Author: Martin Kramer

The American Interest

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer, “The American Interest,” Azure, no. 26 (Fall 2006), pp. 21-33. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

The question of whether Israel is or is not an asset to the United States is one we rarely bother to ask ourselves. Time and again, we see prominent Americans — presidents of the United States at the forefront — emphasizing their special relationship with Israel. In polls of American public opinion, Israel scores very high marks, while sympathy for the Palestinians, never very high, continues to drop. Why should we even ask ourselves whether Israel is an asset or a liability to the United States? Isn’t the answer obvious?

Most supporters of Israel, when pressed to go a bit deeper, will give two prime rationales for why the United States should back Israel. One is a moral obligation to the Jewish people, grounded in the history of Jewish persecution and culminating in the Holocaust. Israel, so this thinking goes, is something the civilized world owes to the Jewish people, having inflicted an unprecedented genocide upon it. This is a potent rationale, but it is not clear why that would make Israel an asset to the United States. If supporting Israel is an obligation, then it could be described as a liability — a burden to be borne. And of course, as time passes, that sense of obligation is bound to diminish.

Another powerful rationale is the fact that Israel is a democracy, even an outpost of democracy, in a benighted part of the world. But the fact is that there are many non-democratic states that have been allies of the United States, and important assets as well. Quite arguably, the Saudi monarchy is an asset to the United States, because it assures the flow of oil at reasonable prices, a key American interest. In contrast, the Palestinian Authority and Iran, which have many more democratic practices than Saudi Arabia, are headaches to the United States, for having empowered the likes of Hamas and Ahmadinejad through elections. So the fact that Israel is a democracy is not proof positive that it is an American asset.

Nevertheless, the Holocaust argument and the democracy argument are more than sufficient for the vast majority of Americans. On this basis alone, they would extend to Israel support, even unqualified support. And there is an important segment of opinion in America, comprising evangelical Christians, who probably do not even need these arguments. Israel is, for them, the manifestation of a divine plan, and they support it as a matter of faith.

But everywhere in the West, there is a sliver of elite opinion that is not satisfied with these rationales. It includes policymakers and analysts, journalists, and academics. By habit and by preference, they have a tendency to view any consensus with skepticism. In their opinion, the American people cannot possibly be wiser than them — after all, look whom they elect — and so they deliberately take a contrary position on issues around which there is broad agreement. In this spirit, many of them view U.S. support for Israel as a prime focal point for skepticism.

In March, two American professors subjected the U.S.-Israel relationship to a skeptic’s examination. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the former from the University of Chicago, the latter from Harvard, published a paper under the title “The Israel Lobby: Israel in U.S. Foreign Policy.” One version appeared in the London Review of Books; a longer, footnoted version was posted on the website of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. The paper caused a firestorm.

Mearsheimer and Walt are academic oracles of the so-called realist school in international relations. Realism, in its policy application, is an approach that seeks to isolate the conduct of foreign affairs from sentimental moral considerations and special interests like ethnic and commercial lobbies, and to base it instead on a pure concept of the national interest. Realists are not interested in historical obligations, or in whether this or that potential ally respects human rights. They see themselves as coldly weighing U.S. interests, winnowing out extraneous considerations, and ending up with policies that look out solely for number one: The United States.

Realist thinkers are not isolationists, but they are extremely reluctant to see U.S. power expended on projects and allies that do not directly serve some U.S. interest as they define it — and they define these interests quite narrowly. Generally, they oppose visionary ideas of global transformation, which they see as American empire in disguise. And empire, they believe, is a drain on American resources. They are particularly reluctant to commit American troops, preferring that the United States follow a policy of “offshore balancing” wherever possible — that is, playing rivals off one another.

These were the principles that guided Mearsheimer and Walt when they examined the United States-Israel relationship. And this was their finding: By any “objective” measure, American support for Israel is a liability. It causes Arabs and Muslims to hate America, and that hate in turn generates terrorism. The prime interest of the United States in the Middle East is the cultivation of cooperation with Arabs and Muslims, many of whom detest Israel, its policies, or both. The less the United States is identified as a supporter and friend of Israel’s five million Jews, the easier it will be for it to find local proxies to keep order among the billion or so Muslims. And the only thing that has prevented the United States from seeing this clearly is the pro-Israel lobby, operating through fronts as diverse as the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, and so on.

This “Israel Lobby,” with a capital L, has effectively hijacked U.S. policy in the Middle East so that it serves Israel’s, not America’s, interests. In one of their most provocative claims, the authors argue that Israel spurred its neo-conservative allies in Washington to press for the Iraq war — a war that served no identifiable U.S. interest, but which was waged largely for Israeli security. And, they continue, the growing drumbeat for an attack on Iran also has its ultimate source in the Lobby. A nuclear Iran would not constitute a threat to the United States, they argue, and military action against Iran would not be in America’s interest, since it would inflame the Arab and Muslim worlds yet again, producing a wave of anti-American terror and damaging the American economy.

The Mearsheimer-Walt thesis is not a new one. What is new is the prestige that they lent to these ideas. Because their paper appeared on the Kennedy School website, it soon became know as the “Harvard study” on the Israel lobby. Harvard is one of the most recognizable names in the world, familiar to every American from high school on up. Their study could not be ignored, and the responses came fast and furious.

