At Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH), John L. Esposito has revisited a prediction he made over five years ago, in the lead-up to the Iraq war. “Five years after a U.S. war with Iraq,” he wrote in November 2002, “it is likely that the Arab world will be less democratic than more and that anti-Americanism will be stronger rather than weaker.” (Read his 2002 prediction here, and his new MESH post here.) Below I reproduce a comment I offered on his post:
John Esposito was prescient to predict that the Iraq war would damage America’s standing in the eyes of Muslims. There are different measures of the damage, and the Gallup World Poll is just one of them. But it’s indisputably the case that the Iraq war represented a blow to U.S. prestige in Muslim public opinion.
Contrast this with the ideological view of Jimmy Carter: “Even among the populations of our former close friends in the region, Egypt and Jordan, less than 5 percent look favorably on the United States today. That’s not because we invaded Iraq; they hated Saddam. It is because we don’t do anything about the Palestinian plight.” Perhaps Esposito should send a copy of his new book to the sage from Plains, Georgia, inured though he may be to all evidence. Even the leading Palestinian intellectual in America, Rashid Khalidi, would concede Esposito’s point. “Iraq has changed everything,” he has written. “In Washington, a city obsessed with the present, it was easy to forget that as recently as a few years ago, the United States was not particularly disliked in the Middle East and that al-Qaeda was a tiny underground organization with almost no popular support.” In other words, the Iraq invasion did much more damage to U.S. standing than decades of U.S. support for Israel and its occupation of Palestinian territories. It’s an important point to remember, as people search for ways to restore U.S. prestige.
But on Esposito’s other key prediction, he missed the mark. It isn’t so that the Arab world is “less democratic” than it was on the eve of the Iraq war. According to Freedom House, one Arab country, Lebanon, made a full-category upward move in this period, from “not free” to “partly free.” There were significant improvements in the scores of Iraq (and, looking next door to the Arabs, Turkey), and mild improvements in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Yemen. Egypt, bucking the trend, went down a notch in civil liberties. Overall, the Arab Middle East looks more democratic today than it was before the Iraq war—to some extent, because of it.
Esposito was at least partly wrong on another score. In 2002, he wrote that the United States “will want compliant allies and governments in the Arab world—and will fear open elections that might bring Islamist enemies to power. As a result, the United States will be forced, at the end of the day, to support strong, authoritarian governments that will rely on their security forces, political repression, and American aid.” In fact, in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, the United States promoted elections that empowered Islamist parties. True, the Bush administration has pulled back after witnessing the main consequence of its folly: the electoral legitimation of Hamas. But on balance, this administration has done more to empower Islamists than any of its predecessors.
Esposito deserves some credit there. As I once noted in a speech at Georgetown, many of the ideas that he championed in the 1990s made their way into administration thinking. These include the diversity of Islamism and its openness to moderation through inclusion in the political process. Both of these notions, I believe, are flawed, and my own criticism of Bush administration policy has focused precisely on their adoption as core policy assumptions. But John has had more of an influence on this administration than I have, so he really should give himself a pat on the back. He contributed his small share to the emergence of the string of Islamist principalities that now dot the Middle East—and that bedevil U.S. policy.
On Friday, the Columbia Spectator ran an article by its “news staff” under the headline: “Yiddish Prof Named Acting Director of Israel Institute After False Media Speculation.” The Yiddish professor is Jeremy Dauber, and the institute is the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Mazel tof to Professor Dauber.
The article adds the following:
Last week, the New York Sun reported that sociology professor Yinon Cohen was appointed permanent director of the institute. The article quoted several professors upset by Columbia’s decision to appoint Cohen, who signed a letter condemning Israel’s policies concerning 2002 military operations in Gaza. The Sun also wrote that it found the information about Cohen on a blog named Sandbox, written by academic Martin Kramer who obtained his master’s degree in history from Columbia in 1976.
[Columbia Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas] Dirks said the Sun’s article was completely false. “I don’t know what the basis for the attack on Professor Cohen is,” he said.
Cohen came to Columbia in fall 2007 as a visiting professor from Tel Aviv University. While Cohen was never appointed director of any institute at Columbia, he recently received the endowed position of Yosef Haim Yerushalmi professor of Israel and Jewish studies—a name similar to that of the institute, which may have been the source of confusion.
