Category: Sandbox

Dr. Rashid and Mr. Khalidi

On By Martin Kramer

On December 11, Al-Jazeera’s program “From Washington” held a discussion on Middle Eastern studies in the United States. Chief guest: Professor Rashid Khalidi, the newly-seated incumbent of the Edward Said Chair in Arab Studies at Columbia University, and director of that university’s (government-subsidized) Middle East Institute. He said little that was original or surprising—until the end, when he blew a gasket and uttered the sort of thing he would only dare to say in Arabic.

It happened like this. At one point in the discussion, Khalidi criticized think tanks “that don’t want true dialogue with people whose views differ from their own, but who want to force their opinions on American citizens and the world.” He mentioned, by way of example, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which he labelled “the fiercest of the enemies of the Arabs and the Muslims.”

The moderator, Hafiz al-Mirazi, played devil’s advocate. Hadn’t the Institute often hosted Arabs and others holding diverse views? It had provided a podium for Nabil Amr, Palestinian information minister, as well as Egyptian presidential adviser Osama al-Baz. Just recently, Washington Institute mainstay David Makovsky had written a joint op-ed with an Egyptian writer from Al-Ahram (the reference was to Dr. Hala Mustafa, a visiting fellow), on democracy promotion in the Arab world.

At this point, Khalidi boiled over:

By God, I say that the participation of the sons or daughters of the Arabs in the plans and affairs of this institute is a huge error, this Israeli institute in Washington, an institute founded by AIPAC, the Zionist lobby, and that hosts tens of Israelis every year. The presence of an Arab or two each year can’t disguise the nature of this institute as the most important center of Zionist interests in Washington for at least a decade. I very much regret the participation of Arab officials and non-officials and academics in the activities of this institute, because in fact if you look at the output of this institute, it’s directed against the Palestinians, against the Arabs, and against the Muslims in general. Its products describe the Palestinians as terrorists, and in fact its basic function is to spread lies and falsehoods about the Arab world, of course under an academic, scholarly veneer. Basically, this is the most important Zionist propaganda tool in the United States.

This is the intimidating language of Arab boycott, aimed against an institution with entirely American credentials. The Washington Institute is directed by Ambassador Dennis Ross, who was the chief Middle East peace negotiator in the presidential administrations of George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He has always been a model of balance (unlike Khalidi, whose forays into politics have always been to advise Yasir Arafat). The Washington Institute is run by Americans, and accepts funds only from American sources. (Contrast with the donors of Khalidi’s chair, whose precise identities Columbia still refuses to reveal.)

And it is outrageous for Khalidi to denounce the Arabs who have come to The Washington Institute as blundering dupes. I was there in the fall, when the Institute brought to Washington a group of Palestinian Fatah activists associated with the Tanzim (an invitation for which Ross took a lot of flak). While in Washington, these Palestinians said things that could hardly be squared with “Zionist propaganda.” Who is Khalidi to tell them they made a “huge error”? For its annual fall conference, the Institute flew in three members of Iraq’s Governing Council, whose country would still be under Saddam’s iron rule if Khalidi had had his way. Who is he to tell them they made a “huge error”? The year before last, my stay coincided with that of Ali Salem, the Egyptian playwright who has faced down Egypt’s entire literary establishment, and who once was detained for his collaboration with democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim. Who in the world is Khalidi to tell him that he made a “huge error”? I doubt these steel-belted Arabs would ever allow themselves to be intimidated by a pampered prof enjoying the full Columbia treatment.

I note that Khalidi has never made a comparable statement in English, probably for this reason: it would damage his reputation as a bridge-building moderate. To maintain that image, he’s even shared podiums with members of The Washington Institute (to wit, David Makovsky). But Khalidi in Arabic, on Al-Jazeera, is someone else altogether. There he is the bridge-burner, the zealot who would warn other Arabs away from The Washington Institute because it is “Israeli,” and a “Zionist propaganda tool.” Behold, Arab-style McCarthyism.

Khalidi’s crude outburst won’t stop the caravan, but it does put yet another question mark alongside his name. I have never called him an apologist for terrorism, and I respect some of his historical scholarship. But I once heard him speak to a predominantly Arab audience, and it alarmed me. This latest statement confirms something I’ve suspected ever since: he isn’t all he appears to be. Caveat emptor—buyer beware. (Too late for Columbia, but not for the rest of us.)