Many of them took the form of reiterating the two arguments I mentioned earlier: Israel as a moral obligation of the West, and Israel as a democracy. These arguments are compelling, or at least they are compelling when made well. But for argument’s sake, let us set aside the claim that Israel and the United States share democratic values, rooted in a common Judeo-Christian tradition. Let us set aside the fact that the American public has a deep regard for Israel, shown in poll after poll. Let us just ask a simple question: Is Israel a strategic asset or a strategic liability for the United States, in realist terms?

My answer, to anticipate my conclusion, is this: United States support for Israel is not primarily the result of Holocaust guilt or shared democratic values; nor is it produced by the machinations of the “Israel Lobby.” American support for Israel — indeed, the illusion of its unconditionality – underpins the pax Americana in the eastern Mediterranean. It has compelled Israel’s key Arab neighbors to reach peace with Israel and to enter the American orbit. The fact that there has not been a general Arab-Israeli war since 1973 is proof that this pax Americana, based on the United States-Israel alliance, has been a success. From a realist point of view, supporting Israel has been a low-cost way of keeping order in part of the Middle East, managed by the United States from offshore and without the commitment of any force. It is, simply, the ideal realist alliance.

In contrast, the problems the United States faces in the Persian Gulf stem from the fact that it does not have an Israel equivalent there, and so it must massively deploy its own force at tremendous cost. Since no one in the Gulf is sure that the United States has the staying power to maintain such a presence over time, the Gulf keeps producing defiers of America, from Khomeini to Saddam to Bin Laden to Ahmadinejad. The United States has to counter them, not in the interests of Israel, but to keep the world’s great reserves of oil out of the grip of the West’s sworn enemies.

Allow me to substantiate my conclusion with a brief dash through the history of Israel’s relationship with the United States. Between 1948 and 1967, the United States largely adhered to a zero-sum concept of Middle Eastern politics. The United States recognized Israel in 1948, but it did not do much to help it defend itself for fear of alienating Arab monarchs, oil sheikhs, and the “Arab street.” That was the heyday of the sentimental State Department Arabists and the profit-driven oil companies. It did not matter that the memory of the Holocaust was fresh: The United States remained cautious, and attempted to appear “evenhanded.” This meant that the United States embargoed arms both to Israel and to the Arabs.

So Israel went elsewhere. It bought guns from the Soviet bloc, and fighter aircraft and a nuclear reactor from France. It even cut a deal with its old adversary Britain at the time of the Suez adventure in 1956. Israel was not in the U.S. orbit, and it did not get significant American aid.

Nevertheless, the radical Arab states gravitated toward the Soviet Union for weapons and aid. Israel felt vulnerable, and the Arab countries still believed they could eliminate Israel by war. In every decade, this insecurity indeed produced war: 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. The United States was not invested heavily enough to prevent these wars; its diplomacy simply kicked in to stop them after the initial energy was spent.

Only in June 1967, with Israel’s lightning victory over three of its neighbors, did the United States begin to see Israel differently, as a military power in its own right. The Arab-Israeli war that erupted in October 1973 did even more to persuade the United States of Israel’s power. Although Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack against Israel, Israel bounded back to achieve what military analysts have called its greatest victory, repulsing an enemy that might have overwhelmed a less determined and resourceful people.

It was then that the United States began to look at Israel as a potential strategic ally. Israel appeared to be the strongest, most reliable, and most cost-effective bulwark against Soviet penetration of the Middle East. It could defeat any combination of Soviet clients on its own, and in so doing, humiliate the Soviet Union and drive thinking Arabs out of the Soviet camp.

The 1973 war had another impact on American thinking. Until then, Arab-Israeli wars did not threaten the oil flow, but that war led to an Arab oil embargo. Another Arab-Israeli war might have the same impact or worse, so the United States therefore resolved to prevent such wars by creating a security architecture — a pax Americana.

One way to build it would have been to squeeze Israel relentlessly. But the United States understood that making Israel feel less secure would only increase the likelihood of another war and encourage the Arab states to prepare for yet another round. Instead, the American solution was to show such strong support for Israel as to make Arab states despair of defeating it, and fearful of the cost of trying. To this purpose, the United States brought Israel entirely into its orbit, making of it a dependent client through arms and aid.

That strategy worked. Expanded American support for Israel persuaded Egypt to switch camps and abandon its Soviet alliance, winning the Cold War for the United States in the Middle East. Egypt thus became an American ally alongside Israel, and not instead of Israel. The zero-sum theory of the Arabists — Israel or the Arabs, but not both — collapsed. American Middle East policy underwent its Copernican revolution.

Before 1973, the Arab states thought they might defeat or destroy Israel by some stroke of luck, and they tried their hand at it repeatedly. Since 1973, the Arab states have understood not only that Israel is strong, but that the United States is fully behind it.

As a result, there have been no more general Arab-Israeli wars, and Israel’s Arab neighbors have either made peace with it (Egypt, Jordan), or kept their border quiet (Syria). The corner of the Middle East along the eastern Mediterranean has been free of crises requiring direct American military intervention. This is due to American support for Israel — a support that appears so unequivocal to the Arabs that they have despaired of overturning it.

