| The Chairman and I. “When the helicopter carrying the frail old man rose above his ruined compound, I started to cry…. Palestinians admired his refusal to flee under fire. They told me: ‘Our leader is sharing our pain, we are all under the same siege’. And so was I.” These aren’t the words of an activist of the International Solidarity Movement. They belong to Barbara Plett, BBC correspondent in the West Bank. She’s not just teary-eyed, she’s disappointed that the Palestinians haven’t rallied to her hero. “Where were the people, I wondered, the mass demonstrations of solidarity, the frantic expressions of concern?” Well, Barbara, maybe the Palestinians have moved on, and you missed the story. It’s time for some real reportage out of Ramallah, and the BBC should have someone else do it. Sun, Oct 31 2004 6:55 pm |
| Psy-Cole-gize. Juan Cole tries to blame 9/11 on Ariel Sharon via Ziad Jarrah, the Lebanese hijacker-pilot of the plane that went down in western Pennsylvania. Jarrah “was eight when the Israelis invaded his country [in 1982] and wrought so much destruction. He obviously was deeply traumatized by the experience.” Obviously? Jarrah wasn’t a traumatized kid. His well-to-do family says he was shielded from the hardships of war and showed no interest in politics. He became a well-adjusted and fun-loving teenager, attended Christian schools, and had career aspirations in engineering and aviation. The 9/11 Commission says he only showed signs of radicalization in Germany, after falling under the spell of fanatics in Hamburg. Jarrah’s case points to the kind of reprogramming that happens in cults. There’s no evidence for childhood trauma of any kind. Cole just made it up. Sun, Oct 31 2004 2:48 pm |
| Cole, boycotter. Juan Cole, last week: “I urge academics and others to boycott the United States Institute of Peace this year, as long as extremist ideologue Daniel Pipes serves on it.” (Pipes, it will be recalled, is one of sixteen members of the Institute’s board of directors. His term ends in a few months.) This (belated) call to boycott a nonpartisan federal institution mandated by Congress is an incredibly irresponsible statement from a candidate for the presidency of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). If the extremist ideologue Juan Cole has been elected MESA’s president (we will know that shortly), I’ll urge academics and others to boycott the association as long as he serves on its board—as president-elect, as president, and as past-president. Perhaps what this country needs is more than one association for Middle Eastern studies. Sun, Oct 31 2004 2:11 am |
| Said and Arendt. Over twenty years ago, a biographer of Hannah Arendt mistakenly wrote that Arendt had contributed funds to the extremist Jewish Defense League (Meir Kahane), when in fact she had given to the very mundane United Jewish Appeal. In 1985, Edward Said wrote an article repeating the error and citing the biography as his source. The guilt-ridden biographer wrote to Said to explain that it was all a mistake, and asked Said to set the record straight if he ever republished his essay, for the sake of Arendt’s reputation. Said never answered the entreaty, and he republished the essay the following year, without a correction. Full story at link. Sun, Oct 31 2004 12:01 am |
| After Arafat. In the spring issue of the Middle East Quarterly, we published a prescient piece by Barry Rubin, entitled “After Arafat.” It’s the best and most thorough assessment anywhere. And in the new, fall issue of the journal, see the article on “Arafat’s Swiss Bank Account” by Palestinian banker and dissident Issam Abu Issa. (This is the first issue edited by the journal’s new editor, Michael Rubin, and he’s off to a flying start.) Sat, Oct 30 2004 11:39 am |
| Cole calculation. Juan Cole, who for all we know may be president-elect of the Middle East Studies Association, jumped up and down in excitement over the Lancet report and its claim that about 100,000 Iraqis have died in the war. So “Across the Bay,” a sharp weblog, jumps up and down on Cole. Recommended reading. Sat, Oct 30 2004 11:11 am |
| MESA poll. You can’t trust the polls, and you certainly can’t trust my own Middle East Studies Association (MESA) presidential poll, which has now come to a close. Only 63 people voted, revealing a high degree of apathy. The results:
Fred Donner, 71 percent (45 votes) Margin of error: enormous. I haven’t expressed a preference, and I’ll announce the actual results when MESA announces them. (The real elections also ended today.) |
| Dump Dabashi. “I have intimidated no one. Neither Columbia University nor I have ever received a complaint from any student.” That’s Joseph Massad, accused Columbia prof, to The New York Times. Well, say you did have a complaint about Massad’s intimidating you over Israel. Proper procedure: go to the departmental chair. That would be Hamid Dabashi. And this is what Dabashi wrote about Israel just last month: “What they call ‘Israel’ is no mere military state. A subsumed militarism, a systemic mendacity with an ingrained violence constitutional to the very fusion of its fabric, has penetrated the deepest corners of what these people have to call their ‘soul’.” Massad’s abuses were made possible by Dabashi’s indulgence, as everyone at Columbia knows. Back in March 2003, I urged the department’s members to “dump Dabashi” from the chair. Columbia’s investigation should include him, and draw the necessary conclusions if he’s found to be complicit. Fri, Oct 29 2004 2:09 pm |
| Festering bias. Now a tenured Columbia professor has emerged, claiming that students have been coming to him “for years” to complain about humiliation at the hands of faculty, and that the anti-Israel bias in the Middle East department has had “anti-Jewish overtones.” So says Dan Miron, a professor of Hebrew literature in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures. He says he’s heard complaints about once a week, from students mocked or shouted down by their professors. “Israel is singled out in a way that is racist,” he told the New York Sun. “The needs of Israel, the legitimate concerns of Israel, are never taken into account.” Columbia’s response to the problem has been “very weak.” Miron’s words are a major breach in the wall of silence that has protected faculty abusers. Columbia president Lee Bollinger promises an investigation; thanks to Miron, it will be harder to do a whitewash. Fri, Oct 29 2004 1:19 pm |
| Massad petition. Down below I wrote that the tendentious petition in support of Joseph Massad was drafted by an English prof at the University of Texas, one Neville Hoad. Hoad has been pushing the petition, but it’s actually the work of As’ad AbuKhalil, California State University, Stanislaus, who’s the first signatory and who announced on his website that he’d be preparing it. It’s AbuKhalil who concocted the deceptive claim that Massad has “written courageously in Arabic and English against anti-Semitism and anti-Semites.” I’ve read through the signatories of the petition, and recognize very few names. Alas for Massad, the doyens of Middle Eastern studies aren’t rallying around him, even at Columbia. Thu, Oct 28 2004 10:47 pm |
