Running on empty, part two

In contrast to previous years' campaigns, the early primaries and caucuses this year mean that we'll know very soon - in principle, at least! - who the candidates will be. What everyone will do between March and August is then anyone's guess. The Republican nominee is virtually certain now, so we'll take a look at the other side.

In spite of Hillary Clinton's early-on air of "inevitability," the Democratic discontent with seeing the Clintons return to the White House (especially given the fact that almost everyone around Clinton is a retread) proved potent. Obama has ridden his balloon upward on this discontent, to the point of seeing the nomination within reach. There's a lot of unhappiness all around at seeing American politics turn dynastic, with Bush, then Clinton, then Bush, then ... wait, stop! :)

The problem is that Obama, while he's played a smart game for several months, has been pushed too far, too fast. He's one of the most underqualified presidential candidates ever, and the air is starting to rush out of his balloon as everyone takes a closer look at his past and at his associates. After seven years of liberals and others complaining about Bush being too provincial and too much of a lightweight - complaints not without foundation - we have now the spectacle of the Democratic field being reduced early on to the two least qualified candidates, with both of them then turning to an ugly identity-politics brawl and interest-group panderfest.

Their recent exchange about leaving the NAFTA trade agreement drew swift responses from the Canadian and Mexican embassies. Embarrassingly, the Obama campaign reassured both that the rhetoric was strictly for the rubes, then publicly denied making such reassurances - leaving us to wonder just who the rubes are. Nothing like alienating allies, friends, and treaty partners! There's much stronger evidence that the Obama campaign routinely bends or breaks the truth routinely in many matters, not just this one. It's not because Obama is some evil conniver; it's because he's in way over his head. Even the shallow end of the pool isn't shallow enough for Obama, his campaign, and his followers. This is why many people are reminded, not only of George W., but of Carter and other "pure" candidates making vacuous promises of "change." Such candidates are largely a function of the hopes and ambitions that people around them project on to them - they lack, and have not had the time or circumstances to define, their own political identity.

So what about tomorrow? If Obama wins everything, he's the nominee. If Hillary wins one or more of the big states (which is likely), the convention will be brokered. At this point, the superdelegates' role will be pivotal regardless of what happens tomorrow. And that will result in an unavoidable uproar over how "democratic" the Democrats are. Neither candidate is really qualified to be president. Clinton is somewhat more viable, has run strong in the large swing states, and has a better shot at defeating McCain in November. Obama would have far less chance. If Hillary does get the nomination, she will end up fighting for it - it won't be the walk-in-the-park coronation she and her supporters were expecting.

And hopefully, this fiasco will leave the mainstream media's credibility more shredded than ever. They've obsessively peddled "narrative" (meaning credulous BS) over fact for months now, in order to get Obama the nomination. Want to see how and how much our addiction to the news media and television damages our politics? Just watch it - it's happening right in front of you.

POSTSCRIPT: Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, check out this interesting discussion on Obama and the Jewish vote. Early on, it became clear that, contrary to some nasty rumors floating around the Internet, Obama is not personally threatening to American Jews or Israel. American Jews do have legitimate larger concerns about Obama's wide-eyed inexperience and parochialism and especially some of the people around him - but so does everyone else. It's just that Jewish anxiety is different from all other anxieties and gets focused early. The evidence is that the American Jewish vote (which is about 2:1 Democratic) is largely going for Clinton.

And don't miss these thoughts from Michael Totten on Obama and the Middle East, particularly on why Obama alarms a lot of foreigners. My own experience with foreigners closely matches Totten's observations. One of Totten's guest bloggers is Lee Smith, who has this. It should be read by everyone who thinks that the American way of dealing with religion is the rest of the world's - it isn't.

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.

Where do we go from here?

In my last pre-election post, I bemoaned the political situation in the US as one party getting it wrong and the other not getting it at all. I didn't make any predictions, but the election results were more favorable to the Democrats than I expected. It looks as if they might control both houses (counting Lieberman as a Democrat). Expect two years of gridlock. (A better outcome would have been a Dem Senate and Rep House, but, oh well.) I think my mistaken view was based on concentraing too much on Bush and Iraq. This election was, of course, about Congress, not Bush, and voters have lots of good reasons to be very unhappy with the congressional Republicans. We also live in an era of rapid political cycling. What used to take years now takes months. But there are implications beyond Congress nonetheless.