United States support for Israel has also enhanced its standing in another way, as the only force, in Arab eyes, that can possibly persuade Israel to cede territory it has occupied since 1967. In a paradoxical way, the United States has been a major beneficiary of the Israeli occupation of Arab territories: Arab leaders who wish to regain lost territory must pass an American test. When they do, the United States rewards them, and the result has been a network of American-endorsed agreements based on American-mediated Israeli concessions.

It is this “peace process” that has turned even revolutionary Arab leaders into supplicants at the White House door. They would not be there if a strong Israel did not hold something they want, and if the United States was not in a position to deliver it.

Compare this to the situation in the Persian Gulf, where American allies are weak. There, the absence of a strong ally has bedeviled American policy and forced the United States to intervene repeatedly. The irresolute Iranian shah, once deemed a United States “pillar,” collapsed in the face of an anti-American upsurge, producing the humiliation of the embassy seizure and a hostile, entrenched, terror-sponsoring regime still bent on driving the United States out of the Gulf. Saddam Hussein, for some years America’s ally, launched a bloody eight-year war against Iran that produced waves of anti-American terror (think Lebanon), only to turn against the United States by occupying Kuwait and threatening the defenseless Saudi Arabia.

Absent a strong ally in the region, the United States has had to deploy, deploy, and deploy again. In the Kuwait and Iraq wars, it has put something like a million sets of boots on the ground in the Gulf, at a cost that surely exceeds a trillion dollars.

It is precisely because the Gulf does not have an Israel — a strong, capable local ally — that the United States cannot balance from offshore. If the United States is not perceived to be willing to send troops there — and it will only be perceived as such if it does sometimes send them — then big, nationalist states (formerly Iraq, today Iran) will attempt to muscle Saudi Arabia and the smaller Arab Gulf states, which have the larger reserves of oil. In the Gulf, the United States has no true allies. It has only dependencies, and their defense will continue to drain American resources until the day Americans give up their SUVs.

In Israel, by contrast, the United States is allied to a militarily adept, economically vibrant state that keeps its part of the Middle East in balance. The United States has to help maintain that balance with military aid, peace plans, and diplomatic initiatives. But this is at relatively low cost, and many of the costs flow back to the United States in the form of arms sales and useful Israeli technological innovations.

In the overall scheme of the pax Americana, then, American policy toward Israel and its neighbors over the past thirty years has been a tremendous success. Has the United States brought about a final lamb-lies-down-with-lion peace? No; the issues are too complex. Are the Arabs reconciled to American support for Israel? No; they are highly critical of it. But according to the realist model, a policy that upholds American interests without the dispatch of American troops is a success by definition. American support of Israel has achieved precisely that.

Then there is the argument that American support for Israel is the source of popular resentment, propelling recruits to al-Qaida. I do not know of any unbiased terrorism expert who subscribes to this notion. Israel has been around for almost sixty years, and it has always faced terrorism. Countless groups are devoted to it. But never has a terror group emerged that is devoted solely or even primarily to attacking the United States for its support of Israel. Terrorists devoted to killing Americans emerged only after the United States began to enlarge its own military footprint in the Gulf. Al-Qaida emerged from the American deployment in Saudi Arabia. And even when al-Qaida and its affiliates mention Palestine as a grievance, it is as one grievance among many, the other grievances being American support for authoritarian Arab regimes, and now the American presence in Iraq.

And speaking of Iraq, we are left with the argument that the United States went to war there at the impetus of Israel and the “Israel Lobby.” This is simply a falsehood, and has no foundation in fact. It is not difficult to show that in the year preceding the Iraq war, Israel time and again disagreed with the United States, arguing that Iran posed the greater threat. Israel shed no tears over Saddam’s demise, and it gave full support to the United States once the Bush administration made its choice. But the assertion that the Iraq war is being waged on behalf of Israel is pure fiction.

As for the suggestion that only Israel is threatened by an Iranian nuclear capability, no assumption could be more na?ve. True, Iran has threatened Israel, and it is a threat Israel cannot afford to ignore. But it is not the first threat of its kind. In the spring before Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, he declared that “we will make fire eat up half of Israel if it tries to do anything against Iraq.” The threat was meant to win him Arab-Muslim support, but his real objective was to stand like a colossus astride the oil-soaked Gulf. And so while he threatened strong Israel, he actually attacked and invaded weak Kuwait.

This is unquestionably the first ambition of Iran: The wresting of the Persian Gulf from United States domination. A nuclear Iran — the nuclearization of the world’s great oil reservoir — could allow Iran to foment and manage crises almost at will. Iran, without invading any other country, or using a nuclear weapon, could fill its coffers to overflowing simply by rattling a nuclear sabre. Remember that Iran derives more than eighty percent of its export revenue from oil, and its intensified nuclear talk has already contributed to windfall revenues. This year Iran will make $55 billion from oil; it made only a little more than half that in 2004. Every rise of a dollar in price is a billion dollars in revenue for Iran. A nuclear Iran could rattle nerves even more convincingly, and drive the price to $100 a barrel.

So Iran has a structural interest in Gulf volatility; the rest of the developed and developing world, which depends on oil, has the opposite interest. The world wants the pax Americana perpetuated, not undermined. That is why the Europeans have worked so closely with the United States over Iran — not for Israel’s sake, but for their own.