| Zion envy. Today’s New York Sun reports this tidbit from the David Project film on intimidation of students by Columbia faculty. “A Columbia student, Noah Liben, recalls a class he had with Mr. [Joseph] Massad in spring 2001 during which the professor, while making the argument that Zionism is a male-dominated movement, told students that the Hebrew word zion means ‘penis’. Zion actually means a ‘designated area or sign post’, which sounds similar to zayin, which means a weapon or penis.” In fact, the two words don’t even sound similar in Hebrew, because they don’t have the same root: Zion is pronounced tsiyon. It’s hard to know what is more risible here: Massad’s ignorance of Hebrew orthography or his perverse mode of analysis. When Bernard Lewis wrote that the Arabic word for revolution, thawra, came from a root also meaning the stirring of a camel, Edward Said claimed Lewis was hinting “that the Arab is scarcely more than a neurotic sexual being.” Ridiculous, but Massad really does practice just this kind of sex-philology. What’s pathetic is that he’s applied it to a language he doesn’t know, and to a word he can’t even spell. Thu, Oct 28 2004 11:44 am |
| The Massad file. For your reading convenience, I’ve concentrated my various commentaries on Joseph Massad in one place. Wed, Oct 27 2004 5:59 pm |
| MESA elections. The official balloting for president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) closes at 7pm Eastern time on Friday. That’s when I’ll close down my MESA poll, on the sidebar of the Sandstorm page. Make sure to cast your real ballot and/or your poll ballot before then. It will be fascinating to see whether there is any correlation between the two results. Wed, Oct 27 2004 5:09 pm |
| Columbia twists. The Columbia Spectator runs an article on Columbia’s response to the David Project exposé on faculty harassment of students. University deans met to discuss the crisis, and the David Project will release the film to the public today, in a screening at a press conference. I haven’t seen the film. But my own criticism of Middle Eastern studies at Columbia has never depended on specific claims of harassment. It goes much deeper, to the systemic faculty bias that has bent the curriculum and driven one-sided appointments. Unfortunately, my approach hasn’t cut much ice, because Columbia has continued to deny the problem. So the university administration brought the film upon itself, and I’m delighted to see it twist in the wind. Wed, Oct 27 2004 11:31 am |
| Massad distorted. Neville Hoad, an assistant professor of English at the University of Texas, is the author of a petition in support of Joseph Massad, whose alleged intimidation of students figures in a documentary exposé on the clique that runs Middle Eastern studies at Columbia. Massad, Hoad writes, “has courageously written in Arabic and in English against anti-Semitism and anti-Semites.” Wait a minute. It’s Massad’s contention that Zionism is anti-Semitism: he’s written in Arabic and English against Zionist anti-Semitism. That’s a perverse variation on the Zionism=Nazism equation. (Indeed, Massad has compared Ariel Sharon to Goebbels.) No courage here, just crude defamation of a nation. I’ll be watching who signs this tendentious and misleading petition, which seeks to silence legitimate criticism of hate speech. Tue, Oct 26 2004 6:01 pm |
| AIPAC Summit. I’m back from the AIPAC summit in Florida (right below). Here’s an accurate report. This was the biggest turnout ever for a national summit, and Richard Holbrooke and Condoleezza Rice competed for the attendees’ applause. Holbrooke and Rice both struck the right notes. But I can’t understand why Holbrooke thinks a U.S. peace process envoy wouldn’t allow a back-door reentry of Arafat. (Sharon advisor Dov Weissglas, in a satellite Q&A, poured cold water on the envoy idea.) As for Rice, two years ago I wrote that “my eyes glaze over” when I hear her “wax eloquent on the coming ‘march of democracy’ in the Arab world.” Well, my eyes were glazing over again. The low point: remarks by Kerry Mideast adviser Mel Levine, who was way too partisan and got booed for it. A fascinating weekend (and the new Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino, where it all happened, is a sight to see). Update: Rice dismisses Holbrooke’s envoy idea. Tue, Oct 26 2004 2:16 pm |
| Policy and politics. Last weekend, I attended the annual conference of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, where Middle East advisors of both presidential candidates made programmatic speechs. Here’s the speech by Stephen Hadley, deputy national security advisor, and here’s the speech by Wendy Sherman, senior foreign policy adviser to the Kerry-Edwards campaign. You decide. I’ll be in Hollywood, Florida on Sunday and Monday, for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Summit. Middle East speeches will be delivered by national security advisor Condoleezza Rice and by Kerry’s top foreign policy advisor Richard Holbrooke. More details here. (I’m in a break-out session on human rights and reform in the Arab world.) I’ll return to the Sandbox sometime next week. Fri, Oct 22 2004 4:46 pm |
| Eyeless at Columbia. Today’s New York Sun also runs an editorial on the situation at Columbia (last four posts), under the headline “Bollinger’s Blindness.” I share its premises. Columbia (which I once nicknamed Bir Zeit-on-Hudson) has a Middle East faculty that’s run like a private club, and a higher administration long mired in denial. Columbia’s President Bollinger now must lead, and there’s no reason for donors to bail him out by rewarding Columbia’s negligence. Joseph Massad (see below) has to go, and Columbia must return the money contributed by the United Arab Emirates toward the Edward Said Chair—a tainted gift that stains the university. The newspaper is wrong to call for “disciplining” the Said Professor, Rashid Khalidi, for “errors in his [latest] book.” That’s the job of reviewers and other scholars, who should think twice about appearing at the Middle East Institute under his management. But the rest of the agenda is just right. Fri, Oct 22 2004 1:34 pm |
| Let Columbia stew. The New York Daily News also weighs in with an editorial on the Columbia situation (see previous). The paper notes that Columbia president Lee Bollinger “is raising money to endow two professorships, one a chair in Israeli studies and the other for visiting professors from Israel. That effort has gone on for months. Clearly, faster action is needed.” I disagree. Donors should keep Columbia at bay, until Bollinger begins to clean out the stables, and proposes a way to insulate any new appointments from the legions of tenured radicals who will try to hijack them. Otherwise, these professorships could turn out disastrously, as they did at Berkeley. Fri, Oct 22 2004 1:14 pm |
