If you’ve come over from Matthew Yglesias, welcome. I’ve suddenly come up on his radar because I’m Middle East advisor to presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani, whom he fears with a partisan passion. He promises to deal with me in future, but in the meantime claims I use this blog to “propound [my] view that the problem with US Middle East policy is that it’s unduly influenced by people who are knowledgeable about the Middle East, and insufficiently under the thumb of people like Kramer who recognize that the only thing these brutes understand is force.”
I have my share of critics, especially in Middle Eastern studies, but I don’t recall a criticism of my views as crude as this one. So I eagerly look forward to the substantive sequel to this glib little sentence, which presumably will be based on a thorough and thoughtful reading of all the work I’ve made readily available on this site. Until then, I offer a lecture I delivered in the fall, in which I do discuss the problem of US Middle East policy: the fact that it’s been unduly influenced by people toting big, transformative ideas. It might surprise you.
When U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice met with Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak last week, he gave her this tip: she shouldn’t neglect the “Shiite banana,” extending from Iran through Syria, to Hezbollah and (?) Hamas. It seems that the phrase “Shiite banana” is Barak’s original creation. He used it last October in a speech delivered in America, where he said that Syrian president Bashar Asad is “a proxy of Iran in this Shiite banana that they are trying to create from Tehran through Baghdad, to Damascus to the south end of part of Lebanon.”
So how does this compare to the “Shiite crescent”? That’s the phrase used by King Abdullah of Jordan back in December 2004, when he accused Iran of seeking to dominate Iraq and the region. The Iranian press and some Arab papers promptly whacked the king for summoning forth the sectarian genie, and he retreated: “My statements on the Shiite crescent were blown out of proportion by some in Iran and interpreted to the contrary of my intentions.”
But by that time, the foreign policy punditocracy had latched on to it. In October 2005, the Middle East Policy Council (originally the American Arab Affairs Council) held a conference on Capitol Hill entitled “A Shia Crescent: What Fallout for the U.S.?” In June 2006, the Council on Foreign Relations in New York held a big symposium on “The Emerging Shia Crescent.” And could the New York Times be far behind? Of course not; the next month it ran a map showing the “Shiite Crescent” as a belt running from Lebanon to eastern Saudi Arabia. From the beginning, the “Shiite crescent” resonated among the Bush-bashers, since it had this overtone: you invaded Iraq, and now look what you’ve done?
The Bush Administration never used it, instead preferring to warn us about the threat of “the Caliphate,” understood as the Qaeda plan for global domination. On the maps accompanying the “Long War” briefings by generals, this didn’t look so much like a crescent as a giant blob. It took some time for the Administration to discover that dissing the caliphate didn’t go down well with our Sunni friends, since they regard the classical caliphate (under the first four “rightly-guided” caliphs) as the golden era of Islamic history. That’s probably why you haven’t heard too many Administration warnings about “the Caliphate” lately. (Oddly, though, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama picked it up, explaining just last week that our enemies are “seeking to create a repressive caliphate in the Muslim world.”)
Both of these phrases are one part reality and two parts hype. They have an important element of truth to them: Iran does manipulate Shiites elsewhere, and Al Qaeda does dream about a global caliphate. But then they extrapolate that element to the point where it actually blunts understanding. The threat posed by Iran isn’t that it’s going to unleash a Shiite chain reaction, which is hard to do, but that it could set off a nuclear chain reaction, which may soon be within its power. And the real danger posed by Al Qaeda isn’t the possible establishment of a unified caliphate–no such thing has existed in well over a millennium–but its possible seizure of turf in a failed state, from which it might plot another 9/11 or something even worse. These are urgent and immediate threats, which get lost in dreamily abstract talk about crescents and caliphates.
Which returns me to the “Shiite banana.” This opens all sorts of possibilities. Is the banana green, or is it already dangerously ripe? Could Iran turn it into the “Shiite banana peel,” which would be even more hazardous? And if the Shiites are bananas, what are the Sunnis? (Given how varied they are, perhaps they’re a fruit platter; Al Qaeda might be nuts.) Alright, I’ll stop it.
But I don’t want to end this little diversion without a plug for my presidential candidate, Rudy Giuliani, to whom I’m senior Middle East advisor. Someone actually did put down a Shiite banana peel for Giuliani. It happened in May, in MSNBC’s Republican debate in California. Giuliani was asked to explain the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. His answer:
The difference is the descendant of Mohammed. The Sunnis believe that Mohammed’s–the caliphate should be selected, and the Shiites believe that it should be by descent. And then, of course, there was a slaughter of Shiites in the early part of the history of Islam, and it has infected a lot of the history of Islam, which is really very unfortunate.