A nuclear Iran would also be a realist’s nightmare, because it could push the Saudis and other Arabs in the nuclear direction. Israel has a nuclear deterrent, but Saudi Arabia does not. To prevent it from seeking one, the United States would have to put it under an American nuclear umbrella. Other Arab states might demand the same. And so the United States might be compelled to extend nato-like status to its Arab dependencies, promising to go to war to defend them. If it did not, the full nuclearization of the Gulf would be only a matter of time.

In summation, American support for Israel — again, the illusion of its unconditionality — has compelled Israel’s Arab neighbors to join the pax Americana or at least acquiesce in it. I would expect realists, of all people, to appreciate the success of this policy. After all, the United States manages the pax Americana in the eastern Mediterranean from offshore, out of the line of sight. Is this not precisely where realists think the United States should stand? A true realist, I would think, would recoil from any policy shift that might threaten to undermine this structure.

Among the many perplexing things in the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, certainly none is so perplexing as this. After all, if the United States were to adopt what they call a more “evenhanded” policy, Israeli insecurity would increase and Arab ambitions would be stoked. Were such a policy to overshoot its mark, it could raise the likelihood of an Arab-Israeli war that could endanger access to oil. Why would anyone tempt fate — and endanger an absolutely vital American interest — by embarking on such a policy?

That is why I see the Mearsheimer-Walt paper as a betrayal of the hard-nosed realism the authors supposedly represent. Sometimes I wonder whether they are realists after all. Mearsheimer and Walt urge “using American power to achieve a just peace between Israel and the Palestinians.” Is this realism, or romanticism? After all, “just peace” is purely subjective, and its definition is contested between and among Palestinians and Israelis. Its blind pursuit might be destabilizing in ways which damage American interests. This hardly seems like a cautious and prudent use of American power. The aim of American policy should be the construction of an American peace, one that serves American interests, not the unstable claims of “justice.”

The arguments for supporting Israel are many and varied, and no one argument is decisive. Morality- and values-based arguments are crucial, but a compelling realist argument can also be made for viewing Israel as an asset to the West. It does not take a “Lobby” to explain this to the hard-nosed strategic thinkers in the White House and the Pentagon. Of course, Israel always welcomes help from friends, but it does not need the whole array of organizations that claim to work on its behalf. The rationale for keeping Israel strong is hardwired in the realities of the Middle East. The United States does not have an alternative ally of comparable power. And if the institutions of the lobby were to disappear tomorrow, it is quite likely that American and other Western support would continue unabated.

That Israel looms so large as a valuable ally and asset, in a Middle East of failed and failing states, is an achievement in which Israel can rightly take pride. But it must never be taken for granted. Israel has come perilously close to doing so in recent years, by unilaterally evacuating occupied territory — first in Lebanon, but more importantly in Gaza. Whatever the merits of “disengagement” in its various forms, it effectively cuts out the United States as a broker, and has created the impression that Arabs can regain territory by force, outside the framework of the pax Americana.

The main beneficiaries of this Israeli strategy have been Hezbollah and Hamas, which are the strike forces of anti-Americanism in the region. It is true that American democracy promotion has also been responsible for the rising fortunes of such groups. But Israeli ceding of territory outside the framework of American mediation has marginalized U.S. diplomacy. Israel has made Hamas and Hezbollah, which claim to have seized territory through “resistance,” appear stronger than America’s Arab clients, who had to sign American-mediated peace deals to restore their territory. If Israel is to preserve its value as a client, its territorial concessions must appear to be made in Washington.

For Israel to remain a strategic asset, it must also win on the battlefield. If Israel’s power and prowess are ever cast into doubt, it will not only undercut Israel’s deterrence vis-à-vis its hostile neighbors. It will undermine Israel’s value to the United States as the dependable stabilizer of the Levant. Israel’s lackluster performance in its battle with Hezbollah in the summer of 2006 left its many admirers in Washington shaking their heads in disappointment. The United States, which has seen faceless insurgents shred its own plans for Iraq, knows what it is to be surprised by the force of “resistance.” But Washington expected more of Israel, battling a familiar adversary in its own backyard.

If Walt and Mearsheimer were right, the disappointment would hardly matter, since the legendary Lobby would make up the difference between American expectations and Israeli performance. But since the professors are wrong, Israel needs to begin the work of repair. Preserving American support comes at a price: The highest possible degree of military preparedness and political resolve, leaving no doubt in Washington that Israel can keep its neighborhood in line. The United States-Israel relationship rests on Israel’s willingness to pay that price. No lobby, however effective, can mitigate the damage if the United States ever concludes that Israel suffers from a systemic, permanent weakness.

While many Arabs have rushed to that conclusion since the summer war, Americans have not. But a question hangs over Israel, and it will be posed to Israel again, probably sooner rather than later. When it is, Israel must replace the question mark with an exclamation point.