The report leaves the vague impression that I contributed to that confusion.
In fact, my blog post made no mention of the Institute. I accurately related that Yinon Cohen had been appointed to the chair of Israel studies first announced in 2005—an endowed chair whose incumbent was recruited by a search committee that included Palestinian activist professors Rashid Khalidi and Lila Abu-Lughod. I’ve followed the fortunes of the chair since 2005, because of the perverse composition of its search committee.
In the academy, endowed professorships are commonly called chairs (the relevant example is here); these should never be confused with administrative chairs of departments or institutes. In the academy, there are people who hold chairs and do no administrative work, and people who are chairs and have time for little else.
The New York Sun subsequently and erroneously reported that Cohen had been appointed to the vacant directorship of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Its reporter apparently thought that if Cohen had been appointed to a chair, as I wrote, then he must be chairing an administrative unit, and it must be the Institute. The Sun runs another story this morning, by a different reporter, banishing the confusion.
That out of the way, the directorship of the Institute would seem to be a story worth following in its own right. On the Institute’s own website, there’s a page that hasn’t been updated, reporting this: “The institute is administered by a director and an associate director, currently professors Yosef H. Yerushalmi and Michael F. Stanislawski, respectively. Upon Professor Yerushalmi’s retirement, it is anticipated that Professor Stanislawski will become the director, and a new associate director will be appointed.” Yerushalmi retired, Stanislawski briefly took over, and then quit, leaving the Institute without a director. I wonder why.
Stanislawski, a professor of Jewish history, took to the stage of Columbia’s comic opera in 2005, when he appeared in the supporting role of fix-it man for the university’s president, Lee Bollinger. Stanislawski headed the search committee for the Israel studies chair, which put him in the ludicrous position of vouching for the Palestinian agitprofs. (Example: “Both Professor Khalidi and Professor Lughod will act totally professionally, whatever their political statements outside the classroom.”) He also wrote a letter to Commentary praising Bollinger as “a true and devoted friend of the state of Israel… and an avid and enthusiastic supporter of the expansion of Israel studies at Columbia.”
But a year later, following the first (failed) attempt by a Columbia dean to bring Iran’s President Ahmadinejad to campus, Stanislawski wrote an anguished private letter to Bollinger, asking this:
What possible enhancement of our collective or individual academic knowledge or understanding of the world’s situation would have been augmented by his speaking on campus? Anyone at Columbia who reads the newspapers or watches television already knows Ahmadinejad’s repugnant views all too well; this is not a question of free speech or stifled speech…. The question here, I would propose, is one of the deliberate invitation to campus not simply of a controversial figure, or even one with repugnant and absurd views, but of a purveyor of hate speech.
Of course, this plea had no long-term effect, because the following autumn Bollinger did allow Ahmadinejad to pollute the Columbia campus. In the ensuing fracas, New Republic editor Martin Peretz likened Stanislawski to a court Jew. All of this may or may not be relevant to why Stanislawski left a void at the top of the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies—I have no way of knowing. Certainly the Institute’s tribulations seem like a worthy story for the Columbia Spectator or the New York Sun to unravel.
In the meantime, another egregious protest letter signed by Yinon Cohen has come to light. (Extract: “Academic faculty in the occupied territories! We wish to cooperate with you in opposing the brutal policy of siege, closure and curfew of the IDF.”) “We were happy and lucky to recruit professor Cohen,” Nicholas Dirks is quoted as saying in Friday’s Columbia Spectator. “He’s a terrific demographer.” Well, “terrific” is less than what was promised to the big-name donors of his chair. Originally, the Columbia Recordreported that Columbia would “appoint a world-renowned scholar recognized by his or her peers as a preeminent figure in the field of modern Israel studies.” Whether Cohen is a “preeminent figure” is indeed a matter best left to his peers. But if the donors expected that Columbia would land anyone as “world-renowned” as, say, Benny Morris or Michael Oren—or, for that matter, Rashid Khalidi—then they have been thoroughly cheated.
Update, March 13:The Forward, doubtless inspired by this post, set out to discover why Stanislawski quit, and came up empty-handed. Here is the report, by Marissa Brostoff:
Professors at Columbia University have been mum over the abrupt resignation last month of Michael Stanislawski as director of the school’s Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies, an umbrella for scholars anchored in other departments. Stanislawski declined to comment on his change in status at the institute…. Other professors at the institute, as well as the Columbia administration, declined to comment or said only that Stanislawski had resigned for personal reasons.
