Author: Martin Kramer

Shiites and U.S. Policy: Between Allies and Adversaries

On By Martin Kramer

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.

Shiites in Middle East

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

On By Martin Kramer

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:

  1. Visas for activists seeking refuge or asylum or the chance to proselytize in the United States.
  2. 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).
  3. U.S. agreement to urge or compel Arab-Muslim regimes like Egypt’s to open space for Islamist political activism which is now suppressed.
  4. A U.S. repeal of its Middle East policy, including its support for Israel.

And what do the “moderate” Islamists offer in return?

  1. Condemnations of the jihadists for actions like the September 11 attacks, the March 11 attacks in Madrid, and the slaughters in Bali and Beslan.
  2. 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.

Sandbox: September 2004

On By Martin Kramer
Intifada lessons. I’m on the road, with no time to post, so here’s just a pointer. Brig. Gen. Michael Herzog is an old friend who recently finished a stint as top military aid to Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz. He’s written a wise and balanced assessment of four years of Palestinian-Israeli war. Read part one.
Wed, Sep 29 2004 11:01 pm
Foucault’s folly. In France, they’ve been marking 20 years to the passing of Michel Foucault. In America and Britain, the followers of Edward Said are marking the one-year anniversary of his death. In English-speaking academe, Foucault and Said go together like knowledge and power. So read this timely dissection of Foucault’s folly: his take on the Iranian revolution, as it unfolded. Foucault (October 1978): “One thing must be clear. By ‘Islamic government,’ nobody in Iran means a political regime in which the clergy would have a role of supervision or control.” And there’s a lot more where that came from. Edward Said suffered from a milder case of the same myopia when it came to Islamism. Is there a pattern here?
Mon, Sep 27 2004 7:30 pm
Hate speech. Last month, a group called Mouths Wide Open put on a collaborative performance at Washington Square Church in Manhattan, as a counterpoint to the Republican convention. They performed mostly music and sketches, in protest against administration policy. The sympathic reviewer in the New York Times ended by mentioning the low point: “Hamid Dabashi [see right below] delivered an incendiary diatribe, propelled by hatred of Israel and the United States—not just the current government, but the culture in general—that seemed out of place in this program. Yet it drew a standing ovation. The finale, in which Dominic Veconi, a boy soprano, sang ‘How Can I Keep from Singing?’ seemed even stranger coming immediately after Mr. Dabashi’s speech.” Hate speech does have a way of spoiling art.
Sun, Sep 26 2004 1:52 am
Academic fraud. More from the execrable travelogue (see below) of Hamid Dabashi, the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies at Columbia. “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’.” Now how did Dabashi manage to glimpse into the deepest corners of the non-soul of the so-called “Israelis”? He doesn’t know Hebrew. On his trip to the West Bank, he skipped all of Israel except the airport. He didn’t have a single encounter with an Israeli who wasn’t on security detail. Yet he presumes to know what resides in Israel’s “deepest corners.” Hamid Dabashi: academic fraud.
Sun, Sep 26 2004 1:51 am
Dabashi gets dirt. Hamid Dabashi, professor at Bir Zeit-on-Hudson (Columbia), sets off for Jerusalem to get a clump of earth to place on the grave of Edward Said in Lebanon. On this, his first visit, he has no contact with Israel and Israelis, except for soldiers on guard duty and security guards at the airport. But he can see into Israel’s being with x-ray vision. “Half a century of systematic maiming and murdering of another people has left its deep marks on the faces of these people, the way they talk, the way they walk, the way they handle objects, the way they greet each other, the way they look at the world. There is an endemic prevarication to this machinery, a vulgarity of character that is bone-deep and structural to the skeletal vertebrae of its culture.” The passage is antisemitic.
Sat, Sep 25 2004 12:31 am
Vote MESA. In the spirit of democracy and mischief, I’m conducting a poll to see who’s the favorite in the elections for president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). It’s over at Sandstorm, on the sidebar. Your choices are pretty limited: Juan Cole or Fred Donner. You don’t have to be a member of MESA to join in the poll, but members are especially welcome. Needless to say, the poll ain’t scientific. Just good, clean fun. Read up on the candidates here.
Wed, Sep 22 2004 6:44 pm