Martin Kramer is a Senior Fellow at the Shalem Center and the Wexler-Fromer Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

The article as published in Azure:Download

Democracy Promotion: Plan B

On By Martin Kramer

On December 4, 2006, Carl Gershman, Jennifer Windsor, and Martin Kramer addressed The Washington Institute’s Special Policy Forum, on “Democracy Promotion in the Middle East: Time for a Plan B?” Gershman is president of the National Endowment for Democracy and a member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee on Democracy Promotion. Windsor is executive director of Freedom House and also a member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee. Kramer does not direct a democracy institute, and he is not a member of the Secretary of State’s Advisory Committee. When you read the text of his remarks, below, you will understand why. (For the remarks by Gershman and Windsor, go here.)

My colleagues on this panel are professional democracy promoters. While I am not a professional democracy doubter, it is well known that I have long been skeptical, and occasionally a critic, of American democracy promotion in the Middle East.

In preparation for today’s event, I looked back at what I had written over the years, and I was alarmed by my own consistency. In 1998, I published these words in an Aspen Institute book subtitled Memos to a President: “The promotion of democratic transformation in the Middle East remains an appropriate mission for foundations, endowments, research centers, and Jimmy Carter. They have no interests to preserve and nothing to lose by failure. It is a dangerous mission for government.” President Bush never read my memo, so when he delivered his “forward strategy of freedom” speech at the National Endowment for Democracy in 2003, I did compare him to Jimmy Carter.

Looking back over the last decade, I am sorry to report that nothing has happened to persuade me that I have been in error. And I am no longer in a minority. Promoting democracy in the Middle East has come to be widely regarded in America as a fool’s errand. If one had to design a mechanism to diminish U.S. influence and promote extremism—so it seems to most Americans—one couldn’t design a more efficient one than democracy promotion. It used to be said that democracy promotion had strong bipartisan support, and in the think tanks and the academy it still does, as the lowest common denominator of foreign policy. But it has lost public support and public confidence.

The reason is easily summarized in three words: Iraq, Hamas, Islamists. The process is legitimizing and empowering radical populists. In three settings—Iraq, Lebanon, and the Palestinian territories—it seems to have magnified conflict and created expectations that could fuel civil war.

Is It Our Fault?

What went wrong? Broadly speaking, there are two explanations for the failure: the first places the onus on us, the second places it on them. The first is put forth by the promoters, the second by the doubters.

There are three variations of the first explanation, the “we’re to blame” school. Variation one: we didn’t follow through. Bush talked the democracy talk, but didn’t walk the democracy walk. He gave high-flying speeches but never adopted a consistent policy in support of freedom and in opposition to tyranny. In some renditions, the villains are underlings in the bureaucracy who undercut the White House—who favored short-term interests over long-term vision.

A second variation of the “onus on us” explanation is that we put the cart before the horse. In our rush to let freedom ring, we put elections before civil society. On election day we got a photo op with lots of purple fingers, but the next day we awoke to empowered Islamists and, in the West Bank and Gaza, a terrorist organization legitimized in free elections. We should have focused on building democratic capacities and saved elections for two or three years later. At the least, we should have favored more cautious electoral processes.

The third variation stresses that we launched the project through war and occupation. By starting democracy promotion at gunpoint in Iraq, the United States spoiled its chances with an Arab world always suspicious of our motives. Arabs came to regard democracy promotion as a cover for imperialism. As a result, we have undercut liberals, strengthened Islamists, and effectively set back the cause of democracy.

All of these variations share a core assumption: had democracy promotion been done right, it would have worked. The time had come, the Arab world was receptive, and it was poised to receive our message. But then we muddled the message, or revealed too much of it at once, or punched them at the same time we delivered it.

Still, it is not impossible to put things right, so the promoters believe, because the Arab world remains receptive. For those who think we have been inconsistent, that means we stop being skittish and forge ahead in every setting, come what may. For those who believe we have made a fetish of elections, it means downshifting to civil society promotion, while praying that the Islamists lose altitude. And for those who blame our big stick, it means pulling back and out of sight, on the assumption that our bullying use of force is the main impediment.

Or Maybe It’s About Them

Cogent arguments can be made for each of these three fixes, but only if you accept the core assumption: the receptivity of the Arab world to the democracy message. That is why I cannot regard these as true Plan Bs. Each of them is a Plan A, version 2.0. They build on the very same premise as Plan A: that we just have to find the right path to their open hearts.

And there’s the rub. There is a growing suspicion that maybe the problem isn’t us, it’s them—it is some complex interaction of culture, history, and economy that is the obstacle to a successful democratic transformation.

I say “suspicion” deliberately. The idea of an Arab exception has always been anathema on the left and in Middle Eastern studies, for obvious reasons. But it has been anathema on the right as well. President Bush (following Ronald Reagan) has attacked “cultural condescension,” and no one wants to be guilty of that. So we have to keep our suspicions to ourselves.

But let us be frank: there isn’t a person in this room who, down in his gut, doesn’t harbor such a suspicion. And no amount of historical analogy, social science theory, or stern gazes from Condi Rice can put this suspicion to rest, because too much of the front page of the paper seems to validate it.

There are also subversive texts that go far to substantiate it. One of them was published by The Washington Institute in 1992: Elie Kedourie’s Democracy and Arab Political Culture. “There is nothing in the political traditions of the Arab world,” he wrote, “which might make familiar, or indeed intelligible, the organizing ideas of constitutional and representative government. . . . Those who say that democracy is the only remedy for the Arab world disregard a long experience which clearly shows that democracy has been tried in many countries and uniformly failed.”

