Author: Martin Kramer

Professorial Pundits Place Iraq Bets

On By Martin Kramer

The war is underway, and most of the rationales for and against it are based on predictions. No one reasonably expects professors of Middle Eastern studies to predict military outcomes. But political outcomes, especially in the long term, are supposed to be their forte. And so here, for the record, are the predictions of four chaired professors of Middle Eastern studies, at leading American universities. At the end of the day, events will prove two of them right, and two of them wrong.

John Esposito is a University Professor (his university’s highest professorial honor) at Georgetown. His prediction, looking five years past a war:

It is likely that the Arab world will be less democratic than more and that anti-Americanism will be stronger rather than weaker. A military attack by the United States and installation of a new government in Iraq will not have fostered democratization in the Arab world but rather reinforced the perception of many… that the United States has moved… to a war against Islam and the Muslim world. To move to a military strike before exhausting nonmilitary avenues, and without significant multilateral support from our European and Arab/Muslim allies, as well as from the United Nations, will have inflamed anti-Americanism, which will have grown exponentially in the region and the non-Muslim world.

That’s a grim prophecy, although the very first part may already be falsifiable: could Esposito now name an Arab country that might be less democratic in five years—given that not one of them is democratic now?

In the opposite corner is Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus at Princeton, past member of the Institute for Advanced Study, and best-selling author. He makes the opposite prediction:

I see the possibility of a genuinely enlightened and progressive and—yes, I will say the word—democratic regime arising in a post-Saddam Iraq. They will have been fully inoculated against the Fascist-style governments that otherwise seem to prevail.

Lewis again, with a bit more caution, but a steady optimism:

Clearly, Iraq is not going to turn into a Jeffersonian democracy over-night, any more than did Germany or Japan. Democracy is a strong medicine, to be administered in gradually increasing measures. A large dose at once risks killing the patient. But with care and over time, freedom can be achieved in Iraq, and more generally in the Middle East.

Do you prefer that your experts on “the Arabs” have Arabic names? Then take your choice. In one corner: Rashid Khalidi, who in September will become the Edward Said Professor at Columbia University. His prediction:

Irrespective of its cost or length, this war will mark not the end, but the beginning, of our problems in this region. Because, however much Iraqis loathe their regime, they will soon loathe the American occupation that will follow its demise. No expert on Iraq… believes that the creation of a democracy in Iraq will be a swift or simple matter; some believe it is not possible as a consequence of an American military occupation…. So we will not have democracy in Iraq. We will have a long American military occupation that will eventually provoke resistance…. Via a lengthy and bloody occupation of Iraq, via the establishment of U.S. bases there, via the direct control of Iraqi oil, we will be creating legions of new enemies throughout the Middle East.

In the other corner: Fouad Ajami, the Majid Khadduri Professor at Johns Hopkins. Ajami argues that the United States should aim high: “The driving motivation of a new American endeavor in Iraq and in neighboring Arab lands should be modernizing the Arab world.” His prediction: an American commitment will be decisive.

In the end, the battle for a secular, modernist order in the Arab world is an endeavor for the Arabs themselves. But power matters, and a great power’s will and prestige can help tip the scales in favor of modernity and change…. [U.S. victory] would embolden those who wish for the Arab world’s deliverance from retrogression and political decay…. It has often seemed in recent years that the Arab political tradition is immune to democratic stirrings. [But] the sacking of a terrible regime with such a pervasive cult of terror may offer Iraqis and Arabs a break with the false gifts of despotism.

So there you have them: the divided opinions of America’s leading authorities on the Middle East. Needless to say, they can’t all be right, so some of these predictions are going to come up losers. Will anyone remember? Possibly. But here is a safe prediction: it won’t matter, certainly not to the professional standing of the professors. Another professor (Robert Vitalis, head of the Middle East Center of the University of Pennsylvania), has put things in precisely the right perspective. The future, he maintains, “is unknowable.”

Administration figures are in fact gambling but there are real and predictable consequences to their betting wrong. Consequences for them personally I mean. This is not the case for virtually any op-ed writer or trusted ally of the Saudis or scholars who, from their perches in Palo Alto and Morningside Heights (or Center City), tell us what is really going to happen. There are no costs to them to being wrong, which is in part why so many pretend to be able to see the future with such remarkable acuity. Even after getting it wrong time and time again in the past 10 years.

How very, very true.

(Palo Alto and Morningside Heights…. Has Professor Vitalis been reading my Ivory Towers on Sand?)

ASIDE: Edward Said, who disagrees with Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami, now claims that neither “has so much as lived in or come near the Arab world in decades.” Anyone with an ear to the ground knows that both of them show up somewhere in the Arab world every year. And I believe it’s been thirty years since Said left Morningside Heights to spend one of his sabbaticals in an Arab country. The amazing thing is that in the very same article, Said makes this admission: “In all my encounters and travels I have yet to meet a person who is for the war.” New York Times/CBS reports: “74% [of polled Americans] now approve of the U.S. taking military action against Iraq, up from 64% among these same respondents two weeks ago.” Perhaps it is Professor Said who ought to get out more.