| Columbia’s Massad problem. The New York Sun reports that Congressman Anthony Weiner, a Democrat of Brooklyn and Queens, has written to Columbia president Lee Bollinger, urging him to “fire” Joseph Massad. This is in response to the David Project’s short film on faculty intimidation of students at Columbia (see the entry before last), where Massad is spotlighted. I sincerely hope that Columbia will have the good sense not to tenure Massad, who is a pseudo-scholar, but I’m not sure letters from politicians are the way to get there. The opinion of serious scholars matters more. In this regard, have a look at Prof. Asher Susser’s review of Massad’s book Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan (scroll down; it’s the fourth review). Susser, who’s a renowned authority on Jordan, finds Massad guilty of “ideological bias,” “factual distortion and sheer invention.” Fri, Oct 22 2004 12:44 pm |
| Just Khalidi’s facts, ma’am. The Columbia Spectator runs a puff piece on Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor and director of Columbia’s Middle East Institute. It ends with quotes from two students who took his seminar on “Orientalism and Historiography” last semester. Student A: “He taught me that you can’t take anything at its face value. Everyone has a bias, and everyone has an agenda.” Student B: “One of the most important things he teaches is the importance of being grounded in the facts. Anyone who talks to him, or reads him, figures out that he’s not trying to argue any one point. He’s just trying to get at the facts.” Does it not appear that these two students took away opposite conclusions from Khalidi’s course? Or maybe the message of Khalidi’s teaching is this: everyone else has an agenda; only Rashid Khalidi has the facts. Thu, Oct 21 2004 11:34 am |
| Columbia exposed. “Columbia Abuzz Over Underground Film”—that’s the headline of this New York Sun story on a short documentary film, in which Jewish students talk of faculty intimidation over Israel. It’s been viewed by Columbia’s provost and Barnard’s president; the latter is reported to have said that the film emotionally affected her. The chief cause of complaint, not surprisingly, is Joseph Massad, who’s up for tenure this year. The article notes that Columbia’s own internal review of bias had turned up nothing (not surprising, given the university’s history of denial), so the David Project, producer of the film, has scored a hit. When I’ve seen it, I’ll say more. Wed, Oct 20 2004 6:15 pm |
| Pilger’s progress. It’s incredible, but documentary filmmaker, journalist, and propagandist John Pilger is doing a stint as a Frank H. T. Rhodes Class of ’56 Professor at Cornell. Pilger is one of the West’s only overt supporters of the Iraqi “resistance.” (“We cannot afford to be choosy. While we abhor and condemn the continuing loss of innocent life in Iraq, we have no choice now but to support the resistance.”) He’s said this, of Michael Moore’s work: “I don’t think that they’re particularly radical films.” Pilger’s films are just that, and this evening, he’ll be presenting one of them: “Paying the Price: Killing the Children of Iraq,” his pre-war indictment of sanctions. (I reviewed it here.) It was this kind of distortion that undercut sanctions, making continued containment of Saddam a losing proposition. Pilger helped to precipitate the war he now reviles. Does he sleep at night? (And was Cornell’s Board of Trustees asleep when they appointed him?) Wed, Oct 20 2004 12:35 pm |
| Kurtz on Hoekstra. Stanley Kurtz interprets Rep. Peter Hoekstra’s Title VI op-ed (see right below): “The real significance of Congressman Hoekstra’s piece is that it sends a political signal. HR3077 passed the House unanimously, yet it’s been held up in the Senate by the higher education lobby. Hoekstra notes that this is a last chance for the Senate to pass the bill. Implicitly, Hoekstra is warning that he is not going to give up on the effort to reform area studies. In fact, we know from his remarks…[to Slate’s Lee Smith] that Hoekstra’s next bill may be a far more difficult pill for the academy to swallow. So in effect, Hoekstra’s piece on NRO today is a shot across the bow of the academy: ‘Stop blocking HR 3077, or risk far worse next year’.” Tue, Oct 19 2004 11:21 am |
| Hoekstra 3077. Critics of HR3077, the International Studies in Higher Education Act, have portrayed the bill as a neoconservative ploy to take over academe. In fact, it’s a bipartisan Congressional initiative to restore some accountability to Title VI. Its author, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican and newly-appointed chair of the House Intelligence Committee, today publishes an important op-ed that rebuts what he calls the “doomsday” scenarios of academe. He also urges the Senate to act on the bill. My advice to academe: don’t underestimate Hoekstra, and stop lying about his bill. He doesn’t appreciate that, and you’ll need his good will to get Title VI reauthorized. Mon, Oct 18 2004 9:53 pm |
| Assassins! I gave a lecture a few years ago on “Nation and Assassination in the Middle East,” at a conference of the Yitzhak Rabin Center in Israel. It’s in the summer Middle East Quarterly, and now it’s on the web. Before you complain that I didn’t include Israel and the Rabin assassination: others dealt with it in several other panels. (By the way, Bernard Lewis’s presentation on my panel was recently published in his collected volume, From Babel to Dragomans. It’s chapter ten, “Religion and Murder in the Middle East.” He covers an earlier period.) Mon, Oct 18 2004 6:29 pm |
| Irresponsible me. The journal International Affairs (Chatham House) has published a belated review essay by Fred Halliday on my book Ivory Towers on Sand. The book, writes Halliday, “is contestable, disappointing from a person of [Kramer’s] scholarly and academic standing, and, on many of the issues he touches, irresponsible. This book…distorts the contemporary state of Middle Eastern studies and has, as it would appear to have been intended to have, deleterious consequences for university life itself.” Oh well. I gave it my best. At a later point, I’ll hack away at this review, but let it not be said that I don’t give my critics a platform. Click here. Mon, Oct 18 2004 4:51 pm |
| More intifada lessons. Two weeks ago I linked to part one of Brig. Gen. Michael Herzog’s retrospective on four years of Israeli-Palestinian war. Here is part two, published today. Thu, Oct 14 2004 3:19 pm |
| Professor PaleStein. If you’d like to read more from Duke’s Professor Rebecca Stein, a featured speaker at the conference of the Palestine Solidarity Movement (see right below), read her attack on the post-Zionists (their scholarship is still tainted by vestiges of Zionism, which “radically curtails [their] ability to rethink Zionism’s history of racist discourse”). And read her admonition that “the Jewish-American and Jewish Israeli lefts not glorify by contrast [with Sharon] the Labor administration of Rabin and Peres and their Oslo ‘peace process’.” It will be interesting to see if this Beinin-tutored Saidian groupie gets tenure at Duke. She’s put herself in the spotlight this weekend, so listen closely, Duke administrators. Thu, Oct 14 2004 3:01 pm |
