Kagan’s purpose in defending U.S. foreign-policy activism here is to deflect criticism of America’s unpopular engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. That is no easy task, and to perform it, Kagan adopts the two-stage approach to persuasion made famous by Prof. Harold Hill in The Music Man: Establish first that there is trouble in River City, and then propose a solution, namely a marching band. Kagan also offers a marching band, but with 40 divisions behind it.

Where River City is concerned, Kagan’s argument is unexceptionable: Without American leadership, the feckless Europeans can’t be counted on to do anything, and the Chinese can’t be counted on not to do things badly. America shouldn’t abandon its position as the leading world power.

What America should do with that position is a different question. In his columns at the Weekly Standard and the Washington Post and in a series of books, Kagan has been the punditry’s most insistent advocate of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. After 6,400 U.S. dead and more than 30,000 wounded, and direct and indirect expenditures in excess of $3 trillion, nation-building is ballot-box poison. Kagan finds it easier to preach generalities. That makes the present volume read like a poor man’s cholent, with the meat of the matter lost in filler. His most important and controversial assertion is that Muslim democracy constitutes a new global wave of democratic advance, but he makes his case weakly and in passing.

“Americans have often been plagued by doubt [about nation-building],” Kagan allows. “They have resented the costs, both material and moral. Wars are expensive, and occupations even more so. A century ago it was José Santos Zelaya and Victoriano Huerta. In recent years it has been Manuel Noriega, Slobodan Milosevic, Mullah Omar, Saddam Hussein, and Muammar Qaddafi.” That’s like saying, “Honey, I bought a lawn mower, a tennis racket, a Bentley, and a new set of patio furniture.” The highest estimate I have seen for the cost of America’s 1998 action against Serbia’s Milosevic, refugee resettlement and all, is about $25 billion, perhaps a hundredth of the combined costs of Iraq and Afghanistan—not to mention the near absence of casualties.

There was little opposition to bombing Serbia and sending peacekeepers afterward. But there has been impassioned objection from both left and right to a massive, multiyear commitment on the premise that America could engineer Muslim democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Even worse, the Iraqi adventure exacerbated the Iranian nuclear threat. As Adm. Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, explained in 2009, America couldn’t strike at Iran’s bomb-building capacity: “We have lots of Americans who live in that region who are under the threat envelope right now [because of the] capability that Iran has across the Gulf.”

In 2004, Kagan lauded in the New York Times the “small but growing movement among scholars of Islam, a group diverse enough to include Gilles Kepel of France and [fellow Weekly Standard contributor] Reuel Marc Gerecht of the United States, that believes the real promise of democracy lies with devout Muslims.” And he continues to believe that the world revolves around the prospects for Muslim democracy. After the second great wave of democracy that followed World War II, and a third wave from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Kagan writes:

it is possible that in the Arab Spring we are seeing a continuation of the Third Wave, or perhaps even a fourth. The explosion of democracy is about to enter a fifth straight decade, the longest and broadest such expansion in history.

He has no illusions that Muslim democracy, should it materialize, will be friendly to America:

Americans, having helped topple dictators in the Middle East, are not sure how they feel about what may follow. The inevitable victory of Islamist parties in some Arab states will probably bring governments to power that are less accommodating to some American interests than the previous dictatorships had been.

But Kagan thinks this is a good thing rather than a bad thing: “Americans’ enduring interest in a liberal world order generally transcends other, more narrow and temporary interests. The United States can lose an Egyptian ally but still gain a healthier world order.” Indeed, he lauds the Obama Administration for helping to topple erstwhile Arab allies: “America found itself withdrawing support from longtime allies like Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak. … American power became a decisive factor shaping the regional and international environment in which the Arab political turmoil unfolded.”

One doubts if any outcome in the Arab world would change Kagan’s mind. In fact, an Islamist government may be the least of Egypt’s problems. With its economy in free fall and its foreign exchange reserves running out, Egypt may soon find itself with no government at all, like Somalia. The Deputy Supreme Guide (that is his actual title) of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood warned recently that economic collapse would “transform a peaceful revolution into a hunger revolution” and asked for American help. Nonetheless, Egypt also is prosecuting American democracy activists, risking the American aid it now receives.

Continue reading: Democratic processes

Lebanon’s Maronite community has long been the region’s Christian citadel. “It used to be that when Christians around the region looked at the situation in Lebanon, it cheered them,” Elie Fawaz, a Lebanese political analyst, told me this week in Beirut. “They saw that here the Christians were equal to their Muslim counterparts. They were citizens and had the same rights as Muslims.” The citadel is now tottering. If Lebanon once served as a beacon for the region’s other Christians, the dimming of this light is making Christians in unstable countries like Iraq, Syria, the Palestinian territories, and Egypt even more vulnerable.

Lebanon’s Christian community comprises up to a third of the country’s total population. It is made up largely of Maronites but also includes Greek Orthodox and a number of other sects, like Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Greek Catholic, and Roman Catholic. Christians were likely never a majority in Lebanon, and yet, says Fawaz, a Greek Orthodox, “the Christians didn’t act like a minority. They pushed their vision for an independent and sovereign Lebanese state.”

Historically, Lebanese Christians have provided some of the region’s most influential intellectual leaders, like Charles Malik, who helped write the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Michel Chiha, one of the authors of Lebanon’s 1926 Constitution. In the wake of Lebanon’s independence in 1943, the Christian vision was to build a sovereign state that would bring political and cultural modernity to the country and, eventually, to the broader Middle East.

That project stalled for a number of reasons. First, there was the relative demographic decline of the Christians in the post-independence period, due to the accelerated birth rates of Sunnis and Shiites. The French authorities that oversaw Lebanon during the mandate period created a power-sharing agreement that allotted Christians 50 percent of the parliament—the other 50 percent was split between Shia and Sunnis—and this struck Lebanon’s growing Muslim population as unfair. Most significantly, in addition to these domestic problems, the Christians were unable to protect Lebanon from the region’s furies, which culminated in the Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) that pitted a number of different domestic players, as well as regional and international actors, against one another.

One of the main causes of that 15-year conflagration was the support of Lebanese Sunnis for the Palestinian cause, which attached these Sunnis to a larger Arab regional identity with a shared goal of eradicating Israel. The Sunni community’s political, diplomatic, and financial support of the Palestinians set them squarely against the Maronites, who resisted turning Lebanon into a forward operating base for the P.L.O. They sought to preserve their vision of a Lebanon free from the region’s destructive political currents and to avoid the Israeli reprisals they rightly feared.

What’s instructive is that the Christians fought in the war. “In 1975, mothers sent their kids to fight the Palestinians,” says Fawaz. “They had a vision for Lebanon.”