These words now shock us in their lack of equivocation; a leading political scientist once denounced Kedourie (Baghdad-born and raised) for his “Eurocentric chauvinism.” But if it is Eurocentric chauvinism we are out to pillory, might not our gaze fall upon democracy promotion itself? Upon the big-think social scientists and New York intellectuals who ran a few data sets or met a few dissidents and proclaimed the Arab world ready and eager? Upon the CPA appointees who flew into Baghdad loaded with books on the postwar reconstruction of Germany and Japan? One could go on in this vein, but you get the idea.

A Different Freedom

The only exit from our own self-centered chauvinism is to begin to think systematically about the way the Arab world is different, and then to formulate a true Plan B—a plan not fixated on elections, or even on democracy, but on the kind of freedoms whose suppression has been most resented in the region. Those freedoms are not the ones we necessarily value. They are collective, not individual; and they revolve around identity, not interests. There is a yearning for freedom—of a kind I call freedom of identity.

Take Iraq, for example. Saddam suppressed the classic individual freedoms: speech, assembly, association. There wasn’t and still isn’t any constituency prepared to fight for any of them. But people rebelled time and again when he denied their freedom of identity: Kurds did it, Shiites did it, tribes did it. They were prepared to fight for a kind of freedom.

But in post-Saddam Iraq, we have denigrated this yearning, by labeling it sectarianism and separatism. We have seen Iraq as a multicultural project, in pursuit of an American ideal. Iraq would validate not only our idea of democracy, but also our respect for diversity. And so we wound up downplaying the only kind of freedom that commands mass loyalty in Iraq: the freedom to be something first, and Iraqi second. In the process, we not only made a fetish of elections; we made a fetish of the map of the Iraq.

Parts of the Middle East are experiencing a surge of ethnic, sectarian, and even tribal identity. We call these loyalties “primordial,” but they legitimately express a deep longing for security and a collective freedom from oppression. This is hardly a liberal longing—you can yearn for this freedom and still sanction honor killing. But this is the hand we have been dealt, and our reluctance to play the cards is hurting us.

It is also a fact that freedom of identity is strongly opposed by our most virulent enemies: the Islamists. Islamism is an impossible supra-identity. In al-Qaeda, it reaches grotesque proportions in the demand for a caliphate. But even in local settings, Islamism threatens not just non-Muslims, but all Muslims who cherish another identity, of locale or sect or tribe. And many of our rogue adversaries, like Iran and Syria, deny freedom of identity to large groups within their state borders. We have been almost completely silent about that.

I would not be so presumptuous as to propose that the United States drop democracy promotion. Even I cannot rule out that in some place, it might work. But even the prospects of democracy—freedom as we understand it—would probably be greater in a Middle East where smaller identity formations had control over their destinies. The most oppressive Middle Eastern states have been large, diverse ones, ruled by minorities in the name of a big ideology. By nature, these regimes will be authoritarian, even despotic. Compact entities with secure majorities are more likely to democratize, and to accord full political rights to minorities.

Israel is such a democracy: it has extended full political and linguistic rights to its Arab minority precisely because its Jewish majority is secure. Iraqi Kurdistan may be on the same path. It is often said that the breakup of Iraq would mean ethnic cleansing on a massive scale. But minority enclaves probably have a better chance of surviving where majorities feel themselves reasonably secure and enjoy explicit recognition of their political status. We might have done better to promote this sort of freedom in Iraq from the outset.

Of course, promoting freedom of identity indiscriminately would be as counterproductive as promoting democracy indiscriminately. There are places where, as with democracy promotion, it would just make things worse—and probably clash with U.S. interests. But it is a genuine Plan B, not just a tweak of Plan A. It would go far toward synchronizing U.S. policy with at least some of the changes now sweeping the Middle East. And it is certainly better than promoting only the kind of process that ends with the Middle East giving us the purple finger.

Big Ideas in the Middle East

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer delivered this address to a Washington Institute for Near East Policy program in Beverly Hills on November 29, 2006. It was first published here. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

U.S. policy over the last decade has been very much influenced by big ideas designed to transform the Middle East. None of these ideas has worked, which is why Washington is being bombarded with new, alternative big ideas.

I have watched one of these ideas evolve over the past year, getting bigger and bigger, and I would go so far as to call it the enemy from within. But before I tell you what the enemy is, let us briefly look back at what has already gone wrong. We must look back, because the debate today is the result of a decade of American failure in the Middle East. Three big American ideas or grand strategies for transforming the Middle East have failed over the last ten years: peace, globalization and democracy.

Grand Failures

First, peace. That is the generic name, but you also know it under its brand name, the “new Middle East.” In the 1990s, some observers began to argue that the conflicts in the Middle East had been put out of business by the end of the Cold War. The Soviets were not around anymore to back up their Arab clients, such as the PLO and Syria. Their weakness supposedly left them more amenable to joining the “peace process.” If peace agreements between Israel and its remaining enemies could be nailed down in a diplomatic push, the Middle East could become a cooperative zone, like the European Union. Animosities would wane; borders would melt.

The brand name, “new Middle East,” came from the title of a book published by Shimon Peres in 1993. Peres wrote: “I have earned the right to dream. So much that I dreamed in the past was dismissed as fantasy, but has now become thriving reality.”

