Author: Martin Kramer

Memo from Gulfistan

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer made these remarks at the 8th Herzliya Conference on January 21.

Lately it has been said that the Arabs are in a panic over the growing power of Iran. We are told that Arab rulers so fear the rise of Iran that this fear has eclipsed all others it’s the sum of all fears. And it’s making a new Middle East

That is what David Brooks, New York Times columnist, wrote last November: “Iran has done what decades of peace proposals have not done brought Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the Palestinians and the U.S. together. You can go to Jerusalem or to some Arab capitals and the diagnosis of the situation is the same: Iran is gaining hegemonic strength over the region.” Martin Indyk of the Saban Center used the same language in a November interview. Iran, he said, was making “a bid for hegemony in the region.”

The Sunni Arab states, and… Israel, suddenly found that they were on the same side against the Iranians. And so that created a strategic opportunity which the [Bush] administration has finally come to recognize, and that’s, more than anything else, what’s fueling the move to Annapolis.

If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Just last month, Iran’s President Ahmadinejad was invited to attend the summit of Arab Gulf rulers (the Gulf Cooperation Council) in Qatar. That was the first time an Iranian president had ever attended a GCC summit. Two weeks later, Ahmadinejad arrived Mecca, for the haj pilgrimage, at the invitation of Saudi King Abdullah. It was the first pilgrimage by an Iranian president since Iran’s revolution. And as any travel log of Arab and Iranian ministers will show, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

What game are the Gulf Arabs playing? Pretend for a moment that you are ruler of a mythical state called Gulfistan, and I am your national security adviser. You have asked me to prepare a memo on our strategic situation. Page one:

  • Your Majesty, these are good times, thanks be to God. With oil at $100 a barrel, you are awash in cash. You have built mega-projects, you have bought new weapons, you have put us on the map. An American university and a French museum have opened branches here. Our skyline flashes glitz and prosperity. And there is no end in sight to the strong demand for our oil. The developed countries are addicted, and China and India need us more every day.
  • We are enjoying this boom under the protection of the greatest power on earth. The United States has built a front line of bases right through the Gulf, and not far from your palace. The Americans are here to protect the oil, and as long as we keep it flowing, we need not fear any enemy.
  • But Your Majesty doesn’t reward me with a mansion in Aspen to tell you only good news. True, it never rains in Gulfistan, but you wish to know if I see clouds on the horizon.
  • I see two clouds. There is President Bush, who thinks God has placed him on earth to make peace in the “Holy Land,” and bring so-called democracy to the Arabs; and there is President Ahmadinejad, who believes God has put him here to spread his Shiite perversion, and who wants nuclear weapons to turn Persia into a great power.
  • These are dangerous men who threaten our security. Your Majesty, wisdom dictates that we not chose sides in their quarrel. We need good relations with the Americans: they are our biggest customers, they will defend us against any foreign enemy, and the weapons they sell us make us look stronger than we are. But we need good relations with the Iranians too. Iran is so close, we can feel its breath on our faces, from OPEC to Iraq. Were Iran to subvert us, by inciting our Shiite minority or encouraging terror, it could burst our bubble.
  • Your Majesty, a nuclear Iran is undesirable. The Persians are pushy; nuclear weapons would only make them more arrogant. For a moment, we thought the Americans would bomb them to stop them. A few of us privately urged them to do that. But the Americans can’t make up their minds. Some think Iran should be bombed. Some think Iran has no weapons program. Others share the view of General Abizaid, the former U.S. commander here. “Iran is not a suicidal nation,” he’s said. “Nuclear deterrence would work with Iran.” The Americans would destroy Iran if it touched our oil, which is ultimately their oil. But if Iran is careful, it might get the bomb.
  • In this uncertain situation, we should balance America and Iran. On the one hand, let us reassure Iran that we are good neighbors. Tell the Iranians we will oppose aggression against them, and we won’t boycott their business or freeze their assets. On the other hand, let us reassure the Americans that we are good allies. Tell them we will stabilize oil prices and let them build their big bases off in the desert. We must keep Washington and Tehran equally close and equally distant.
  • Your Majesty, the Americans want you to shake the hands of Jews and give a hand to Palestinians, to support the so-called “peace process.” We are fortunate: God gave us all the oil and no Jews. He gave the Palestinians no oil and all the Jews. If you join the “peace process,” the Jew will be at your door, demanding “normalization,” and the Palestinian, as usual, will repay generosity with ingratitude. The wise course is to keep this an American problem. Say you will help, but set impossible conditions; come to their “peace conferences” but make no commitments. True, many of your people are moved by the plight of the Palestinians. But this won’t weigh on us, so long as they blame only the Jews and the Americans. If we avoid commitment, the blame will never fall on us.
  • If we are wise, we can keep up this game until Bush and Ahmadinejad fade into history. I, your humble servant, will continue to act as your adviser in these sensitive matters. Perhaps, then, I might be rewarded with that small estate outside London? My youngest wife very much fancies it…

Now obviously I’ve simplified things here. There is no typical Arab Gulf state like Gulfistan. Different Gulf states have different interests and different policies. That is why we have Gulf experts.

But this isn’t the place to explore what distinguishes, say, Kuwait from Saudi Arabia. The point I want to make is this:

We all know how little fuel there is right here to keep the Annapolis process going. At this point, Israelis and Palestinians are running on fumes. That’s why Martin Indyk said that most of the fuel for Annapolis would have to come from a grand anti-Iran coalition. But the reality is that the coalition never formed, and now even its premises have disintegrated. Assembling this coalition was bound to be difficult; after the NIE, it has become impossible.

