Author: Martin Kramer

Bush, Kramer debate democracy in Prague

On By Martin Kramer

No, that headline didn’t appear in The New York Times or the Washington Post. It’s a Sandbox exclusive. Is it accurate? Well, let’s not quibble. On June 5, at the Prague conference on “Democracy and Security: Core Values and Sound Policies,” and in front of an audience comprised of leading dissidents and democracy advocates, I addressed the conference theme. Four hours later, on the very same podium, President Bush delivered a speech on the very same theme. Of course, we didn’t actually debate or even meet, the President wasn’t present for my remarks, and he had forty minutes to make his case, while I had only seven.

Still, the two presentations reflect the two poles of the debate over democracy promotion. Below, read my text as delivered (or scroll down to the video and see me deliver it), and then read that part of Bush’s speech that holds the core of his argument. Then you decide. We begin with Kramer:

In urging democracy on the Middle East, its advocates generally argue that the spread of democracy will make the Middle East and the world more secure. The theory goes like this: dictators and authoritarian rulers need an external enemy to justify their grip on power. This makes them unreliable allies and bellicose neighbors. To preserve power, they not only threaten their own people, they directly or indirectly threaten us. As long as this region isn’t free, we’ll be insecure. My teacher and mentor Bernard Lewis has put it starkly: “We free them or they destroy us.”

Now there’s no doubt that such dictators have arisen in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein is their exemplar. Kanan Makiya described the Baath system in Iraq as a “republic of fear.” Such regimes are bellicose by design: they can be counted upon to wage war against their peoples and their neighbors. These dictatorships turn their subjects into what Natan Sharansky has called “fear societies.” Our obligation, in such cases, should be self-evident.

But the Middle East is also home to another kind of authoritarian rule. In this kind of system, the regime doesn’t rely only on fear, or even primarily on fear. Such regimes don’t require an external enemy or perpetual war. To the contrary: the ruler builds a consensus around the status quo, by sharing a bit of power, balancing interests, upholding law, and averting war. These aren’t free societies–you can’t stand in the town square and say what you want without fear of being arrested. But these aren’t “fear societies” and they aren’t “republics of fear.”

Now in the Middle East, Saddam-style dictatorship, with mass graves and invasions of neighbors, is the exception, not the rule. So is Taliban-style puritanism, based on terrorism at home and abroad. The same is true of the genocidal regime in the Sudan, and the potentially genocidal regime in Iran. Democracy competes not against them, but against this consensual authoritarianism. And the reason democracy is losing that competition is that consensual authoritarianism produces security for its peoples, and exports security to its neighbors and the world.

We mustn’t be blind to these facts: these regimes cooperate with the world in combatting terrorism and containing an aggressive Iran, they have peace treaties with Israel or float peace initiatives, they don’t threaten or intervene in the internal affairs of other countries, and they don’t seek weapons of mass destruction. None of them has gone to war in the last thirty-plus years.

And who are the net exporters of insecurity? These are states that have multi-polar or pluralistic systems: Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and what some call Palestine. These systems aren’t democracies, but in terms of formal practices like elections, they’ve actually gone the longer distance. Yet they don’t provide security for their peoples, and they export insecurity, in the form of terrorism, refugees, radical Islam, and nuclear threats. What’s discouraging is that this isn’t true in only some of the cases, or only half of them. It’s true, for now, in all if them.

Now it was also my teacher Bernard Lewis who said this: “Democracy is a strong medicine, which you have to give to the patient in small, gradually increasing doses. If you give too much too quickly, you kill the patient.” This doesn’t contradict his earlier statement, so much as it complements it. If they’re not made free, they’ll destroy us; but if they’re made free too quickly, they might destroy themselves, and take us with them.

So how do we know whether the democracy dosage is too much, too fast? Security is the test. People around the world will look to this conference and say: solve this conundrum. Don’t just cite precedents from other places and times. This is the Middle East, it looks different. Don’t just offer lofty rhetoric. People are skeptical of it. Don’t say that America will provide the security: it won’t. And don’t say that we have to think long-term: too much can go wrong in the short-term. The pro-democracy forces need to show how they’ll make their peoples not only freer, but more secure–and how they’ll make the rest of us safer.

Now unlike some others, I don’t think this is an impossible mission. But it has to be acknowledged as the primary mission of dissidents today. It’s a fact of life that the world’s support for freedom isn’t unconditional– even for this US administration–and security is the condition. Meet that condition, even part way, and good people in the world won’t just admire your courage. They might even take a chance and support you.