But not every dream comes true, and the failed pursuit of fantasies is not without cost. In reality, it turned out that Syria and the PLO, even without the Soviets behind them, were not going to be pushed or pulled into any “new Middle East.” Syria never came in, and the PLO stepped in at Oslo and then out again at Camp David. Yasser Arafat’s intifada then turned the “new Middle East” into an object of ridicule, and the peace process went down with it.

Second big idea: globalization. Where diplomacy couldn’t do the job, so the globalists said, economic forces would do it. Tom Friedman became the champion of this notion in his 1999 book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree. There he wrote about the “silent invasion going on in the Middle East the invasion of information and private capital through the new system of globalization.”

The Arabs and Iranians would eventually have to put on what he called the “Golden Straitjacket.” “As your country puts on the Golden Straitjacket,” he wrote,” two things tend to happen: Your economy grows, and your politics shrink.” Friedman filled his book with anecdotes about another Middle East, full of wired, business-focused Arabs and Persians. His book became a bestseller, because it made Americans feel good: market forces would fix the world.

The United States tried to accelerate the process by organizing Middle East economic summits. And the United States punished bad guys with economic sanctions, which became the all-purpose jackknife of U.S. Middle East policy.

Even by the late 1990s, it was obvious that economic sanctions were not taming the radicals. But the globalization idea finally came crashing down with the Twin Towers on September 11. Globalization, it turned out, could also empower the wrong Arabs most obviously, Osama bin Laden and the global jihad. They were using e-mail to plot terror acts, the banking system to transfer money and websites to post their videos, which were carried by Al-Jazeera via satellite to millions of viewers. Globalization in the Middle East, we now know, has not made politics shrink; it is making them expand, politicizing every corner of society, often against us.

If globalization wasn’t going to cure the Middle East, what would? Obvious, said the neoconservatives: democracy. The root cause of the problems in Middle East, they said, is the absence of democracy and the continued rule of dictators.

The way to cure the Middle East was to shake it up by promoting democracy first by forced “regime change” in Iraq and then by encouraging liberals across the Middle East. The president launched what he described as his “forward strategy of freedom in the Middle East.” It became known as the “Bush Doctrine.”

Now that big idea has crashed, too. It has crashed, first, as a result of the maelstrom in Iraq, and second, as a result of the election of Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and the fact that free elections everywhere end in victory for Islamist zealots. The “forward strategy of freedom” is ending in a quest for an exit strategy from chaos. Poll after poll now shows that the majority of Americans think there is no chance of making Iraq into a model democracy, and that is understating it. Promoting democracy to Arabs is coming to be regarded in this country as the ultimate fool’s errand.

So the three big ideas for transforming the Middle East peace, globalization, democracy all have been repulsed or hijacked by forces opposed to America’s vision.

The Next Big Thing

This has left us at one of those rare moments in Washington, when the playing field is suddenly made level for the competition of new big ideas. It happened after September 11, and it is happening now because of Iraq.

In this environment, everyone gets a hearing. Jimmy Carter has a book on Palestine, and former Sen. George McGovern has one on Iraq. Ideas are ricocheting around town, some of them old, some of them recycled and some of them brand new. We are seeing the beginning of a true battle of ideas. And there is a big idea out there that is moving toward the center of the battlefield and that I have no hesitation in describing as the enemy from within. This big idea calls itself “engagement.”

Its basic premise is this: the root cause of the pathology of the Middle East is… us. The Middle East has its problems, but everything we do just makes them worse. All the big ideas that have failed were about transforming the Middle East. What we really have to do is first transform the United States to get ourselves back over the horizon, as much out of the Arab line of sight as possible. And since Israel is our client and its treatment of the Palestinians is blamed on us, we have to pull Israel back today.

To do that, we have to treat a domestic problem: we have to democratize our own policy toward the Middle East. Right now it is being dictated by the Israel lobby, which got us into the Iraq war and which could get us into an Iran war. This is America’s own pathology the inability of our political system to resist the pressure of a highly motivated, aggressive and determined interest group, whose parochial interest now conflicts with the national one.

And as we pull back, say the engagers, we have to admit that our putative Arab friends are too weak to hold the line. The Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians are all weak reeds; the radical forces are stronger. So to manage our withdrawal, we have to talk to the stronger forces to Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas. We have to “engage” them in a “dialogue” and find some shared interest with them, so that we can reposition ourselves safely and not leave chaos behind.

After all, they continue, radicals have interests, too. Perhaps if we get out of their line of sight, we might even be positioned to transform them it is our policies that made them radical in the first place, so if we change those policies, it might make them reasonable. For in every radical resides a potential moderate and we have the power to bring him out, through humility and dialogue.

Now I hope that even in this abbreviated summary of “engagement,” you can appreciate its appeal. Why fight what the Pentagon calls the “long war” already longer than World War II when we can send in the pinstripes and get better results? Why battle the radicals, when we can de-radicalize them by getting out of their sight?

It helps that many advocates of “engagement” call themselves “realists” Americans are nothing if not realistic. And proponents of “engagement” come from the pinnacles of the foreign policy and academic establishment here is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, there is a chaired Harvard professor, and over there, a former national security adviser.