That changed when political calculation and greed shifted Christians’ focus from their war against the P.L.O. and Yasser Arafat’s allies to each other. The Christians split into different factions that faced off during the civil war. Two decades after the end of the war, the Christians are still plagued by this fissure, and they are still represented by the same political leaders who took them to war against one another more than 20 years ago. The result, says Fawaz, “is that today the Christians have no vision. They are definitely a numerical minority and acting like one—reactive and fearful.”

The Christian community here is suffering from a number of symptoms of minority psychosis. Consider that the head of the Maronite church has spoken out in defense of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Patriarch Beshara Butros Rai called Assad “open-minded” in a September interview. “I am hoping Assad will be given more chances to implement the reforms he already launched,” Rai added. An unfortunately all-too-typical Christian fear and hatred of Sunnis has convinced many Lebanese Christians—as well as Syrian ones—that only Damascus’ Alawite minority regime can protect the region’s Christians from Sunni Islamists.

Obviously, a regime that has slaughtered protesters for almost a year hardly embodies the sort of values promoted in the gospel, or warrants the faith of a cleric. But more to the point: This is the same Syrian regime that waged an open-ended campaign of terror against Lebanon’s Christians starting in 2005. Christian politicians and journalists were assassinated; bombs detonated in Christian regions of the country. And the official head of Lebanon’s Christian community is now appealing to Assad for protection?

The Maronites had always distinguished themselves as among the region’s most stubbornly independent of confessional sects. But fear, resentment, and short-sighted political calculation have led them today to seek protection and patronage from the Middle East’s most dangerous and retrograde elements: Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah. Recently, Fawaz explains, senior church officials came out in favor of the arms of Hezbollah’s Islamic resistance. “The Maronite church,” Fawaz says, “has taken a position defending the party that stands accused of killing the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri.” Fear has compelled the Christians to abandon logic as well as moral scruple.

In the aftermath of the February 2005 assassination of Hariri, Damascus withdrew its troops from Lebanon after almost 30 years. That represented a golden opportunity for the country’s Christians. “They’d been resisting Syrian hegemony in order to regain a free and independent Lebanon,” Fawaz says. “With Syria out, the Christians had what they always said they wanted: Sunni leadership that had a Lebanon-first policy.” Some Christian parties did ally themselves with the largest Sunni party, led by the late Hariri’s son Saad. But the majority, under the leadership of Michel Aoun, the former head of the Lebanese army, partnered with Hezbollah instead.

In other words, today’s Christians seem less motivated by their vision of an independent Lebanon than by their hatred of the Sunnis. It’s true that Lebanese Christians, like other minority groups here, including the Shiites, suffered terrible persecution at the hands of the Sunnis, who for centuries treated them as second-class citizens (at best). But Lebanon’s current Sunni leaders are not Ottomans, never mind jihadists. Like the Christians themselves, the Sunni leadership here promotes liberal values and a liberalized economy.

By openly siding against the Sunnis and allying with Hezbollah—and by extension Iran—the Christians have let identity politics and ideology, rather than interests and values, drive policy. The Sunnis are the regional majority, and no matter what sort of revolutionary project Iran has in store for the Middle East, the Sunnis aren’t going anywhere.

The question for the Christians is how to respond to the upheavals that have reshaped the region over the last year. Lebanon’s Christian population has the power to set the agenda for the rest of their regional co-religionists. Either they can identify and work with those Sunnis who share their same vision for Lebanon and the rest of the region, or they can let ancient wounds dictate a strategy of resentment that will ensure their demise.

Those inclined to discount the possibility of a Christian-free Middle East would do well to remember that Jews, in the recent past, had a significant place in the Ottoman Empire and Iran. Were it not for the birth of a sovereign Jewish state that took in Jewish refugees thrown out by countries that turned against them, this regional minority might well have disappeared half a century ago. Without an Israel of their own, if the Christians don’t get it right their era in the Middle East may be coming to an end.

Often askew, the frames in One to Nothing offer geometric compositions in a palette of the desert: sand, mud, rust, washed-out skies, and Jerusalem stone. Human or animal subjects are often in repose, with their eyes hidden, such that they become as much a part of the sunburned landscape as a cypress, a bougainvillea blossom, a Jewish star on a gate, or a car that has gone over a cliff. But even in their anonymous stasis, the people appear unaccommodated. Rozovsky—who now lives in Russian Brooklyn but grew up on the north shore of Boston after narrowly missing direct emigration to Israel with her Soviet Jewish parents—acknowledges that though her pictures contain humans, they are not portraits. “They’re more actions and gestures,” she told me recently, “human effort abstracted.”

In one, a man climbs a gated fence from one part of an ancient wall to a seemingly identical part. In another, a young couple—embracing, mourning, or reconciling, it’s hard to say—find the space to fully hold each other between parked cars. A camel’s head is tucked such that it’s impossible to know if the animal is coming or going. A family seems to have made its home in a tent on a remote beach across from a turbulent sea, while another couple has found an idyll by pushing a wheelchair to the coastline. A young frum girl, in her jean skirt, stands glumly in thigh-deep water, while a mud-covered woman pushes against the earth as if to nudge it along in space.

In fact, though, there is no such thing as an apolitical view of Israel—the stakes are too high, and the history too deep. A move toward abstraction could be viewed as the cheapest of cop-outs—the artist might be saying, I won’t take sides because, hey, there are no sides to take. Or it could be viewed as an artful transcendence that subtly and not-so-subtly acknowledges and engages the political background to take the specific land and identity struggles of that part of the Middle East and kick them into the universal slog of existence. That distinction is carried in nothing more than the quality of the art. Here, where that abstraction is successful—where these conceptual images could only have been taken in Israel, now—the overall effect is to suggest that in the harsh landscape of the Holy Land, nothing is much, much greater than one.

And that is exactly what the president did in his Arab Spring speech. Repeatedly invoking the mantle of universal values, staging a dogged defense of “inalienable rights,” and enlisting the righteous historical forces of the American Revolution and the Civil Rights movement, Obama set forth an idealistic path in such a resolute manner that conservatives, unable to control their nostalgic impulses, could not help but observe that the president was sounding more and more like his predecessor George W. Bush. With one big difference, that is: Whereas the former president—by his own admission—was a “gut player” who had primarily relied upon his instincts to formulate ideals, Obama, the former law professor, has always counted much more on the power of ideas.

A closer look at his new ideas, however, reveals a distressing philosophical flaw. Framed by two seminal rhetorical exhibitions—the Cairo speech of June 2009 and the State Department speech last month—the evolution of Obama’s approach to the Arab world continues to oscillate between diametrically opposed philosophical polarities that cannot be adequately resolved. The first one, as laid out in Cairo, espouses a multicultural engagement with the world that embraces an array of separate but equal values. The second, so eloquently displayed two weeks ago, subtly discards this same multicultural bent only to replace it with a categorical reaffirmation of “universal rights.” The unbridgeable logical gap that divides these two speeches—and their binary perspectives about what constitutes truth—also reflects the fundamental philosophical contradiction underpinning the president’s unfolding Middle East strategy: How do you convincingly stand up for a set of universal values while at the same time denying the legitimacy of their universalism?