And here is President Bush’s rebuttal:

The freedom agenda is making a difference. The work has been difficult, and that is not going to change. There will be triumphs and failures, progress and setbacks. Ending tyranny cannot be achieved overnight. And of course, this objective has its critics.

Some say that ending tyranny means “imposing our values” on people who do not share them, or that people live in parts of the world where freedom cannot take hold. That is refuted by the fact that every time people are given a choice, they choose freedom. We saw that when the people of Latin America turned dictatorships into democracies, and the people of South Africa replaced apartheid with a free society, and the people of Indonesia ended their long authoritarian rule. We saw it when Ukrainians in orange scarves demanded that their ballots be counted. We saw it when millions of Afghans and Iraqis defied the terrorists to elect free governments. At a polling station in Baghdad, I was struck by the words of an Iraqi–he had one leg–and he told a reporter, “I would have crawled here if I had to.” Was democracy–I ask the critics–was democracy imposed on that man? Was freedom a value he did not share? The truth is that the only ones who have to impose their values are the extremists and the radicals and the tyrants.

And that is why the communists crushed the Prague Spring, and threw an innocent playwright in jail, and trembled at the sight of a Polish Pope. History shows that ultimately, freedom conquers fear. And given a chance, freedom will conquer fear in every nation on Earth.

Another objection is that ending tyranny will unleash chaos. Critics point to the violence in Afghanistan, or Iraq, or Lebanon as evidence that freedom leaves people less safe. But look who’s causing the violence. It’s the terrorists, it’s the extremists. It is no coincidence that they are targeting young democracies in the Middle East. They know that the success of free societies there is a mortal threat to their ambitions–and to their very survival. The fact that our enemies are fighting back is not a reason to doubt democracy. It is evidence that they recognize democracy’s power. It is evidence that we are at war. And it is evidence that free nations must do what it takes to prevail.

Still, some argue that a safer goal would be stability, especially in the Middle East. The problem is that pursuing stability at the expense of liberty does not lead to peace–it leads to September the 11th, 2001. The policy of tolerating tyranny is a moral and strategic failure. It is a mistake the world must not repeat in the 21st century.

Others fear that democracy will bring dangerous forces to power, such as Hamas in the Palestinian Territories. Elections will not always turn out the way we hope. Yet democracy consists of more than a single trip to the ballot box. Democracy requires meaningful opposition parties, a vibrant civil society, a government that enforces the law and responds to the needs of its people. Elections can accelerate the creation of such institutions. In a democracy, people will not vote for a life of perpetual violence. To stay in power, elected officials must listen to their people and pursue their desires for peace–or, in democracies, the voters will replace them through free elections.

Finally, there’s the contention that ending tyranny is unrealistic. Well, some argue that extending democracy around the world is simply too difficult to achieve. That’s nothing new. We’ve heard that criticism before throughout history. At every stage of the Cold War, there were those who argued that the Berlin Wall was permanent, and that people behind the Iron Curtain would never overcome their oppressors. History has sent a different message.

The lesson is that freedom will always have its skeptics. But that’s not the whole story. There are also people like you, and the loved ones you represent–men and women with courage to risk everything for your ideals. In his first address as President, Vaclav Havel proclaimed, “People, your government has returned to you!” He was echoing the first speech of Tomas Masaryk–who was, in turn, quoting the 17th century Czech teacher Comenius. His message was that freedom is timeless. It does not belong to one government or one generation. Freedom is the dream and the right of every person in every nation in every age.

You’ve read two contrasting views, constituting a debate of sorts. I’ve had actual debates with democracy advocates on past occasions, and I do it for a reason: I want them to persuade me that I’m wrong and they’re right. It’s the one area where I’d rather be confounded than vindicated. Occasionally I’ll be moved a notch or two by one of these debates, until reality comes along and resets me to my previous position. Was I moved by Bush’s argument? No, but I can’t help wishing that history will prove him right, that all the dissidents I met in Prague will realize their dreams, and that my words will make me look foolish in a democratic future. I’ll relish them should I ever have to eat them–however cold they may be.

(My thanks to Natan Sharansky, my colleague at the Shalem Center’s Adelson Institute–conference co-sponsor–for including me in the proceedings.)

Update, June 14: Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute appeared on the same panel with me, and gives an account of our exchange here. It’s accurate.

