aims to provide for its readers reviews on books and publications concerning the viability of a two state solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict, the emerging role of Iran in the Gulf, and nuclear proliferation in the Middle East.
The third annual report on Muslim-American terrorism showed twenty Muslim-Americans were indicted for violent terrorist plots in 2011, down from 26 the year before, bringing the total since 9/11 to 193 – just under twenty a year. That number, while disconcerting, fails to support secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano’s 2011 assertion that the terrorist threat facing the United States “is at its most heightened state since” the 9/11 attacks. The numbers also belie the hyperbole flung from Congressman Peter King, chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Homeland Security, that al-Qaeda has extensively infiltrated and radicalized the Muslim-American community.
The report recognizes that the threat of terrorism remains and radical Islamists continue to urge Muslim-Americans to engage in violence. But such calls have been ignored by the vast majority of Muslim-Americans, concludes the report’s author, Charles Kurzman. (Kurzman’s book, The Missing Martyrs, is reviewed below).
The study notes that two of the 20 terrorist suspects received training abroad, the plots were of limited competence and did not reflect the planning of sophisticated, well-trained Islamist operatives, they did not fit any demographic profile, and prison did not appear to be a major source of Islamic radicalization.
There was also a decline in the number of Muslim-Americans indicted for support of terrorism, falling from 27 individuals in 2010 to 8 in 2011. The total number of indictments for support for terrorism since 9/11 – conduct including financing, false statements, and other connections with terrorist plots – is 462. While any acts of terrorism or terrorist related conduct is abhorrent, that 28 Muslim-Americans, out a Muslim-American community numbering more than 2 million, were indicted for such conduct in 2011 underscores the community’s low level of radicalization.
The study is the third such report issued from the Triangle Center on Terrorism and Homeland Security, a joint project between Duke University, University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and RTI International, focusing on Muslim-American terrorism suspects and perpetrators.
Previous Triangle reports similarly dispelled myths about how Muslim-American opposition to Islamist terrorism is lackadaisical or nonexistent. One report found that “Muslim-American organizations and leaders have consistently condemned terrorist violence here and abroad since 9/11, arguing that such violence is strictly condemned by Islam”. Such statements, Kurzman and his co-authors concluded, “were not just for public consumption, but were supported by local Muslim religious and community leaders, who consistently condemned political violence in public sermons and private conversations.”
The investigation found that Muslim-American leaders were not timid in confronting signs of radical Islam within their communities. “Muslim-Americans have adopted numerous internal self-policing practices to prevent the growth of radical ideology,” the report observed. This included “confronting individuals who express radical ideology or support for terrorism, preventing extremist ideologues from preaching in mosques, communicating concerns about radical individuals to law enforcement officials, and purging radical extremists from membership in local mosques,” as well as outreach programs to Muslim-American youth.
That Muslim-Americans often reached out to U.S. law enforcement to finger individuals suspected of terrorist inclinations was significant, another study found. Kurzman determined that the largest single source of initial information (48 of 120 cases) to U.S. law enforcement involved tips from the Muslim-American community. Some of the tips came from family members of the accused but most stemmed from the general community. At least two Muslim-Americans judged by the community to be terrorist-prone because of their radical rhetoric later turned out to be police informants.
Since December 2010, when Tunisia kicked off the string of uprisings currently reorienting the political landscape in the Arab World, I have repeatedly been asked, “Will that happen in Qatar (where I live) or other countries in the Gulf?” While researched and written prior to the Arab Spring, Sean Foley’s book about the Arab Gulf States – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman – offers information and insights helpful in understanding how the Arab Gulf may accommodate its new regional environment.
Foley examines the Gulf’s socio-economic and political backdrop by starting in the 1930s and taking us through “the emergence of the modern Gulf” and into the present. He makes the point that today’s challenges in the Gulf predate the discovery of oil (in commercial quantities) in 1932, and that these states have been dealing with tough issues relating to foreign workers, gender, and a welfare system long before they became the focus of international media and politics.