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Obama’s memorable speech at Al-Azhar University in Cairo two years ago this week was one of the most humble, respectful, and ultimately unavoidable foreign policy speeches ever given by an American president. In Obama’s undisguised attempt to herald “a new beginning” with Islam and disassociate his presidency from the stained legacy of his predecessor—the controversial war in Iraq that Bush initiated—Obama departed from Bush’s unwavering belief in the supreme virtue of American values. Instead of extolling freedom and democracy, Obama offered elaborate accolades for Islam that were essentially meant to afford it a similar moral and historical legitimacy to our own ideals—suggesting that while Western and Islamic values may differ, they were still equally valid.

In discussing the need for governments that “reflect the will of the people,” Obama conceded in Cairo that “each nation gives life to this principle in its own way, grounded in the traditions of its own people,” and added that “there is no straight line to realize this process,” before clarifying that “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone” and insisting that “no system of government can or should be imposed by one nation on any other.” The philosophical implications of the speech were quite evident: By acknowledging that each nation produces its own set of principles according to its own particular circumstances, Obama was also admitting that there was ultimately no single criterion with which to evaluate multiple systems of value and meaning. In other words, he was implying that we could agree to disagree on the normative solutions to existential questions, since none of us actually possess the right answers.

It is not surprising that such a flexible philosophical approach spurred conservative critics to accuse the president of multiculturalism and to accordingly label him an “illiberal multicultural relativist.” For all the lingering ambiguity and confusion that such terms continue to generate, they do share an unequivocal repudiation of the universal legitimacy—and supremacy—of Western Enlightenment thought and its inherent beliefs in individual freedom, political equality, secularism, and democratic government. And although Obama has always acted in a nuanced manner that defies easy ideological labeling, his carefully crafted Cairo speech and the correspondingly deferential rhetoric he has chosen to use when engaging the Arab world suggest that he has shared to some extent in this repudiation—at least until recently.

What makes the Arab Spring speech remarkable is the fact that the president’s previous sympathies for the “common principles” that America shares with Islamic and Arab cultures seemed to dissipate beneath a resounding rhetorical defense of the universal legitimacy of Western ideals. Although still emphasizing that the Unites States “must proceed with a sense of humility” and conceding that “not every country will follow our particular form of representative democracy,” Obama steadfastly avowed that “we can and we will speak out for a set of core principles,” explicitly declaring that “the United States supports a set of universal rights”—a historically fraught term that had been conspicuously absent from the Cairo speech. The president’s repeated references to “universal rights,” “inalienable rights,” and “the self-determination of individuals,” as well as the sanctity of women’s rights and religious freedom, were all aimed at reaffirming the universal validity—and moral superiority—of core Western values.

Obama also chose to conjure the experiences of 1776 and the Civil Rights era last week and to quote that timeless Jeffersonian line that historically unites them—“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.” By declaring that the core American values indeed constitute “self-evident truths,” Obama was essentially also implying that anything contradictory must necessarily be false.

Rather than display a philosophical coherence or even a theoretical consistency, what these carefully divergent speeches suggest is a fundamental contradiction that lies at the heart of the president’s emerging Middle East strategy. The multicultural tones of the Cairo speech and the undeniable universalism proudly exhibited last month are not complementary or symbiotic but rather competing. If you indeed believe that equal rights for women are indisputable, you cannot then concede that patriarchal cultural traditions that deny these rights are still legitimate. Alternatively, if you espouse that there is nothing more sacred than individual self-determination then there is no logical approach that allows you to endorse the validity of legal institutions that outlaw the sexual expression of that individuality by severely penalizing acts of homosexuality, as is the norm throughout the Arab world. Finally, if you contend that religious freedom is paramount, you cannot respect or even acknowledge the legitimacy of religious traditions that attempt to brutally subordinate—and eliminate—alternative beliefs, as is currently happening in Egypt, where Coptic Christians are increasingly being assailed by radical Muslims. The broader problem, put simply, is that if you advocate the universal values of Western Enlightenment—which the president clearly did in the Arab Spring speech—you have to then be willing to stand firmly behind everything that these values entail while at the same time explicitly repudiating anyone who attempts to undermine them.

Although the postmodern awakening of the late 1960s that bred multiculturalism may have opened our eyes to injustices latent within Western societies and altered the way in which we have come to engage questions of race, gender, and ethnicity, its continuing hold on the American political imagination may severely hinder the Obama Administration’s success in ushering in the ambitious transformation he described last month, from the Middle East “as it is” to the Middle East “as it should be.”

As the Arab Spring continues to consolidate and expand, the pressures placed upon the United States to take a stand and pick a side will inevitably only mount. At some point, the president will have to halt his juggling act and decide whether certain values are not just preferable but superior to others. It is one thing to respect the religious and cultural traditions from which Sharia law, Arab tribal identity, and patriarchal authority have sprouted. But once these traditions begin to threaten the vitality and sustenance of the very freedoms and rights that this Arab Spring is attempting to secure—and they will—Obama won’t be able to continue to maintain his unstable balancing act between universalism and multiculturalism. If there is any chance of transcending the sordid status quo and creating a new Middle East, the president must also be ready to unapologetically admit that there are still many things that the Arab world can—and must—be willing to learn from us.

‘The Roulette Wheel’
Paul Berman is the author of The Flight of the Intellectuals:

The cries in the street appear right now to be uniformly denouncing corruption and autocracy—a fact that means nothing at all, given that every revolution in the history of the world has been conducted in the name of hatred for corruption and autocracy. Still, no one is shouting, “Islam is the solution!” Nor is anyone calling, so far, for some other imaginative kind of regime different from a conventional democracy. Nor do the principal crowds in the street appear to be the manipulated dupes of a hidden revolutionary organization. The many thrilling cries for democracy and freedom that we hear seem to be, on the contrary, genuinely spontaneous and mass. A conclusion, therefore: We are witnessing an enormous event whose most obvious surface element right now is a resemblance to 1989.

Some other surface elements are less reassuring. The liberal factions and parties and intellectuals of the region appear to be standing on institutionally flimsy foundations. Worse, their liberalism itself appears sometimes to be shaky. And there is the big problem beneath the surface. The Muslim Brotherhood, in its various branches and offshoots, appears to be magnificently disciplined, well-organized, sure of itself, and ideologically sturdy. The Brotherhood, in circumstances like these, merely needs to act with caution and an eye on the ultimate goal, and then it will stand in an excellent position to inherit the various revolutions as time goes by—to inherit the revolutions either in full or, more likely, in some kind of power-sharing arrangement with national armies and other groups.

