Author: Martin Kramer

President Bashar will see you now!

On By Martin Kramer

Reports say that the fighting in Damascus is now “visible from the Presidential Palace,” which has prompted me to take you, my reader, on an exclusive tour of it. If the violence culminates in a revolution, the fall of the Presidential Palace would symbolize the endgame, so seizing it will become a prime objective. (But I wouldn’t expect a last stand there: that would take place far away, in the Alawite regions in the north of the country.)

So climb in the official limo, ascend the mountain, traverse the long boulevard, and enter the inner sanctum of the Assad regime! All you have to do is click here. Oh, you’re alarmed by that gunfire echoing down the marble-clad corridors? Pay no mind! The people love their leader!

Yitzhak Shamir and leadership

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer delivered these remarks to a dinner of the Board of Governors of Shalem College (then in formation), Jerusalem, July 9, 2012. Present was board chairman Yair Shamir, whose father, the Israeli leader Yitzhak Shamir, had passed away on June 30. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

In recent days, much has been written and said about Yitzhak Shamir, which is ironic, as Yitzhak Shamir was very taciturn and said little. The response to his passing has been nothing short of remarkable. He is now remembered by many with nostalgia as an ideal leader: determined, resolute, unyielding, principled. It says something about the moment we are in: as the “new Middle East” melts away, and even the bedrock peace with Egypt seems to shake, so Yitzhak Shamir is regarded rather wistfully as the kind of leader we need today.

I’ll leave it to others to elaborate on Shamir’s qualities. I would only add that the qualities he exhibited as a political leader—the tenacity, the resolve, the certitude in the way chosen—are precisely the qualities that enable political prisoners to endure exile and incarceration without losing hope. Yitzhak Shamir was exiled by the British empire to one of its most desolate outposts, Eritrea, in the hope of isolating and breaking him. He endured, escaped, made his way back home, and resumed his struggle.

Prison and exile leave an imprint often more lasting than study and reflection. They are a flame that forges character, and we see that in figures from Natan Sharansky to Nelson Mandela. Yitzhak Shamir came through that same flame. As far as I know, no one has written a book about political prisoners who became heads of state. In such a book, Yitzhak Shamir would deserve a prominent place, along with Menachem Begin.

Experience left him with a remarkable set of personal qualities. But as I always tell students, leadership isn’t a personal quality. It’s a relationship. For leadership to be successful, there must also be followers—persons who are in a symbiotic relationship with the leader. And so the interesting question isn’t only Yitzhak Shamir’s unique qualities, but why he so resonated with the Israeli public that he became the second-longest serving prime minister of Israel, after Ben-Gurion.

My summer interns are doing some work for me on Abba Eban, which gives rise to this reflection. Eban and Shamir were both born in 1915, only months apart. In one respect, they were similar: they were both outliers, Eban by his origins, Shamir by his politics. But otherwise, they were total opposites. During World War Two, Eban rose to the rank of major in the British Army; Shamir promoted attacks on British officers who were Eban’s colleagues. When the Lehi assassinated Swedish mediator Count Bernadotte, Eban was sent to represent Israel at his funeral. Shamir was always suspected of involvement in the assassination. Politically, of course, they were separated by the widest of gaps.

Eban was famously loquacious, a veritable talking machine. Someone once gave this tongue-in-cheek account of Eban’s oratorical style: “His speeches proceed with such an unbroken flow of admirable phrases that one awaits in a state of delighted incredulity the consummation of his eloquent sentences in which one sinuous clause takes up from its predecessors the elusive thread of the argument he is weaving, the shuttle of his words flying ever faster till he shakes out suddenly, like a conjurer’s silk handkerchief, the finish fabric of his speech.”

Shamir, by contrast, was extraordinarily taciturn, a man of few words. My friend Robert Satloff, who runs The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, shared this story with me, and I share it with you, Yair, as you may not have heard it.

The Institute rented out the St. Regis Hotel in the mid-80s to host an event with Shamir. 300 people filled the ballroom. My task was to prepare some questions for the Q/A session and plant them around the room. Shamir comes and delivers his usual remarks. 9 minutes total. Then we start Q/A and he runs through one question after another with olympic speed. (It doesn’t take long to say “no” — which he did better and with more frequency than anyone I ever met.) So, after a total of 28 minutes, Shamir exhausted every question (and every questioner) in the room. And we paid for a full hour!

Now if one had been situated in 1960 or 1970, and had to bet which of the two men would become prime minister of Israel, Eban would have been the obvious choice. If you’d been an American Jew, it wouldn’t even have been a question. The Encyclopedia Judaica first appeared in 1970. It devoted a column of print to Eban; Shamir didn’t even have an entry. Eban was an international icon, a hero of public diplomacy; Shamir worked in the shadows, spending years in secret operations.