The Arab Gulf States dashes many Western stereotypes of life and society in the Gulf. In the field of education and gender, Foley shows the past decades having witnessed a radical increase in the number of educated Gulf Arab women, who have gone on to assume leadership positions throughout society. This phenomenon cuts across all states in the region; educational attainment and social progress have advanced in Qatar, the UAE, Bahrain, and Kuwait. Oman has seen the largest gains in female students, where more women than men now attend school. In Saudi Arabia, between 1960 and 2000, female participation in the workforce grew as much as 691 percent.
Foley notes that the role of women in the Gulf continues to face cultural obstacles, but his depiction of the experience and quality of life for women in the region is appropriately nuanced and thoughtful. He points out that the Gulf’s social conservatives will increasingly face daunting challenges to traditional ways of life as a highly educated professional class of women overtakes men in professional advancement.
Foreign workers, who often are the majority of the population in some Gulf states, frequently are viewed as a threat to stability. But Foley shows that their presence is not new. The Gulf has never been homogenous but has always, since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, been host to diverse peoples including Jewish silversmiths, Catholic priests, Protestant missionaries, Hindu engineers, and Arab and Persian Shi’a Muslims. The influx of foreigners has always necessitated a healthy discussion among the Gulf countries about “inclusion, tolerance, and accommodation.”
Foley argues that the large presence of foreign residents forms an essential component of Gulf society and must continue for at least two reasons: their labor is critical to the region’s sustained economic growth and they significantly contribute to the area’s cultural enrichment. Unfortunately, the recent rise in nationalism has seen some Gulf states become less inclusive and accommodating to their foreign guests, either through the “disappearance” of certain groups, such as the Jews in Saudi, or by creating barriers to integration by restricting residency and citizenship. There are now sharper distinctions and inequalities between indigenous and expatriate populations. What remains unanswered is whether these tensions will intensify and, if so, how Gulf states will manage the divide between their huge foreign resident communities and their indigenous citizenries.
According to Foley, the Arab Gulf states have traditionally defused social and political tensions through establishing welfare states that have kept their citizenries financially comfortable. Ibn Saud, the founder of modern-day Saudi Arabia, initiated this strategy in 1915 and it continues today. Over the past year, I have often heard Qataris say, “There is no need for uprisings in Qatar like those in Egypt or Libya because we have more rights than we deserve.” Those rights are interpreted as socio-economic rights. Many Qataris appear satisfied with lesser civil and political freedoms so long as they are guaranteed a living standard that includes a salary, housing, healthcare, and education. However, such largess does not extend to the majority foreign-born population, which creates uncomfortable societal tensions. Similar difficulties exist for other states, which have not been unequivocally generous to all their residents (examples being the Shi’a in Saudi and Bahrain). Just how long this welfare state strategy will successfully last for the Arab Gulf states is an open question.
Foley ends his book by highlighting the chief question for Gulf Arabs: for almost a century they have balanced government dependence on Western security guarantees and financial ties with a citizenry that rejects many other Western policies, particularly those policies implicating the Israel/Palestine conflict. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and the view that U.S. power in the Middle East is declining, coupled with region-wide radical political change, is pushing the Arab Gulf into new territory. Foley predicts that the Gulf states will meet such changes by staying the course. Governments will continue to support a welfare state, encouraging their indigenous populations to fill the workplace while remaining dependent on foreign workers, and accepting women into prominent positions in business and politics. The states will seek to reshape their societies and economies from one based on a single modern industry—oil—to one that is diversified and based on education, science, and technology. In Foley’s eyes, the Arab Gulf is a work in progress; where it will go remains to be seen.
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Courtney Erwin has an M.A. in Islamic law and J.D. in international law. From 2007 to 2010, she was chief of staff at the Cordoba Initiative, an advocacy group that promotes improved relations between Islam and the West. She now lives in Doha, Qatar, working on issues related to legal protection for education during situations of insecurity and conflict.
