Author: Martin Kramer

American hijab

On By Martin Kramer

Robert Satloff of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy has circulated a sharp essay on the “hearts and minds” question: how do we persuade a billion Muslims that we are not enemies of God? The folks in the State Department who are running this campaign call it “public diplomacy,” and it’s turning into a big-ticket item, involving radio, television, and various gimmicks. The idea is to persuade Muslims that the United States isn’t waging a crusader war against Islam under the guise of the “war on terror”—something which, to judge from yet another poll, a vast majority of Muslims believe to be so.

One high-profile tool in the hearts-and-minds department is a State Department website devoted to Muslim Life in America. It includes a photo gallery meant to illustrate the diversity of Muslim life in this country. But as Satloff discovered, what visitors really get is lots of pictures of women whose heads are covered by hijabs and chadors. Satloff:

In its goodhearted but profoundly counterproductive effort to project American tolerance abroad, this website projects the image that virtually all American Muslim women (and the large majority of American Muslim girls) are veiled, hardly a message of support to the Afghan women now free to choose whether to wear the burqa; to Iranian women fighting to throw off the chador; or to Turkish women, whose contribution to building a democracy in an overwhelmingly Muslim state should be celebrated.

Photo after photo, the image is the same: women with covered heads. “It is difficult to overstate the sheer variety of the Muslim experience in the United States,” announces the website. In fact, what the website does is dramatically understate that variety. A couple of photographs showing veiled women would have demonstrated the point: women in America are free to go about veiled, if they so choose. The repetitive portrayal of women in hijab and chador is almost orientalist in its relentless stereotyping.

As it happens, a woman runs the State Department’s “public diplomacy” campaign: Charlotte Beers, a former Madison Avenue advertising executive (Uncle Ben’s Rice, etc.). It seems to me that if the United States really wants to demonstrate its respect for Islam, she should don a hijab the next time she flies off to Cairo or Doha. (Here she is without one.) During the Second World War, the British sent a woman, Freya Stark, to run their propaganda campaign in the Arab world, at a time when pro-Axis sentiment ran high. There are lots of photos showing Dame Freya in Arab garb; I’m sure the Arabs loved it. Here are some options for Ms. Beers, from the Middle East collection of fashion designer Miguel Adrover.

As for the website, the State Department should let its hair down.

Qui custodiet ipsos custodes? Campus Watch

On By Martin Kramer

The Middle East Forum yesterday launched Campus Watch, a project to follow the more absurd doings in Middle Eastern studies and some of the pernicious Middle East-related activity of university and college faculty. I think it’s a great idea, and an overdue one. As I asked in an endorsement of the project that appeared in its press release, “Who will ‘guard the guardians’, making certain the American public gets a fair return on its new investment [in Middle Eastern studies]? Campus Watch is a timely initiative. Academe needs freedom, but it also deserves the same critical scrutiny as government and the media.”

Just for the record, I’m proud to be associated with the Middle East Forum as editor of its print journal, but I am not involved in the selection of emphases over at Campus Watch. A press report today gave two examples of the type of hot-button issues that will get the attention of the project: the “American jihad” commencement flap at Harvard last spring, and the summer controversy over the Qur’an reading assignment at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Personally, I thought the Harvard affair was a storm in a teacup, and I was not particularly bothered by UNC freshmen reading the Qur’an. If you want to know what I think is truly egregious, read my Professors and Pundits column in the Middle East Quarterly, which Campus Watch was good enough to include on its site.

Of course, the establishment of Campus Watch will give rise to howls of protest from the tenured ranks. The other day, I heard someone say about the Saudis that there is nothing they like less than to be talked about by others. It struck me that this is just as true for the extended royal family of Middle Eastern studies. Now the fact is that there is nothing on the Campus Watch website that isn’t already in the public domain. The “Dossiers” on individual scholars and institutions turn up less than a Google search. (One hopes these dossiers will be filled out, and that new ones will be added.) No matter: the mere fact that someone has bothered to organize freely available information in this way will give rise to paroxysms of protest.

Well, academic colleagues, get used to it. Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you’ve also posted, will be scrutinized. Your websites will be visited late at night. And to judge from the Campus Watch website, the people who will do the real watching will be none other than your students—those young people who pay hefty tuition fees to sit at your feet. Now they have an address to turn to, should they fall victim to intellectual malpractice.

I wish Campus Watch well.

In March 2004, Steven Heydemann wrote an op-ed for the Chicago Tribune, selectively quoting this entry to draw a comparison between myself and Saddam’s secret police. I wrote this response at Sandbox.