As for the Brotherhood’s ultimate goal, this, of course, is 1979 exactly—an Islamist dictatorship (which will call itself a “democracy”), naturally with adaptations suited to different countries and circumstances, and whose goal will be regional (and more than regional), not just local. You have only to cock a keen ear to the Brotherhood’s oratory to recognize that, ideologically speaking, the Muslim Brotherhood has evolved not one whit.

This exhilarating moment of ours is therefore also a terrifying moment. And it would be foolish to hazard even the slightest prediction—foolish even to toy with a phrase like “more likely,” though I have just toyed with the phrase. The history of every revolution that has ever taken place tells us that at moments like this the role of hitherto-unknown leaders and of unforeseeable events is going to be vast and that leaders and events will point in every possible direction. Some countries will fare rather well, others will plunge into catastrophe—and the roulette wheel is spinning at this very moment.

‘Populism’
Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, was deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush Administration:

The 1989 revolutions benefited from several positive factors, such as prior years of democracy (Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states are a good example) and the model of the European Union. In the Middle East history is not so kind, nor does the Arab League offer much to admire. So, one can be at least dubious about whether vibrant democracies are assured in every case. I worry about a kind of populism developing, as the demands of the people for economic improvement will likely outstretch what new governments can deliver (except perhaps in Libya, with its oil wealth and small population). It would not be surprising to see politicians doing what came so easily in Latin America, appealing to lowest common denominators, inveighing against the rich, and pursuing policies guaranteed to produce more poverty.

Still, there are reasons for optimism. There are models of Muslim democracies in Asia. No one in the Arab world admires the Persian model of velayat-i-faqih, or clerical rule, nor do they admire the dictatorship that has been established in Iran today. In the years since 1989, there is an even stronger global consensus around democracy and human rights. While the Chinese model may be invoked, it seems entirely irrelevant in the Arab cases. One ingredient that must not be left out is the United States, for our voice is still heard in the region, and we can push and pull to get better outcomes than might otherwise occur. Here I am not so optimistic, however: The Barack Obama Administration does not seem ready, willing, or able to do that kind of pushing and pulling successfully.

‘Egypt’s Path’
Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow in the Saban Center for Middle East policy at the Brookings Institution, served in the CIA for 30 years. He is the author of Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad:

An earthquake has shaken Arab politics this winter like never before. Dictators are toppling in the face of home-grown revolutions. The winter of Arab discontent may give rise to a spring of democracy or a reversion to new autocracies. Some fear a repeat of the 1979 Iranian revolution, but there are fundamental differences between Iran then and the Arab revolutions now, especially the most important one in Egypt. Egypt is the centerpiece of the Arab world in terms of demography, culture, and history. The jasmine revolution in Tunis inspired Egyptians; Egyptians are inspiring the rest of the region.

The Iranian revolution was dominated from the start by Ayatollah Khomeni and a coterie of like-minded mullahs, especially Ayatollah Beheshti. They controlled the message and the marches. Secular, liberal, and leftist voices tried to gain traction but were always secondary players to Khomeni, who also had a revolutionary idea, the concept of a Shia supreme leader for a new Iran, that left no space for dissent. In the CIA’s task force monitoring the revolution we concluded in the fall of 1978 that Khomeni was the revolution. His triumphal return from Paris in early 1979 set the stage for the coup de grace and the collapse of the army.

No such charismatic figure has emerged in Egypt. So far the revolution has not had a single leader or dominant party. The Sunni clerical establishment in Egypt has not sought such a role, nor has the Muslim Brotherhood to date sought to monopolize the process of change. This could of course change. Revolutions tend to produce Bonapartes, leaders who grab the mantle of power and take charge. But so far that is not the case in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, or Libya. In Egypt the process of change has now been channeled into a dialogue between the broad-based opposition and the army.

The Egyptian army is another big difference. In Iran the military collapsed as did SAVAK, the secret police. In Egypt the army is still a power broker and widely respected. It will have a cautionary voice in determining Egypt’s future.

Egypt and the other Arab revolutions need not be a repeat of 1979, nor are they likely to look like Eastern Europe in 1989. They will each forge their own unique new political orders. As it has for centuries, Egypt’s path will be the one that sets the standard.

‘Foreign Policy Models’
Andrew J. Tabler is a Next Generation fellow in the Program on Arab Politics at The Washington Institute:

Recent events in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya are closer to the spirit of 1989 than to the Iranian revolution in 1979. Protesters have poured into the streets because of the way they were governed, not because of their countries’ foreign policies. As globalization and the Internet have penetrated Arab countries dominated by authoritarian regimes, this has opened up new spaces where people can talk about their aspirations and organize to achieve them. It has also undermined the fear-factor deterrent that regimes use to keep people down.

To help ensure that the uprisings of 2011 do not turn out like 1979, where one authoritarian regime is replaced by another, the United States needs to work with our allies on the ground to help these countries build more liberal systems that respect human rights, rule of law, and ensure that one party or group cannot dominate the political system. This will be hard work, and it will be difficult for the United States to affect specific outcomes that serve our interests. But we don’t have a choice—the old “realist” or “stability” foreign policy models built during the Cold War, when we separated our relations with countries from their domestic politics, is no longer sufficient. On a country-specific basis, we need to bring human rights, rule of law, and democracy issues into the mix if we truly want to bring stability to our allies in the region. A greater emphasis on these issues could, if directed properly, undermine U.S. adversaries throughout the region.

A particular challenge will be Washington’s approach to Syria, which the United States is currently trying to bring to the negotiating table with Israel. To facilitate those talks, Washington has kept human rights pretty low on the list of issues with Damascus. Recently, the regime sentenced a blogger to five years in prison for allegedly working with the CIA—a charge the U.S. government vehemently denies. The best way to show Damascus that human rights matters to Washington is to move it up the list of issues and explain that the United States has every interest in facilitating peace between Israel and Syria, not just Israel and the Assad regime.

‘Too Soon to Tell’
Brian Katulis is a senior fellow for national security at the Center for American Progress:

“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future,” said Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was part of the Manhattan Project. Popular-uprising shock waves emanating from the pent-up frustrations about a broken political and economic order continue to reverberate throughout the Middle East, and it is far too early to predict how events will evolve in any particular country, let alone come up with a reasonable forecast for what the region might look like in a few years.