| Duke agitprof. The Palestine Solidarity Movement will hold its conference at Duke this coming weekend. Only one Duke faculty member will address the event: Rebecca Stein, an assistant professor of cultural anthropology (and a former Stanford student of Joel Beinin’s). At Duke she’s taught a course on “Palestine, Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict.” So have a look at this appalling piece of pseudo-scholarship, in which she denounces the “grossly myopic [Israeli] focus on Israeli loss” from suicide bombings, and insists on calling the attacks cases of “Palestinian militarism.” There are footnotes and a thin veneer of theory (public debate takes place in a “polyphonic discursive sphere”), but it’s propaganda. It’s not just that Duke is hosting a weekend conference. It’s that Duke is becoming another Columbia. Wed, Oct 13 2004 6:29 pm |
| Basket case. Over at MEMRI’s new television monitoring site, they’re running some examples of execrable commentary on the Sinai terrorist attacks from the Arabic broadcast media. Be sure to see and listen to the amazing commentary by an idiotic twit from the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, a comparatively reputable outfit, presenting the attacks as an Israeli plot to defame Egypt. There’s no hope for this guy. (If you can’t view the clip, there’s an accompanying transcript.) Mon, Oct 11 2004 4:01 pm |
| Arab Mind revisited. When Seymour Hersh published his New Yorker exposé on Abu Ghraib, he quoted anonymous persons who told him the abuses had been inspired by a book published in 1973: The Arab Mind by the late Raphael Patai. That seemed far-fetched to me, and I said so here in the Sandbox. The fact that Patai is too dead to defend himself also irked me. At the time, I was still editor of the Middle East Quarterly, so I sought permission to run Norvelle De Atkine’s foreward to the 2002 reprint edition of The Arab Mind. (De Atkine, a retired U.S. Army colonel with long experience in the Middle East, had written a foreward that paid homage to Patai’s work.) We published De Atkine’s foreward in the summer issue, with a preface by the editors, and it’s now on the web. Mon, Oct 11 2004 3:06 pm |
| Muslim Brothers’ keeper. Abu Aardvark has written a considered rejoinder to my Sandstorm posting of Thursday (“He ain’t heavy, he’s my Muslim Brother”), making the counter-argument for engaging “moderate” Islamists in dialogue. Alas, I don’t have the spare few hours I’d need to plunge into a spirited exchange just now (he’s kindly invited me to do so, in his comments section). But when I can find the time, I’ll give you, my own readers, a heads-up. Mon, Oct 11 2004 1:07 pm |
| Defining success. Juan Cole argues that Bush has failed in the war on terror. Evidence? “If, three years after 9/11, Zawahiri can arrange for al-Qaeda to blow up yet another building, this time in Egypt, killing scores, that is a sign of failure. If an al-Qaeda-aligned group…is permitted by the Pakistani state…to blow up Shiite mosques, … that is a sign of failure. If radical Sunni groups, or ex-Baathists aligned with them, are able at will to fire Katyusha rockets into the Baghdad Sheraton…, that is a sign of failure.” No, Professor Cole. If Al-Qaeda had managed to repeat a 9/11-style attack in the U.S., even in miniature, that would be a sign of failure. Terrorists, like the poor, will always be with us. The definition of success: keeping them out of house and yard. Mon, Oct 11 2004 10:14 am |
| One to watch. My alma mater has just posted this at the Chronicle of Higher Education: “The Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University invites applications for a tenure track position in the economies, societies, or cultures of the modern Middle East, to begin September 1, 2005. Rank: Assistant Professor, Ph.D. required.” Deadline: November 8. Details at the main link. Sun, Oct 10 2004 12:15 pm |
| Hope in Egypt. The Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt, held a conference on the fate of the ancient library of Alexandria. To the organizers’ credit, they invited Bernard Lewis, who couldn’t attend, but who sent a paper, read in his absence. The correspondent of the Ahram Weekly, Amina Elbendary, tied herself in knots about it. The invite to Lewis was “bewildering,” since Lewis is “controversial, to say the least, and often associated with the negative connotations of Orientalism.” Well, quite obviously the organizers—accomplished Egyptian historians—haven’t been corrupted by post-Orientalist orthodoxy and its blacklisting militancy. There’s hope. Sat, Oct 9 2004 1:01 am |
| Hey, Muslim Brother! As promised, I’ve posted my remarks from a panel I shared with Gilles Kepel the week before last. My words weren’t meant as a response to Kepel (he also rejects the idea of “dialogue” with the likes of Sheikh Qaradawi), but as a counter to things said to the Washington Post by various experts (links in posting). Notice that in those WP articles, nobody quotes John Esposito or Fawaz Gerges. Too discredited. But it’s the same (bad) idea, now elicited from persons whose credibility wasn’t tarnished by 9/11. Thu, Oct 7 2004 12:01 pm |
| Useful idiots. Gilles Kepel has crossed America promoting his new book, The War for Muslim Minds. He appeared last week at UCLA. Here is an intelligent summary of his remarks, but I link to it primarily because it relays this quotable quote from Kepel: “A number of former communists and fellow travelers of the left have been supportive of the Islamists. They see the Islamists as the embodiment of the masses. The communist cadres used to call these people useful idiots and the term still holds.” (I appeared in Washington with Kepel on the start of his tour. I’ll be posting my own remarks from that occasion very shortly.) Tue, Oct 5 2004 8:56 pm |
| Book updates. If you haven’t done so, visit the Book Updates box on the sidebar of the Sandstorm page. The two most useful features are the new releases—one is added each weekday—and, just beneath them, links to the latest reviews and excerpts. I try to add a few entries here each day, and they’ll save you a lot of trawling. Today, for instance, you’ll find a link to an excerpt from The Folly of Empire by John Judis, assessing the (supposedly deleterious) influence of Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami on Bush and Cheney. Book Updates is a non-partisan exercise: I link to things I like and don’t like. No endorsements, just pointers. Tue, Oct 5 2004 11:58 am |
| Belmont Club. I’m delighted to get a permanent link from Belmont Club, the outstanding, anonymous weblog written by someone who calls himself Wretchard. Belmont Club, devoted largely to Iraq and terrorism, gets 20,000 visitors a day, which puts it way ahead of Juan Cole, Daniel Pipes, or this humble amateur. Some of those thousands are stopping by over here. But since I can’t email Wretchard (his address bounces mail), I’ll make the plea here, just in case he drops in: it’s Kramer with a K, not a C. Many thanks. Mon, Oct 4 2004 5:21 pm |
