nasr also elaborates on. Briefly, the sudden transition immediately creates big winners and losers. This seems to be a growing decade-plus-long failure of globalization. It poses a potentially fatal danger to any hope that the Islamic world can be integrated peacefully into global civilization. It is also a major source of anti-Americanism.