The Big Lie. One William Fisher, journalist, has written an article on HR3077 for the Middle East Times. Fisher: “Big Brother will come in the form of an ‘advisory board’, which would have at least two appointees representing national security agencies. The board would oversee curricula, course materials, and even the hiring of faculty at institutions that accept federal government money for international studies.” Every claim in these two sentences is a bald lie. (The second sentence is refuted by the plain English of HR3077: “Nothing in this title shall be construed to authorize the board to mandate, direct, or control an institution of higher education’s specific instructional content, curriculum, or program of instruction.”) To dispel the lies, Congress should pass the bill.
Tue, Sep 21 2004 5:07 pm
Impact of Terror. Last night, CNN Presents broadcast Tim Wolochatiuk’s Impact of Terror, a documentary film on the 2001 suicide bombing of the Sbarro pizzeria in Jerusalem. The terrorist attack killed 15 innocents (seven of them children). One of the film’s merits is that it makes no mention at all of the bomber’s identity or his motive. It’s the fashion in documentaries to juxtapose bomber and victim. This is the profound moral failing of Simone Bitton’s The Bombing, a travesty predicated on a false symmetry, casting the perpetrators as victims. Suicide bombers deserve documentaries—completely separate ones. (See, for example, Suicide Bombers by Tom Roberts, shown by PBS over the summer.) CNN will broadcast Impact of Terror again this coming Saturday, 8pm and 11pm Eastern.
Mon, Sep 20 2004 5:52 pm
Woody, vénéré. So over the weekend I’m passing through Frankfurt airport, and I pick up a copy of Le Monde, and here’s an article about Woody Allen at a film festival in Spain, telling a press conference that Bush’s reelection would be a tragedy. Minor news interest, right? (Not one U.S. paper picked it up). But the Allen item is on page one of Le Monde. France and America: clash of civilizations.
Mon, Sep 20 2004 4:59 pm
French questions. Over the weekend, Richard Cohen wrote a piece for the International Herald Tribune on the French hostage crisis. As I did earlier in the Sandbox, he recalls that this is the second time around for Jacques Chirac on French hostages. Earlier instance: Lebanon, mid-1980s. Since then, France has bowed deeply to Arab public opinion, especially on Palestine and Iraq—but not deeply enough. “The kidnappers scoff at the view of France as friend,” writes Cohen. They say it is the enemy of the Muslims, for backing the Algerian regime against Islamists, for banning headscarves in public schools, and so on. Bottom line: “Chirac desperately needs to do better this time or he will face what he has up to now avoided: intense questioning on French Middle East policy.” Wouldn’t that be refreshing?
Mon, Sep 20 2004 4:40 pm
Bernard Lewis on Jewishness. Read this reflection by Bernard Lewis on Jewish identity. He opens with a personal vignette.
Mon, Sep 20 2004 4:14 pm
“Money was diverted.” After Peter Hoekstra’s appointment as chair of the House Intelligence Committee (see below), he gave the interview at the main link. Q: “Experts say there is still a critical lack of translators of Arabic and other languages. Why isn’t there a greater sense of urgency on these issues?” Hoekstra: “As Congress was appropriating money for languages and these kinds of things, sometimes this money was diverted to go into other areas. There has been a lot of emphasis but sometimes not a lot of results. That is a problem, and Congress shares some of the blame for that.” I italicized the first line because it alludes to academe’s diversion of Title VI money away from languages. And the second, because it points to the solution: more Congressional oversight.
Sat, Sep 18 2004 3:15 pm
Hoekstra and HR3077. The author of HR3077, the Title VI reform bill, is Rep. Peter Hoekstra, a Michigan Republican. The bill’s critics usually fail to mention him at all, as though he were some sort of droid acting on behalf of Stanley Kurtz or me. That’s a dumb mistake, because HR3077 is his idea. Now Hoekstra’s stature has risen: last month, he was named chair of the House Intelligence Committee. (He fills the place vacated by Rep. Porter Goss, Bush’s choice for CIA director.) Hoekstra has been to Iraq four times over the past year. He’s razor sharp, and he’s determined to improve this country’s intelligence. He wrote and introduced HR3077 because the U.S. needs a demonstrable return on its investment in academe. Now that Chairman Hoekstra is Mr. Intelligence in the House, his bill will benefit.
Tue, Sep 14 2004 12:29 pm