| Cut out middlemen! Lee Smith has an interesting piece at Slate.com about the disconnect between government’s dire need for Arabic translators and the government’s own programs (e.g. Title VI) meant to encourage language study in universities. Bottom line: Washington’s entire approach has to be revised. The most remarkable quote comes from Rep. Peter Hoekstra, the Michigan Republican who wrote the (stalled) Title VI reform bill, HR 3077: “Maybe we’ll focus more on driving dollars to students rather than academic programs. If we provide incentives to students, colleges will see there’s a market for creating these programs that emphasize language proficiency.” Excellent idea, and a real alternative to throwing money down the hole of what has become Entitlement VI. Mon, Oct 4 2004 11:01 am |
| Those French. John J. Miller, national political reporter for National Review, has a new co-authored book, published officially this coming Tuesday: Our Oldest Enemy: A History of America’s Disastrous Relationship with France. According to the book description, the authors “demonstrate that France has never been our friend, has always been our rival, and has often been our enemy.” Three years ago, Miller wrote a National Review article inspired by my book, Ivory Towers on Sand, and it’s still a good read. He’s also set up a website for his book, where you can read an excerpt. He’ll be on O’Reilly on Monday night. Update: O’Reilly cancelled. Sun, Oct 3 2004 6:13 pm |
| France gets spanking. The French pretend to be great connoisseurs of the Arab world. You Yanks lack finesse, they say. So read this AFP account of the madcap blundering that has dogged French efforts to spring the French hostages in Iraq. A leading French weekly opines that the affair “could be judged ridiculous if it were not a matter of life and death.” The government is impotent, and shady middlemen are freelancing, raising and dashing hopes. One paper suggests that Syria is causing the latest problems: Damascus wants to punish Chirac, who’s joined the growing international clamor for Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. My prediction: the hostages eventually will be freed, but only after France has been thoroughly humiliated—the point of the exercise. Sun, Oct 3 2004 1:01 pm |
| Said was convinced. In the spring of 2003, the late Edward Said participated in a Cairo roundtable with journalists from Al-Ahram. In the Arab world, Said was regarded as a very great expert on U.S. politics, about which the journalists peppered him with questions. And this is what he told them: “I and many others are convinced that Bush will try to negate the 2004 elections: we’re dealing with a putschist, conspiratorial, paranoid deviation that’s very anti-democratic.” Well, I’m still holding my breath, but if there’s no putsch in the next few weeks, I guess we’ll know who suffered from paranoia. The double tragedy is that Said could say such a thing despite having lived for over fifty years in America, and that clueless people in the Arab world believed him. Sun, Oct 3 2004 12:59 am |
| Neo-Nazis too. In my introduction to the edited volume The Jewish Discovery of Islam, I showed how Jewish scholars pioneered an empathetic approach to Islam in nineteenth-century Europe. Now the website of the neo-Nazi National Alliance runs a slick piece based on my intro, claiming that the “subversive, Islamophile Orientalism of Jewish scholars” is the source of the “massive loss of European will that has allowed the growing Muslim invasion once again assailing the continent….If Kramer’s analysis is correct, we can blame Jews.” Edward Said and I are denounced for subverting civilization, and there is this: “Islam has very few virtues, but anti-Semitism is, luckily, among them.” Disinfect screen after reading. Fri, Oct 1 2004 11:10 pm |
| Aliens and Araby. John E. Mack, Harvard psychiatry professor and the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Lawrence of Arabia, died earlier this week when he was struck by a car in London. Most obituaries mention his belief in alien abductions (Harvard investigated him), but praise the biography. So I recall the devastating commentary on the book by the late Elie Kedourie. He wrote that Mack had “no more than scratched the surface” of the relevant public archives, and he dismissed Mack’s historical judgment as “uncritical and unreliable.” Mack’s life of Lawrence was “innocent of the complexities” of Middle Eastern politics, for which he substituted “modish slogans and shibboleths.” “As I often say,” Mack once told an interviewer, “a Harvard Prof can only make a fool of himself once.” Make that twice. Fri, Oct 1 2004 2:49 pm |
Author: Martin Kramer
Shiites and U.S. Policy: Between Allies and Adversaries
This lecture was delivered by Martin Kramer on October 16, 2004, at the 2004 Weinberg Founders Conference, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.
In invading Iraq, the United States destroyed longstanding Sunni hegemony over that country. By its attempts to establish a democratic order, the United States seems destined to empower the Shiites, who form a majority of the population. This empowerment has yet to unfold, but when it does, it will have repercussions.
This moment reminds me of the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution in 1979, when we asked the same question. What will be the impact of the revolution on Shiites elsewhere? At that time, many analysts anticipated that the entire region was on the brink of a Shiite revolt. The Iranian revolution would undermine the established order and bring Shiites out from the shadows. In Iraq, where the Shiites form a majority, and in Lebanon, where they form the largest sectarian community, Shiites would be impossible to suppress. Their grievances against the Sunni-inflicted Arab nationalist order would be as irresistible as the Iranian revolution itself. We were on the brink of a Shiite era.
It did not happen. And the reason it did not happen can be summarized in two words: Saddam Hussein. It was Saddam Hussein who rallied the Sunni-led regimes around him in his war with Iran. It was Saddam Hussein who ruthlessly crushed the fledgling Shiite movement in Iraq. Saddam Hussein cast himself as the Arab bulwark against the Iranian hordes, but many in the Arab world also saw him as the Sunni champion against Shiite ascendancy.
Thanks in large measure to Saddam Hussein, the Iranian Revolution never really spread. He blocked its export to Iraq, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia. In Lebanon, the Shiite group Hizballah gained a foothold, but only because Syria licensed it to attack Israel. There was no Shiite-led Islamic revolution in Lebanon, and whenever Hizballah got out of line, Syria put it in its place.
The legacy of the Iranian revolution and Hizballah’s terrorism gave Shiism a reputation as an almost inherently anti-American form of Islam. The United States had seen Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini use Shiite themes to make an anti-American revolution and to establish a theocratic dictatorship. It saw Hizballah play on Shiite themes to rally its followers in Lebanon to support bombings, hijackings, and hostage-taking. Hizballah was seen then much as al-Qaeda is seen today, and Shiism was regard then much as Wahhabism is regarded today.