The Middle East is at the start of what is likely to be a long and probably messy period of transition—and it could take the rest of this decade before any clarity truly emerges. As fast-moving as the day-to-day events are, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that some fundamentals remain the same in most countries in the region—the military regime that ruled Egypt since 1952 still rules today, and the region’s problems of widespread poverty, cronyism, and corruption will likely remain for years to come, even if serious democratic political reform moves forward in some countries. At this early stage, the question of whether serious political reform toward democracy is in the cards remains quite uncertain, even in places like Egypt and Tunisia, where leaders were ousted.

In 2004, I argued that the power elites in Middle East countries included economic elites who benefited from a corrupt and opaque status quo that authoritarian governments helped preserve using their internal security services. Slicing through the old order that has controlled the security, politics, and economies of these countries and restructuring the distribution of power will take more than street protests—and the process will take a long time.

What the uprisings have done thus far is remind regular people in the region that their actions can lead to some change. I have argued that in the global arena these days, power (defined as the ability to get things done and achieve certain goals by applying resources) is more “open source” than in the past—there are fewer barriers to entry, and elite institutions have less of an ability to maintain their monopoly.

That’s the case in the Middle East now—and what we’re seeing under way is the beginning of a protracted negotiation over how power is distributed within these societies. Some of these negotiations will take place peacefully in debates over constitutional reforms, as we see in Egypt; some of these power negotiations will devolve into vicious and deadly battles in the streets, as we see in Libya.

And while it’s tempting for any Middle East observer to apply to the region the frameworks for analysis that dominate the policy discussions in America—whether about the uprisings’ impact on Islamism, Iran’s role in the region, or peace with Israel—the more realistic yet unsatisfying answer is that it is too soon to tell. Many countries in the Middle East are going to see their focus turn sharply inward as they deal with the crushing demographic, economic, and social problems that sparked most of these protests. How this leads to a reordering within each country or more broadly in the region it is far too soon to tell.

If it weren’t for the historic events in Tunisia—where for the first time in Arab history a people rose up to send their ruler packing—people in Rabat, Morocco, where I’m traveling for the next week, and throughout the region would still be talking about Clinton’s speech. What made it surprisingly welcome is that, up until last Thursday, the Obama Administration had been putting as much distance as possible between itself and President George W. Bush’s “Freedom Agenda.” It wasn’t clear whether President Barack Obama believes that democracy promotion is likely to destabilize the repressive and volatile political systems of the Arab world—and that the survival of those regimes would be in America’s best interest—or if he was just following an anything-but-Bush handbook.

But Clinton picked up the gauntlet and laid it at the feet of Arab regimes, timed perfectly to herald an age of Arab accountability: Right after the Tunisians deposed their president-for-life, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, sealed indictments were handed down in the United Nations investigation of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, and while the names are yet to be revealed, the indictments are expected to identify Hezbollah members as well as government officials of its Syrian and Iranian sponsors.

Tunisia’s so-called Jasmine Revolution is the culmination of demonstrations that started with the self-immolation of a produce vendor in Sidi Bouzid after his goods were confiscated. Other suicides followed, accompanied by widespread protests against the lack of jobs, housing, freedom of speech, and food price inflation and corruption. Police and security forces shot and killed demonstrators, but when the army refused to turn on their countrymen, Ben Ali fled the country for Saudi Arabia last Friday, leaving Tunisia without a government and Tunisians elated with the rarest of achievements: vanquishing an Arab strongman.

In the days following Ben Ali’s exit, the Tunisian army skirmished with security forces still loyal to the ousted president. One hopes the military can now serve as the guarantor of a more or less peaceful transition as Tunisia takes its first steps toward a more democratic political culture. The more pessimistic interpretation is that the stark image of city streets vacant of any human beings except those who are armed to the teeth is a living tableau of Middle Eastern political culture. Here the masses are merely props to be chewed up and tossed away, and the real action is nothing but security chiefs and generals in a fight to the death.

That is to say, as thrilling as it is to see a people take its own destiny in its hands, there is reason to be concerned—for Tunisians and for the rest of the region, where protests seem to be gathering momentum. Algeria, Egypt, and the Islamic Republic of Mauritania have already reported cases of self-immolation—an ostensibly selfless and heroic gesture that is unfortunately reminiscent of one of the Middle East’s more popular forms of political expression: the suicide bombing. Something is happening in the region—in fact, has been happening for some time—that is simply not going to be solved with the downfall of one dictator.

***

Which is why it’s not surprising that the Moroccans I’ve met here, on a trip sponsored by the Moroccan American Center for Policy, do not share the excitement with which the Jasmine Revolution has been received in many corners of the U.S. policy establishment. Some of the Moroccan diplomats, human rights activists, and parliamentarians I’ve spoken to even believe that Obama’s carefully modulated statement on Tunisia was too enthusiastic, given that no one has any idea yet whether democrats or Islamists or the army will wind up in power, and what the consequences will be.

Because many of these Moroccan officials are close in one way or another to the ruling regime, it is reasonable to interpret their vivid worries about “security”—all couched in terms articulating brotherly concerns and hopes for the citizens of another Maghreb state—as the fears of a ruling order imagining a bad end for itself. However, while it is important to understand the worries of any elite class in terms of its own self-interest, it is also foolish to discount the misgivings of those who actually have experience in Arab politics and governing Arab people.

From here in the region, it is perhaps easier to see the fundamental problems with Clinton’s welcome brand of Western-style honesty. For instance, what she calls “corruption” is just one family or tribe advancing the interests of its own clique while shutting out the others. Corruption as such is standard operating procedure in the Middle East. Only a lunatic, or an American public official, would give money to an armed gang with uncertain loyalties.

In Doha, Clinton argued that “[i]t is important to demonstrate that there is rule of law, good governance, and respect for contracts to create an investment climate that attracts businesses and keeps them there.” The problem here is that this isn’t necessarily true—a fact borne out by Ben Ali’s Tunisia. The regime was corrupt to the core—Ben Ali’s wife’s family had a hand in virtually every business venture in the country—but the country’s pro-business climate and liberalized economy won praises from all corners, including the IMF. Good governance then had nothing to do with building Tunisia’s economy or creating the country’s middle class, for it was all crafted by the heavy hand of a dictator.

“If leaders don’t offer a positive vision and give young people meaningful ways to contribute, others will fill the vacuum”—namely, “extremist elements, terrorist groups and others who would prey off desperation and poverty,” Clinton warned her audience in Doha. Alas, this isn’t true either. Visitors to the police state that Ben Ali ruled admired the country’s relatively open atmosphere—open, except for political dissent—but its secularism, educational system, and the relative freedom of women, had very little to do with a positive vision. Rather, it was all engendered by the single-minded obsession of a tyrant who perceived, perhaps rightly, that the country’s Islamist movement constituted his most serious and best-organized opposition. It is the fact that Ben Ali thoroughly repressed the Islamists and eradicated any evidence of their potent symbols and discourse that gave Tunisia’s its left-bank flair.