Giuliani’s answer hit the right nails–theological, political, and historical. Pretty good, I’d say.
Last week, Rudy Giuliani’s presidential campaign announced the Mayor’s team of foreign policy advisors. Charles Hill, a renowned former diplomat who now teaches at Yale, has been named Giuliani’s chief foreign policy advisor and head of his foreign policy advisory board. Other senior advisors whom I know personally include my old friend Norman Podhoretz, my Harvard colleague Stephen Rosen, and Hoover’s Peter Berkowitz. Other senior advisors: Sen. Bob Kasten, S. Enders Wimbush, and Kim Holmes.
I’ve also been named to the team, as senior Middle East advisor. I agreed to come on board for a simple reason: I believe that Mayor Giuliani gets it. He understands perfectly what is at stake in the Middle East, he sees precisely the forces arrayed for and against us, he knows this will be a long contest, and he has the resolve to see the United States prevail. I don’t see that same depth of understanding in any of the other candidates.
So choosing the Mayor was an easy call. But taking on this sort of role did give me a moment’s pause, because of something written by my dear and departed friend, the late Elie Kedourie. A scholar of the Middle East and political philosophy, he achieved an astonishing grasp of the nitty-gritty of statecraft, through the painstaking study of British diplomatic records. This led him to conclude that making foreign policy was an entirely “practical pursuit,” which nowhere overlapped the scholarly vocation. In 1961, he wrote an article chiding academics for throwing around advice about foreign policy.
If the academic is to recommend action here and now–and in foreign policy action must be here and now–should he not have exact and prompt knowledge of situations and their changes? Is it then proposed that foreign ministries should every morning circulate to historians and “social scientists” the reports of their agents and the dispatches of their diplomats? Failing this knowledge, the academic advising or exhorting action will most likely appear the learned fool, babbling of he knows not what.
Elie anticipated the riposte:
It may be objected that this is not what is meant at all; we do not, it may be said, want the academic to concern himself with immediate issues or the minutiae of policies; we want his guidance on long-term trends and prospects; and here, surely, his knowledge of the past, his erudition, his reflectiveness will open to him vistas unknown to the active politician, or unregarded by him. And should not this larger view, this wider horizon be his special contribution to his country’s policies and to its welfare?
Yet this, too, Elie rejected. “This appeal to patriotism, this subtle flattery, needs must be resisted,” he wrote. Why? “The long view, the balanced view, the judicious view, can positively unfit a man for action, and for giving advice on action.” To make policy, wrote Kedourie, is to leap into the unknown.
Shall academics presume to instruct a man how he shall leap? Presumption is the pride of fools, and it ought to be the scholar’s pride not to presume. It is pursuit of knowledge and increase in learning which gives scholars renown and a good name. How then should they, clothed as they are in the mantle of scholarship, yet imitate this lobby or that pressure group, and recommend this action or that, all the time knowing full well that in politics one is always acting in a fog, that no action is wholly to the good, and that every action in benefiting one particular interest will most likely be to another’s detriment.
I gave much thought to Elie’s view of this over the years, so much so that I took it as the theme of a lecture I delivered a few years back, to mark the tenth anniversary of his passing. I could see the point of his uncompromising position–but also why, as I showed in my lecture, he eventually compromised it himself. For that story, you’ll have to read the lecture in full. But here’s a clue as to where Kedourie finally came to rest, from an article he published in 1978:
It is usually (and rightly) said that the academic’s virtues–his critical turn of mind, and his willingness to follow the argument wherever it leads–become defects in the man of action, who must accustom himself to make quick decisions on the basis of hunches and imperfect information. But in a region like the Middle East, where yesterday’s friend can become today’s opponent, where alliances and allegiances shimmer and dissolve like the fata morgana, the academic’s skepticism, his readiness to scrutinize far-fetched theories and unlikely suppositions, are perhaps qualities that even busy men of action should cultivate.
Ah. For the Middle East, Elie Kedourie was prepared to make an exception. I’m glad he did.
Addendum: View this speech on the Middle East by Mayor Giuliani, delivered on June 26 at a synagogue in Rockville, Maryland (where, as it happens, I grew up).
Martin Kramer on the Middle East 
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