The basic facts of Prouty’s story are well known, thanks to a 60 Minutes story that aired in 2010: a Lebanese student who entered the United States at age 19, she joined the FBI and swiftly rose up through its ranks to investigate prominent terrorism cases. Seeking more action in the aftermath of 9/11, Prouty transferred to the CIA where she found herself in Iraq, clandestinely traveling about the country, identifying and debriefing Iraqi “assets.” She did this at considerable risk to her life, including a period of time when she was pregnant. But when the FBI Detroit’s office linked one of her family relatives to a Lebanese sheik purportedly associated with Hezbollah, Prouty’s world crashed down upon her. Accused of begin a Hezbollah mole, she was forced to plea guilty to criminal fraud based on a twenty year old sham marriage. Her U.S. citizenship was revoked but her deportation was “withheld,” an implicit recognition that the same terrorist groups in Lebanon she allegedly helped would have killed her for having worked for the CIA.
Uncompromised tells of the numbing unfairness of the FBI investigation and federal prosecution of Prouty and stands as a warning of how paranoia and xenophobia can twist the U.S. justice system. There was no evidence that she ever illegally passed intelligence or that she undermined U.S. national security. She was wholly vindicated by a subsequent internal CIA investigation. Public opinion and parts of official Washington rallied around her, resulting in what Prouty now calls her “redemption.” Nine months after the 60 Minutes broadcast, her legal permanent residency status was reinstated. Her U.S. citizenship application is pending.
Prouty stated during an interview on the Diane Rehm Show that she should have gone to trial. That probably was wishful thinking. Federal prosecutors had brow beaten her into submission through character assassination and intimidation. The New York Post took to calling her “Jihad Jane.” The lead prosecutor, Kenneth Chadwell, taunted her by declaring “in the post-9/11 environment, you could be found guilty by simply being an Arab.” He threatened to file fraud charges for each time over the past 15 years she had used her allegedly fraudulently issued U.S. passport. That would have constituted hundreds of separate criminal counts and exposed her to dozens of years in prison. Her husband was threatened with prosecution and the family’s financial savings were nearly exhausted. In the end, Proudy capitulated, agreeing “to any terms they set before me.”
Prouty’s plea agreement required her to admit that she illegally accessed an FBI computer system on Hezbollah when “she was not assigned to work Hizballal cases as part of her FBI duties.” She writes that the accusation was farcical as investigating Hezbollah was one of her principle tasks in the FBI’s anti-terrorism unit. But absent this concession, the prosecutor’s proclamations of exposing a Hezbollah mole in the FBI and CIA would have fallen flat.
Prouty also pled guilty to criminal immigration fraud based on her 1990 sham marriage. That the prosecutor achieved this conviction only after coercing her to waive the 10 year statute of limitations underscored the lack of evidence supporting any claims of espionage. Prouty admitted that when she was 19 years old she married solely to obtain legal permanent residency (eg. the “green card”) but insists that the FBI and CIA knew about it. Her claim rings true: the practice of fraudulent marriages in green card applications was so well known that the same year Prouty was married, the Oscar-winning movie Green Card came out, a romantic comedy about a sham marriage. It’s impossible to believe that both agencies’ background investigations would have failed to scrutinize her prior marriage.
Much of Uncompromised tells of Prouty’s journey from Lebanon to the United States. It was an immigrant experience warped by unique hardships. Growing up in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war was deeply unsettling for her and the Levant’s internecine battles were echoed Prouty’s home life. Her father was physically abusive and he valued only his son. She admits that the FBI became her “first real American family,” providing the stability and normality she coveted. At the Bureau, she was a workaholic and wholly devoted to protecting America from terrorist attacks. That is why, when her new-found family turned on her and she summarily was marched out of her office under armed guard, the pain she suffered was immeasurable.
The government’s case against Prouty was not evidence based but fueled by politics, personal ambitions, and anti-Arab fear-mongering. Uncompromised, along with her web site and a Facebook page, exposed such abuse and helped Prouty reclaim her reputation. This self-advocacy is understandable but it’s unfortunate that she devoted only two paragraphs on what the broader implications of her experience portends for Arab or Muslim Americans. That hardly was adequate in light of the systematic efforts to demonize Islam and Muslim Americans. Critics’ complaints that she was remiss for not trusting the U.S. justice system to prove her innocence could have been quieted by explaining that Chadwell’s abusive tactics were not uncommon, as American University law professor Angela J. Davis points out in her book Arbitrary Justice: The Power of the American Prosecutor. That power helps to explain why 95 per cent of all criminal cases in the U.S. end in guilty pleas.
