Author: Martin Kramer

Iraq: Another “Expert” Blind Spot

On By Martin Kramer

Where are America’s Iraq experts? According to one view, the media are hiding them from you. That’s the claim of Juan Cole, University of Michigan historian. He’s one of the establishment boosters of Middle Eastern studies, and a staunch defender of the Middle East Studies Association against all comers. (He also edits its quarterly journal.) In a recent piece, he complains that the media are ignoring America’s historians of Iraq—people who know about the country in its historical context. “It is an index of America’s longstanding anti-intellectualism,” he remonstrates, “that long hours of cable television news are filled with the views on Iraq of small town radio talk show hosts and retired colonels, but virtually no one who actually knows Arabic or has written substantially on the country appears on the small screen.”

He goes on to list the historians and their fields of expertise, and the reader’s eye races ahead to learn the names of those who’ve done contemporary work. Suddenly, we crash into this paragraph:

No American historian has essayed a major work on Baathist Iraq, for which the sources would have to be propaganda-ridden Iraqi newspapers, expatriate memoirs with an axe to grind, Western news wire reports, and what documents the U.S. government has been willing to declassify. Given the limitations of these sources, it is no wonder that most scholars have devoted their energies to the Ottoman and British periods, for which more documentation exists, the biases of which are more easily dealt with because passions have cooled with the passage of centuries.

I wonder whether Professor Cole is even aware that he has contradicted himself. He complains that the media have excluded Iraq “experts” from the public forum, even as he reports that those same “experts” have excluded Baathist Iraq from their own area of expertise. In fact, the real scandal is not the “anti-intellectualism” of the American media. There is no reason on earth for them to ask an expert on 19th-century trade in Mosul about the intentions of Saddam Hussein. The scandal is the admitted fact that American academe has not produced a single work on Baathist Iraq.

Millions of taxpayer dollars have been poured into this field—including, after the Kuwait war, a special appropriation for research fellowships called the Near and Middle East Research and Training Program, justified on the grounds of “national security.” You would have thought that at least one bright young man or woman would have gravitated toward the study of Baathist Iraq, which for over a decade has been America’s top national security concern in the Middle East. But no one did, and the answer is implicit in Cole’s own words.

I’d like to work on Baathist Iraq, says the student. Don’t waste your time, says the professor. The sources are too unreliable, the subject is too burdened with passions. If you insist on working on Iraq, tackle some remote period. (Unless, of course, you want to join the legions of Middle East “experts” who are “working” on the Palestinians: any period, any subject is just fine. Palestinian newspapers, memoirs, and oral testimonies are evidence, and the historian of the Palestinians has special dispensation to indulge his or her biases and passions.)

It’s the guild masters who have created a situation where Baathist Iraq has been excluded from the research agenda. Outside America, where the guild is run differently, invaluable work has been done on this very subject. There is Amatzia Baram’s book on the Baath’s manipulation of Iraqi identity. There is Ofra Bengio’s book on Saddam’s political discourse. They made excellent use, among other sources, of those “propaganda-ridden Iraqi newspapers.”

Nor is it true, as Cole says, that there is “more documentation” for the Ottoman and British periods. After the last Gulf war, the United States government brought eighteen tons of Iraqi official documents to Washington, a treasure trove seized by Kurds from Iraqi government offices. Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya and Human Rights Watch have made use of these documents. Not so historians and political scientists, who presumably are too busy studying “masculinities in Egypt” and “perceptions of the deaf in Islamic societies” (real research topics funded with “national security” appropriations).

In the lengthening indictment of Middle Eastern studies, Cole’s confession—”no American historian has essayed a major work on Baathist Iraq”—is one of the weightiest counts. That absence, like the absence of studies of Bin Laden, is the result of a skewed academic culture that systematically discourages policy-relevant research. Why Washington continues to pump money into this enterprise is more of a mystery than the doings of Saddam Hussein.

POSTCRIPT: Now the Boston Globe has published a piece confirming the point of this entry from other sources. Dick Norton (Boston University): “We don’t have a single academic expert in America who understands how Iraqi politics work in 2003, not a clue.” Judith Yaphe, National Defense University: “There’s nobody in this country who really knows the internal dynamics, the fabric of how Iraq works.” So where did all that federal money go?