Eventually both men served their county as foreign minister—but that’s as far as Eban got. The explanations are many, and there’s an element of accident and happenstance. But nothing in history is ever pure accident. There was something in Yitzhak Shamir that resonated in the Israeli people—something that made his brand of leadership appealing.

Future historians will debate what it was, but I’ll venture a preliminary guess: he personified an Israeli determination to stand firm against pressure. As a small country in a hostile neighborhood, Israel is always under pressure, from enemies and friends alike. There are many strategies to alleviate pressure—diplomacy, negotiation, concessions. Eban practiced them like a maestro. The problem is that these strategies often just invite more pressure. Shamir practiced a different strategy: simply make it self-evident that pressure will never work. This touched something deep in the Israeli psyche—and gave him a trusting following that transformed him into a national leader.

His policies can and will be debated, as will his legacy. But his strategy has proven itself. He didn’t reach it through profound study, just through the personally observed behavior of human kind. And this brings me to my final point.

There’s nothing particular in the career of Yitzhak Shamir that endears his memory to our project, Shalem College. He studied only sporadically; he learned what he knew from the school of life. Abba Eban collected 20 honorary doctorates from universities; Yitzhak Shamir collected two or three (and each time, the award excited protests). But his life poses the question we hope to answer. That’s because no young Israeli will lead such a life again. No young Israeli will be sent into exile as a political prisoner, driven underground to live under a false identity, be pursued by the armies of an empire. And it’s a good thing no young Israeli will live such a life, because we’re now a sovereign people.

In sovereign states where young people are protected and nurtured, which life experiences can begin to substitute for the tests imposed by the absence of sovereignty on an earlier generation of Jews? Since we’re not going to send our young people to a hole in Eritrea, or have them go to war with the crude tools of an underground militia, what other rigorous tests can we impose?

That is the mission of Shalem College. At some point, every stable and secure society must ask how it can mold leaders through some method other than adversity. The answer everywhere has been the rigors of a demanding education. We won’t see the likes of Yitzhak Shamir again, because the history that forged him is past. But we owe it to him, to ourselves, and to the Jewish people, to put our best young people to an exacting test, and so build them to be worthy successors of the founders. We’re grateful for the life of Yitzhak Shamir—and resolute in our determination to forge the successor generation with different tools, made possible by the privilege and power that comes with Jewish sovereignty.

Worst-case scenario in Egypt

On By Martin Kramer

A Muslim Brother, Muhammad Morsi, has entered Egypt’s presidential palace and taken his seat in the chair once occupied by Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak. This is a stunning development—a slow-motion Islamic revolution that few envisioned back in January 2011, when the crowds filled Tahrir Square.

The experts systematically underestimated the Muslim Brotherhood for a simple reason: they saw the revolution as they wanted it to be, not as it was. The distorted optic of the Tahrir stage seduced and misled them. But it was even more than that: the Muslim Brotherhood itself conducted a campaign of deliberate deception. They claimed they wouldn’t try to dominate the parliament, that they wouldn’t run candidates for every seat—and then they did. They said they wouldn’t run a presidential candidate of their own—and then they did. The credulous believed these reassurances—they seemed so rational and pragmatic. Marc Lynch, an estimable expert on these matters, actually chided the Brotherhood when it defied his analysis of its best interests and nominated a presidential candidate. It was, in his words, a “strategic blunder.”

In fact, it was a strategic master-stroke. From the beginning of the revolution, the Muslim Brotherhood has understood that the fluid situation created by the fall of Mubarak won’t last forever, and that now is the time to seize every possible position they can, before alternatives take form. They want power, they crave power, and they won’t let it slip through their fingers by sitting out even a single contest. At the end of the day, all of the arguments for holding back have fallen by the wayside. They’re going for broke.

And have no doubt about the Muslim Brotherhood. The Brotherhood seeks to restore Egypt to the glory it once knew, by implementing Islamic social and legal norms. The translation of Islamic ideology into practice is the point of holding political power. The Brotherhood might not be able to effect an exact translation—that would be difficult—but a translation of ideology into practice it will be. This worries secular Egyptians, the international community, and Israel. At this early stage, many will say that such worries are overblown, that the Brotherhood will adapt and compromise. To consolidate power, it might. But at a later stage, many may regret having been so nonchalant.

No one can stop Brotherhood. You say: what about the military chiefs? The military, at times, has appeared to be winning. The revolution got rid of Gamal Mubarak, Husni Mubarak’s son and presumed successor, and that suited the military fine. The parliamentary elections, won by Islamists, demolished the liberals by revealing their weakness. That suited the military fine.