It appears that the FBI’s distrust toward Arab Americans have not changed since Prouty’s redemption. Chadwell continues to rely on immigration-related errors to prosecute Muslims, dubious FBI tactics continue to fuel animosity toward Arabs and Muslims, and young Arab Americans are labeled suspected terrorists for purchasing too many cell phones at Wall-Mart. Prouty found redress because of the power of 60 Minutes; other individuals coming under the Justice Department’s scrutiny may not be so lucky.
Even after the death of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan, the routing of his organization in Afghanistan, and the assassination of the leadership of the Arabian Peninsula affiliate, the U.S. government continues to promote the threat of al-Qaeda. According to the national security apparatus, al-Qaeda still maintains the capacity to regroup in Central Asia and to launch attacks on the United States from its redoubts in Yemen and Somalia. It still inspires jihadists all over the world with its anti-imperial rhetoric and its dreams of reestablishing a global caliphate. And it threatens all civilization with its efforts to obtain weapons of mass destruction.
Most of this threat inflation is nonsense, as Fawaz Gerges points out in his new book, The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda. He reserves special scorn for al-Qaeda’s nuclear threat. “For a group that has never displayed any technical sophistication in its attacks, this would involve a monumentally steep learning curve,” he writes. “Even were al-Qaeda to acquire the technical sophistication to build a nuclear bomb – and here we enter the sphere of science fiction – it lacks the structural capacity to develop such a weapon, let alone the necessary ingredients.”
Thanks largely to the spectacle of 9/11, al-Qaeda acquired a mythic reputation. But as Gerges details, the organization basically got lucky. Intelligence services should have averted the attacks beforehand. The Bush administration’s decision to attack Iraq gave the organization another shot in the arm. But that’s as far as its luck has gone. Al-Qaeda’s persistent attacks on fellow Muslims – as traitors to the faith – alienated the organization within the Muslim world. Its message of transnational terrorism was never particularly popular to begin with, even among the bulk of jihadists, who preferred to wage their struggles within particular countries such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt.
As he debunks this central myth of al-Qaeda’s power, Gerges corrects the record on a number of other points. The organization, for instance, did not exist in any institutional sense until the second half of the 1990s, even though its origin is commonly traced back to 1988. Sayyid Qutb did not provide the spiritual inspiration for al-Qaeda, for he didn’t support war against the United States. And bin Laden himself was against the shedding of Muslim blood at first, initially withholding his support for fighting against the Egyptian and Algerian governments in the 1990s.
And perhaps most importantly, al-Qaeda was not the culmination of the jihadist struggle. It was the last dying light of the movement. “When bin Laden’s group burst onto the Islamic scene in the early 1990s, the jihadist movement had largely spent itself – jihadism had failed,” Gerges writes. “Al-Qaeda’s decision to internationalize jihad was less an indicator of internal cohesion and strength of jihadism than of its inner turmoil.” In other words, not only has the reputation of al-Qaeda been over-hyped, but so has the whole tradition of violent jihadism.
The election of Barack Obama has not substantially altered the U.S. approach to al-Qaeda. Although he promised to close Guantanamo, end torture, and pull out of Iraq, and although he did retire to noxious phrase “global war on terror,” the president has largely preserved the counter-terrorism narrative. Instead of extraordinary rendition, the United States now uses drones to identify and kill suspected terrorists (along with assorted other people). And al-Qaeda remains a number one priority. Although the organization even at its height only commanded a couple thousand fighters, possessed little in the way of conventional weaponry and zero weapons of mass destruction, and controlled no significant territory, the United States remains on a war footing comparable to the Cold War when we faced a Soviet Union that matched us in terms of conventional and nuclear armaments and possessed an ideology that was more globally influential than anything bin Laden ever touted. But fear – and the need to find a compelling reason to maintain the national security status quo – has kept the United States on a war footing.