Alexandria Lost and Found

On By Martin Kramer

I haven’t yet seen the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the UNESCO-sponsored library which opened last October in Alexandria, Egypt, amid much verbiage about “intercultural dialogue.” The library, designed by the Norwegian architectural firm Snøhetta, is meant to reconnect Egypt and us to the ancient lost library of Alexandria, although just how it could possibly do so is difficult to say. Recently I (re)read Alexander Stille’s account of the background to its construction, in his engaging book The Future of the Past. Stille reminds us that in the rush to lay the foundations for the new library, the contractors may well have demolished archaeological remnants of the ancient one.

Benny Ziffer, literary correspondent of Ha’aretz, has a travelogue in yesterday’s paper, telling of his pilgrimage to this new post-post-modern library, set in the decrepit squalor of contemporary Alexandria. Ziffer:

It was pleasing to see how Eastern nonchalance is already having its effect, moderating with humor the building’s serious messages. Take, for example, a guard in a well-worn uniform whom we passed on the way to the main door. This guard has apparently been assigned to watch over the broad esplanade in front of the library. He placed his straw chair in the middle of the covered passageway leading to the entrance. Next to the chair is a box, for the teacup, and a tin plate left over from lunch, spread with sauce of ful on which lay the tail of a receding pita. And doesn’t he also need a tattered rug for praying on? He does. And he speaks, the guard, in shouts with two maintenance workers who are walking across the monumental glass slope carrying a metal pipe. The pipe falls and rolls to the foot of the monumental wall on which are engraved the words in the world’s languages, including Hebrew. Thus shall it be done, and rightly so, to symbol-laden buildings.

Actually, Ziffer got one thing wrong. This isn’t just the fate of “symbol-laden buildings,” it’s the fate of most Egyptian public buildings. In my student days, I spent a couple of months reading Arabic newspapers in what was then called the new national library (Dar al-Kutub) in Cairo. It was new, but it was already in an advanced state of disrepair. A couple of months ago, its oldest Arabic manuscript went missing, presumably joining all those famed lost scrolls of the ancient library.

So make the effort to see the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina. It will be history-in-motion to see it transformed (through “intercultural dialogue”) from something Norwegian into something else.

A WISE Guy at College Park

On By Martin Kramer

One of the scholars most thoroughly duped by Sami Al-Arian and his gang (see Friday’s posting) is Charles Butterworth, a specialist in medieval Islamic political philosophy at the University of Maryland. In the early 1990s, the Florida Islamic Jihad cell drew him into the activities of the World and Islam Studies Enterprise (WISE), the front run by Ramadan Shallah, the man who later surfaced in Damascus as the leader of Islamic Jihad. People like Butterworth gave them credibility—and the perfect cover. When Al-Arian later had university troubles, Butterworth wrote on his behalf.

And now? Never mind the indictment. Butterworth has posted a message to a Middle East politics discussion group reaffirming his belief in the greatness and goodness of Al-Arian and WISE. “Nothing that I know of Sami Al-Arian and none of my experiences with WISE justify the allegations made against him or that organization.” Butterworth still believes that neither WISE nor Al-Arian “has done anything to subvert US law. Each, in different ways to be sure, has attempted to make a clearer case for religious devotion even while opening up Middle Eastern regimes to democratic procedures.”

Religious devotion? Democratic procedures? Here is the Western romance of the noble extremist in its purest form. The burning missionary desire to see fervent Muslims embrace democracy becomes a self-imposed veil. In this case, these same “devoted” Muslims were pumping American dollars into a terrorist organization, hustling to send suicide bombers with flesh-ripping explosive belts into buses and restaurants. Their Islamic Jihad was not a struggle for “self-improvement.” Poor Professor Butterworth. A brilliant student of Alfarabi and Averroes. And the most useful of all idiots.

Photo above: Aftermath of the January 22, 1995 Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) double suicide bombing at Beit Lid, central Israel, that killed 22 and wounded 59. Para. 130 of the indictment: “On or about February 10, 1995, SAMI AMIN AL-ARIAN wrote a letter to Ismail Al-Shatti in Kuwait asking for money for the PIJ. SAMI AMIN AL-ARIAN bragged about the January 22,1995 Beit Lid bombing, and cited the bombing as an example of what PIJ could do. He asked for money and said that Shaker and Sukkar [the two suicide bombers] left large families and debts; he also wrote that the PIJ was poor and destitute and indicated the Iranians were providing little financial assistance. He wrote that despite the hardships the PIJ carried out distinctive operations which all the Arab armies lacked the strength to execute.”