“The Iraqi People”

On By Martin Kramer

Read these words, written by an esteemed Iraq expert:

There are present in Iraq civilian forces possessed of brains, literacy and organizing experience, and reflecting a meaningful diversity of interest and opinions. However, the men at the head of these forces have not yet developed the ability to coexist, to play the game by recognized rules, to compound their differences for the sake of an agreed higher denominator. In addition, it is doubtful whether a sufficiently large part of the population can be interested in orderly and sustained political activity—distinct from the appeal of rabblerousing catchwords. Lastly, and most important, the civilian forces lack the prestige and forcefulness to induce the army to accept the role of a non-political guardian of public order, in times of disturbance as well as in normal circumstances.

That assessment could have been written this morning. In fact, it was written by the late historian (and my colleague) Uriel Dann 35 years ago, in the conclusion to his book Iraq under Qassem. Note that Dann located the core of the problem in the weakness of Iraq’s “civilian forces,” not in oppression by its military ones. Dann did not believe that the Iraqi people could be led; they could only be incited or intimidated, a combination that later worked perfectly for Saddam. I don’t think Dann would have suffered fools babbling in his presence about Iraqi “civil society.”

That same assessment is implicit in this crucial passage from his book:

A climate of violence is part of the political scene in Iraq…It is an undercurrent which pervades the vast substrata of the people outside the sphere of power politics. Hundreds of thousands of souls can easily be mobilized on the flimsiest pretext. They constitute a permanently restive element, ready to break into riots which more than once in recent years have resulted in mass butchery. This climate of violence…has been the cause of more political and judicial assassinations than have taken place in any other Arab country in a comparable state of social advancement.

Notice that Dann did not locate the problem only in Iraq’s military (he called it a “caste,” easily distinguished by its various uniforms). He thought that violence was endemic to Iraqi society, and perhaps inherent in the very nature of the polity. “There is no ‘Iraqi nation’,” he announced at the very outset of his massive tome—and the rest of the book proved it.

Dann’s skepticism about Iraq’s political culture led him to this conclusion: “The army leadership alone can ensure for Iraq a modicum of stability and ordered progress.” That was true, for some years, under the Baath. But Saddam brought out the army’s fatal flaw: its weakness for “Arab” adventures, such as the invasions of Iran and Kuwait. Iraq’s sole national institution showed itself to be defective at its core, and when it acquired some technology, it became an engine for the export of Iraq’s violent malaise to places abroad.

Yes, only the army leadership can ensure a modicum of stability and ordered progress. The difference between Dann’s perspective in 1968, and ours today, is that we know it will have to be the United States army. Dann would have welcomed the removal of Saddam: after Saddam was spared in 1991, Dann grimly predicted that “the day will come when he will hit, we do not know with what weapons….And when he does…the innocent will pay by the millions.” But once Saddam is gone, it will fall to America to make Iraq a nation. What would Uriel Dann have thought of that?

Chicago Prof Joins Conspiracy-of-the-Month Club

On By Martin Kramer

Leave it to a professor of Middle Eastern studies to infiltrate the crudest interpretation of American motive into Chicago’s leading daily. Fred Donner is a professor of early Islamic history at the University of Chicago. Last week, the Chicago Tribune ran a piece by Donner, where he called the idea of removing Saddam a “Likudniks’ scheme.”

Why? It is “a vision deriving from Likud-oriented members of the president’s team—particularly Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith.” (Perle is explicitly denounced as a dual loyalist: “Why is he serving in a high position in an American administration?” asks Donner.) A war against Saddam would be “mainly in the Likud’s interest rather than our own.” And poor President Bush, according to Donner, is not even aware that a war would open a “Pandora’s box,” because he now sees the Middle East through the “Likud’s rose-colored glasses.”

True, this theory has surfaced in the mainstream media, but not in such a crude form. Naturally, Jewish organizations have written letters in response. The chair of Chicago’s Jewish Community Relations Council noted that Donner, “applying thinly-veiled code words, essentially argues that America’s Iraq policy was designed and is being driven by disloyal Jews.” An officer of the Anti-Defamation League, in a published letter to the Trib, wrote that Donner had provided “fodder for conspiracy theorists and anti-Semites,” and served “to propagate centuries-old anti-Semitic canards of Jewish control.” I’d have to agree.

I’m acquainted with Professor Donner (we overlapped at Princeton for a couple of years), but I don’t purport to know him. I do know that he’s no authority on Washington’s workings or the contemporary Middle East. And I strongly suspect that he simply parrots whatever conspiracy theory is fashionable on his campus or in the media at any moment.

Here, for example, is a photograph of Professor Donner at the January 18 anti-war rally in Washington. Read his sign. Beneath the words, “Pre-emptive war is un-American” (a questionable assumption), it says: “NO WAR FOR OIL!” Now am I missing something? This is a completely different conspiracy theory from the one Donner has put forth in the Trib, where oil doesn’t even appear. So what is it, Fred? Greedy oil companies or devious American Likudniks? Or maybe you haven’t got a clue?

I respect Donner as a historian of early Islam. Unfortunately, he and his colleagues seem to think that modern American politics operate like the early Islamic caliphate (albeit with less moral authority). Add the Donner affair to the bill of indictment.