And whatever al-Qaeda was its height, which was minimal, it is now a shadow of its former self. Even its only real successor organization, al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), is marginal at best. Gerges numbers its core operatives at between 50 and 300. It has no mass following. “It does not possess the material, human means, or endurance to sustain a transnational campaign, nor does it have the assets or resources to build viable alliances with Yemeni tribes and a social welfare infrastructure,” Gerges writes, and this was before the assassination of its leader, Yemeni-American Anwar al-Awlaki.
The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda is an important book, well-researched and fiercely argued. Its central message, that al-Qaeda poses only a limited, tactical threat – must be heard and absorbed by the entire U.S. national security apparatus. Until then, we will continue to fight against monsters that are largely of our own creation.
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John Feffer is the co-director of Foreign Policy in Focus at the Institute for Policy Studies.
Often heard following the 9/11 attacks was the scary prediction that if only one percent of the world’s one billion Muslims joined al-Qaeda, at least one million terrorists would soon be launching attacks against the U.S. and its allies. The subsequent years have shown that forecast to be pure hogwash, tinged with a little anti-Islamic bigotry. According to the U.S. State Department’s 2009 Country Reports on Terrorism, worldwide terrorist acts from 2005 through 2008 – excluding attacks occurring in war-torn Iraq and Afghanistan – averaged about 6,600 yearly, hardly the number you’d expect from a million person assault.
Nor has the United States been inundated by Islamist inspired terror attacks. According to Would-Be Warriors, 2010 Rand Corporation study, from 9/11 to the end of 2009, 46 publicly reported cases of domestic radicalization and recruitment to jihadist terrorism occurred in the United States. Only 125 persons were identified in the 46 cases and half of the cases involved only a single individual. The report’s author, Brian Jenkins, one of the toughest but fair-minded analysts on terrorism, also pointed out that “the volume of domestic terrorist activity was much greater in the 1970s than it is today.” That decade, Jenkins calculated, saw 60 to 70 terrorist incidents, most of them bombings, on U.S. soil every year—a level of terrorist activity 15 to 20 times that seen in most of the years since 9/11, even counting foiled plots as incidents.
Equally specious have been the repeated claims that while “all Muslims are not terrorists, all terrorists are Muslim.” The FBI’s publication Terrorism 2002 -2005 calculated that Islamic extremists accounted for only six percent of all terrorist acts on U.S. soil from 1980 to 2005; in contrast, Jewish radical groups accounted for seven percent, Latino groups 42 percent, and “extreme left wing groups” 24 percent, and “others” 16 percent.
This is not to dismiss the real threat that domestic terrorism poses to the United States or to minimize the tens of thousands of individuals killed or injured in worldwide terrorist attacks. But these figures plainly deflate the alarmist “Muslim as terrorist” hyperbola that continues to abound a decade after 9/11. The anticipated million man march of al-Qaeda suicide bombers was a delusion but continues in personalities as diverse as Sean Hannity, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Glenn Beck.
Charles Kurzman, professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wants to know why, if roughly one-fifth of mankind is Muslim and they all supposedly hate the West and embrace martyrdom, are there not more Muslim terrorists? The short answer is that the vast majority of Muslims – well more than 99 percent – reject al-Qaeda’s goals. Kurzman points to numerous opinion polls evincing that the number of Muslims eager for a theocratic state ruled by Sharia law is a distinctly small minority. Secularists number a fifth to half of the population in various Muslim majority countries and liberal Muslims – those supporting an Islamic government following democratic procedures – account for about half the populace, including in countries such as Saudi Arabia. A 2007 Pew Research poll found that majorities in 13 out of 14 Muslim societies agreed that religion should be kept separate from government policy.
Kurzman wants the American public to “turn down the volume on terrorism debates” and “put the threat of Islamist terrorism in perspective.” Given how the U.S. media immediately assumed that the slaughter in Norway was perpetrated by Islamists, he faces a towering, up hill battle. But Kurzman offers convincing arguments for those willing to listen. The surprising numbers of opinion polls that regularly monitor public attitudes in Arab and Muslim communities evince support for his views. They show that the vast majority of Muslims are repulsed by terror attacks against civilians and that such acts turn public opinion against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. He also introduces the idea of “radical sheik” to explain to why internet forums and young Arab musical groups laud Islamist attacks on the U.S. and the West. Young Muslims, he counsels, express sympathy for “Bin Ladin and his ilk as heroes of anti-imperialism and Islamic authenticity – without actually wanting these revolutionary movements to succeed.” This widespread “symbolic endorsement” of radical Islam, Kurzman points out, has “not translate into support for revolutionary goals or potential collaboration with terrorism.” Radical Islamists appear to have the upper hand in Muslim communities because so long as they use violence, “their visibility far outweighs their numbers.”