Tinfoil cap. I can’t help quoting Eli Lake‘s NYSun column from last week on the conspiracy theorists who’ve come out of the woodwork in the Larry Franklin affair (a case so murky, it hasn’t got a name). Lake cites a few far-out examples, but names Juan Cole as “taking the cake for outrageous libel.” Lake: “Only a few years ago, Mr. Cole’s blather might be consigned to that corner of the Internet reserved for tinfoil-capped witnesses of alien landings and the self-appointed investigators of the British royal family’s drug cartels. But it is a sign of the times that Mr. Cole is appearing as a commentator on National Public Radio and has been quoted in the Washington Post and has spoken before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.” Lake joins Andrew Sullivan (see below) as a Cole-burner.
Tue, Sep 14 2004 7:45 am
Come over from Slate? If you’ve arrived here via a link from Lee Smith’s article at Slate, he’s referring to the entry “France held hostage” from September 6. Scroll down in this box.
Tue, Sep 14 2004 5:46 am
Same analysis, different diagnosis. Gilles Kepel wrote a piece last week for the Financial Times. (The main link is to a reprint elsewhere.) He argues that Al-Qaeda is at an impasse. The Taliban are out, the U.S. occupies Baghdad, Hamas is stuck behind a fence. In seizing the school in Beslan and abducting French journalists in Iraq, the jihadists sought new “modes of action that will trigger mass mobilization.” I’ll go with him that far. But then he claims that the Russians (and Americans) have missed the point by using force. Far wiser the French, whose restraint has let Muslim opinion build against the jihadists. Here I part with Kepel. Beslan has done more to split Muslim opinion. And the French have mortgaged their foreign policy to win Muslim sympathy. No model there—for a great power.
Mon, Sep 13 2004 8:41 am
1683 and all that. In July, Bernard Lewis gave an interview to the German daily Die Welt. (It’s been translated into 12 languages, but not English. It’s summarized in English here.) In closing, he made this mega-prediction: Europe will have a Muslim majority by the end of the 21st century. It will become an Islamic extension of Arab North Africa. Sequel: EU single market commissioner Frits Bolkestein (Netherlands) gave a speech the other day, quoting Lewis to argue against Turkey’s inclusion in the EU. “I do not know if Lewis is right,” said Bolkestein, “or whether it will be at that speed, but if he is right, the liberation of Vienna in 1683 would have been in vain.” Lewis himself has said, “I don’t see a hope in hell of Turkey being admitted” to the EU—unless the EU “becomes a Muslim state.” And he is Turkey’s friend.
Mon, Sep 13 2004 4:05 am
9/11 context. Three years later, the context of 9/11 is still a contested issue. On September 16, 2001, I published my first take on the attacks, offered here at the main link. I have reread it, and I would not change a word of it. I wrote it at a moment when my academic colleagues were desperately repeating the mantra that the attacks had nothing to do with any extant reading of Islam. (Juan Cole, speaking a full two weeks after 9/11: “I’ve spent 30 years now studying Islam and this scenario does not sound to me like Islamic fundamentalism…it doesn’t sound to me like it has anything to do with Islam.”) I like to think that we understand more about 9/11 than we did in those first days and weeks. But the misunderstandings, many of them deliberate, keep resurfacing. The work must go on.
Sun, Sep 12 2004 4:11 am
Our Muslim brothers. The Washington Post runs a thorough piece on the international Muslim Brotherhood. There’s a contradiction at its heart: the reporters, John Mintz and Douglas Farah, bring all the evidence of the Brotherhood’s links to terrorism, and the “experts” are all quoted as believing the U.S. should engage it anyway. “It is the preeminent movement in the Muslim world,” former CIA official Graham Fuller tells them. “It’s something we can work with.” I thought the U.S. had worked with the Brotherhood, in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and in return got the first World Trade Center bombing. Of course, Fuller also thought it possible to work with Khomeini, and provided the intellectual framework for U.S.-encouraged arms sales to Iran. I tell his story here.
Sat, Sep 11 2004 5:53 pm
Book updates. Head over to the Sandstorm page, and scroll down to the new book updates box. In the box, you’ll find four things: (1) a list of new releases on the Middle East, to which one or two new items will be added daily (with links to Amazon); (2) links to new reviews of Middle East-related books in major media; (3) Amazon’s top seller list for the Middle East; and (4) another top seller or featured list from Amazon, which I select according to circumstances (this week, it’s 9/11). This is beta for sure. It’s a Rube Goldberg machine. If at first the box doesn’t load, refresh, refresh again.
Sat, Sep 11 2004 1:30 pm
News and weather. The news feeds on the Sandstorm/News page are meant to provide you with a quick way to track the reports in a wide range of news sources, from the The New York Times to NPR, from Aljazeera.net to Haaretz. There are almost fifty feeds, all devoted exclusively to the Middle East or a part of it. But what if the feeds still leave you hungry? Now you can just scroll to the bottom of the page, and use the search box for Google News. Try it out. (If you don’t enter a search term, you get the top stories generally.) So bookmark the page, and start your day here. Also have a look at the weather outlook map for the Middle East. It updates automatically, twice a day.