The Wilson Center held hostage

On By Martin Kramer

Outrage is building over the affair of Haleh Esfandiari, the director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. In December, she went to Tehran to visit her 93-year-old mother, a trip she’d made in the past. This time, she was detained and interrogated, and on May 8 she was thrown into the notorious Evin prison. Esfandiari has been pulled down into the Kafkaesque realm that lies just beneath the surface of Iran–a realm so remote from us that it might as well exist in another dimension.

My own vantage point on this story isn’t remote. I’ve done two stretches at the Wilson Center, the first as a fellow, the second as a public policy scholar. I know Esfandiari, and I’ve known her husband, Shaul Bakhash, even longer–from my graduate student days, when he came out of Khomeini’s Iran and landed in Princeton. I’ve participated in Wilson Center events organized by Esfandiari, and in the fall I wrote a piece for the latest issue of her newsletter, devoted to last summer’s Lebanon war. The issue is a typical Esfandiari product, bringing together an Israeli, an Iranian, a Lebanese, a Syrian, a Turk, and an American. Disclaimer for what follows: the people and the institution are dear to me.

There’s been considerable speculation as to why the Iranian regime decided to turn Esfandiari into a hostage. Well, why not? Let’s remember who we’re dealing with: a clique of messianic-minded, nuke-bent, Holocaust-denying conspiracy theorists who’ve embedded themselves in positions of power, from which they occasionally extend a black hand to haul someone down into their depths. It’s the very nature of the regime, and it would be surprising if it didn’t claim an innocent victim from time to time, to feed the mania.

The only surprise is the choice of Esfandiari. She’s not a dissident campaigner, and she hasn’t made a career of challenging or provoking the regime. But it turns out she’s a very convenient proxy hostage. Her tormentors are using her to humiliate the Wilson Center and, through it, the United States Congress and the U.S. government, which are the mainstays of the Center.

In the campaign to free Esfandiari, there’s been a tendency to obscure this truth, by keeping the focus solely on her, or making inaccurate assertions about the Wilson Center. For example, the Voice of America, in reporting the affair, described the Wilson Center as a “non-governmental academic Center.” It’s a misleading description for an institution established by an act of Congress (PL 90-637, 1968) as the nation’s official memorial to Woodrow Wilson. The President of the United States appoints its board of trustees, Congress provides a third of its budget, and the Center is housed in a wing of the Ronald Reagan Building, a federal complex.

It’s because the Wilson Center inhabits this liminal space between academe and government that it’s a perfect focus for Iranian conspiracy theories. These are on dramatic display in the May 21 statement on Esfandiari issued by the Iranian intelligence ministry. “Certain U.S. institutes, foundations, and organizations [are] aimed at influencing the developments in the Islamic Republic of Iran,” the statement asserts. Behind these façades, an “unseen key role [is] played by certain intelligence agents and undercover officials in pushing forth the objectives of such projects.” In particular, the Wilson Center, “whose budget is allocated by the U.S. Congress…. is the connection ring between the Iranians and the U.S. organizations and foundations whose main objective is fortifying the social trends that act in line with the interests of the aliens…. The ultimate goal of those foundations… is aimed at soft overthrowing of the system.”

When the Wilson Center went public with Esfandiari’s case, it revealed that her interrogation focused on its activities, not on anything Esfandiari had said or written.

The [Iranian] questioning [of Esfandiari] focused almost entirely on the activities and programs of the Middle East Program at the Wilson Center. Dr. Esfandiari answered all questions fully; when she understandably could not remember details of programs stretching back five and even eight years, the staff at the Wilson Center provided her all the information requested…. Repeatedly during the interrogation, Dr. Esfandiari was pressured to make a false confession or to falsely implicate the Wilson Center in activities in which it had no part.

The Wilson Center’s statement then summarized a letter sent by Center president and director Lee Hamilton to Iranian president Mahmud Ahmadinejad on February 20. In it, Hamilton went to extraordinary lengths to portray the Wilson Center as a simple podium:

[Hamilton] pointed out the obvious: that the Wilson Center’s mission is to provide a forum for the exchange of views; that the Wilson Center does not take positions on issues; and that it does not try to influence or to determine specific policies or directions of the Iranian Government or any government in the Middle East. He pointed out that there is no “agenda” behind Wilson Center programs on the Middle East, including Iran; that he would not allow it; nor would Dr. Esfandiari.