This legacy informed the U.S. decision not to support the Shiite revolt in Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. The fear was that it would open Iraq up to Iranian penetration. In 1991, Iraqi Shiites paid the price for Khomeini’s anti-Americanism and Hizballah’s terrorism.
Over the next decade, Americans pondered whether their assumptions about Shiism had been right. Iraqi Shiites set about persuading American policy makers that the Shiites in a liberated Iraq would be free of Iranian influence. The Shiites in Iraq, they said, would never be pawns in Iranian hands, and Iraqi Shiism would not spawn a new version of Hizballah. Iraqi Shiites had their own, largely secular, priorities. They had their own religious leadership. And they might form a partnership with the United States if America would liberate them. The United States allowed itself to be persuaded this was so.
In the end, the obstacle of Saddam Hussein was removed not by Iranian human-wave attacks and Ayatollah Khomeini, but by U.S. guided munitions and President Bush. Saddam delayed the Shiite moment. U.S. intervention has brought it back.
The consequences of this are difficult to foresee. There is no question that the removal of Saddam has set the stage for a revival of Iraq’s historic role in Shia Islam. By now, most Americans are aware that Iraq contains the holiest Shia shrines, the Shrine of the Imam Ali in Najaf, the Shrine of the Imam Husayn in Karbala, and other important shrines in other cities. But these are not merely places of pilgrimage and burial, and Najaf is not just the Jerusalem or the Lourdes of the Shiites. It is also an Oxford and a Cambridge. It was the great center of scholarship and study, a seat of apprenticeship for Shiite clerics. Aspiring young Shiites once flocked to Iraq from the four corners of the world, especially from Iran and Lebanon. The Grand Ayatollah Ali Husayn al-Sistani himself is a classic example. He was born in Iran. He came to Najaf as a young man to study and he stayed. But he still speaks Arabic with a distinct Persian accent, which may be one reason we never hear him speak in public.
Saddam’s regime shut out most of the foreign Shiites. He expelled many who had been resident in Iraq for decades. The centers of scholarship and learning atrophied, and places like Qom and Mashhad in Iran replaced them. But the liberation of Iraq has made it possible to imagine the restoration of Iraq’s Shia institutions to their former glory. That would shift the center of Shiism back to Iraq and away from Iran, which is one of the reasons Iran has such a keen interest in establishing influence over Iraq’s Shiite religious institutions.
Iraq is also immensely important to Lebanese Shiites. In earlier generations, virtually all of the senior Shiite clerics in Lebanon were schooled in Iraq. The most senior Shiite cleric in Lebanon today is Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah. His father went to Iraq to study and then settled in Najaf. Fadlallah was born in Najaf; he lived and studied there until the age of thirty, when he came to Lebanon.
The younger generation of clerics beneath Fadlallah has had to study in Iran, but there is no doubt that a new generation would prefer to study in Iraq, which has very great prestige in the eyes of Lebanese Shiites.
Are the Shiites adversaries or allies? The answer is that they are something of both. The adversarial relationship is rooted in the history of U.S. relations with Iran and Hizballah. For more than twenty years, the United States had a reputation as the adversary of Shiite empowerment. It clashed spectacularly with Khomeini’s Iran and Hizballah. It allied itself with strongly anti-Shiite regimes in the Sunni Arab world, primarily Saudi Arabia and Saddam’s Iraq. And even when it broke with Saddam after the Kuwait invasion, the United States refused to lift a finger to help Iraq’s Shiites. That legacy is far from erased. The United States remains in an adversarial relationship with Iran and Hizballah, whose leaders still lead enthusiasts in chants of “death to America.”
There are two new developments. First, the United States now confronts another virulent form of extreme Islamism of the al-Qaeda variety. This variety of Islamism, which is Sunni and tinged with the doctrines of Saudi Wahhabism, is riddled with anti-Shiite prejudice. In the cosmology of these extreme Sunnis, the Shiites belong right down there with Americans and Jews as devilish subverters of true Islam. Where there are no Americans or Jews, as in Pakistan, Shiite targets will do just fine. The United States, by declaring war on these Sunni extremists—the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Abu Musab Zarqawi, and the Wahhabi hate network—is battling the visceral enemies of Shiism. This lays the foundations for a potential alliance of convenience.
The second factor is that the United States not only removed Saddam, but is now fighting the Sunni extremists who want their dominance of Iraq back. The Sunni extremists in Iraq have already targeted Shiite holy places and clerics. Because the Shiites do not have the means to strike back, they are counting on the United States to neutralize the threat. And the United States, by preaching democracy for Iraq, is essentially preparing the groundwork for the ascendance of a Shiite majority. Iraq’s Shiites need the United States to carry them to power, and the United States needs the Shiites to legitimize the U.S. mission in Iraq. So here, too, there are grounds for an alliance of convenience whose champion on the Shiite side is Ayatollah Sistani.
Among the Shiites, two models for achieving ascendancy, for realizing the Shiite moment, are in competition. The first is the Iranian-inspired Hizballah model. Its basic premise is that the United States is the enemy of Islam in general and of Shiism in particular. The United States inevitably will betray the Shiites because its real interests lie with the corrupt Sunni monarchies and with Israel. For the Shiites to realize their moment in the Middle East and for other Muslims to accept their leadership, Shiites must lead the resistance to American and Israeli hegemony.
Hizballah offers itself as an example of how a Shiite movement can transcend its sectarian origins to capture the imagination of the Muslim masses. While Arab regimes and Yasser Arafat were trading away Arab rights to get back territory, Hizballah waged a determined resistance to drive Israel out of Lebanon and ultimately achieved what no Arab army or the PLO ever achieved. It drove Israel from Arab land. It put an end to an Israeli occupation without making any concession and without offering peace in return.
And since the Israeli withdrawal, Hizballah has taken its struggle into the heart of Israel through its material and moral support for the Palestinian intifada. Hizballah has smuggled arms, subsidized the so-called “martyrdom operations,” and spread its propaganda on al-Manar television. Hizballah presents itself to the Arab Muslim masses, to the Arab street, as the last standard bearer of genuine independence from Western domination and Israeli hegemony.