There will be intense pressure on Bush to force Rumsfeld out and to leave Iraq as quickly as possible, by 2008 at the latest. (The Pentagon's original timetable for Iraq was to leave in 2008 anyway.) Iraq will move from a half-baked civil war to a fully-baked one, and Iran will effectively control the southern half of Iraq, to the extent that anyone controls it. It's been the case that American foreign policy since 9/11 has been strangely favorable to Iranian interests, and the Iranian government has been both riled up by American intervention in the region, but at the same time, liberated by the removal of two regimes (the Taliban and Saddam) that they viewed as threats. Even with the recent drops in oil prices, expect Iran to feel its oats as never before in the next 2-3 years, running up to the moment when they have functional nuclear weapons. The Iranians are likely not to use those weapons, but once they have them, expect a regional arms race. The Republicans will make big hay out these developments in 2008, especially after soldiers start returning from Iraq and embarass the Democrats. But the Republicans can't expect voters to give them a free pass on spectacular incompetence forever.

More generally, especially after 2008, expect a gradual American withdrawal from global commitments. The Democrats are still in the confused state of having no foreign policy and most of them still look back nostalgically on the post-1945 era of America leading willing allies. What they don't realize yet is that the post-1945 liberal internationalist era, with its institutions, processes, and so on, is dying, if not dead already. The US will be in less and less of position to prevent regional arms races, regional conflicts, and trade wars. American foreign policy is headed towards a much narrower construal of US interests. Democrats, once the party of foreign affairs, have largely lost interest in the rest of the world. The implication is that US allies will have to start figuring out their own futures and redeveloping their own military and foreign policies. Expect regional instability in east Asia, for example, a much lower profile for the US in the Middle East, and a polite American write-off of Europe. Unilateral Israeli action has already become more comon, with no imaginary pot-at-the-end-of-the-rainbow "peace process." The whole range of Middle East conflicts has now gone full circle back to being religious, not nationalistic. Few in the US really understand this yet, but we soon will.

The voter mood in the US hasn't suddenly become more liberal. The large number of conservative or "blue-dog" Democrats winning in this election indicates something else, roughly similar to the early 1990s. The voter mood is populist - anti-free-trade, anti-immigration, and suspicious of foreign policy involvements. The Republicans have stirred the expectations of populist voters, then disappointed or angered them. That's a sure way for politicians to get into trouble. Read what George Will has to say: The Iraq war, like the Alaska bridge, pungently proclaims how Republicans earned their rebuke. They are guilty of apostasy from conservative principles at home (frugality, limited government) and embrace of anti-conservative principles abroad (nation-building grandiosity pursued incompetently).

POSTSCRIPT: Rumsfeld has resigned. His apparent successor, Robert Gates, has a tough job ahead of him, pulling out American troops from a country with an accelerating civil war. Unlike Vietnam, the so-called (Sunni) "insurgency" will not win, but will be crushed by the Iranian-backed triumph of the Shi'ites. Within a couple years, Iraq will be three countries. American relations with key Sunni allies (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt) will be strained beyond anything seen before.

Expect darkness to reign in the Middle East for the next while, starting with another war in Lebanon, superficially against Israel, but in reality to break Lebanon for good. The same forces will be at work in Iraq.

Thoughts-in-parallel from Michael Totten.

Middle East: More deep background with Michael Totten

Michael Totten's blog on the Middle East is the best you'll find anywhere, as I mentioned in an earlier posting. Instapundit Glenn Reynolds and Instawife Helen Smith podcast-interview him here.

Middle East: Deep background

Friends want to know from where I know what I know about the Middle East (ME). My first advice: stop watching television news and treat newspapers with a large grain of salt. The latest faux-tography scandals just reinforce this point.

The Middle East's most basic problems are (1) its tribal/sectarian social structure; and (2) the curse of oil money.

1. The first means that ME countries are not societies in the Western sense, but tribal collectives lacking a "social contract" and making civilization and progress impossible. The only apparent alternative to endless Hobbesian war-of-all-against-all is dictatorship or theocracy.

2. The flow of oil out means a flow of oil money in. That money goes into the hands of elites (governmental and otherwise). It gets squandered on war and terrorism, or socked away in Swiss bank accounts. Governments also use it to buy off their populations, inverting the normal relationship between productive citizens and the tax-dependent state. Without the normal flow of money from society to state, society has no say in how the state operates. Here is one of the main reasons why the Middle East is not democratic.

American policy must be rebuilt from scratch to counter these two problems:

1. Political reform (NOT forced regime change) in promising Arab countries (like Jordan, Morocco, Gulf States) while reducing American relations with Saudi Arabia and Egypt; and

2. An international effort by oil-consuming countries to reduce demand for oil. This is not mainly an American problem (most of that oil goes to Europe and Asia), but American leadership here is nonetheless essential. The international oil market is fully flexible, and oil is a fully fungible commodity, meaning that its pointless to try to achieve "energy independence" -- the oil market in one place is completely coupled to everywhere else.