This left standing the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis. Everyone assumed that they wouldn’t dare put forth a candidate for the presidency. The new president was to have been a consensus personality above party politics—an ElBaradei or Amr Musa. It was the Brotherhood’s decision to run a presidential candidate that threw the military off-balance, and they have been scrambling ever since. The first Brotherhood candidate, the formidable deputy-guide Khayrat ash-Shater, was disqualified—he would have won a sweeping victory. His replacement, Muhammad Morsi, basically a stand-in, had less appeal, and against him, the unlikely Ahmad Shafik stood a chance. But it gradually became evident that even the stand-in might defeat Shafik, hence the drastic measures by the military chiefs, stripping the presidency of most of its powers even before the first ballot was counted.

The military’s efforts to contain the Muslim Brotherhood, at this late date, can only buy limited time. The parliament has been dissolved, but it will have to be reconstituted, and then what? The rewriting of the constitution can be delayed, but the constitution will have to be written and approved by the legislature, and then what? And if the president isn’t to be the supreme commander of the Egyptian armed forces, then who will be? The simple truth is that Egypt isn’t going to revert to military rule—it’s too late, the polls show that a vast majority of Egyptians want a transition to civilian, constitutional rule. For the military, the question is, what are the terms of this transition? What will guarantee their economic enterprises? What will assure them that they won’t be prosecuted and purged? This is now the core of Egyptian domestic politics: the terms on which the military will exit. And with each passing day, the hand of the Muslim Brotherhood is strengthened in this negotiation, because it grows more legitimate and the generals grow less legitimate. There are those who think that the Muslim Brotherhood can still be outmaneuvered by gerrymandering the system. In the long term, it can’t. Egypt is headed toward populist Islamist rule, and it is just a matter of time before the Brotherhood checkmates its opponents.

So how will the Muslim Brotherhood rule? It is the misfortune of the Muslim Brotherhood that, having waited more than 80 years for power, they have come to it at perhaps the lowest point in the modern history of Egypt. The country teeters on the edge of bankruptcy, the result of decades of bad decisions, corruption, and the absence of the rule of law. The Muslim Brotherhood is in a bind, because it has to deliver. For the masses of people who voted for the Muslim Brotherhood, the revolution wasn’t about democracy and freedom. It was about bread and social justice.

The Brotherhood has a so-called “Renaissance” plan for the overhaul of the Egyptian economy. I won’t pretend to judge its feasibility. Could modernization of tax collection double or triple tax revenues? Can Egypt double the number of arriving tourists, even while contemplating limits on alcohol and bikinis? Can a renovation of the Suez Canal raise transit revenues from $6 billion a year to $100 billion? Can Egypt’s economy surpass the economies of Turkey and Malaysia within seven years? These are all claims made at various times by the economic thinkers of the Muslim Brotherhood, who trumpet Egypt’s supposed potential for self-sufficiency.

If you think this is pie in the sky, then it isn’t difficult to imagine the “Plan B” of the Muslim Brotherhood. It is to find ways to raise the rent Egypt collects from the West and rich Arabs for its geopolitical position. Call it a shakedown, call it a bailout, it doesn’t matter. The message Egypt is sending is that it’s too big to fail, and that the world, and especially the United States, owes it. The deputy guide, Khayrat ash-Shater, put it directly: “We strongly advise the Americans and the Europeans to support Egypt during this critical period as compensation for the many years they supported a brutal dictatorship.” Egypt, which is one of the largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid, is thus owed compensation.

A key part of this narrative is that Mubarak sold peace with Israel on the cheap. In Egypt it is believed that the $1.3 billion that Egypt receives a year in military aid, and hundreds of millions more in economic aid, are just a portion of what Egypt’s adherence to peace is worth. To get more, the plan of the Muslim Brotherhood is to persuade Washington that it can’t take Egypt for granted. The strategy will be to stimulate crises that will be amenable to resolution by the transfer of resources. No one can predict what those crises will look like. It’s hard to imagine that some of them won’t involve Israel.

So the question the United States faces will be this: is Egypt indeed too big to fail? Is the United States now not only going to talk the Muslim Brotherhood—which it is already doing—but actively work to help it succeed? The question comes at a time when the United States has become frugal. And there is no superpower rivalry that Egypt can exploit. When John Foster Dulles informed Nasser in 1956 that the United States wouldn’t finance his great dam at Aswan, Nasser went to Moscow. Today there aren’t any alternatives to the United States.

That being the case, the only way for Egypt to get the attention of Washington is to threaten to spin out of American orbit and into the opposing sphere of radical Islam. At no point will it be indisputable that the United States has “lost Egypt.” But at every point, Egypt’s loss will seem imminent. In that respect, the Muslim Brotherhood has already made its mark on history: from this day forward, Egypt can’t ever be taken for granted again.

For future reference, Marc Lynch stands by his analysis: