Author: Martin Kramer

Edward Said CRASSHes

On By Martin Kramer

Edward Said, celebrity professor and advocate for Palestine, has just ended a stretch at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities—acronym CRASSH—at Cambridge University in England. Between his lectures on “The Example of Auerbach’s Mimesis” and “Return to Philology” (serious people never left it), Said huddled in his rooms to settle an old score with the Iraqi dissident Kanan Makiya. The result is an emission that is truly breathtaking for its sheer hypocrisy.

The Said-Makiya feud is more than a decade old, and it’s not easy to map all its labyrinthine passages. So here is a crib note. Makiya, an Iraqi who first found politics in the bosom of the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, later went into exile and set about exposing the regime of Saddam Hussein. His book, Republic of Fear, shattered the complacency surrounding the Iraqi regime, bringing evidence that situated Saddam and his gangs outside civilization. A subsequent book, Cruelty and Silence, brought more evidence of Saddam’s crimes, and also served an indictment against Arab writers who either swooned before the Iraqi dictator, or didn’t see his misdeeds as sufficient cause for America to act. (For more, see my review of the book.)

Palestinian “intellectuals” beat loud drums for Saddam; some of them played shrill flutes against American intervention. Edward Said was the first flautist. In the fray, Makiya accused Said of sacrificing the Iraqi people to the unappeasable god of “Palestine first.” Said in turn denounced Makiya as a traitor to the mother of all Arab causes. The feud later subsided, but the current U.S.-led drive for “regime change” in Iraq, coming as it does in the midst of yet another Palestinian drama, has gotten Said stirred up again—and against Makiya. That’s because it’s hard to read a major newspaper, or listen to National Public Radio, or even thumb your favorite magazine, without bumping into Kanan Makiya. One reason: Makiya is prominent in the “Democratic Principles Working Group,” composed of some 30 Iraqis who belong to the State Department’s “Future of Iraq Project.” This has enraged Said to the boiling point; in his column in the Ahram Weekly, he boils over. Take a deep breath, and read it.

Makiya doesn’t need me to defend him, and I won’t. I’m more interested in the patent hypocrisy of Said’s charges. He hardly makes an accusation against Makiya that couldn’t be made—usually with more justification—against himself. I’d describe it as a suicide character-bombing.

For example, Said tells us that that before Makiya went into exile, he was “an associate of his father’s architectural firm in Iraq.” That firm did business with the regime. In the next paragraph, Said steals second base: Makiya was a “beneficiary of the Iraqi regime’s munificence.” By the end of that paragraph, Said has stolen home plate: “Makiya himself had worked for Saddam.” It’s a crude spin on a typical case of son-works-for-dad. And the irony here is that Said’s own father, a Cairene businessman, also kept his son in the office, and compromised him. In fact, according to Said’s own memoirs (p. 289), he signed a business contract for his father that criminalized him. “For the next fifteen years,” writes Said, “I was unable to return to Egypt because that particular contract, and I as its unsuspecting signatory, were ruled to be in contravention of the exchange-control law.” So shall we visit the sins of businessmen fathers on their sons? If we were to apply Said’s severe judgment of Makiya to himself, we would have to include money laundering among his past occupations. (On Makiya’s tortured relations with his father, see the chapter “Oedipus in Samara” in Lawrence Weschler’s Calamities of Exile.)

Said then announces that Makiya “never wrote in an Arab country…whatever meager writing he produced had been written behind a pseudonym and a prosperous, risk-free life in the West.” And just where in the Arab world would it have been safe for Makiya to have written and published Republic of Fear under his own name? Come to think of it, has Said ever written in an Arab country? Said told an interviewer in 1989 that even were a Palestinian state created, he wouldn’t live in it. “It’s too late for me,” he said. “I’m past the point of uprooting myself again.” “I could have gotten a job at Bir Zeit,” he later said. “But I realized this is something I cannot do. My fate is to remain in New York.”

Said’s “fate” at Columbia University in New York has been—well, prosperous and risk-free. “I get promotions, salary increases, all the perks,” Said admitted in that 1989 interview. Columbia has backed him to the hilt, and his politics have helped to make him a prize-class celebrity. So it’s frankly bizarre to see Said take Makiya to task for finding refuge in these United States, and seeking to work from this seat of unrivalled freedom, power and wealth to free his native country. Isn’t this exactly what Said claims to be doing? And it’s jolting to read Said’s characterization of Makiya as someone caught “between countries and cultures and with no visible commitment to anyone (except to his upwardly mobile career).” Said’s whole story (or myth) is that of a man “out of place,” caught between countries and cultures. (“Whether I’m with Americans or with Arabs, I always feel incomplete.”) And has anyone been more bent on upward mobility?

But the heart of Said’s complaint is Makiya’s role as an interlocutor between the US government and the Iraqi opposition, and Makiya’s effort to fashion a post-war vision for Iraq. Never mind that in the late 1980s, Said did the same sort of thing on behalf of the PLO, lobbying George Shultz’s State Department for US recognition. (In Said’s words, Arafat “used a number of people, including me, as go-betweens with the US Administration.”) What really offends Said is Makiya’s vision of Iraq’s future. Makiya believes that “federalism is a necessary condition of democracy and that it means devolving power away from Baghdad to the provinces.” And he believe that “a democratic Iraq has to be an Iraq that exists for all its citizens equally, regardless of race, ethnicity or religion. That means a non-Arab Iraq.” Said’s scornful rejoinder: it would require “magic” to “de-Arabize the country,” the evidence that the Iraqis want federalism is “pretty negligible,” and federalism never works anyway. (“One would have thought,” writes Said, “that post-Tito Yugoslavia never existed and that that tragic country’s federalism was a total success.”)

Wait a minute. The last time I looked, Said was proposing precisely this for Palestinians and Israelis: a one-state solution for Arabs and Jews, who are supposed to downgrade their Arab and Jewish identities, and live as citizens in one de-nationalized state, based on “the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community.” In this one state, which is now Said’s “solution,” Jews and Arabs would live in “federated cantons.”

So let me get this right, Professor Said: Iraqis can’t possibly be “de-Arabized,” but Palestinians apparently can; Iraqis don’t want federalism, but Palestinians do; and federalism hasn’t worked anywhere, but in Israel-Palestine it’s not only doable, it’s the only “solution.”

Have I found a contradiction here? You bet. It’s rooted in Said’s belief that the Palestinians are a chosen people among the Arabs, and that they must be the first to break their shackles. Who are the Iraqis to hope for more than Saddam? They’re more or less accustomed to the iron fists of dictators. It’s enough to insist that the Americans don’t bomb them. But the Palestinians? They deserve so much more: sympathy, solidarity, secularism, democracy—and, Said has decided, all of Palestine. A couple of years ago, an Israeli correspondent asked him: “So what you envision is a totally new situation in which a Jewish minority would live peacefully within an Arab context?” Said: “Yes. I believe it is viable. A Jewish minority can survive the way other minorities in the Arab world survived.” Clearly we are dealing here with someone who really doesn’t know much about, say, Iraq. Introduce this man to an Iraqi Kurd.

My point here is not to defend Makiya’s vision of Iraq’s future, which I don’t necessarily share. My point is to demonstrate that Edward Said, as a master of self-awareness, is much overrated. He can’t see the obvious parallels between his predicament and Makiya’s; he sees only the differences, and naturally they all work in his favor. And he is so fixated upon Palestine that the rest of the Arab world is reduced to a blur. Now for Said-watchers, pro and con, there’s nothing new in all this, but it’s still disappointing. A few years ago, Said told the New York Times that his own circumstances had prompted him to consider writing a book on “late style,” about writers and composers “full of unresolved dissonances,” people who “go out with more complexity and more energy than they came in.” No one knows how late in the day it is for Said, but I see no new complexities here. All I see in this latest character-bombing (not just against Makiya, but against Bernard Lewis) is an attempt to score one last point before the curtain falls.

With Makiya poised to make a dent in history, and Lewis riding a runaway best-seller, I’d say it’s too little, too late.

Georgetown Blows Fuses

On By Martin Kramer

Georgetown University, where Arab demonstrations occur almost daily, witnessed something rare on Monday: a demonstration by Jewish students against remarks made by one of the university’s faculty. Professor Hisham Sharabi was reported in the Beirut press to have given a speech at a Lebanese university, where he said this: “Jews are getting ready to take control of us and the Americans have entered the region to possess the oil resources and redraw the geopolitical map of the Arab world.” Georgetown rushed to distance itself from anything Sharabi might have said. (This is not the first time a Georgetown professor has blown a fuse in the Arab world. Back in April, Halim Barakat published a bizarre piece in the London Al-Hayat, claiming the Jews had lost their humanity.)

