Category: Sandbox

The Middle East Circa 2016

On By Martin Kramer

I have been remiss in not posting my remarks on a panel held on May 12, at the annual Soref Conference of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. I shared the podium with Robert Kagan and Robin Wright, and the assignment was to envision the Middle East five years hence, in 2016. The Institute has published a précis of the entire conference, including my panel. Below, my remarks as delivered (or you can watch me say the same thing here).

When I received the assignment for today, it reminded me of that 1999 book, Dow 36,000. At the time the authors wrote it, the Dow stood at 10,300, and the book became a bestseller. But today the Dow is only 20 percent higher than it was then—it’s only at 12,700. Last February, one of the co-authors wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Why I Was Wrong About ‘Dow 36,000’.” “What happened?” he wrote. “The world changed.” Well, what a surprise.

Now there was a lot of talk that sounded like “Middle East 36,000” just a couple of months ago. This is a new Middle East, everything you thought you knew is wrong, bet on revolution and you’ll be rewarded handsomely with democracy. Let’s face it: Americans like optimistic scenarios that end with all of us rich and the the rest of the world democratic. There’s much in the American century since World War Two to foster such optimism. But while you enjoy reading your copy of “Middle East 36,000,” I’m going to quickly tell you what’s in the small print in the prospectus—the part that’s in Arabic.

First, the competition. For years, the structure was defined by what I’ll call, for short, the circle and the crescent. The circle was comprised of Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states, wrapping around the region. It was an informal alliance of unnatural allies. American credibility and the willingness to use its power kept the circle intact. Opposite it was the crescent, beginning in Iran and stretching westward through Iraq, Syria, and into Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamists. Iran’s skill in using its leverage has kept the crescent in alignment. The crescent is smaller but more cohesive and integrated than the circle—largely because it’s mostly Shiite.

These two formations are being transformed. In fact, the circle is pretty much broken, a scene of elbowing and shoving. The deterioration between Turkey and Israel started it, now the scuffling has commenced between Egypt and Israel, and this is only the beginning. In contrast, the crescent is still intact. As Syria wobbles, the Western end of the crescent could come undone. But the crescent is a more natural formation than the circle. Some of those in it happen to be cousins, so it’s more resilient. And even as Iran represses its own people, it’s been able to build bridges to Erdogan’s Turkey and post-Mubarak Egypt, capitalizing on disarray in the circle.

Now, what the competition might look like in 2016 is anyone’s guess. Alliances will have shifted; some states may flip alliances. But the key variable, I think, is whether the United States can or can’t resurrect a stable coalition of unnatural allies. If it can’t, a few cohesive middle powers are going to emerge as rivals for dominance, and they will be testing one another as they jostle to fill the void left behind by the United States.

There are four middle powers: Turkey, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. They are already operating beyond their borders, with flotillas to Gaza, and rockets to Lebanon, and secret bombings of Syria, and troops into Bahrain. By 2016, the middle powers will have developed more capabilities to do these sorts of things, from long-range missiles to surveillance satellites, and nuclear weapons will be next. And their competition will have intensified. In this respect, the Middle East in 2011 bears a certain resemblance to Europe in 1911. Looking five years out, that’s not an analogy we would want to see fulfilled.

Now you notice I didn’t include Egypt as a middle power. There has been much talk of Egypt returning to its Arab vocation, to its past role as a regional leader. It’s unlikely. Egypt is going to have to recover from the revolution, which will depress the economy as long as uncertainty lasts. Is Egypt too big to fail? That’s going to be the Egyptian question in Washington between now and 2016. Egypt desperately needs to raise the rent others pay for its good will, so while we’ll hear the sound of the rattling sabre, more insistent will be the sound of the rattling cup.

What about the other countries that aren’t middle powers? Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, the Palestinians? The defining character of these states is that they are highly segmented. Under a ruthless dictator, they have played larger roles—think of Iraq under Saddam, Syria under Hafez Asad, even the Palestinians under Arafat. But as the era of the dictators winds down, the likely outcome will be a mix of quasi-democratic practices with regionalism, sectarianism, and even tribalism. Violence will be endemic, and disaffected groups on the margins will seek to break away from ineffectual central governments. In some places, the very map may be redrawn. Some of these states are little empires, preserving in amber the interests of the long-defunct empires of Europe circa 1916. By 2016, some of these mini-empires could fracture. And in this volatile situation, Israel is unlikely to part from its own best lines of defense, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.

Finally, a warning label on Islamism. Those who were mesmerized by images from Tahrir Square, and thought that Islamism was passé, saw only what they wanted to see. Today Islamists call the shots in Lebanon, they’ve survived a serious challenge in Iran, they dominate the scene in Turkey, they’re busy planning their creeping takeover in Egypt, and they’re poised to set the agenda for the Palestinians. Democracy, such as it is in these places, is usually a mechanism of Islamist empowerment. No one knows how this will play out by 2016. It does mean that Islamism’s opponents will have to be much more agile than they were when the dictators were doing the work.

So I’ve read you the small print. But this is just a caveat, not a prediction, and the story can be changed. It can be changed by what used to be called a “wild card,” but is now called a “black swan”—something unpredictable yet decisive. There could be an Iranian spring. There could be a breakthrough on energy. China could propel itself into the Middle East. Who knows? No one does.

More to the point, though, the United States could do something to help improve the story. Earlier I said that the key variable is whether the United States can or can’t resurrect a stable coalition of unnatural allies. The way to do this isn’t to resolve their age-old differences—you can’t, and you end up looking weaker for failing. The way to do it is to be consistent in rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. Then people will want to be your friends, even if they don’t like the company. In other words, to resurrect the circle, you have to clip the crescent. You might not get to “Middle East 36,000.” But you might just prevent a crash.

Al Qaeda is dead! (Again!)

On By Martin Kramer
Fawaz Gerges

Fawaz Gerges, media-friendly academic, is out and about, telling us that Al Qaeda is over, it’s had its day, it’s history. Al Qaeda is “organizationally moribund.” Indeed, it “peaked with the 9/11 attacks.”

After bin Laden, his cohort, and the Taliban were expelled from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda was effectively decapitated. The leadership was on the run or captured. Dispersed haphazardly into various countries, most of which were unwelcoming, bin Laden’s men were rounded up by vigilant local security services competing to show Americans how cooperative they were.

Al Qaeda’s numbers have also plummeted: “At the height of its power in the late 1990s, al Qaeda marshaled 3,000–4,000 armed fighters. Today its ranks have dwindled to around 300, if not fewer.” For years now, it has faced “a serious shortage of skilled recruits in the Muslim heartland.” Gerges has written a book—more an extended essay—devoted to this proposition, entitled The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda. There he complains that “America’s political culture remains obsessed with al-Qaeda and the terrorism narrative continues to resonate both with ordinary Americans and with top military commanders.”

Maybe, maybe not. The problem is that I remember having heard the same thing from Gerges sometime in the past—to be precise, just one year before 9/11. Here is Gerges, fall 2000:

Despite Washington’s exaggerated rhetoric about the threat to Western interests still represented by Bin Ladin—US officials term Bin Ladin “the pre-eminent organizer and financier of international terrorism” and have placed him on the FBI’s “10 most wanted” list—his organization, Al-Qa’ida, is by now a shadow of its former self. Shunned by the vast majority of Middle Eastern governments, with a $5 million US bounty on his head, Bin Ladin has in practice been confined to Afghanistan, constantly on the run from US, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian intelligence services. Furthermore, consumed by internecine rivalry on the one hand, and hemmed in by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt on the other, Bin Ladin’s resources are depleting rapidly. Washington plays into his hands by inflating his importance. Bin Ladin is exceptionally isolated, and is preoccupied mainly with survival, not attacking American targets. Since the blasts in Africa [in 1998], not a single American life has been lost to al-Qa’ida.

Not a single one! And here was Gerges, only six months before 9/11:

Should not observers and academics keep skeptical about the U.S. government’s assessment of the terrorist threat? To what extent do terrorist “experts” indirectly perpetuate this irrational fear of terrorism by focusing too much on farfetched horrible scenarios? Does the terrorist industry, consciously or unconsciously, exaggerate the nature and degree of the terrorist threat to American citizens?

These have to go down as the most embarrassing assessments of Al Qaeda and terrorism made by anyone prior to 9/11. But while Gerges obviously didn’t know much about Al Qaeda at the time, he did know something about America: everything you’ve said quickly gets forgotten if you keep talking, especially if you actively cover your tracks. This is how he tried to do it one week after the 9/11 attacks:

Sadly, I’m not surprised that the evidence for the most devastating terrorist attack in history points to a Middle East connection.

I have just returned from the area after almost two years there as a MacArthur fellow. I was conducting field research on how Islamic movements perceive and interact with the West, particularly the United States. The writing was all over the wall.

Not surprised! Writing all over the wall! Well, it would have been a total surprise to anyone who’d read Gerges before 9/11, and I’d wager it was a total surprise to him as well.

Gerges only knows one tune: Muslims hate the terrorists among them, so the terrorists are always losing popularity, struggling to survive, “on the run,” and so on. Just leave the Muslims alone, they’ll sort it out. The idea may look debatable to you, but it’s worked for him—professorships, book contracts, media gigs. How well it holds up in practice doesn’t really matter, given the public’s memory deficit. Still, it’s amazing (to me) that Gerges shows not a smidgeon of the humility usually imparted by a rough encounter with reality. Not him! He just repeats his same old arguments, made with the same measure of cocksure certitude.

I don’t know if Al Qaeda is up for another round or has gone down for the count, and experts disagree on it. I do know that Fawaz Gerges doesn’t know either. And if it were my day job to know, I’d be worried—should Gerges, by some strange aberration of nature, actually be some sort of negative oracle, whose assertions are reliably and consistently false.

Shalem College in uncertain times

On By Martin Kramer

Martin Kramer delivered these remarks to the meeting of the Board of Governors of Shalem College, then in formation, New York, August 11, 2011. Posted retroactively at Sandbox.

Friends, we live in uncertain times. It would have been preferable to establish Israel’s first liberal arts college at a moment when Israel’s present was stable, its future was predictable, and markets were steadily rising. In fact, when the college was first conceived in the mid-1990s, those conditions almost seemed to apply. But fate has it that the implementation comes at a time of uncertainty, and this effort has become a test of how we deal with uncertainty. As we presume to prepare future students intellectually to deal with just such situations, it’s wholly appropriate that we should have to pass the same test ourselves. Let me proceed from the general to the specific in my assessment of how uncertainty might impact us, and how we might deal with it.

This has been a summer of discontent in Israel. There have been very large demonstrations in public squares, tent cities have sprung up, and earnest and not-so-earnest debates over Israel’s direction fill the newspapers. No one expected this, and it has aspects that attract and repel. I won’t impose on you my own views of the issues, on the promise and the peril in the slogan “social justice.” I do want to share some thoughts on the implications for Shalem College. There’s much to encourage us in these events—and a few things to give us pause.

It is inspiring to see multitudes of young people thinking about the current and future course of Israel—and not just think, but speak out. It is inspiring because our own venture arises from an idealistic vision that Israel can be better, that the work of pioneering is far from over, and that the way to push forward is to stir the minds of the young. To anyone who thought that Israel’s young people have become detached or apathetic, this summer has been a wake-up call. They’ve prompted a debate over the core values that should inform Israel’s social policies. They’ve posed the question of what constitutes the virtuous state and the good society—a question largely abandoned by Israel’s politicians, harnessed as they are to sectoral interests.

In the balance, this is good for our project—for what is our college devised to do, if not provoke debate over what constitutes the virtuous state and the good society? Isn’t that why we believe our students should read the best in Western and Jewish and Zionist thought? So that they might understand how great thinkers debated and answered these questions? Of course, in the street protests, these same questions are sometimes politicized, simplified, even vulgarized. But that doesn’t mean that young people aren’t thinking more deeply about them—those in the tents, those in the streets, but also the great majority watching from the sidelines. This makes our project even more timely.

Shalem College has the opportunity to become a leading venue where the young of Israel of every stripe come to think deeply and together with us about the virtuous state and the good society. Israel must change, Israel will change, and today’s young people will be the agents of that change. Is there any more direct way to reach far into the future, than to cultivate those young minds now awakened to their responsibilities? And is there any more exciting place to be, to share in that process, than Shalem College?

So these developments are welcome. But let me sound a cautionary note. These protests resonate widely, because they reflect the growing fear of Israel’s middle class, that decent middle-class life in Israel is becoming unaffordable from day to day, from price rise to price rise. I expect Shalem College to have students from all sectors, but the majority will come from the middle class. In our most optimistic moments, we envision these students (or, more likely, their parents) paying handsome tuition for our offerings. But as the price of everything rises, the middle class falls back on whatever subsidies it does have. Public higher education may be the greatest of Israel’s subsidies to the middle class. I pay more for cottage cheese than you do, but I pay only a fraction of what you pay to send my children to a decent university.

The spiraling cost of everything else is turning private higher education into a luxury product, out of reach of the middle class. We must be wary lest we become an enterprise that’s simply unaffordable. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: our mission isn’t to service an elite, it is to create one. To do so, we have to put ourselves in the mindset of potential students and their families—and do everything to assure that we stay well within reach.

Let me come now to the specifics of the college. Here, too, there is uncertainty. Our aim was to open Shalem College in fall 2012. We’re in summer 2011—fourteen months from the opening we had hoped for. We aren’t accredited, and we don’t know when we’ll be accredited—it’s guesswork. We’re making progress, we’ve had positive signs, but the process is still a black box. I’ve begun to describe the accreditation process in Israel this way: imagine that in order to open a business or launch a product line, you needed the permission of all your top competitors. That’s precisely how accreditation works in Israel.

I don’t want to preempt the systematic discussion of this subject this afternoon. I just want to state my guiding principle—the same one I stated the very first time I addressed this board. We should open as soon as accreditation permits. In the balance, delay hurts us more than it helps us. There will be seat-of-the-pants aspects to the opening. So what? In the lore of every other institution of higher education in Israel, there are seat-of-the-pants stories. The largest university in Israel, where I spent 25 years, began just this way: improvised and scrappy. And until we have living, breathing students, and an operation that’s functional, our fundraising will be handicapped as compared to that of comparable institutions that do have living, breathing students. The enthusiasm of the young is naturally stirring—more so, I think, than our own middle-aged determination. And it’s easier to sell an idea and a place, than an idea alone.

Friends, the inaugural day of Shalem College is drawing closer, even if we can’t now circle a date on the calendar. Of course, there are uncertainties. As I’ve said before, if it were easy to do this, someone would have done it already. It would have been a lot easier for Shalem to have remained one more think tank, with a fairly predictable impact. But we yearned to do much more—to mold the minds of hundreds and ultimately thousands of young people who will decide the future of Israel. To get there, everyone at this table has taken a risk—reputational or financial or both. All of us want to reduce and manage that risk—that’s why this board meeting is so important. But we will be richly rewarded for the risks we take today.

Allow me to steal a line from Henry V, in Shakespeare’s play of that name, who celebrates “we few, we happy few, we band of brothers”—and, I might add, sisters—and I would just slightly alter the rest as follows: “And gentlemen in New York now a-bed, Shall think themselves accursed they were not here.” We are here, Shalem College will be, and we will have reason to be proud of it. And of that, I’m quite certain.*

*Shalem College opened its doors in October 2013.