Samantha Power is the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on genocide, and she has a professorship at Harvard (in something called “Global Leadership and Public Policy”). She is also a senior foreign policy adviser to Barack Obama. This isn’t an honorific: she has worked for Obama in Washington, she has campaigned for him around the country, and she doesn’t hesitate to speak for him. This morning, the Washington Post has a piece on Obama’s foreign policy team, identifying her (and retired Maj. Gen. Scott Garion) as “closest to Obama, part of a group-within-the-group that he regularly turns to for advice.” Power and Garion “retain unlimited access to Obama.” This morning’s New York Timesannounces that Power has an “irresistable profile” and “she could very well end up in [Obama’s] cabinet.”
She also has a problem: a corpus of critical statements about Israel. These have been parsed by Noah Pollak at Commentary’s blog Contentions, by Ed Lasky and Richard Baehr at American Thinker, and by Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.
Power made her most problematic statement in 2002, in an interview she gave at Berkeley. The interviewer asked her this question:
Let me give you a thought experiment here, and it is the following: without addressing the Palestine-Israel problem, let’s say you were an advisor to the President of the United States, how would you respond to current events there? Would you advise him to put a structure in place to monitor that situation, at least if one party or another [starts] looking like they might be moving toward genocide?
Power gave an astonishing answer:
What we don’t need is some kind of early warning mechanism there, what we need is a willingness to put something on the line in helping the situation. Putting something on the line might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import; it may more crucially mean sacrificing—or investing, I think, more than sacrificing—billions of dollars, not in servicing Israel’s military, but actually investing in the new state of Palestine, in investing the billions of dollars it would probably take, also, to support what will have to be a mammoth protection force, not of the old Rwanda kind, but a meaningful military presence. Because it seems to me at this stage (and this is true of actual genocides as well, and not just major human rights abuses, which were seen there), you have to go in as if you’re serious, you have to put something on the line.
Unfortunately, imposition of a solution on unwilling parties is dreadful. It’s a terrible thing to do, it’s fundamentally undemocratic. But, sadly, we don’t just have a democracy here either, we have a liberal democracy. There are certain sets of principles that guide our policy, or that are meant to, anyway. It’s essential that some set of principles becomes the benchmark, rather than a deference to [leaders] who are fundamentally politically destined to destroy the lives of their own people. And by that I mean what Tom Friedman has called “Sharafat” [Sharon-Arafat]. I do think in that sense, both political leaders have been dreadfully irresponsible. And, unfortunately, it does require external intervention…. Any intervention is going to come under fierce criticism. But we have to think about lesser evils, especially when the human stakes are becoming ever more pronounced.
It isn’t too difficult to see all the red flags in this answer. Having placed Israel’s leader on par with Yasser Arafat, she called for massive military intervention on behalf of the Palestinians, to impose a solution in defiance of Israel and its American supporters. Billions of dollars would be shifted from Israel’s security to the upkeep of a “mammoth protection force” and a Palestinian state—all in the name of our “principles.”
This quote has dogged Power, and she has gone to extraordinary lengths to put it behind her. Most notably, she called in the Washington correspondent of the Israeli daily Haaretz, Shmuel Rosner, to whom she disavowed the quote:
Power herself recognizes that the statement is problematic. “Even I don’t understand it,” she says. And also: “This makes no sense to me.” And furthermore: “The quote seems so weird.” She thinks that she made this statement in the context of discussing the deployment of international peacekeepers. But this was a very long time ago, circumstances were different, and it’s hard for her to reconstruct exactly what she meant.
It must be awful, at such a young age, to lose track of why you recommended the massive deployment of military force, and not that long ago. So let me help Samantha Power: I can reconstruct exactly what she meant.
Power gave the interview on April 29, 2002. This was the tail end of Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield, Israel’s offensive into the West Bank in reaction to a relentless campaign of Palestinian suicide bombings that had killed Israeli civilians in the hundreds. The military operation included the clearing of terrorists from the West Bank city of Jenin (April 3-19). At the time, Palestinian spokespersons had duped much of the international media and human rights community into believing that a massacre of innocent Palestinians had taken place in Jenin. It had not, but the name of Israel had been smeared, particularly in academe. At Harvard, pro-Palestinian activists canvassed the faculty for support of a petition calling on Harvard to divest from Israel. (It was published on May 6.)