And speaking of Columbia, what has Khalidi done to promote what he calls “true dialogue” since his September enthronement in the Edward Said Chair? Two Israelis—academic post-Zionists—spoke at his institute this past semester. He and they would have nodded in agreement over Israel’s alleged misdeeds. I don’t think that’s good enough, and it leaves me wondering (again) why his institute gets what The Washington Institute doesn’t get: a $400,000-a-year Title VI handout from the American taxpayer. It’s a dubious mechanism that puts such a hefty subsidy at the disposal of an Arab boycotter. It really should be fixed.

Saddam in Court: Who’s on Trial?

On By Martin Kramer

With Saddam in U.S. hands, thoughts turn to his future trial. Various pundits have claimed that it won’t be enough to examine Saddam’s crimes. It will also be necessary to probe U.S. and Western support for his regime, during the decade of the Iran-Iraq war and the lead-up to Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait.

The late Elie Kedourie, historian and political theorist at the London School of Economics, put the issue in just the right perspective, in an interview granted in June 1992. (This was less than three weeks before his untimely passing.) Kedourie, it will be recalled, was a native of Baghdad, and an acute observer of Iraq’s troubled history. The interviewer told him that a Paris-based scholar had declared Saddam to be a “creature of the West.” Kedourie’s reply:

I do not understand what he means by that. If he means that it was Western governments that put him in power, then that is not true. If he means that from 1980 to 1990 the American and French governments and German firms did their best to help him, this is perfectly true. But you have to look at what their intentions were….The Americans believed, mistakenly I think, that if they did not do something in order to stop Khomeini, he would sweep over the whole of the Middle East. I think there was little prospect of that, but that is what they believed and therefore they chose to support Saddam. Again, within its own terms it was a rational if mistaken calculation. It was a terrible mistake, which lay at the back of the invasion of Kuwait and the war that followed, which I consider an unnecessary war. It was the result of policies that the Americans had followed vis-à-vis Saddam for ten years and that made him think that he could invade Kuwait with impunity.

A calculation went wrong. But I do not think that there was anything else there. Saddam is not a creature of the West. He is not a creature of anybody.

There are two crucial points here. First, Kedourie knew far too much about Iraq to regard Saddam as the West’s creation. He understood precisely which tectonic forces, by their immense internal pressures, had combined to produce him.

Second, Kedourie did not rail against the United States for its best-guess policies of the 1980s. He regarded the U.S. decision to back Saddam against Iran as a mistake and a miscalculation. But as a thinking historian, who never stopped reading in diplomatic archives, Kedourie thought it perfectly legitimate for states to calculate and act on self-interest. (This was always preferable to action the name of ideology. Ideological states, Kedourie believed, were intrinsically dangerous to their peoples and their neighbors.) Kedourie also knew and expected that states, working in a fog of partial knowledge, were bound to make mistakes in pursuing their interests. He never set himself up in Olympian judgment of policymakers for these sorts of errors.

But while he could understand errors of calculation, he could not pardon failures of will. For Kedourie, support for Saddam before 1990 was an error, but the decision not to remove him in 1991 was a failure. U.S. leaders lacked the will to act in pursuit of the U.S. national interest, and so fell down on their sworn duty. In a May 1991 lecture, Kedourie said this:

The American campaign stopped in its tracks by order of the president. Given this aggression by Iraq, and given that Iraq had to be stopped, one would have thought that it would be quite meaningless simply to liberate Kuwait and leave untouched the structures of the Baathist regime which had organized and committed the aggression. Iraq is a very populous and a rich country. If the regime remains in place, there is no way it can be prevented from reestablishing itself and acquiring new supplies of weapons of all kinds….It may not be possible next time around to organize an expedition of half a million troops and an armada in order to deal with this recurrent situation. So as things look to me now, the aftermath of the Gulf war seems a tremendous failure for the U.S.

As usual, Kedourie shows us the way. Saddam was no one’s creature. It would be an affront to justice to diminish Saddam’s criminal culpability by invoking U.S. policy mistakes, however egregious. Mistakes are not crimes.

The decision that left Saddam in power in 1991 was a monumental failure, and one that history has already judged severely. But at least credit those who did organize an expedition and an armada in 2003, and who did their duty despite the criticism of feckless “allies” and the absence of “international legitimacy.” Some of those who launched this expedition were party to the previous mistake and the earlier failure. By their actions this year, they have balanced the books—and then some.

U. of California’s Deans Don’t Quite Get It

On By Martin Kramer

This morning’s San Francisco Chronicle runs an op-ed on H.R. 3077 by two heavy-hitters in the University of California system: Geoffrey Garrett, vice provost and dean of the UCLA International Institute, and David Leonard, dean of International and Area Studies at Berkeley. It’s the most intelligent thing that academics have produced so far in response to the bill. They don’t make the absurd claim that the Title VI advisory board would interfere in curriculum, and they accept the idea of a board in principle. But they do propose a change in the board’s composition. Unfortunately, this proposal rests on yet another misreading of the bill.