It’s clear, then, that the Wilson Center itself is at issue, and I confess that I stirred uneasily when I read this statement. For while it’s absolutely true that Wilson Center programs have no “agenda,” the Wilson Center does have a mission, and it goes beyond serving as a “forum for the exchange of views.” Hamilton may have found it politic to blur or omit the rest of this mission in his appeal to Ahmadinejad, but Iran’s thugs shouldn’t be allowed to presume, even for a moment, that their act of intimidation has compromised it in any way.

The Wilson Center’s mission statement is explicit: “The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars aims to unite the world of ideas to the world of policy by supporting pre-eminent scholarship and linking that scholarship to issues of concern to officials in Washington.” The Wilson Center seeks “to bridge the gap between the world of ideas and the world of policy, bringing them into creative contact, enriching the work of both, and enabling each to learn from the other.” The Center is “not an advocacy think tank developing specific policy recommendations,” but neither is it just a talk shop: “The Center’s outreach emphasizes contacts between scholars and public officials in Congress and the Executive Branch.”

The Wilson Center didn’t always have this clear mandate to engage government. I have a brochure published exactly twenty years ago, defining the mission in a much more diffuse way. There was no explicit mention of contacts between scholars and U.S. officials back then. The Center’s role was to promote “fundamental studies which will illuminate our understanding of past and present.” During my first fellowship, in 1989, the Center had the feel of an academic humanities center transplanted from a campus. (It even had a campus ambience: back then, it still resided in the Smithsonian Castle, and I spent the year way up in the clock tower–truly the closest thing to an ivory tower in Washington.) The director in those days, Charles Blitzer, a man of vast erudition who’d specialized in seventeenth-century English political theory, previously headed the National Humanities Center in North Carolina, and he ran the Wilson Center in the same spirit. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1990 portrayed the Center as a “haven” from “Washington’s seductions,” and noted that Blitzer had “tried to increase the emphasis on pure scholarship–provoking some controversy in the process.”

That controversy nearly wrecked the Center. In the mid-1990s, the Center came under assault by Republicans in Congress, and especially Rep. Ralph Regula (R-Ohio), who chaired the subcommittee overseeing the Center’s budget. “I don’t see much in the way of tangible benefit [of the Wilson Center] to the people or to the government,” Regula said, in proposing its phase-out. “Many of the members [of Congress] I’ve talked to don’t even know what it is.” At one hearing, Regula contemptuously read out a list of some of the more arcane research projects the Wilson Center had sponsored. At about the same time, the National Academy of Public Administration (NAPA) issued a report criticizing the Center for not contributing to policy debates in Washington. Democrats in Congress had to work hard to save the Center from extinction, and Blitzer (for whom I had a great affection) chose to step down.

The reinvention of the Wilson Center began in 1999, when Lee Hamilton took over. Coming straight from 35 years in Congress, he knew how to manage the critics on the Hill. But more important, he came with a vision of a different kind of Center, one closely attuned to informing foreign policy debates. When I returned to the Wilson Center as a public policy scholar in 2000, the Hamilton era was well underway. The Center had moved into spanking new quarters, and every program had been realigned with the mission of policy relevance. Personally, I liked the change, and it suited me while I wrote about a third of my book Ivory Towers on Sand–to be precise, the chapters on the policy irrelevance of Middle Eastern studies.

The Wilson Center today is a privileged conduit between government and academe, and it’s now urgent to defend that space against its enemies, foreign and domestic. Abroad, there are Middle Eastern governments like Iran’s, which cannot imagine an institution like the Wilson Center as anything but a front for espionage and subversion. But the academic left in America is as doctrinaire as Iran’s fanatics in shunning the United States government as though it were the Great Satan incarnate.

An example is Ervand Abrahamian, an Iran specialist at the City University of New York, who said this in response to Esfandiari’s arrest: “It has to be stressed that scholars such as Haleh have nothing to do with U.S. policy of ‘regime change.’ We academics need to distance ourselves from policy makers in D.C.” Abrahamian is right about Esfandiari–she hasn’t been an advocate of regime change–but he’s utterly ignorant of the Wilson Center’s mission, which is to engage policy makers on a continuous basis. If Wilson Center fellows distanced themselves from policy makers, there would be no point in the taxpayer maintaining them in Washington. The Center’s fellows and staff could be dispersed to the universities, where they could talk to one another and to Abrahamian–on someone else’s tab.