What is more depressing is that while we believe poverty, hopelessness, and despair may pave the way for extremist elements and terrorist groups, we know that democracy has empowered them where repression sidelines them. Even avid Bush partisans cannot ignore the fact that the gospel of democratization propagated by Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, during the president’s second term helped bring Hamas to power in Gaza and strengthened Hezbollah’s hand in Lebanon.

There is a reason why a famous Arab dictum has it that 100 years of tyranny is preferable to one day of chaos. It is meant to remind us of the nature of man, the political animal, who cannot foresee the consequences of his actions. The Arabs’ ancients would have been right to fear how an uprising that began in a suicide might end. If this saying is frequently held up as an example of Arab timidity, the same might be said of any society, and the fact is that the Arabs have stood up before and will invariably do so again. Still, it is unlikely that the uprising in Tunisia will serve as a model for the rest of the region. The Tunisian middle class succeeded where, for example, the Iranians failed in June 2009 only because the divisions in Ben Ali’s security apparatus were decisive. Presumably, rulers around their region right now are worried less about crowds in the street than about whether their intelligence officials are happy with their latest paycheck.

Moreover, it is unseemly for Americans to gloat about the fate of Arab regimes when the real issue is Arab people, like those getting shot in the streets of Tunisian cities or setting themselves on fire in Cairo. Their problems are not going to be solved with the exit of one Arab dictator—or even the whole pack of them, from Riyadh to Algiers. What’s wrong with Arab reform is that in most cases the institutions that need to be fixed do not yet exist—a fact that makes the content, though perhaps not the rhetoric, of Clinton’s speech no less irrelevant to Arab reality than the high-flown language of democracy favored by Condoleezza Rice. If there is a formula to fix what’s wrong with the region, no one has it.

We asked where the White House had succeeded or failed. We looked for the premises on which the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president based his regional policy. And we wanted to know what the future looks like for the United States and the Middle East—on questions from the state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Iranian nuclear program, from U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the region’s rising powers, like Turkey and Qatar.

Here’s the first batch. Read more—including Jacob Weisberg and Martin Kramer—tomorrow.

‘A Diminished America’
Elliott Abrams is a senior fellow for Middle East Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the former deputy national security adviser in the George W. Bush Administration:

The Obama Administration appears to have three basic premises about the Middle East. The first is that the key issue in the entire Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The second is that it is a territorial conflict that can be resolved in essence by Israeli concessions. The third is that the central function of the United States is to serve as the PLO’s lawyer to broker those concessions so that an agreement can be signed. I think these premises are all wrong.

The main struggle in the region is partly ideological, between moderate, pro-Western groups and Islamist and jihadi groups, and partly it is a contest for power in the region by Iran, in its effort to diminish American influence. The administration’s view is playing into Iran’s hands.

Regarding Iran, the administration has held together the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the U.N. security council—United States, Russia, China, France, and the United Kingdom—plus Germany) solidly against the Islamic Republic, but the price has been a long delay in getting sanctions, as well as the weakening of sanctions to satisfy the Chinese and Russians.

Now the next issue of some concern is Turkey. The Erdogan government’s first major step outside of the U.S. alliance was during the Bush Administration, when it wouldn’t let Washington use Turkey as a launching ground for U.S. troops entering Iraq in 2003. The question is, to what extent is Turkey moving into a perceived vacuum of diminished U.S. power? Or, does Turkish policy reflect internal developments; namely, is the country genuinely becoming more Islamist? If it’s correct that the country is becoming more Islamist, then any U.S. administration would be dealing with the same Turkish problems. But if the answer is rather that Turkey sees an opportunity to assert leadership alongside a rising Iran and a diminished America, the problem is a reflection of Obama policy in the region.

‘Tactical Missteps’
Robert Malley is the Middle East program director at the International Crisis Group:

The Obama Administration came into office with the overriding desire to turn the page on a number of Bush Administration policies that, in its view, had eroded U.S. credibility and thus America’s ability to promote its interests. Hence the effort to revive the peace process, reach out to Arab public opinion, and engage with so-called rogue states. Almost two years on, it is fair to describe the outcome as mixed.

The image, if not necessarily the credibility, of the United States undoubtedly has improved, which is not insignificant. But results have lagged far behind. Several reasons suggest themselves. To begin, and this is beyond this or any administration’s control, the region has become less susceptible to outside suasion or pressure than was initially thought—or that had been the case in the past. This reflects both long-term structural changes in the regional and global balance of power but also the more short-term fallout from the Bush years.

Second, there have been several tactical missteps, from the early focus on a full Israeli settlement freeze and Arab moves toward normalization with Israel to the overly cautious approach toward Syria. These are not irreversible, but they have led to a feeling of stagnation, of lost time, from which the administration has yet to fully recover.

Third, the administration appears to be extremely president-centric, which is not a bad thing in itself but leads to an impression of drift unless and until he puts his personal stamp on a given policy. We witnessed this clearly on the domestic front with the evolving dynamics of the health-care debate. We see it, too, on the question of the peace process. The president will need to show his hand and make it clear to his team where he wants to go, and at what political price, for clarity to emerge and a sense of direction to take hold.

Finally, and this is both the most interesting and in some respects troubling aspect, the administration—for all its attempts to disentangle itself from the past—remains wedded to a particular way of perceiving the region, namely as divided between militants beholden to Iran (who must be weakened) and moderates close to the United States (who we must bolster). This paradigm assumes the existence of “axes” that are not quite as coherent as believed, overlooks the degree to which some countries operate in the grey “in between,” and thus misses important opportunities to influence regional actors.

This is the more serious of the various issues. For it suggests that we are fighting the last war, guided by an obsolete model. So much has changed since 2000, the last time Democrats were in power. Because of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, because of what has happened in Iran, because of our long disregard of the peace process, the United States no longer has the authority or legitimacy it once had to shape events. Our traditional Arab allies are running out of steam. New, more dynamic states and movements are gaining in influence. And faith and even interest in the peace process is fading. All of this matters because it determines what we can do, how, and with whom.

‘Asymmetry’
Dore Gold heads the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and served as Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1997 to 1999:

Clearly the Obama Administration came to office with very different conceptions about the Middle East than many Israeli governments. This administration stressed the Palestinian issue as the key to regional stability while Israel was increasingly focusing on Iran as the main source of Middle Eastern conflict that had to be addressed first. The Israelis came to the peace process with the keen sense that five prime ministers prior to Benjamin Netanyahu had tried to reach a final-status peace agreement and were unable to do so, and therefore it was necessary to reassess how peacemaking might be conducted differently. In Washington more broadly there had been a tendency to accept the received legacy of Camp David and Taba without the same reservations that you would find in Israel.