Sharabi is emeritus, but he is listed as one of ten core faculty at Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. His “academic” activities abroad are not entirely out of character with the Center’s own activities at home.

I have before me the June 2002 issue of the CCAS News, the newsletter of the Center. The headline of the lead article runs as follows: “CCAS Responds to Ongoing Crisis in Palestine.” The crisis is described in these words:

Twenty months into the current intifada, the situation in the Palestinian occupied territories continues to go from bad to worse. In a flurry of large-scale military violence, the Israel Defense Forces stepped up their reoccupation of West Bank towns and villages, culminating in the rampages on Ramallah, Nablus, and Jenin in April, the devastating loss of civilian life and the destruction of key Palestinian Authority (PA) ministries, civil society institutions and civilian infrastructure.

Nowhere is there even an allusion to how the situation in Israel went from bad to worse, the flurry of large-scale terrorist violence by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad, culminating in the suicide bombing rampages in Netanya, Jerusalem, and Haifa in March, the devastating loss of Israeli civilian life, and the destruction of the key civil society institutions of the Israeli peace movement.

In fact, the CCAS News is indistinguishable from the newsletters of the dozen Arab advocacy organizations based in Washington. Throughout the spring, the Center conducted a straightforward propaganda campaign, inviting a succession of Palestinian spokespersons and pro-Palestinian “peace activists” who addressed Georgetown’s students. There’s really nothing new in all this: since the 1970s, the Center has been a hotbed of political activism in the service of the Palestinian (and other Arab) causes. Arab governments and corporations with Arab business paid the bills.

What is new is that since 1997, the Center has been the “core” of a National Resource Center on the Middle East, and receives Title VI federal funding through the U.S. Department of Education. The subsidy has been worth $223,000 a year. How can that be, when Georgetown’s Arab studies concept is so remote from the usual model of a balanced Middle East center? Answer: while the money comes from the Department of Education, the recipients are chosen by academics on review panels. They apparently think it useful to have a propagandizing presence in the heart of Washington, at the U.S. taxpayers’ expense.

There is something perverse in any process that provides a direct government subsidy for the agitprop of Sharabi and his colleagues. Let the Arab governments, whose ambassadors enjoy the run of the place anyway, pay the full freight. There is undoubtedly some politically disengaged Middle East center that deserves the funds far more than the Georgetown lobby. The competition for the 2003-2005 cycle of funding is underway. The Georgetown experiment has run for six years, and has failed. Give someone else a chance.

UPDATE: The Metro section of the Washington Post now runs this opinion column, slamming the Georgetown club.

Military Responses to Religious Terrorism

On By Martin Kramer

Remarks by Martin Kramer to the Conference on the Study of Religion and Terrorism, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, November 22, 2002. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

I’m a draftee in this session. I was originally asked to speak on Islam and terrorism, and I was to have spoken yesterday. But at some point, I was shifted into this session on military responses to terrorism. As I’m not a military expert or strategist, and as I don’t hold myself up as an authority on terrorism per se, I’m doubly handicapped to say anything original on this subject. And if that weren’t bad enough, it’s very late in the conference, and I’ve seen most of my few original ideas chewed over already.

And it’s worse than that. Having heard lots of other things, I’m naturally tempted to digress into responding to them, instead of addressing my assigned topic. I won’t, but I’d like to position myself a propos the great debate of yesterday evening.

Why They Hate Us

Frankly, it’s a mystery to me why anyone would think it impossible to pursue both an “iron fist,” if you will, and a “hearts and minds” approach to the Middle East, at the same time, one reinforcing the other. All the European powers in the Middle East did just that. Although I’m placed on this panel, I happen to be a firm believer in a more intensive campaign for “hearts and minds.”

Of course, any “hearts and minds” campaign has to come to terms with a basic limitation. Now that the United States is the sole great power, everyone everywhere who has a propensity to fix blame for their problems on an external source is fixing it on the United States. That propensity is endemic in the Arab and Muslim worlds—especially as the Arab world has lost its own bid for power these last twenty years, as documented by the Arab Human Development Report. All the free-floating hostility of this wounded civilization is bound to fix itself on the United States. America stands out all too visibly, like the World Trade Center; all the other powers are just so many Chrysler Buildings. So whatever other powers do, in Chechnya or Kashmir or Xinjian, the United States will remain the most resented of all powers. That is a fact, and nothing the United States can do will change it, short of divesting itself of its power. There are people who don’t like who we are, and there are people who don’t like what we do. What they agree on is they don’t like what America has, which is overwhelming and (to them) inexplicable power. Keep it, and expect to be hated.