Web cop. Heydemann in the Trib: “Invoking tactics more common to the former Iraqi regime than to a democracy, [Kramer] warned professors that their Web sites would be ‘visited late at night’ to police their content. ‘Yes, you are being watched,’ Kramer wrote on his Web site.” Compare that to my actual words (emphases added): “The mere fact that someone has bothered to organize freely available information will give rise to paroxysms of protest. Well, academic colleagues, get used to it. Yes, you are being watched. Those obscure articles in campus newspapers are now available on the Internet, and they will be harvested. Your syllabi, which you’ve also posted, will be scrutinized. Your websites will be visited late at night.” Google ’em and they cry McCarthyism. In our open society, it’s my right–and yours–to access anything on the web, at any hour. Heydemann, like the Baath, fears what information might do. I guess he worked too long on Syrian authoritarianism.
Sun, Mar 14 2004 6:15 pm

Where have all the Iraq experts gone? Long time passing

On By Martin Kramer

As the United States moves toward a war to remove Saddam Hussein, we will experience many moments of deja vu. Whether we are any the wiser remains to be seen, but we are certainly poorer. That’s because two scholars who spoke great truths about Iraq are no longer with us.

Elie Kedourie was born in Iraq, whence he fled in 1949. He was the author of a string of seminal essays on Iraqi politics, and while his interests ranged widely at the London School of Economics, he always paid close attention to shifts in the tortured politics of his native Baghdad. During the Kuwait crisis, he became a frequent contributor to the opinion columns.

One article particularly pays rereading. Kedourie wrote it for the New York Times in the month following the Iraqi invasion. “We speak of the crisis,” he wrote, “as thought it is obvious what the crisis is and what its resolution might be.” Most observers assumed that removing Iraq from Kuwait would resolve the crisis. “However,” wrote Kedourie, “such an outcome would settle very little.” The problem, as he saw it, was the “imbalance in power between Iraq and its neighbors….To correct this imbalance requires action more drastic than slow-acting sanctions or embargoes, and more far-reaching than the restoration of Kuwaiti sovereignty.” Indeed, if the regime were allowed to keep its power, “Baghdad would be seen as having humiliated a superpower, and would seek to derive from such a situation maximum advantage in regional power politics.”

To reread Kedourie is to realize how precisely he diagnosed the core of the problem—not a decade later, not a year later, but a month after the Iraqis entered Kuwait. He understood, even then, that the only effective treatment would have to be “drastic” and “far-reaching,” that it would have to go beyond the liberation of Kuwait and a regime of sanctions. Had he only been heeded then, we would not be where we are now.

Uriel Dann lived and breathed Iraq. He was the author of a monumental book on Iraq under Qassem, a masterly work that hasn’t been superseded. (“I shall never forget,” he later wrote, “nor did my wife, how I once awoke in the small hours of the night believing that I was Qassem. The delusion passed.”) In 1991, as it became clear that Saddam would remain in the saddle, Dann wrote a piece for The New Republic (June 3, 1991), entitled “Getting Even.” Read these words and commit them to memory: they are the considered judgment of a man who knew Iraq as well as, if not better than, any “expert” alive today:

Saddam Hussein does not forget and forgive. His foes brought him close to perdition and then let him off….He will strive to exact revenge as long as there is life in his body. He will smirk and conciliate and retreat and whine and apply for fairness and generosity. He will also make sure that within his home base it remains understood that he has not changed and will never change….And 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. This must never be put out of mind: Saddam Hussein from now on lives for revenge.

So far, Saddam’s conduct abroad and at home has borne out Dann’s prediction to the last detail. Who is absolutely certain that if Saddam is spared yet again, the more dire part of Dann’s prediction will not come true?

A speeding car killed Dann in the fall of 1991; Kedourie died of a heart attack the following spring. Without them, we are more vulnerable to cant, wishful thinking, and loose analysis. In their absence, then, it is incumbent upon us to extract those nuggets of wisdom in their writings that bear repeating now. So here is one: the most astute one-paragraph guide to policy in the whole of the literature, penned by Kedourie:

In an unstable and disturbed area like the Middle East, where, in the twinkling of an eye the Shah becomes the Ayatollah Khomeini, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein turns from friend to foe, and Syria’s Hafez al-Assad vice-versa, it is impossible to build a policy on any durable assumptions about the character of this or that regime, or on the steadfastness of enmities or friendships. The only guide in such a quagmire is a firm and clear understanding of where one’s own interests lie.

It’s an elegant statement of a simple truth. So what will guide U.S. policy in this crisis? Dubious assumptions about “friend” and “foe,” or a clear understanding of American interests? Kedourie published those words in the New York Times in 1990. In September. To be precise: 9/11.