Power at the time was executive director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, which she founded in 1999. In 2001, she had recruited a celebrity director for the Carr Center: Michael Ignatieff, a Canadian intellectual and journalist who, like herself, had come to prominence writing about atrocities in the Balkans and Africa. A profile of Ignatieff in March 2002 described the division of labor in the Carr Center: “He shares administrative responsibilities with Samantha Power, the center’s executive director. The division of labor works wonderfully, he says: ‘She does all the work.'” Power later told a Canadian journalist that “their social relationship was based on three Bs: baseball, bottles and boys. They talked about the Boston Red Sox, of whom she is a fanatic supporter; they spent evenings together ‘yelling and laughing’ over bottles of wine, and she found him a kind and sympathetic confidant when it came to affairs of the heart.”
The Carr Center under this management team generally steered clear of the Middle East. But in that spring of 2002, the pressure to come up with something was very great. Ignatieff, who had been to the Middle East a few times, took the lead. On April 19, 2002, only ten days before Power emitted her “weird” quote, Ignatieff published an op-ed in the London Guardian, under this headline: “Why Bush Must Send in His Troops.” I wrote a thorough critique of this piece over five years ago, so I won’t repeat my dissection of its flaws. As I showed then, the op-ed includes every trendy calumny against Israel.
More relevant now are Ignatieff’s policy conclusions. “Neither side is capable of making peace,” he determined, “or even sitting in the same room to discuss it.” The United States should therefore move “to impose a two-state solution now.”
The time for endless negotiation between the parties is past: it is time to say that all but those settlements right on the 1967 green line must go; that the right of return is incompatible with peace and security in the region and the right must be extinguished with a cash settlement; that the UN, with funding from Europe, will establish a transitional administration to help the Palestinian state back on its feet and then prepare the ground for new elections before exiting; and, most of all, the US must then commit its own troops, and those of willing allies, not to police a ceasefire, but to enforce the solution that provides security for both populations.
Ignatieff ended with a grand flourish:
Imposing a peace of this amplitude on both parties, and committing the troops to back it up, would be the most dramatic exercise of presidential leadership since the Cuban missile crisis. Nothing less dramatic than this will prevent the Middle East from descending into an inferno.
So this was the thrilling idea that swept the Carr Center that April: a “dramatic exercise of presidential leadership,” through a commitment of U.S. troops to impose and enforce a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Middle East would be saved. The “amplitude” of this notion made divestment seem small-minded. Samantha Power did not misspeak ten days later in her Berkeley interview. She was retailing a vision she shared with her closest colleague. Power went a bit further than Ignatieff, when she spoke about how this show of presidential courage “might mean alienating a domestic constituency of tremendous political and financial import.” Ignatieff would never have written that. But it was implicit in his text anyway.
So Ignatieff’s op-ed was exactly what Power meant. That she should claim no recollection of any of this context seems… weird. Or perhaps not. Remember, Ignatieff wasn’t talking about deploying “international peacekeepers,” the context Power now suggests for her words. He specifically proposed United States troops, followed by anyone else who was “willing.” Their job wouldn’t be to keep the peace, but to “enforce the solution.” Far better today for Power to have some kind of blackout, than to tell the truth about the “dramatic exercise” she and Ignatieff envisioned.
(“Iggy,” by the way, left Harvard in 2005 to plunge into Canadian politics, and he is now deputy leader of Canada’s opposition Liberal Party. He still has strong views on what Americans should do. “I’ve worn my heart on my sleeve for a year,” he recently announced. “I’m for Obama.”)
Is there a conclusion to be drawn from this genealogy of a truly bad policy idea? Ignatieff himself may have hit on it. Last year he published a reflection on what he’d learned since experiencing real (as opposed to academic) politics. “As a former denizen of Harvard,” he wrote, “I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners.”
Just substitute Pulitzer for Nobel.
Update: The Israel-relevant segment of the Power interview is now on YouTube.
Martin Kramer on the Middle East 
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