I find it odd to learn that a “hearts and minds” approach means altering American policy in ways that would appease its critics. This confuses ends with means. A “hearts and minds” policy, as it is understood inside the Beltway, is something different. It is to persuade foreign peoples to support, accept, or at least acquiesce in policies that, at first blush, they are likely to dislike, resent, or oppose. And since the United States hasn’t even begun to attempt to do that on its own, I think that proposals for a drastic reorientation of policy are premature to say the least.

Yesterday mention was made of double standards in U.S. policy. I always find it striking when the Arab and Muslim worlds grow indignant about this, since in their own polities, the gap between rhetoric and reality, between principle and practice, can be positively breathtaking. But there is one gold standard that everyone in the Middle East understands: you reward your friends, and punish your enemies. They all do it. Now it is proposed that the United States reward its enemies and punish its friends—as I understood it last night—distancing the U.S. from its allies, lifting sanctions against Iraq, and so on—all this, to win the good will of Middle Easterners.

If the United States were to do this, no one would ever again risk aligning himself with this country, and it would truly be Osama’s hour of power. People may not always like U.S. policy, but they have to admit that the United States has stood by its allies, friends, and proxies. You tamper with that credibility at your very great peril.

They Want Us Dead

Now that this is off my chest, I come to the assignment, which is the military response to terrorism.

Why is a military response unavoidable? In many instances, the goals of terrorists are such that there is no reasonable political response. This is particularly true when one confronts terrorists whose motivation is religious, especially Islamist. National movements often develop terrorist appendages, but their goal remains terrestrial: the liberation of this or that piece of territory. Religious movements that develop terrorist appendages often have goals that are civilizational, and that envision an Armegeddon-like catharsis. When Osama bin Laden calls, as he did in his last tape, for the conversion of America to Islam, we know we have entered another dimension. Or perhaps a time warp: the man has offered America the choice between Islam and the sword.

The Islamist terrorists who have struck at Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, also have demands that are no less total. They want the Jews to surrender sovereignty as a prelude to their departure from the eternally Muslim land of Palestine. I am sorry to bear bad tidings, but this is what Islamists mean when they say “just peace.”

Of course, we can deceive ourselves. We can reassure ourselves that “they” only want the United States to bring about a reign of human rights, or for Israel to withdraw to the June 1967 borders, or for the U.S. to stop propping up oil sheikhs, or for the U.S. to end economic sanctions against Iraq. There are people in the Middle East who want the U.S. to do one or the other of these things, but they aren’t the terrorists, who want much more even than the sum of all these things combined. Unfortunately this brand of terrorism isn’t reducible to some grievance that we can banish through some ingeniously creative diplomacy, or some quick repositioning of U.S. forces. Many of the political motives attributed to Islamist terrorists are just the visible tips of a massive iceberg of grievance, that has broken off the frozen continent of the Arab and Islamic world.

We are dealing here with something much larger than politics, and the larger nature of the terrorism itself bears witness to this. Those groups and movements motivated by civilizational goals are more likely to cross two operational red-lines. First, they make no distinction between the foreign metropole and its outposts. Most nationalist movements carry out terrorist acts on the ground they seek to liberate. Religious movements are not nearly so discriminating. Religion de-territorializes conflict, and thus universalizes it. It also makes it possible to recruit followers from every possible nationality. Al-Qa‘ida offers this model in its purest form. It is global in the conception of its mission; global in its operations; and global in its composition.

The other thing about religiously-based terrorism is that it doesn’t have inhibitions about killing large numbers of people. We have already mentioned the old cliché, that terrorists don’t want a lot of people dead; they want a lot of people watching. The terrorism of Islamist groups very much belies this notion. They want a lot of people dead. Religious terrorism disinhibits its perpetrators, because it is utterly indifferent to public opinion on the opposing side. Lots of terrorist movements in the past would reassure even as they struck: we have no quarrel with the people, but we do have a quarrel with their government and its policies. You will find nothing comparable to this reassurance in the statements of al-Qa‘ida.

In fact, you’ll find the opposite: go back to bin Laden’s statement in which he first urged the killing of American civilians. The Americans are not a great and good people led by an evil government. They are themselves evil, arrogant, the anti-Islam, so that every last American bears the full brunt of responsibility for his or her government’s crimes. For Hamas and Jihad, the policies of Israel’s government are but a function of the treacherous nature of the Jews as a people, as attested in the Qur’an.

This concept of conflict—and they do call it jihad—prepares minds for terrorism on a mass scale. The suicide bombings serve many functions, but one of them certainly is to leverage small numbers of devotees into large numbers of casualties on the opposing side. In the Arab press, some have calculated just how many suicide bombers it would take to kill off all the Israelis: if there were only that many willing bombers, the job could be finished. And who doubts that the terrorists of 9/11, had they been able to kill 50,000 rather than 3,000, would have done so?

Before They Kill You

The nature of the threat determines the nature of the response. Because the threat of religious-based terrorism is so much more acute—because of its totalizing nature—an effective military response has to be of a kind.

It has already been said here, but I will repeat it. The military response cannot take the form of deterrence. These people will not be deterred from their sacred mission by the threat of counter-strike. They can’t be forced into a kind of cold war stand-off. They themselves boast that they enjoy a decisive advantage because they love death, whereas we love life. And this isn’t just bravado.

Now we can call the appropriate military response by all kinds of euphemistic names. Here are the candidates: the very bloodless word, “preemption”; another favorite of mine is “long-range hot pursuit.” There’s also “selective targetings” and “extrajudicial punishment.” All of these come down to the same thing: going out and killing them before they kill you: hunting them down in narrow alleys and in remote caves, eliminating them, one by one.

The purpose is fairly obvious. While they do perhaps love death, and can’t be deterred, they need a living chain of command to function. They need a network; in this respect, they are exactly like every other terrorist movement that has gone before them. By finding and killing (or capturing) key cogs in the machine, especially leaders, you drive the network even deeper under ground. You create suspicion in their ranks. You disrupt their internal communications. You make it difficult for them to raise funds and recruit new members. They may love death, but paradoxically they soon become preoccupied with self-preservation. Is that noise above a Hellfire missile headed straight for me? Can I use that cellphone and be sure the conversation won’t lead to my capture? Perhaps the cellphone itself might explode in my face? (There was a case in the West Bank of a wanted terrorist who feared using cellphones, so he used public phones—until one of them blew him up.)

These kinds of fears must be present in the minds of your terrorist adversaries—and you can only put them there by a policy of search and destroy. The objective is to turn their existence into something that’s nasty, brutish, and, if you’re lucky and get the right piece of intelligence, also short.

How Do We Know We’ve Won?

Now here we come to the rub. It is not always easy to gauge the success of your military response. Yesterday afternoon there was an argument on just this point. Was the glass half-empty, with many of al-Qa‘ida’s operatives still loose, and the Bali bombing? Or half-full, with the fact that fourteen months later, the Taliban are gone and there has been no major al-Qa‘ida attack against this country? It is a perpetual and endless debate: you will never know how many hundreds or thousands still walk the earth, because you killed or grabbed a terrorist.

Alas, if you fail, everyone will know it. And here we come to the dilemma of the military response. It is possible to defeat terrorists militarily day after day after day. Israel does it constantly, foiling attacks almost daily—including mega-terrorist attacks specifically planned to emulate 9/11. The difficulty is that terrorism is more than a series of engagements, and it can achieve its intended effect even if it loses nine out of ten encounters, or 99 out of 100, or 364 out of 365—the ratio depends on the nature of the conflict, and above all on the stoicism and steadfastness of civilians, who are effectively front-line combatants.

Now we have talked about lots of various “fronts” in this war—everything from Arabic-language radio to homeland security. What we haven’t talked about is the need to prepare the American people, in advance, for the notion that they could be called upon to show at least a fraction of the stoic fortitude that Brits showed during the blitz, or Israelis have shown through the daily mix of shooting attacks and suicide bombings. Having just lived in Washington through the sniper episode, where the fear of one rifle was everywhere palpable, my conclusion is that this road is very long indeed.

Which brings me back to “hearts and minds.” A military response must be pursued simultaneously with a “hearts and mind” campaign—but this time I mean one directed toward the American people. Without that, it may well be that the military response, however resourceful, will be deemed a failure. Then we will hear the chorus that “there is no military solution,” and American decision-makers will be sorely tempted to begin a creeping capitulation to the litany of grievance laid out by Osama bin Laden, with or without him.