That also pointed to a more fundamental problem that existed between the United States and Israel, which went beyond who was president of the United States. The Israelis had undertaken two major peace initiatives vis-à-vis the Palestinians that led to a serious undermining of state security. First, during the Oslo years, Israel absorbed a wave of suicide bombing attacks, leaving more than 1,000 Israelis dead, which had emanated from areas under Palestinian jurisdiction, where Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Fatah militants had a safe haven. Second, while Israel had hoped that the 2005 Gaza withdrawal would address in part Palestinian political grievances, the pullback resulted in a 500 percent increase in rocket attacks on Israel from 2005 to 2006. Therefore, Israelis became far more security-oriented as they looked to any peace initiatives in the future, and in fact the Israeli body politic moved to the right.

In the United States, after the debate over the Iraq war, the American discourse on foreign affairs stressed diplomacy as a panacea for the world’s problems, unshackled by Bush-era security concerns. Even engagement with adversaries, like Syria and Iran, became part of the new approach to global affairs. In short, both countries were moving in opposite directions in 2009.

Finally, for the last decade and a half, while Palestinian leaders had been very specific about their political demands—a viable contiguous Palestinian state with Jerusalem as a capital—the Israeli side, unfortunately, has been far more vague about its diplomatic goals, preferring a more abstract concept like peace, or peace and security, which are in and of themselves worthy goals but have nothing of the specificity of the Palestinian side, resulting in an asymmetry that made the American discourse on Middle East peace far more attuned to what the Palestinians needed than to Israel’s concerns.

‘Of Comparatively Little Importance’
Andrew Exum is a fellow at the Center for a New American Security:

The Obama Administration’s efforts in the Middle East have centered around the same three I’s that would most concern any U.S. administration: Israel, Iran, and Iraq. The United States has an interest in a secure Israel, a non-nuclear Iran, and a democratic Iraq at peace with itself and its neighbors.

In Israel, the Obama Administration has badly managed relations with the ruling coalition in Jerusalem, but it is hardly to blame for the right-wing composition of that government, which would have certainly clashed with the previous administration as well. U.S. and Israeli policymakers simply have different opinions about what will secure Israel in the long term: Israeli policymakers worry almost exclusively about Iran and its proxies, while the United States and its allies also press for the establishment of permanent borders and a Palestinian state as well as the dismantlement of most Israeli settlements.

With respect to Iran, the Obama Administration has successfully passed tough U.N. sanctions against the regime, but few believe these sanctions will prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Nothing short of large-scale U.S.-led military action—the second-order consequences of which would be horrific—is likely to seriously retard the program’s development.

Iraq, ironically, and thanks in part to a 2007 surge of troops that then-Sen. Obama opposed, is the lone U.S. success story in the Middle East. But it is a fragile success. U.S. military commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus and Raymond Odierno, fret that an Israeli or U.S. military strike on Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities would endanger Iraq’s democratic peace and U.S. troops both there and in Afghanistan.

I tend to believe the actions of local actors are more significant than those of U.S. policymakers. And experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has taught me that U.S. military force alone cannot decisively protect most U.S. interests. I also believe U.S. interests in the Middle East should be prioritized against one another within the region and also against U.S. interests elsewhere. In President George W. Bush’s second term in office, for example, the United States assumed greater risk in Afghanistan—diverting troops and other resources—in order to succeed in Iraq. Under Obama, the reverse is true. The president has been remarkably clear and consistent in terms of U.S. policy, strategic goals, and commitment of resources to Afghanistan. One senses, in fact, that when compared to Afghanistan, the Arabic-speaking Middle East is of comparatively little importance for this president.

As in Afghanistan, though, the Obama Administration inherited a difficult environment in the Middle East. It has made mistakes, but the difficulties it has encountered would have likely confounded a McCain Administration as well. Not that this will be of any comfort should U.S. policies in either the Middle East or Central Asia fail.

This is the first in a two-part series. Go on to part two.

While the Institute produces sober analyses on a host of regional concerns from Turkey to the Persian Gulf, it is best known as the home away from home of the Arab-Israeli peace process. It is no surprise that the hottest topic of conversation at this family gathering is the seeming apostasy of everyone’s favorite uncle, Aaron David Miller. A former high-ranking State Department official who helped inaugurate the peace process in 1988 as an aide to Secretary of State James Baker and continued to knock Israeli and Arab heads together under President Bill Clinton, Miller just announced in a cover story in the new Foreign Policy that he no longer believes in the peace process. Recalling the hopefulness of the early 1990s and the Oslo process, Miller writes: “America had used its power to make war, and now, perhaps, it could use that power to make peace. I’d become a believer. I’m not anymore.”

Most people in the room don’t know what to make of Miller’s apparent about-face on the single issue that has united the major institutional players in the American Jewish community’s foreign policy establishment from the Washington Institute to American Israel Public Affairs Committee for the past two decades. Combined with the recent vitriolic public attacks on Obama adviser Dennis Ross from outside and within the Administration for his supposed “dual loyalties” and insufficient dedication to the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, which Ross oversaw under President Bill Clinton, Miller’s article suggests that a watershed moment has been reached in the history of the peace process, which once served to show how American Jews could serve their country while also helping to bring peace to Israel. It has become a dead letter—or, at worst, a wedge to pry Jews out of decision-making positions in the U.S. government and suggest that the interests of the United States and Israel are necessarily opposed to each other.

Some suggest that Miller’s article is a mere bit of showmanship, meant to get the former policymaker some attention at a time when everyone—perhaps even those in the Obama Administration—knows the peace process is stalled. “You get a lot of respect if you make one big flip-flop in your life resulting from an epiphany,” says Washington Institute scholar Martin Kramer. He cites Francis Fukuyama, who declared “the end of history” in 1989 only to turn against his neoconservative colleagues when the Iraq war didn’t work out so well, and Benny Morris’s public disenchantment with the Israeli left. “Do it twice,” says Kramer, “and you’re dismissed as a flake.”

Miller sees his views as consistent with his public statements over the past few years. “What I’ve seen over time is that prospects for peace are getting bleaker and bleaker,” he told me over the phone last week. Miller believes that he is the same man he has always been—it’s the Middle East that has gotten meaner. “My perspective changed because reality changed,” Miller says. “This region has become much nastier, more complex. The political leaders are hostages, not masters, of their fate, and the issues are much more complicated.” Problems like the status of Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees—the core of the conflict since 1948—seem no closer to being solved then they did when Miller began his peace processing under President George H.W. Bush. In other words, the region hasn’t changed for the worse; Miller’s just frustrated that it hasn’t changed for the better yet. But as Miller himself admits, he has not entirely turned his back on the peace process. “I didn’t reject the religion of yes to embrace the religion of no,” he says.

