Author: Martin Kramer

Glasnost in MESA

On By Martin Kramer

Lisa Anderson, dean of international affairs at Columbia and president of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), has sent a letter to members in the current MESA Newsletter. It contains a remarkably frank indictment of the performance of Middle Eastern studies over the past decade.

Anderson describes how the Middle East stagnated in the 1990s, dashing the academics’ hopes for democratization. “It was an ugly picture,” she admits, “and, to be candid, few American scholars of the Middle East did much to advertise it.”

Thousands of individually rational decisions, as my political science colleagues might observe, contributed to a collective abdication of responsibility. In the social sciences, graduate students who wanted jobs and junior faculty who wanted tenure mimicked their colleagues in other areas and looked for flickers of electoral politics and glimmers of economic privatization…and neglected the stubborn durability of the authoritarian regimes….More senior scholars, pained by the demoralization in the region and its neglect in their disciplines, suspended active research agendas in favor of administrative assignments in their universities….In the humanities, many scholars…were reluctant to jeopardize access to visas and research authorizations; in their excessive caution, they failed to speak out about the often appalling circumstances of their friends and colleagues there.

In sum, the practitioners either silenced themselves or parroted disciplinary dogmas. I made most of these points, with evidence, in the fourth chapter of my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America. I’m glad to see them finally conceded, instead of denied. Anderson’s own joint appearance with me on a panel in Washington in November was the first sign of glasnost in MESA. This is another.

In another part of her letter, Anderson takes an unfair stab at Campus Watch, for “claiming that half of MESA’s membership is ‘of Middle Eastern origin'” and that some of these MESAns have “brought their views with them.” Actually, the first flagging of the Middle Eastern origins of the members surfaced in a MESA presidential speech, delivered in 1992 by Barbara Aswad (and quoted by me in Ivory Towers). Aswad: “Our membership has changed over the years, and possibly half is of Middle Eastern heritage.” Campus Watch wasn’t the first to make that estimate.

When I brought Aswad’s quote, it was to dispute another claim about MESA, made by Edward Said:

During the 1980s, the formerly conservative Middle East Studies Association underwent an important ideological transformation….What happened in the Middle East Studies Association therefore was a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination.

I pointed out that so total an “ideological transformation” in MESA would not have taken place had there not been a massive shift in the ethnic composition of its membership, as attested by Aswad. And on the very same page, I quoted a political scientist who noted “the widespread, if undocumentable, impression that an individual’s ethnic background or political persuasion may influence hiring and tenure decisions” in Middle Eastern studies. The political scientist: Lisa Anderson.

Personally, I wouldn’t care if Middle Eastern studies were comprised entirely of people of “Middle Eastern heritage.” What I find objectionable is the way MESA has been transformed into “a metropolitan story of cultural opposition to Western domination.” That agenda does sound like something pulled straight out of Damascus or Tehran, and it’s certainly not the proper role of an American professional association. The problem with MESA is that so many of its past officers have tried to whip it into an ethnic lobby or a popular front. It’s this abysmal legacy that Professor Anderson would do right to disown in her next message to the members.

Sovietology: The original title of this posting was Perestroika in MESA. A reader, Fryar Calhoun, wrote to ask whether glasnost is more appropriate. He’s right. While Professor Anderson does write that “we may have to become more assertive as an organization,” and makes some modest suggestions, it’s the self-critique that’s the important aspect of her letter. So glasnost it is.

Goldilocks Warrior at Penn

On By Martin Kramer

Last week, a Columbia University anthropologist made the New York Times and other national media, when he told 3,000 students at a campus teach-in that “I wish for a million Mogadishus”—the 1993 battle that cost the lives of 18 U.S. soldiers. (By the way, the same prof also emitted this statement at a Columbia sit-in last year: “The heritage of the victims of the Holocaust belongs to the Palestinian people. The state of Israel has no claim to the heritage of the Holocaust.”) The wish for a “million Mogadishus” is in a class of its own—leave it to Columbia faculty to scrape bottom—but it does have some interesting parallels in more respectable quarters.

For example, consider a talk delivered by University of Pennsylvania political scientist Ian Lustick. Lustick, who works mostly on Israeli and Palestinian issues, isn’t a raving campus radical. Still, he has admitted that the radical 1960s “affected me long term.” It looks like the prime effect on Lustick has been a susceptibility to conspiracy theories. He’s a big promoter of the “cabal” theory of policymaking, which he’s tirelessly advanced on Nightline and in The Nation. Lustick has described the war in Iraq as a “supply side” war: 9/11 created a surplus of political capital, which the neo-con “cabal” diverted away from the legitimate war on terror to a “criminal” war in Iraq.

In Lustick’s theory, there is another crucial factor that preserved this political capital from erosion: the ease of the American victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan. Lustick (verbatim):

I supported the war [in Afghanistan] but I warned that we needed a Goldilocks outcome and we didn’t get it. And what did I mean by that? What I meant was if we did not win quickly enough, if the war lasted through to the summer we would end up destabilizing Pakistan and risking nuclear events in South Asia. On the other hand, if we won too quickly, if we broke things in Afghanistan too successfully, and that’s definitely what we’re good at, we’re fantastic at breaking anything we can find—it’s putting things back together that’s the tough question—but my fear at that time was that if we broke the Taliban too fast and it was perceived in the United States that we had a quick and relatively bloodless on the American side victory, that this would give the necessary fill to that wing, that cabal in the administration….What I wanted was a war, a Goldilocks war, not too fast and not too slow but we didn’t get it. We got one that was too fast and it gave the whip end to the cabal.

To borrow academic jargon, this statement can be “unpacked,” and if you unpack it, this it what you get: regret that American forces didn’t suffer some sort of Mogadishu in Afghanistan, so that the victory would not have seemed “relatively bloodless on the American side.”

There’s probably a valid if banal analytical point lurking behind this: military superiority is its own temptation. But there is something more sinister and cynical in Lustick’s remarks, because he’s stating a personal preference, not an analytical thesis. And the remark’s cynicism extends beyond possible American losses. For if a bit more American blood had been shed in a longer war in Afghanistan, it’s certain that a lot more Afghan blood would have been shed as well.

It’s just not enough to plant an American flag on the podium, as Lustick did before one of his anti-war talks. (Even this gesture was tinged with camp: “Every demonstration must have American flags,” he told his audience, “if only to prevent the cops from beating you.”) No, it really is the thought that counts. Lustick’s Goldilocks thought is another example of why anti-war activists got so little traction opposite the so-called “cabal.” If you want to change outcomes in Washington, you have to speak the language of national security and solidarity, with feeling. That’s something well beyond the capacity of those “affected long term” by Vietnam-era radicalism. And that’s why they never stood a chance.

I’ve been fascinated by Professor Lustick’s computerized attempt to simulate the behavior of a typical Middle Eastern polity, a project he’s now extended to terrorists. “I think about terrorism in terms of popcorn,” Lustick has said. “You assume you’ll always have some kernels that are going to pop. How much lower does the temperature have to get before you have a dramatic decrease in the ability of terrorists to operate?”

Interesting idea, but why not test it in a more familiar environment? I’d like to see it applied to the professors. How much higher does the temperature have to get before still more of them pop, so that they clamor openly for American defeats? Sandstorm will employ the latest equations from the laboratories of the political sciences, to provide as much advance warning as possible.

Baghdad, Babylon, Brandeis

On By Martin Kramer

The Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya, who has been working with the State Department on Iraq’s “transition,” has started writing a “war diary” for one of the weeklies. In one entry, he reports that “there are hundreds—if not more—of Iraqis in America, Britain, and the rest of the diaspora who are quitting their jobs and boarding planes to help rebuild their ravaged country.”

It’s a noble notion—perhaps too noble. To gain just a bit of the flavor of what the encounter might involve, see the documentary film Return to Babylon by the Iraqi film director Abbas Fahdel. Fahdel left the country at the age of 18 for France, and returned last year after an absence of 25 years, to see what had become of his house, his town (Al-Hillah), and his childhood friends.

This place, in Babil (Babylon) province a short drive south from Baghdad, is remembered by Fahdel as a busy provincial capital, graced with movie theaters that filled him with wonder for the cinema, and lush parks and playgrounds. It’s now bleak and forlorn. The parks have turned to dust, the theater is a decrepit shell, where sullen young men watch old films recycled year after year. His friends—those who haven’t “disappeared” or died on some battlefield—have had their dreams dashed. In their sparse shops and homes, he hears of an entire generation lost, and marvels (with a mix of guilt and gratitude) at his own incredible luck. Fahdel has brought along a batch of old photographs; each poignant comparison of what was and what is evokes loss.

The smooth-shaven Fahdel, in his neat white jacket and sunglasses, looks like a tourist. In the marketplace, a boy mistakes him for a foreigner, and calls out “Mister!” I’m not a “Mister,” he replies in Arabic with hurt and embarrassment, I’m an Iraqi. One has a gnawing feeling that even the most patriotic Iraqis in exile will be mistaken for so many “Misters” when (and if) they do reappear.

Makiya quotes an e-mail he’s sent to Iraqi “democrats” living abroad, and it’s a sharp rebuke:

Some of you think you can lift your noses and ride into Iraq on American tanks, above the stink of it all, without having to wade knee-high in the shit that the Baath Party has made of your country. You cannot. That is a pipe dream. The Americans will be here for the shortest time that they can possibly get away with, and they will not understand during that time, nor even are they capable of imagining, exactly what it is they are dealing with, much less have they the stamina to move it all in the direction of the gentle and forgiving way of life (by contrast with Iraq) that we all have enjoyed for so many years in the West.

Makiya, who left Iraq 35 years ago, has been an adjunct professor at Brandeis University since 1997. He’s been on leave this year, to work on Iraq’s “transition.” But he won’t be among the returnees. Two weeks ago, Brandeis named him incumbent of the new Sylvia K. Hassenfeld Chair in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies. “We look forward to his return to Brandeis,” said the president of Brandeis on the announcement.

I assume that Makiya is looking forward, too. “I am getting too old to be going on wading in the shit of Arab politics, as I have been doing for over 30 years now,” he wrote in his e-mail. “I am not sure how much more of it I can take.” No one can blame Makiya, and certainly the job description of his chair—to assist in “the development of a new Center for Middle East Study at Brandeis”—is as important a task as any in American academe. Somewhere there must develop an alternative to what now passes for Middle Eastern studies. I wish Makiya well. I advise him not to throw away his high boots. He’ll still need them.

FILMOGRAPHY: I saw Return to Babylon on La Cinquieme, but it was also broadcast in Canada in December. It’s distributed by an outfit in Paris, and there is a version with English subtitles.