Kurzman makes the case that radical Islamists are under ideological siege and losing the war of ideas among Muslims. Socially conservative but non-violent Muslim televangelists attract thousands of more adherents than the barkers of revolutionary Islam. Eclipsing radical Islamist doctrine has been the evolving tradition of liberal, democratic Islamic thought that has sought to modernize Muslim majority countries while paying fidelity to socially conservative Islam. Kurzman’s critique of liberal and revolutionary Islam should be mandatory reading for anyone insisting that Islam inherently stifles creative political thinking or condemns its adherents to a backward, violent theology. Progressive Islamic opinion has been publicly stifled in the Arab world partly by the murderous attacks of radical Islamists but more so by repressive Arab governments that view such voices as threats to their hold on power. Facilitating such silence has been the U.S. and its Western allies. In the U.S., Kurzman points out, such silence has been enforced by ignoring or belittling the proponents of liberal, democratic Islamic thought. “Expert pessimism about the potential for Islamic liberalism,” Kurzman explains, “has a long heritage in the West.”
Kurzman is one of the few analysts to admit that there is little Washington can do to change the Arab world’s deep hostility toward the United States, absent a meaningful change in U.S. foreign policy – a nil prospect. But most Muslims view the U.S. as a threat to their national security and religion yet still maintain positive attitudes toward American culture and society. Kurzman urges U.S. policymakers to take advantage of the latter. Published before the current “Arab Spring,” he suggests that Washington replace its traditional, narrow question of how a policy will affect U.S. “national interests” with how will a policy effect the groups and movements that share American values and care about democracy. Forging alliances with such groups in the long term will help to secure U.S. national interests and further isolate radical Islamists. Readers seeking insight into the political cross-currents emerging from the Arab Spring without fear mongering rhetoric over radical Islam would do well to read The Missing Martyrs.
In this Council on Foreign Relations publication, Peter Beinart presents another in a long line of critics of American foreign policy who take aim at exceptionalism. His critique falls into the “liberal” camp; it does not seek to follow in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, or any other radical dissection. But like them, Beinart directly addresses the question why U.S. leaders, regardless of party, persist in intervening abroad to spread American values and secure supposedly vital interests.
The analysis was completed as Barack Obama took office, so the George W. Bush administration is the most recent one discussed. In addition, Beinart also devotes particular attention to the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson and Lyndon Johnson—not just to the decision makers, but also to the foreign-policy intellectuals who stood behind them and gave policy a veneer of establishment authority. As Beinart sees it, hubris is the fundamental problem—an unstoppable virus to which, when it comes to foreign-policy adventurism, no U.S. leader is immune. To a greater or lesser degree—he cites FDR and, somewhat strangely, Ronald Reagan (do Central America and the extraordinary nuclear-weapon buildup not count?) as having departed from the norm—all administrations played on the American people’s fears (of communism or terrorism), presumed that the “can-do” spirit would overcome all difficulties, and proceeded to use force abroad in places both important and insignificant to the national interest.
“A wise foreign policy,” Beinart writes, “starts with the recognition that since America’s power is limited, we must limit our enemies.” The limitations of power, even a superpower’s power, are the pivotal element in his analysis. If U.S. leaders recognized those limitations, he argues, our fears would not take over clarity of thinking and purpose. What America needs is another George Kennan—someone who never allowed ideology or idealism to lead the country into crusades; someone whose area expertise created clarity about the enemy’s own limitations. Evidently, Henry Kissinger need not apply.