Fri, Sep 10 2004 11:59 am
Kepel coming. Gilles Kepel, the French Islamicist (the French have this wonderful term, islamologue), is coming to the U.S. promote his new book, The War for Muslim Minds. Here’s my review of his last book. If you are on the invitation list of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, make a note now: Kepel and Kramer share the podium, September 24, noon.
Fri, Sep 10 2004 10:54 am
Requiem. Belated word reaches me from North Carolina, of the passing in April of the composer and recorder virtuoso Tui St. George Tucker. Each summer of my youth, I attended a small boy’s camp where she served as music director. (The camp was directed by the beloved classicist and German-language poet Vera Lachmann.) Tui’s obit: “With fiery red hair and an explosive temper that coincided with her Dionysian lust for life, Tui seared an enduring impression on the campers. The children were often elevated to musical greatness, performing such works as Bach’s Magnificat, and Handel’s Messiah, and even performing at New York’s Town Hall. At least two-dozen of the boys from Camp Catawba have gone on to become professional musicians.” Not I, but the impression has endured. Rest in peace.
Fri, Sep 10 2004 10:53 am
No comment. I’ve been using a comments add-on called Haloscan, which allows readers to post their comments. When Haloscan’s server is down, pages on which its comments feature is implemented don’t load at all. So Sandstorm and Sandbox were completely down this morning. It’s not the first time, and it’s no good. So I’ve expunged Haloscan, and we’ll do without comments until something better comes along. Addendum: Did some quick math: less than one out of every thousand visitors leaves a comment. So I think I’ll join Juan Cole and Daniel Pipes on this one, and dispense with comments altogether. Of course, I’m always eager to hear from readers (many more write than post comments). Mail me from the home page.
Thu, Sep 9 2004 7:45 am
Who’s selective? Zachary Lockman, in his rebuttal to me (see below), writes this: “Kramer claims in Ivory Towers that U.S. Middle East scholars have repeatedly made predictions that did not come true. His accusations are sometimes on target, though he is rather selective. He does not, for example, take his colleague Daniel Pipes to task for inaccurately predicting in the early 1980s that Islamist activism would decline as oil prices fell.” First: I took Pipes to task for that analysis 20 years ago, when I reviewed his book In the Path of God. Read the last three paragraphs of my review. Second: Pipes had the decency to admit error when events went against him. After 9/11, the academic establishment did the opposite, denying all error. Intellectual honesty? I’ll prefer Pipes any day.
Wed, Sep 8 2004 6:05 pm 
NGOs against Israel. In my last issue as editor of the Middle East Quarterly, I published this eye-opening study by Gerald M. Steinberg, entitled “NGOs Make War on Israel.” It’s just gone up on the web. Steinberg: “Major NGOs such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty, and Christian Aid, working closely with the media and groups such as the U.N. Human Rights Commission, have been instrumental in promoting the Palestinian political agenda, using the terminology of international law.” The blight of political advocacy extends even to Save the Children. Like academics, NGOs believe themselves to be above scrutiny, not to speak of accountability. Steinberg is campaigning to change that.
Wed, Sep 8 2004 5:29 pm
France held hostage. This matter of the French journalists held hostage in Iraq has prompted me to post a review article I published in 1990. The title: “France Held Hostage.” Back then, it was Hizbullah that held France hostage, grabbing journalists and other Frenchmen in Beirut. Jacques Chirac called the shots then too, and the current episode looks a bit like a reenactment. The difference: the pro-Iranian hostage-takers in the 1980s had a real grievance, France’s heavy pro-Iraq tilt. (Iran and Iraq were at war.) Those earlier hostages suffered long, and one of them died a miserable death, but France eventually cut a deal. That may be why France now finds itself held hostage again.
Mon, Sep 6 2004 6:00 pm
Hizbullah redux. Earlier I had mentioned Daniel Sobelman’s study of the rules that govern the “game” between Israel and Hizbullah. It’s now on the web. After explaining the rules, Sobelman concludes that they might have been made to be broken: “It is likely that the day is approaching when restraint by both sides on the northern border will not be enough to preserve stability, either because of an Israeli initiative to attack Hizbullah or because of a response to provocation attributed to the organization in the Palestinian context.” (The reference is to Hizbullah’s active incitement and promotion of Palestinian terrorism.)