This is what they write:

The legislation dictates that the [seven-member] advisory board include two members from national security agencies, such as the CIA and the Department of Defense….Why should the national security agencies be singled out above other organizations concerned with international studies and foreign language education?

If any federal agency should be given privileged representation on the board, it is the Department of State. With decades of experience in educational and cultural exchange such as the Fulbright program, the State Department is best suited to help promote international higher education—particularly given the importance of fostering mutual understanding in the post-Sept. 11 world.

How have Professors Garrett and Leonard misread the bill? The two advisory board members who would represent government (and who would be appointed by the Secretary of Education) would not be appointed “from national security agencies.” Rather, they would be appointed from “agencies with national security responsibilities”—that’s the exact language of the bill.

What is an agency with national security responsibilities? Look at the definition used for the purposes of another government-supported program, the National Security Education Program (NSEP), which funds scholarships for students who commit themselves to work in just these agencies. That definition includes these executive departments: the Department of Defense, the Intelligence Community, the Department of Commerce, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Energy, the Department of Justice, the Department of the Treasury—and, yes, the Department of State. All of these departments are deemed to have “national security responsibilities.”

I agree with Professors Garrett and Leonard that there are no grounds to privilege the Department of Defense and the CIA over the Department of State, and the bill doesn’t do that. I hope they would agree that there is also no reason to exclude defense and intelligence agencies in appointments to the board, or to marginalize one department by privileging another. After all, these departments are part of one government, and all of them have needs in the field of international relations.

Congress must be wary lest it lend its hand to an academic boycott of the country’s intelligence and defense agencies, by excluding their representatives from the board. In the present bill, the Secretary of Education is given full discretion to make these two appointments, from whichever agency he or she sees fit. There is no credible reason to limit that discretion. The language of the bill on this point is perfect just as it is.

Professors Garrett and Leonard have one more complaint:

We are further concerned by the proposal that the board be given unusually broad powers to investigate grantee activities, by drawing on the full information available in all government agencies—including intelligence agencies. Because the activities of the Title VI programs are public, why should it be necessary to consult intelligence files to determine the range of the views they present?

This is a reference to a boiler-plate provision of the bill, which gives the advisory board the authority to secure from anywhere in government the information it needs to make its recommendations. That authority is essential, and it has nothing to do with investigating anyone’s views.

For example, one of the nagging questions about the Title VI program is how many of its beneficiaries go into government service. In April of last year, the president of the American Council on Education, David Ward, testified in support of Title VI before Congress, and made this claim:

Many of the graduates who benefited from these programs have gone on to serve in key U.S. government positions… Anecdotal (because the data are classified) evidence suggests that most career security foreign language and area specialists in agencies such as CIA and DIA were trained at institutions with Title VI centers. A local newspaper, for example, recently printed a picture of an intelligence officer in Afghanistan who had received language training at a Title VI center.

When Dr. Ward made this claim, I myself contested aspects of it, again on the basis of anecdotal evidence. But why should a government advisory board, presumably including two government officials, be limited to anecdotal evidence? Only agencies of government can tell the advisory board whether they benefit from the program in the way Dr. Ward claims they do.

So it’s perfectly proper that the law require those agencies to cooperate with the board in its work. The board’s recommendations on the effectiveness of Title VI—which spends $100 million of taxpayers’ money a year—should be grounded in fact and not anecdotes, especially when some of the facts are just waiting to be harvested in Washington.

Thanks to Professors Garrett and Leonard, the debate about H.R. 3077 in academe has moved forward. Yet they still don’t adequately grasp all aspects of the bill’s language and intent. It’s odd that Washington should have to educate the academy in the precise reading of a text. Call it an education.

Berkeley addendum. Over at Berkeley, the head of the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Professor Nezar AlSayyad, has called H.R. 3077 “an attempt to silence those who criticize the government.” He has also announced that his center, which now receives a hefty Title VI subsidy, will not apply for funding if the bill is passed. This, from a man whose main claim to administrative fame is the establishment of an Arab studies program named after the Saudi defense minister Prince Sultan, pumped up with $5 million from the Prince Sultan Charity Foundation. One wonders how much criticism of the Saudi government emerges from Berkeley’s center.

I’m going to hold Professor AlSayyad to his word. Let Berkeley’s Middle East center not apply. It will be one less application that has to be read and processed in Washington.