On the subject of oil money and what it does, look at Roger Stern's concise, arresting analysis of oil market power (a politically managed monopoly with artificially elevated prices) and the ME mischief it makes possible (PDF download). Here's a non-technical summary.

Take a look at JihadWatch and its DhimmiWatch page. You will learn things that the establishment media would rather not discuss about Islam and its attitude towards nonbelievers and their status under traditional Islamic law. If you want to know what a dhimmi is, think of Uncle Tom living under Islamic law, then go read DhimmiWatch. In this vein, consider these books: Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Jihad (2005) and Ibn Warraq (pseudonym), Why I Am Not a Muslim (2003). In a related vein, check out The David Project, led by the brilliant Charles Jacobs.

The best blog on the Middle East is that of Michael Totten. It is essential reading if you want to keep up and get a flavor of what it's really like. Totten has spent the most time in Lebanon, but also a lot of time in Israel, Kurdistan, and other places. And he has a long list of links to other great blogs and resources, as well as to wonderful essays by himself and others.

Here's my own, far from exhaustive, list of essential books, with comments.

Bernard Lewis: Any book you can get, especially The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982), The Jews of Islam (1984), Semites and Anti-Semites (1986), Islam and the West (1993), and What Went Wrong? (2001). The last of the polymathic giants, an unrivaled knowledge of languages and literature, one of the last century's greatest historians and Orientalists. Increasingly under attack by PC-ignorant "Middle East studies" hacks not worthy to lick his shoes. Has important blind spots -- too close to the subject in some ways, often blinds him to what Pryce-Jones writes about (see below).

Speaking of PC-ignorant academic hacks, contemplate the corruption of American academia by political correctness and Saudi oil money by following Martin Kramer's devastating study of "Middle East studies," Ivory Towers on Sand (2001).

David Fromkin: International relations faculty at Boston University, author of A Peace to End All Peace (1989), the best single book on the origins of the modern Middle East. Narrows temporal focus to 1910-1924, broadens geographic focus to all of "greater" Middle East, including central Asia (Persia, Afghanistan, Soviet "stans").

Critical insights: the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and its caliphate in 1921 started the transition of the ME from an imperial-theocratic to a Western-style secular nation-state system, which transition is resisted by Islamic traditionalists and reactionaries. More than ever, now that the Cold War is over, this is THE major conflict at issue in the ME.

David Pryce-Jones: Journalist and novelist, 60-plus-year veteran of the ME, author of The Closed Circle (1989), the best single book on the culture of the Middle East. Dark, dense, long, with depressingly pessimistic conclusions, worth the long slog to get through it.

Critical points: defines like no other book the keys to the ME's tribal culture: the honor-shame system, power challenging and violent careerism built on sponsored proxyship (think Arafat, Zarqawi, Nasrallah etc.), lack of social contract, resulting in no progress possible -- hence, the "closed circle" or "zero-sum" game. How these tribal patterns interact in a toxic way with Islamic restrictions on women and religious and ethnic minorities. The noxious role played by petrowealth in creating pseudo-modern countries with the material trinkets of modernity (bought from actually modern countries), but lacking real political, social, and economic modernity.

Fouad Ajami: Now teaching at Johns Hopkins, author of two essential books on the post-1967 Middle East, The Arab Predicament (1981 and 1992) and The Dream Palace of the Arabs (1998). The best criticism of the ME is by semi-insider/semi-outsiders -- in Ajami's case, a half-Persian, half-Arab Shiite from Lebanon now living in America.

Conor Cruise O'Brien: Famous Irish diplomat, once Ireland's ambassador to the UN, got to know Israel's ambassador because "Ireland" is next to "Israel" in the alphabet, author of The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (1986). Somewhat dated and superseded by more recent scholarship, but still the best single-volume introduction.

Fareed Zakaria: I should also mention a book that I'll return to later, his The Future of Freedom (2003), one of the most important foreign policy books published since the end of the Cold War.

This generations' sharpest critics of Islam, not surprisingly, are women. Everyone suffers under the theocracy-based system of honor-shame, but women more so as a rule than men. Many of the best women authors here are Iranian. See these personal odysseys:

- Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran (2003), an astonishing best-seller
- Marjan Satrapi's Persepolis (2003) and Persepolis 2 (2004)
- Roya Hakakian's Journey from the Land of No (2004)

And they're not all Iranian: don't miss Irshad Manji (The Trouble with Islam, 2004) and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (The Caged Virgin, 2006, based on Submission, a 2004 film co-produced with director Theo van Gogh, who was murdered by an Islamic fanatic as a result). See Christopher Hitchens' tribute to Ali here.