This is the resistance model. The message of Hizballah and its Iranian allies to Iraq’s Shiites is that resistance will take them from the margins to the center. It will put the Shiites at the vanguard of a struggle that is destined to prevail, the struggle of the Muslim masses to replace American military, economic, and cultural hegemony with the authentic and true values of Islam. We see strong echoes of this resistance discourse in the movement of Muqtada al-Sadr.
Opposing the resistance model is what we might call the democracy model. According to this model, the Shiites are now in a demographic position, both in Iraq and in Lebanon, to become the dominant factor in politics. If there were true one-man, one-vote systems in Lebanon and Iraq, the Shiites would inevitably occupy the center of the political arena. Since Iraq and Lebanon are central states in the Arab world, this would finally put the Shiites on a par with the Sunnis and break the Sunni monopolies enshrined in the dogmas of Arab nationalism.
Because the United States has ceased to be a status-quo power in the Middle East, because it is driving a democracy agenda, both in Iraq and, lately, in Lebanon, it is objectively the ally of the Shiites. The Shiite road to power runs through democracy, not resistance, and a de facto alliance with U.S. power to clear the road makes sense. This approach has important adherents, including Ayatollah Sistani, but it is not nearly as well articulated as the resistance rhetoric that often drowns it out.
Can the United States influence this competition of approaches? On the very simplest level, it already has. Just as the United States does not wish to be perceived as the enemy of Islam, it does not wish to be cast as the enemy of Shiism. The Shia shrines in Iraq are symbols of the creed; the U.S. facilitation of pilgrimages and avoiding damage to the shrines during battles has been vitally important in countering the idea that America is an enemy of the Shiites.
But just as the United States cannot have a policy toward Islam per se, it cannot have a policy toward Shiism per se. U.S. policy has been driven, and it will continue to be driven, by the usual factors. In Iraq in particular, policy will be driven by Iraq-specific factors.
But we should be aware that U.S. actions have shifted the sectarian balance. In promoting democracy, the United States does not just undermine the authoritarian order, it inevitably undermines Sunni primacy. It is often said that the Shiites constitute only one-tenth of all Muslims. There are about 130 million Shiites. But about 120 million of them live in the region between Lebanon and Pakistan where they almost equal Sunnis in number. The shift of political power in their direction will raise sectarian tensions. It will anger dispossessed Sunnis, who may gravitate towards extremism, and it will require the United States to find its own delicate balance so that it is not drawn into any sectarian conflict.
Until the Iraq war, the United States was largely preoccupied with a highwire balancing act between Israel and the Arabs. Now, the United States will have to juggle Shiites and Sunnis at the same time. All wars have unintended consequences. A major challenge is to identify them as they emerge. This is potentially a huge one. It will require consummate skill and a lot of luck to turn it into a minor one.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my Muslim Brother
Martin Kramer delivered these remarks on September 24, on a panel entitled “Islam, Islamism, and U.S. Foreign Policy.” He shared the podium with the French Arabist Gilles Kepel, author of a new book, The War for Muslim Minds. The event took place at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
On September 11, the Washington Post published an article entitled “In Search of Friends Among the Foes.” The subject was the debate over whether the United States should begin a dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood and other so-called “moderate” Islamists. The very next day, the newspaper ran a lengthy opinion piece, arguing that the United States should do just that: “We need to listen to the bad guys too to understand where the fissures—and opportunities—might be.”
Reading the article, I had a pervasive sense of déjà vu. A similar debate took place in the early- and mid-1990s, among many of the same participants. The question of dialogue is a perennial one, arising whenever it looks like Islamists may be gaining ground. The debate a decade ago was prompted by the Islamist surge in Algeria and Egypt. That surge subsided, and so did the debate. The renewed debate is prompted by a forboding that Islamists may come out on top in Saudi Arabia or Iraq.
Today, there is an added incentive for pursuing such dialogue. Even if these so-called “moderate” Islamists are not about to take power, they might be useful as a counter to the jihadists. After all, for several decades, the United States looked to “moderate” Islamists to help counter the Soviet threat. Miles Copeland, CIA operative, wrote in his book The Game of Nations about how the United States, circa 1950s, tried to find an Iraqi “holy man” to carry the anti-Communist message. And there was the cooperation with Islamists that flourished after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. If the U.S. so effectively played this card against the Soviet Union, why not play it against Al Qaeda? There are rivalries there, so we are told; why not build on them? “You want in a Machiavellian way to have fundamentalists do [our] dirty work,” one veteran of the old battles tells the Washington Post.
Add to this the sense that the U.S. paid a price for not having some Islamic leverage on its side during the Iranian revolution. About 20 years ago, a State Department veteran, Ambassador Hermann Eilts, made the case for dialogue before Congress:
We must develop new modes of diplomacy, potentially involving Islamic leaders, for possible use in crises situations. During the Carter Administration, efforts were made by President Carter to persuade estimable Islamic leaders, respected by Khomeini, to intercede with the Ayatollah for the release of the hostages. It did not work because no Islamic leader could be found with the stature to confront Khomeini on an Islamic level or a willingness to stick his neck out for the U.S. But this type of contingency, that is, soliciting intercession on an Islamic level, should be kept in mind and planned for well in advance. Hence, the desirability of sustaining close and constant dialogue with senior Islamic figures everywhere.
Whenever I hear the word “dialogue,” I ask myself the question: dialogue about what? What does the United States have to say to the Muslim Brotherhood in a “close and constant dialogue”? What does it hope to learn?
There is a facile argument that it is good to hear their ideas first-hand. But there is nothing that cannot be learned about the Muslim Brotherhood’s positions from readily available sources. A good analyst, relying on the mass of openly available texts, will have no trouble eliciting the worldview of, say, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood’s actual paramount guide. Tell me you want to meet with an Islamist to tempt him with a cash-stuffed envelope, that is one thing. But meet him to sound him out? If you have done your homework, he will tell you nothing you do not know already.
Quid pro quo. The point of dialogue is give-and-take. It is here that the problem arises, and it is this: Islamists would give us very little, and take from us a great deal.
What would the so-called “moderate” Islamists demand from such a dialogue? Here is the laundry list:
- Visas for activists seeking refuge or asylum or the chance to proselytize in the United States.
- The freedom to raise money in the United States, ostensibly for widows and orphans, for school lunches and prayer rugs (i.e., access to cash-stuffed envelopes).
- U.S. agreement to urge or compel Arab-Muslim regimes like Egypt’s to open space for Islamist political activism which is now suppressed.
