Author: Martin Kramer

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 He was the author of a monumental book on Iraq under Qassem, a masterly work that hasn’t been superseded.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.

Thinking (too) big thoughts about Islamism

On By Martin Kramer

Francis Fukuyama (with the help of one Nadav Samin) has produced a think piece for Commentary with the provocative title Can Any Good Come of Radical Islam? It’s interesting primarily as evidence for what happens when a really big reality (like 9/11) collides head-on with a really big idea (like Fukuyama’s “end of history”). Inevitably, the idea crumples to absorb the shock.

Fukuyama, who is nothing if not persistent, concurs that Islamism is a destructive force that warrants comparison with communism and fascism. But it might also be a modernizing one—it might, despite itself, strip away the traditional constraints that have prevented Muslims from modernizing. And if Islamism, in turn, can be stripped of its ideology, then perhaps it might turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Quote:

The Islamists clearly hope to reunite religion and political power one day, which would be a disaster. But they are learning—and inculcating—habits of association and independent action that, if somehow divorced from their radical ideology, might yet help lay the groundwork of a true civil society.

And again, on the fact that Bin Laden, a layman, dared to issue a fatwa (calling, by the way, for killing American civilians):

The mere fact that bin Laden was willing to cross this line shows the extent to which Islamism has undermined traditional Islamic legal authority. But a line crossed in the name of waging all-out war against the West may yet be crossed in the name of healthier purposes.

Such developments “may yet help pave the way for long-overdue reform. If so, this would certainly not be the first time that the cunning of history has produced so astounding a result.” And so we are back on the road to the “end of history” after all.

So has “endism” successfully absorbed the shock? I’m not persuaded. In Fukuyama, Hegel springs eternal, and it was Hegel who passed this judgment (early in the nineteenth century): “Islam has long vanished from the stage of history, and has retreated into oriental ease and repose.” The sheer refusal of Islam to do just that remains one of the principle flaws of “endism,” from Hegel to this day—that is, for as long as the modern West has rubbed shoulders with Islam. In theory, of course, Islam might be reformed into irrelevance. The late Ernest Gellner even opined that while Islam “did not engender the modern world, it may yet, of all the faiths, turn out to be the one best adapted to it.” But in actual practice, real Muslims have treated their would-be Luthers very shabbily; the space between Islamism and the authoritarian state remains a leaderless void, which neither side has an interest in filling.

The danger of Fukuyama’s argument is that it could encourage complacency. He really does not come down very far from the starry-eyed Middle East experts. I think in particular of Georgetown political scientist Michael Hudson, who once told a congressional committee that “whatever the ultimate intent of Islamist movements, their current function is a liberalizing one.” Fukuyama would just switch the adjectives around: whatever the current intent of Islamist movements, their ultimate function is a liberalizing one. It’s a short distance from this point, to the argument that we should welcome Islamist seizures of power, so as to speed up the inevitable process of regeneration. And Fukuyama’s idea that Islamist “independent action” might “lay the groundwork of a true civil society” sounds precisely like the argument of John Esposito (who’s also scrambling to fix his crumpled fender).

In any case, Fukuyama’s thesis can’t be proved or disproved in any near term, and it is pointless to debate it. Its policy implications are vague at best. And it doesn’t change the fact that at this moment in time, it isn’t Islamism but “endism” that (to paraphrase Hegel) has “vanished from the stage of history”—even if it still crops up on the (unlikely) pages of Commentary.

Anti-Americans mark 9/11

On By Martin Kramer

Yesterday, Muslim extremists in North London held a conference under the title “September 11: A Towering Day in History.” The Times of London carries the most detailed story. The Finsbury Park mosque was bedecked with posters of the Twin Towers in flames and banners proclaiming: “Islam Will Dominate the World.” Speakers hailed Al-Qa’ida for delivering a powerful blow to America, the extremists claimed new recruits, and they promised new attacks if America strikes Iraq.

No less disturbing, to my mind, is a report in this morning’s Frankfurter Allgemeine on the proceedings of the First World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies (WOCMES), meeting in Mainz, Germany. Elsewhere I have written about how the initiative for this event came from America’s own Middle East Studies Association (MESA). “Only rarely was self-criticism heard from the ranks of the Middle East researchers,” reads this morning’s report. “Everyone concentrated on criticizing America. And self-critical utterances were made in such a way that, at the end, America was again held responsible for everything.” The correspondent lamented the absence of a spokesperson of the U.S. government, who might have “done some simple reapportioning of blame.” (Where are America’s public diplomacy soldiers when you need them?)

This would be bad enough if the congress were the errant mischief of those Europeans. Alas, it was the initiative of America’s premier academic association for Middle Eastern studies. And there were plenty of Americans on the panels. Apparently, none came to their country’s defense, on foreign ground, on 9/11. Am I surprised?

Last night, the congress unanimously conferred the first “WOCMES Award for Outstanding Contributions to Middle Eastern Studies” on Edward Said. Give me the London extremists anytime. At least you know where you stand.