So the Esfandiari affair is really about this: her right, and the right of all scholars, to enjoy open and private contacts with U.S. policy makers and U.S. public officials. This too is an element of academic freedom, and it’s precisely this element that’s under assault by Iran in Esfandiari’s case. This is why I’m pleased to see the likes of the Middle East Studies Association rising to Esfandiari’s defense: inadvertently, no doubt, they’re defending the mission of the Wilson Center, and the right of every scholar to enter and inhabit that space between academe and government, without being accused, Iran-style, of espionage, collusion, or complicity.

One spin on the Esfandiari case actually undermines that right. Robin Wright of the Washington Post, who can be relied upon to get everything wrong, described the arrest of Esfandiari and other “soft hostages” as “an Iranian reaction to the Bush administration’s $75 million program to promote democracy in Iran.” The Wilson Center even felt compelled to note that it doesn’t receive funding from that pot. Come on. For nearly thirty years, Iran’s leaders have lived in the certainty that Washington is running a massive covert operation to subvert them, one that makes $75 million look like chump change. If they’ve decided you’re a part of the plot, one more proof against you is that you don’t get a share of the overt money. So repeat after me: It’s not Bush’s fault. If you split the responsibility for Esfandiari’s fate, you’re helping to seal it, and undercutting everyone else’s academic freedom.

So what is to be done by the rest of us, beyond signing petitions? (I signed this one.) I don’t support the idea of an academic boycott of Iranian scholars, but Iran’s official representatives are another matter. For example, there’s Iran’s smooth-talking ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammad Javad Zarif, who’s finishing his stint in New York. He did the rounds of universities and think tanks this spring, even as Iran barred Esfandiari from leaving his country. Zarif spoke at the Council on Foreign Relations (March 27), the Nixon Center (March 29), and Columbia University’s Middle East Seminar (May 2), and I saw him perform via video link at Harvard University’s Belfer Center (May 8–the day Esfandiari was thrown into prison). No academic institution or think tank should agree to host him, his successor, or any other Iranian official until Esfandiari is freed. Collegial solidarity demands no less, and allows no exceptions.

Beyond that, I recommend doing what I’ve just done: make a gift to the Wilson Center. You don’t have to agree with everything it’s sponsored over the last few years to cherish what it legitimizes: scholarship in the nation’s service.

Finally, as someone who’s appreciated the transformation Lee Hamilton has wrought at the Wilson Center, I’d like him to reassure the American people, as well as Ahmadinejad, that the Wilson Center won’t depart from the course he set for it. Indeed, even as Esfandiari languishes in prison, it’s incumbent on the Wilson Center to sponsor discussion and analysis of what her arrest tells us about the situation in Iran (nothing good, I believe), and convey that to officials in Congress and the Executive Branch.

May Haleh soon be among us again.

Update, May 29: A spokesman for Iran’s judiciary made this announcement today: “Esfandiari has been formally charged with endangering national security through propaganda against the system and espionage for foreigners. She has been informed of the charges against her.”

The Fragile Crescent

On By Martin Kramer

On April 30, I gave a lecture at Harvard University, where I am Olin Institute Senior Fellow, and where I’ve spent the past month. The subject: “After Iraq: The Future of the United States in the Middle East.” Below is an excerpt from the lecture.

The objective of the United States is to protect and advance its interests at the lowest cost, and from the greatest distance. That is easiest done when there is a stable structure of states with which to interact. A state is a convenient address a place to which you can dispatch diplomats or cruise missiles, to which you can sell arms or issue threats. In short, a state is an entity with which a state can conduct business, usually at arm’s length.

The states of the Middle East are the legacy of the Anglo-French partition of the Ottoman empire that followed the First World War. The United States has regarded these successor states, however constituted, as basic building blocks of order. Washington did not draw the map of the Middle East, but it has been adamant that the map not be altered. At times, certain Middle Eastern leaders, acting in the name of this or that ideology, have attempted to wipe a state off the map. Nasser’s Egypt absorbed Syria, Saddam’s Iraq absorbed Kuwait, and Asad’s Syria absorbed Lebanon. In each case, the United States used its influence or power to put the map back.

It has been axiomatic in Washington that the foundation of the pax Americana is the maintenance of a partition largely finalized back in 1922. The United States is even committed to putting Palestine back on the map, from which it disappeared in 1948. If only the map could be completed, so the thinking goes, the Middle East, like Europe, would cease to be preoccupied with identity, and move to more productive pursuits.

Not only has this “final status” eluded the United States. The irony is that the United States itself has delivered a massive blow to the map. In Iraq, it meant to destroy the regime and leave the state intact, but the state collapsed with the regime. The ramifications throughout the region are profound, if uneven.