Might greater humility about what the United States can accomplish abroad and a larger role for country and regional expertise undermine what the author calls “assumptions about American omnipotence”? These changes are no doubt necessary. But are they sufficient? Examining Beinart’s analysis of the Iraq invasion in 2003 provides some answers.
Beinart’s case study is strongest when discussing Bush’s personal motives and Colin Powell’s beleaguered situation. And Beinart is undoubtedly correct, as so many inside studies have determined, about the deeper forces that explain the Iraq invasion: the cockiness of US leaders; Bush’s idealism about spreading freedom and democracy; and a pervasiveness blindness to Middle East history and culture at the highest level. Still, Beinart’s study of the Iraq war would be more compelling if he had delved into other domestic sources of US policy, such as bureaucratic politics (for example, the pressure placed on the intelligence community to mold its findings to conform with official policy, and groupthink in the decision-making process); the role of Middle East oil in US policymaking; Dick Cheney’s promotion of an expanded definition of presidential power; and the neoconservatism movement’s determination, well in advance of 9/11, to push a more militant, specifically Reaganesque, foreign policy (embodied in the Project for the New American Century and the “Vulcans” study group). Beyond hubris and the hyped fears of terrorism that Beinart so well describes lay the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld team’s effort to firmly establish American hegemony in the Middle East.
Beinart’s conclusion is commendable: America’s real security depends, as FDR once said, on the success of the grand experiment at home. President Obama’s June 22, 2011 speech on Afghanistan reflected this view, providing some hope that the extraordinary expenditures on two Middle East wars would be in some major part diverted to address the country’s array of economic and social problems. But don’t hold your breath: Even if some diversion takes place, Pentagon spending will continue its upward path, arms transfers to repressive regimes such as Pakistan’s will go forward, and the prerogatives of presidential power will continue to be used to override legal and legislative barriers. Thus, the beat goes on.
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Mel Gurtov is Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Portland State University, Oregon and Editor-in-Chief of Asian Perspective. He previously served on the research staff of the RAND Corporation (1966-71), where he was co-author of the Pentagon Papers. He has published twenty books and numerous articles on East Asian affairs, U.S. foreign policy, and global affairs.
That governments never negotiate with terrorists is a refrain well worn but false. Two Israeli scholars have now challenged the veracity of the parallel argument – that terrorism does not coerce governments into changing their policies. In the first systematic examination of whether terrorism is an effective strategy to achieve political ends, they conclude that Palestinian terror attacks forced Israel to accommodate Palestinian goals. Terror attacks “significantly affects the preferences and attitudes of Jewish Israelis” and the attacks “induced the local population to exhibit a higher willingness to grant territorial concessions.” But at some point the violence reaches a tipping point where Israeli attitudes harden and Israeli opinion refuses further thought of concession.
Writing in the October 2010 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Professors Eric Gould and Eseban Klor compared over time Jewish Israeli opinion and civilian Israeli fatalities based on statistical data derived from political attitude surveys of Israeli citizens conducted from 1969. They determined with the use of regression analysis that “terrorism brought about a leftward shift of the entire political map in Israel over the last twenty years, including the position of right-wing parties who are traditionally less willing to grant territorial concessions to the Palestinians.” Terrorism prompted Israeli voters to move to rightwing parties but those parties in turn moved “leftward” in their political views, by which Gould and Klor mean they moderated their political stance. Left-leaning groups supported right-wing parties “only because the right-wing parties are moving to the left.” The “Likud’s position in 2009,” the authors point out, “is to the left of the left-wing Labor party’s platform in 1988.”
Gould and Klor conclude their study reveals that “terrorism can be an effective strategy” because right-wing Israeli parties were forced to concede “concession to the Palestinians.” But while the rhetoric of Israel’s right-wing parties may have changed, the facts on the ground expose an entirely different reality. The Likud may be talking the language of territorial concession but it consistently has pursued the goal of territorial annexation.
Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem has been relentless. Since 1993 when Israel signed the Oslo Accords, Israel’s West Bank settler population grew from 116,300 to 289,600 in 2009. The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem puts the total settler population in the West Bank and East Jerusalem at over 300,000. Only photographs can capture the reality of settler colonization in the West Bank.