- A U.S. repeal of its Middle East policy, including its support for Israel.
And what do the “moderate” Islamists offer in return?
- Condemnations of the jihadists for actions like the September 11 attacks, the March 11 attacks in Madrid, and the slaughters in Bali and Beslan.
- The implicit promise that once the United States throws open its doors to Islamist activism, it will be accorded immunity from further attacks. (The implication is that, to improve one’s immune system, one should allow freedom of operation to an even wider range of Islamists.)
Any dialogue with the Muslim Brotherhood or its appendages must inevitably develop along these lines. This is the core deal, the very substance of any “close and constant dialogue.” And there is ample precedent: there are several European governments that have engaged in such dialogue and cut this deal, either in whole or in part.
Let me explain why, to my mind and from the point of view of the United States, this is a raw deal.
If the United States has one achievement to show for the war on terror, it is this: there has not been a repeat of a 9/11-style attack on any scale, even in miniature, on U.S. soil. There are those who claim that U.S. policy has escalated the terror war, and that it has been unsuccessful. But this ignores the fact that the continental United States remains the prime terrorist target. This country’s enemies have been unable to strike it, partly because of the stringent measures of homeland security put in place after 9/11. Why would the United States endanger this indisputable achievement by opening itself up to Islamist penetration? Why would it run the risk of becoming another Londonistan? In return for what?
For we know from experience that Islamist “condemnations” of other Islamists tend to be hedged and conditional. And we know from experience that the money raised for the widows and orphans often gets diverted to assassins and bombers. And we especially know that Islamists use the freedoms of the West to attack precisely those in the East who are willing to work with us closely, whether they be regimes or liberals. This offends Muslim anti-Islamists mightily, and it makes us appear like wavering allies.
And even if, for the sake of argument, we wanted to play this tune in a minor key, there is no certainty that we would know who the “moderate” Islamists are. If there is anything more simplistic than lumping Islamists together, it has been the attempt to divide them into the neat classifications of “moderate” and “extremist.” Gilles Kepel in his book has a crucial passage on the branches of salafism, the pietistic and the jihadist. He comments on
how porous the two branches of salafism really are: to pass from one to the other is quite easy. The intense indoctrination preached by the sheikhists [e.g., the Saudi-style imams] reduces their flock’s capacity for personal reasoning, which makes these followers easy prey for a clever jihadist preacher. The first stage of brainwashing occurs at the hands of a pietistic salafist imam. Later they encounter a jihadist recruiting sergeant, who offers to quench their thirst for absolutes through a bracing activism.
Even if, as Kepel writes, such a migration to jihadism is not inevitable, we cannot know in advance or even in real-time when it is occurring. So why would we take a chance?
Engaging Islamists in a common cause against the Soviets was one thing: the Soviets were unbelievers. Even so, the anti-Soviet partnership was fraught with risks, culminating in the blowback of 9/11. Here we would be engaging Islamists in the hope that they would counter their own radical offspring. The risks here, in trying to turn Islamist against Islamist, would be greater by magnitudes.
Europe’s bind. So the advantages of dialogue are not at all clear, while the disadvantages are obvious. If one needs more evidence, one might look to Europe. Kepel’s last chapter is called “The Battle for Europe,” and he opens with these words: “With events in Madrid in spring 2004, Europe emerged as the primary battlefield on which the future of global Islam will be decided.” This is the same Europe that cut a deal with Islamists years ago, offering visas and asylum on the understanding that Europe was neutral ground. If it is now the “primary battlefield,” as Kepel describes it, it is because the United States has successfully pushed back the front line since 9/11, and because of decades of complacency of European elites.
What Europeans are discovering is that deals with Islamists, once cut, don’t always last. The U.S.-Islamist deal over Afghanistan did not last, and the European-Islamist deal is coming apart now. Europe’s unique dilemma is that Islamism is so thoroughly implanted in vast emigre communities (17 million), that it may be necessary for Europe to cut still another deal, even less favorable than the previous one. Kepel has an interesting section on how some Muslims have come to consider Europe part of dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam. The trade-off these Islamists now offer is a forgoing of violence in return for implementation of Islamic law for Muslims on European soil—nothing less. And when Europe balks at this, as France did when it banned headcarves from schools, it finds itself held hostage.
In fact, dialogue with Islamists has never provided the iron-clad immunity Europeans thought it would. For example, it was from a Paris suburb that Khomeini conducted his campaign against the Shah. When he returned to Iran, an Air France jet carried him home. The French, by their hospitality and solicitude, were quite certain they would enjoy an inside track with the revolutionary regime.
Did they? Over the next few years, their troops were blown up in Beirut by Iran’s clients, their nationals were abducted in Lebanon at Iran’s behest, and Iranian assassins wantonly killed dissidents on their territory. Agents of Iran even subjected Paris to a bombing campaign, which prompted the so-called war of the embassies, during which both countries laid siege to one another’s embassies. In short, the French got the same treatment as the Americans, if not worse, despite a policy that had effectively coddled Iran’s Islamists on their march to power. This has been replicated today: despite France’s opposition to U.S. policy in Iraq, Iraqi Muslim extremists have seized French hostages, and have resisted all appeals for their release.
The wrong Muslims. If some of the Islamists today were on a march to power, the case for dialogue might be more compelling. But where are these Islamists? Where is the Khomeini of Saudi Arabia or Iraq? Skeptical as we may be about the prospects for the Saudi monarchy or the Iraqi government, it is difficult to see Islamists who could replace them. And what would we talk about in a dialogue with the kinds of Islamists who seek to seize power in Saudi Arabia or Iraq? Would not such a dialogue merely antagonize and alienate those forces for stability that still have a chance to see the crisis through? And do we really think that were we to facilitate the ascent of any of these groups, they would be grateful for it? Any more so than the Afghan mujahideen?
In sum, dialogue with “moderate” Islamists, far from undercutting the jihadists, would undercut their opponents. It would muddle the message of the war on terror—the message that there can be no middle ground, and that Muslims must choose. Islamists not only wish to create a middle ground in the Middle East, but they seek to extend it to American soil. Few things could undermine the war on terror more thoroughly than dialogue with them, because it would facilitate just that.
The United States has no use for equivocating Islamists. The United States does have use for dialogue with believing Muslims—those who share its vision of a Middle East that is free, and free of terror.
Martin Kramer on the Middle East 
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