They are not as significant for the states that draw upon a strong sense of territorial or ethnic or linguistic nationhood—Egypt, Turkey, Iran. But what I call the “Fragile Crescent” has felt the shocks acutely.

The British and French divided this part of the Ottoman empire, but not into its smallest conceivable parts. In fact, many of the successor states in this area were mini-empires in their own right, modeled on the late Ottoman system, governed on the same principles, and often by the same elites. Iraq, in particular, was a scaled-down version of the Ottoman empire. David Fromkin in his book A Peace to End All Peace wrote: “The Allies proposed a post-Ottoman design for the region in the early 1920s. The continuing question is whether the peoples of the region will accept it.” But precisely because the design was not entirely post-Ottoman, it somehow did function and most people grudgingly accepted it.

Now that design has been given a blow, and large pieces of the remaining order are threatened with further fragmentation. Put differently, the dissolution of the Ottoman empire has resumed.

There are three specific impacts of the Iraq war that are rendering parts of the political map an anachronism.

The first is the Shiite revival in Iraq and beyond, also known as the “Shiite Crescent,” a phrase coined by Jordan’s King Abdullah in a loquacious moment. The idea—a Sunni one, not a Shiite one—is of a Shiite band of population running from the Arab Gulf states through Iran, southern Iraq, leap-frogging Sunni parts of Iraq and Syria, and extending into Lebanon a trans-border, trans-ethnic belt of allegiance with Iran at its center.

The “Shiite Crescent” is one part hype, one part reality. There isn’t a contiguous belt of Shiites like the one shown in newspaper graphics; Shiites outside Iran and Iraq are still surrounded by a Sunni sea. Nor are Shiites driven by a need to reconfigure the map. In key states in the “Shiite Crescent”—Lebanon, Iraq, Bahrain—Shiites are not minorities: they seek to capture the state whole, not break it into parts. Still, wherever the Sunni-Shia rift runs through a state, that state is vulnerable. The “Shiite Crescent” may be a hyped Sunni slogan, but it highlights the growth of an allegiance that is both sub-state and supra-state, and that erodes the state order from without and within.

The second impact gets less attention: the Kurdish crescent. The Kurdish revival is as deep as the Shiite, but it is potentially far more subversive of the state order, because Kurds, unlike Shiites, are everywhere a minority. Iraq’s Kurds already have a de facto state, and it is a going concern, which is unlikely to maintain more than a formal tie with the rest of Iraq, if that. The autonomy of Iraq’s Kurds is a long-standing American commitment, which the Kurds are reinforcing through an extensive public relations and lobbying effort.

The more successful Iraq’s Kurds are—the more state-like they become—the more this affects Kurds in Turkey, Iran, and Syria. The rather expansive map of “greater” Kurdistan is a logo map—that is, a mental map inculcated via its representation on everything from keychains to commemorative plates. You will not find “Shiite Crescent” keychains, because the notion is Sunni, not Shiite, and Shiism is not a territorial nationalism. But Kurdistan is another matter: Kurdish nationalism has a strong territorial component, and it won’t be put back in a bottle.

The third and last impact involves the movement of millions across borders: the refugee crescent. These are mostly Iraqi Sunnis who have fled the chaos of their country to Syria or Jordan, and who are waiting out the war. Their numbers are already substantial, and they could increase dramatically in various scenarios. As the Palestinian case demonstrates, refugees put more than a material stress on host states. They throw the legitimacy of the status quo into question. While populations are being separated in Iraq, a great mixing is taking place in Syria and Jordan, with outcomes that cannot be predicted.

In sum, the map has been undermined. The choice the United States will face with greater frequency and urgency is whether or not to sustain its traditional support for that map. Past challenges came from aggressive states encroaching on smaller ones, and aggressors could be cajoled, deterred, and punished. But transformation within states, in which the main actors are movements, insurgents, refugees, and secessionists, is another matter.

We have a natural proclivity to dwell on those problems that we somehow might fix or tweak with the tools we have. Iran’s nuclear ambitions are a classic case. So is the Israeli-Palestinian issue. I have not discussed those problems this afternoon they are already being discussed elsewhere and everywhere. But it is precisely because the United States has so few of the tools it needs to deal with this sort of “new Middle East,” that its strategic and policy implications are not being discussed anywhere. Perhaps now would be a good time to start.

Postscript: For my pre-war discussion of this same issue, go here.