We have been here before. Every few years, a prophet arises to proclaim a new Middle East, including Israel. In the 1990s, peace between Israel and the Palestinians was supposed to turn the Middle East into a zone of economic cooperation including Israel. Then we were told that Iraq’s liberation would turn the Middle East into a zone of democracy including Israel. A few months ago, we were told that the Iranian threat would turn the Middle East into a zone of political and military alliance including Israel.

This latest new Middle East has had the shortest life of them all. Apparently, new Middle Easts just aren’t what they used to be.

Crude and tasteless

On By Martin Kramer

In September of last year, Pat Buchanan, founder of the weekly magazine The American Conservative, published an article on its pages entitled “Fascists Under the Bed.” In that piece, Buchanan attacked President Bush for his assertion that we are “at war with Islamic fascism.” As a prelude, Buchanan made a general critique of the reckless way analogies to fascism have been deployed in American politics. Buchanan:

Orwell said when someone calls Smith a fascist, what he means is, “I hate Smith.” By calling Smith a fascist, you force Smith to deny he’s a sympathizer of Hitler and Mussolini…. Since the 1930s, “fascist” has been a term of hate and abuse used by the Left against the Right, as in the Harry Truman campaign. In 1964, Martin Luther King Jr. claimed to see in the Goldwater campaign “dangerous signs of Hitlerism.” Twin the words, “Reagan, fascism” in Google and 1,800,000 references pop up.

The loose use of the fascist analogy, claimed Buchanan, was a trademark of the far left, so that those who identified the enemy as “Islamofascism” simply betrayed their intellectual origins:

Unsurprisingly, it is neoconservatives, whose roots are in the Trotskyist-Social Democratic Left, who are promoting use of the term. Their goal is to have Bush stuff al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran into an “Islamofascist” kill box, then let SAC do the rest. The term represents the same lazy, shallow thinking that got us into Iraq, where Americans were persuaded that by dumping over Saddam, we were avenging 9/11.

Having read Buchanan’s denunciation of fascist-name-calling as a far-left and neo-con rhetorical device—on the pages of The American Conservative—I almost fell over when I saw the cover of the current issue of The American Conservative:

A few bloggers have commented that Giuliani is cast here as a Mussolini figure. No he isn’t. He’s being portrayed as a Nazi. It’s not just the armband, it’s the pose and the fine details of dress, all of which refer back to this iconic image, from the poster for the 1933 Nazi film, S.A.-Mann Brand (“Storm-Trooper Brand”):

So you get the picture. Pat Buchanan gets himself into a righteous lather if you dare to compare Osama bin Laden to a fascist. But on the cover of the very magazine where he does that, it’s perfectly legitimate to compare Rudy Giuliani to a Nazi. The cover of The American Conservative seems to have been concocted by someone steeped in the tradition of… well, the Trotskyite-Social Democratic Left. But here’s another irony: the cover article it illustrates, criticizing Giuliani’s foreign policy vision, is by Michael Desch, who’s well-known for his belief that the civilian leaders of this country exercise too much control over the professional military.

Is this bizarre convergence of far left and far right either American or conservative? I don’t know, but I do know that its graphic rhetoric is crude and tasteless.

Kicking footnotes of ‘The Israel Lobby’

On By Martin Kramer

The Israel Lobby by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has 106 pages of footnotes over 1,200 footnotes in total. The book’s boosters like to cite this fact as somehow proving the scholarly virtue of the authors. “Mearsheimer and Walt have corroborated all their arguments with a wealth of primary and secondary sources,” gushes one prof. In fact, most of the critics who have actually perused the footnotes have made the valid point that they almost never point to primary sources or interviews. The book was researched off the Internet, and the notes are just padding for a preconceived theory. But do the sources cited in the notes say what Mearsheimer and Walt say they say? Even this is doubtful. Here’s an example.

The context is their claim that U.S. support for Israel is primarily responsible for the drop in America’s popularity in the Muslim world. Policies supportive of Israel, they write, “help explain why many Arabs and Muslims are so angry with the United States that they regard Al Qaeda with sympathy and some are willing to support it, either directly or tacitly.”

Of course, no one denies the drop in America’s popularity, but there is a debate about its causes. Some would argue that the Iraq war made the difference. Thus, Rashid Khalidi asserted last month that “Iraq has changed everything. 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.” To counter this notion, Mearsheimer and Walt need to prove that the United States was particularly disliked before the Iraq war, precisely because of U.S. policies toward Israel and the Palestinians.

So how do they attempt that? On page 68, they present the evidence:

The Pew Global Attitudes Survey reported in 2002 before the invasion of Iraq that “public opinion about the United States in the Middle East/Conflict Area is overwhelmingly negative,” and much of this unpopularity stems from the Palestinian issue.73

The footnote at the end of this sentence points to page 54 of the relevant Pew report.

I found this claim intriguing, so I decided to check it out by going back to the Pew Report. You can download it yourself right here. If you do, you’ll discover what I did: that there’s no evidence whatsoever, on page 54 or any other page, that U.S. unpopularity in the Middle East stemmed in any part from the Palestinian issue. In the entire report, Israel and the Palestinians are mentioned only once, on page 3. There the issue isn’t Arab or Muslim opinion at all. It’s the opinion of Europeans and Americans on whether Iraq or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict posed the greater threat to them. This was the only question in the survey questionnaire (Q11) that mentioned Israel or the Palestinians, and it wasn’t even posed to Middle Easterners.

Academic incompetence? Intellectual dishonesty? Over-reliance on the many “research assistants” and “fact-checkers” whom the authors acknowledge? All that really matters is that not one of these 1,200-plus notes should be taken at face value. Not only do the authors only cite sources that support their argument. They cite sources that don’t, while claiming that they do. How many other bogus references pad the back-matter of this book? We’ll probably never know, because no one will ever have the patience to wade through them all.