Mon, Sep 6 2004 5:14 pm
Cole on a roll. Yeah, I know, I really should stop commenting on Juan Cole’s commentary. It’s just that it gets more outlandish by the day—he must have gone off his medication. And he so perfectly demonstrates my case against the Middle East studies establishment that I am drawn to him like a moth to a flame, like a kid to a candy store, like… Anyway, after another update on what he calls the “AIPAC spy case,” Cole delivers an out-of-the-blue tirade against Waled Phares, a media-savvy prof at Florida Atlantic U. “The FBI should investigate how Phares, an undistinguished academic with links to far rightwing Lebanese groups and the Likud clique, became the ‘terrorism analyst’ at MSNBC.” This is not meant as a joke: an earlier post suggested that Bernard Lewis be investigated (see below). Juan Edgar Hoover.
Sun, Sep 5 2004 5:44 pm
Sullivan on Cole. Andrew Sullivan takes Juan Cole to task, for his “glib and easy assignment of ulterior motives and bad faith.” Cole makes “unproven accusations that this administration is deliberately working against the interests of this country. If you ask me, that’s why the far-left Middle East academic elite has had so little influence over this debate. Their shrillness crowds out their expertise.” Cole responds rather meekly (Sullivan too big?), then makes this lament: “I mean, sure, I situate myself on the left side of the aisle, but ‘far left’? What could that mean? Isn’t it just name-calling?” Well, just the other day, Cole called me an “extremist.” I may be a few degrees right of center, but an “extremist”? Hardly. Name-calling. Cole gets a dose of his own—and he whines.
Sun, Sep 5 2004 3:02 pm 
The antidote. Zachary Lockman’s new book, Contending Visions of the Middle East: The History and Politics of Orientalism, is now out from Cambridge. It wasn’t conceived as such, but it will be used in universities (and maybe beyond) as the antidote to my Ivory Towers on Sand. (About ten pages are entirely devoted to refuting it.) Read the table of contents, the introduction, and the index of Lockman’s book. I’ll have more to say later.
Sat, Sep 4 2004 7:49 am 
Colecism. In one of Juan Cole’s postings yesterday, he speculates on the doings of “Israeli arms merchants connected to the government in Tel Aviv.” Actually, the government of Israel sits in Jerusalem, not Tel Aviv. The Knesset convenes, the cabinet deliberates, and the prime minister sits in Jerusalem. The “government in Tel Aviv” is a stock phrase in Arabic, usually employed to avoid mentioning Israel (as in “the government of Israel”), or simply to deny any association between Israel and Jerusalem. Sometimes a small slip tells a lot, and Cole’s slip tells us this: his vantage point on Israel isn’t just Arabist, it’s Arabic.
Thu, Sep 2 2004 9:41 am
Frozen feeds. The newsfeeds on the Sandbox/News page of this site are frozen in time (as of yesterday, Wednesday evening). Hopefully the problem will clear itself up soon. Update: Feeds are unfrozen! The news is current.
Thu, Sep 2 2004 4:00 am
Fadlallah condemns. Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, in Beirut, is getting some press for his take on the kidnapping of the two French journalists in Iraq. He’s agin’ it. This recalls his position in the 1980s, when he opposed the abduction of foreign journalists in Lebanon. The bad news is that Fadlallah’s condemnations didn’t count for much even in Lebanon. Terry Anderson, the American journalist, was abducted the day after he met with Fadlallah. The cleric immediately called for his release—and Anderson spent seven years as a hostage. Fadlallah endorsed an appeal for the release of a kidnapped French scholar, Michel Seurat, who was pro-Palestinian. Seurat died of disease in captivity. Not a good record. At the main link: my article (1990) treating Fadlallah and hostages.
Wed, Sep 1 2004 1:20 pm
Investigate Lewis! Juan Cole isn’t happy that the FBI’s Pentagon leak investigation is focused on Larry Franklin, who isn’t even…you know. To Cole’s mind, the “conspiracy of warmongering and aggression” includes not just Franklin’s Pentagon associates, not just AIPAC, but The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Daniel Pipes, and, yes, Bernard Lewis. Today Cole retails a “tip” from an unnamed source, on Lewis’s supposed influence over a Defense Department appointment. Cole’s tipster: “Were there ever to be a serious investigation of the Israeli infiltration of the Pentagon (unlikely, of course), one would certainly have to examine Bernard Lewis’s role here.” (Left-wing nuts call Lewis an Israeli agent; the right-wingers still think he’s MI5.) I guess this chart of the plot will have to be expanded.
Wed, Sep 1 2004 12:30 pm