A False Realism

They call themselves realists. But the interesting thing is that “engagement,” despite its realist pretensions, actually oozes optimism about the Middle East. And in a bizarre twist, its optimism is fixed first and foremost on Syria, Iran and the Islamists.

“Engagement” rests on the notion that these states and movements don’t have big ideas or grand strategies of their own. They have interests, but what really drives them is “grievances.” If we were only to address these “grievances,” we could diminish their bad behavior their pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, their support for terrorism, their anti-American incitement. The assumption of course is that these grievances are finite that is, addressing them would somehow diminish the pool of resentment.

I could give you lots of examples of “engagement-think,” but I will confine myself here to one relating to Hamas. U.S. policy toward Hamas has been to isolate it, sanction it and give Israel a wide berth to punish it. None of this has moderated Hamas, but it has arguably diminished its popularity. But here is Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs, on how “engagement” would approach the problem.

U.S. officials, he says, should “sit down with Hamas officials, much as they have with the leaders of Sinn Fein.” And once they are all seated together, what should they discuss? Haass thinks now is the time for the United States to outline a final Israeli-Palestinian settlement, including the creation of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines. Then he adds: “The more generous and detailed the plan, the harder it would be for Hamas to reject negotiation and favor confrontation.”

So “engagement” with Hamas is essentially about appealing to some Hamas sense of fair play getting it to say “yes” by being “more generous.” Here you have, in capsule form, the core optimism that infuses the “engagement” strategy the idea that a movement whose leaders have vowed they will never, ever recognize Israel can somehow be talked out of it by acts of American generosity.

The flaw of “engagement” is the same flaw that has wrecked the last decade of U.S. policy. It is yet another case of unfounded, unwarranted, unjustifiable optimism about the Middle East. Just as you could not turn Arafat into a man of peace (even with a Nobel peace prize ceremony), and just as you could not turn Iraqis into democratic citizens (even when their fingers turned purple), you cannot change Syria and Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah into our partners by sitting down with them.

That is because they have more than interests and more than grievances. They also have big ideas and grand strategies, just like we do.

The essence of their biggest idea is simple: America will never be anything but an enemy of their regimes, their culture and their religion. So every move they make has the purpose of pushing America back, out and away. Their big idea is served every time America is humiliated, reviled and defeated. They aren’t interested in helping us to achieve final settlements or our visions of a “new Middle East.” They are out to defeat us and to replace us.

And nothing so feeds their big idea than our own defeatism. They were ecstatic when Haass wrote these words: “Less than 20 years after the end of the Cold War, the American era in the Middle East … has ended…. The second Iraq war, a war of choice, has precipitated its end.”

We’re on the run. In a recent Newsweek, a report from Damascus by a veteran journalist described the mood in ruling circles as “cocky,” because they overhear us. A Syrian analyst close to the regime has told the foreign press that Syria has its terms for “engagement,” but the package, in his words, is “all or nothing.” This is “engagement” Syrian-style: the dictation of terms by the victor to the vanquished.

So “engagement,” which masquerades as realism, is as naive and ahistorical as any big idea America has produced about the Middle East. It envisions a fantasy new Middle East of radicals transformed, working with us over Iraq, proliferation and resolving the Palestine issue. This fantasy, if carried to its conclusion, would simply continue and complete the failures of the past decade. For although proponents of the idea give it the feel-good name of “engagement,” in the Middle East, it looks, feels and smells like appeasement. It is emboldening our enemies, and it is leaving our allies bewildered.

Appeasement can work if your opponent has limited aims. But everyone in the Middle East knows that the aims of Iran, Syria and the Islamists are not limited, that every concession will give rise to a new demand, that every sop to violence will produce more violence. “Engagement” is one more disaster just waiting to happen one that would leave the Middle East under the thumb of Iranian nukes, Al Qaeda insurgents and Bashar al-Assad’s mafia. “Engagement” is the enemy within because only we can so thoroughly defeat ourselves.

Fatal Attraction

Now so far, we have been winning the battle against “engagement.” The White House has resolved instead to engage its Arab friends more intensively, and that means Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates what is coming to be called the Arab Quartet.

One of the more fanciful notions of the neocons was that you could make Iraq work while criticizing your own Arab allies for being undemocratic. That has been jettisoned for a new approach of bringing together all the Arab forces that fear a Middle East dominated by the wrong people. The strongest of those forces are the status quo regimes. They are much stronger than they are made out to be, and if they were provided with packages of incentives and generous offers and if we were to stop delegitimating them they could do more.

In the short term, this is the real realism a policy that doesn’t accept America’s decline as a fait accompli, and that is savvy enough to know that you keep your position in the Middle East by rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies, not vice versa.

This probably will not end the American quest for the next big idea for the Middle East, because Americans are attracted to big transformative ideas. But this is a fatal attraction. The last decade has shown, time and again, that big ideas lead to big trouble, because they underestimate the strong undercurrents of Middle Eastern societies. A process has to start of disabusing Americans of the notion that the pathologies of the Middle East have one root cause and one grand fix. There are many different pathologies in the Middle East and no single fix. For some of the pathologies, alas, there may be no fix at all.

Further reading: For some things the United States has gotten right about the Middle East, see Martin Kramer’s article “The American Interest,” also from fall 2006.