Land confiscation in the occupied territories has been persistent, with Jewish settlers now holding about 42 percent of the land. A map revealing the extensive swath of West Bank land that Israel is permitted to control for “security” purposes under the Oslo Accords is jaw dropping and underscores claims that the territorial compromise as envisioned by Israel and the United States subjugates Palestinians to a Bantustan-like existance. Human Rights Watch documented the existence of two-tier system of laws, rules, and services that Israel operates in the West Bank that favors Jewish settlers but imposes harsh conditions on Palestinians. The cumulative result of such policies, concludes University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, is that the “two-state solution is now a fantasy” as Israel incorporates the occupied territories into a ‘Greater Israel.’”
Gould and Klor correctly concluded that Palestinian violence successfully coerced Israeli pubic opinion to accept territorial compromise, but the suggestion that it was an “effective strategy” toward achieving Palestinian independence is woefully misplaced.
The U.S. Congressional Research Service (CRS) is an often overlooked gold mine of information on U.S. policy on an array of topics, including foreign affairs. A division of the Library of Congress, it offers analysis of issues for members of congress and their staff and is written by individuals knowledgeable in their chosen field. While some of its reports are classified, most can be found on line.
Reports issued by CRS’s division of foreign affairs are predictably stilted but their descriptive content is indispensable for those seeking data on U.S. foreign military and economic assistance, succinct histories of U.S. foreign relations, and summarizes of U.S. policy concerns toward select countries. It’s a bonanza of information collected in one place. The Middle East division has been particularly busy in recent months, having issued 12 reports in January 2011 and December 2010, compared to their monthly average of two. Issues include political reform in Oman, Bahrain, and Kuwait, U.S. relations toward Syria and Lebanon, background reports on Hezbollah and Hamas, and U.S. foreign aid to Israel.
The most recent releases are Tunisia: Recent Developments and Policy Issues and Egypt: Background and U.S. Relations. The 13 page Tunisia report was written soon after President Ben Ali fled the country and highlights following the Tunisian uprising the “potential implications for Congress related to the oversight to U.S.-Tunisian bilateral relations and assistance.” It offered the understated prediction that “many analysts believe the events in Tunisia could affect political stability in other countries in the region with authoritarian-leaning, Western-backed regimes.”
The 28 page report on Egypt, released January 18, 2011 at the rise of the Egyptian rebellion, presents an overview of Egypt’s political structure and parties and U.S.-Egyptian relations, including a chart showing U.S. aid to Egypt from 1948 to the present. It recognizes the tension between some U.S. policy makers advocating an “orderly” transfer of power from Mubarak to new leadership that insures “Egypt’s peace with Israel, U.S. access to the Suez Canal, and general bilateral military cooperation” and others wishing to see in Egypt “a genuine democracy even if it empowers the Muslim Brotherhood.”
CRS also issued in early January 2011 Iran Sanctions, a report detailing the evolution of international sanctions against Iran. It succinctly reviews the myriad of U.S. sanctions legislation, U.N. resolutions, and action by other countries against Iran. It outlines the policies that target Iran’s energy sector, restrict its ability to make or import gasoline, and isolate Iran from the international financial system. The report states that by “all accounts,” sanctions is “having a growing effect on Iran’s economy” by intensifying “the effects of Iran’s economic mismanagement and key bottlenecks.” But the CRS study concedes that a “consensus [opines] that sanctions have not, to date, caused such an Iranian policy shift.” It suggests that the White House and Congress may be promoting Iran’s domestic opposition by “emphasizing measures that would sanction Iranian officials who are human rights abusers, facilitate the democracy movement’s access to information, and express outright U.S. support for the opposition.”
The report’s author, Kenneth Katzman, is prominent among Washington’s Middle East foreign policy establishment and a long time Iran watcher, having started his career at the CIA’s Middle East analytic section and authoring one of the earliest books on Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. He has written an extensive series of fact laden CRS publications on Iran, with one title, Iran: U.S. Concerns and Policy Responses, periodically updated. Glenn Greenwald, however, considers him a neocon whose opinions “reveal the grotesque indifference and banal evil that characterizes much of America’s war-loving Foreign Policy Community.”