The religion of yes, which is as good a name as any for the faith that Miller claims to have abandoned, has little in common with a naïve belief in unicorns and fairies or in the righteousness of Yasser Arafat. Rather, it was a coherent strategy formulated more than 40 years ago by American statesmen like Henry Kissinger and other cold, calculating policy professionals. Jewish-funded institutions like AIPAC and the Washington Institute shaped the peace process’s moral core and in doing so gave American foreign policy one of its articles of faith: Someday, Israelis and Palestinians will have a negotiated settlement allowing both peoples to live side by side in peace, prosperity, and security.

The Washington Institute, one of the pillars of the peace process, was founded in 1985 by Martin Indyk, then AIPAC’s deputy director of research who went on to be the U.S. ambassador to Israel in the Clinton Administration. Indyk is often an acerbic critic of Israel and hardly a member of American Jewry’s right-wing militant fringe.

“They obviously come from a pro-Israel framework,” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman told me on the phone, describing the Washington Institute. “But they’ve brought in real quality people, not just Israelis, but also Arabs as well as European scholars, to do important work. They’ve made the stew here richer at an important time.”

Perhaps the Institute’s best-known alumnus is Dennis Ross, who has worked in Republican and Democratic administrations and currently serves in the Obama White House. Someone in the Administration, under the cover of anonymity, leaked to a reporter the observation that Ross “seems to be far more sensitive to Netanyahu’s coalition politics than to U.S. interests.” The accusation of Ross’s “dual loyalty” was quickly picked up by Israel Lobby co-author Stephen Walt, who used the opportunity to attack the Institute. “Isn’t it obvious,” Walt asked, “that U.S. policy towards the Middle East is likely to be skewed when former employees of WINEP or AIPAC have important policy-making roles, and when their own prior conduct has made it clear that they have a strong attachment to one particular country in the region?”

Walt’s article, as well as the charges made by Ross’s anonymous colleague, stunned Washington policymaking circles. After all, Ross is a lifelong peace processor whose willingness to ignore Arafat’s most egregious provocations earned him heaps of criticism in hawkish circles. Yet here was Ross portrayed as being yet another Jew whose loyalty to Israel trumped his obligations as a public official and U.S. citizen. Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute, wrote a rebuttal to Walt’s article. “If terrorism is the use of violence against innocents for political purposes, this is the analogue in the policy debate,” he told me last week by phone. “To use the worst sort of attacks on people’s loyalty, legitimacy, ethics, and values to try to undermine them doesn’t belong in a sober policy debate.”

Yet for all the intellectual fireworks about dual loyalties and the peace process, the American electorate seems to have firmly made up its mind about Israel policy. A Quinnipiac University poll released last week shows that while 48 percent of Americans approve of President Obama’s foreign policy in general (with 42 percent disapproving), only 35 percent approve (with 44 percent disapproving) of the way the Administration is handling the situation between Israel and the Palestinians. Some 42 percent believe that the president is not a strong supporter of Israel. Half of American Jews polled say that Obama is a strong supporter of Israel, but only 23 percent of Protestants and 35 percent of Roman Catholics agree. The issue is not that American Jews fear that Obama has no deep reservoir of feelings for Israel but that American Christians believe Obama is out of step with the rest of the country on the matter of the Jewish state.

“To Stephen Walt, pro-Israel is a bad thing, but to the American people it is a good thing,” says Steven Rosen, director of the Middle East Forum‘s Washington Program. “If he thinks our national interests are not being followed, and that Dennis Ross and WINEP are instruments of a foreign power, then by that measure, the majority of the American people are instruments of a foreign power.”

Walt claims that his argument for favoring Israel less and pushing Jerusalem harder on making peace is based on a realist evaluation of U.S. interests. However, a sharper version of realism suggests that a real Middle East peace would actually weaken the U.S. position in the region. After all, it was U.S. arms shipments in the middle of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war that proved to the Arabs they could not hope to defeat an Israel backed to the hilt by the Americans. If the Arabs wanted concessions from Israel, they’d have to come through Washington. With that nifty bit of policymaking the United States went from being a Great Power to a regional power broker, capable of leveraging both sides against each other for our own national gain. A just and comprehensive peace between the Arabs and Israelis, allowing the two sides to deal with each other directly, would diminish our role dramatically.

The problem with the peace process, of course, is it makes no place for such cynicism. Dennis Ross’s The Missing Peace is perhaps the most earnest book ever written about the Middle East, more plangent than all but a handful of King David’s psalms. Aaron David Miller is considered a skeptic because he says without a trace of irony that the Middle East is a nastier place than when he began two decades ago. Even a mild cynic might recall that 1989, the year that the peace process began in Madrid, was the end of two regional wars that killed millions of people: the Iran-Iraq war and the Lebanese civil war. Today’s Middle East is hardly the Garden of Eden, but the people living there are no worse off than they were two decades ago.

The peace process is perhaps the least cynical enterprise ever launched by the most optimistic country in world history, and the caretakers of that process are American Jews, a group for whom the peace process has indeed become the centerpiece of a kind of secular theology. Interestingly, Arab rejectionist movements such as Hamas see the peace process through a similar lens, though the language they use is quite different. In their telling, the peace process is a plot hatched by the Americans at the behest of their Zionist paymasters with the acquiescence of Arab quislings and Palestinian collaborators who would betray sacred Muslim lands.

Stephen Walt is an ideologue of a different sort than the rejectionists of Hamas, for they at least have to live with the consequences of their choices. Walt’s problem is that his realism and reality are totally incommensurate. He believes that the Israel lobby in the United States is blocking an attainable peace in the Middle East, when the rejectionists have made it quite clear that they don’t want any version of the peace that they have been offered, and would prefer an apocalyptic confrontation with the Zionists and the West. When Hamas says that the Middle East Peace Lobby and the peace process itself is a pro-Israeli front, there is an important sense in which they are right. Walt’s imagination can’t encompass the reality that no one cares more about the peace process than the American Jewish lobby, which is why he has to accuse Dennis Ross of being an enemy of the peace process and a traitor to his country.

In his recent book Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World, Jeffrey Herf claims that “The conflict between Israel and the Palestinians would have been over long ago were it not for the uncompromising, religiously inspired hatred of the Jews that was articulated and given assistance by Nazi propagandists and continued after the war by Islamists of various sorts.” One example comes from a 1942 message broadcast to the Middle East in which Hitler announced: “Your only hope for rescue is the destruction of the Jews before they destroy you!” The transcript for this and 6,000 other broadcasts were held as classified by Washington until 1977, and two years ago Herf became the first scholar to examine them.

Roots of Islamic Fundamentalism Lie in Nazi Propaganda for Arab World, Book Claims [Telegraph]

Such a statement must lead to only one conclusion: Israel will do everything in its power to prevent Iran from having its first nuclear device, including the use of military force.

Such a notion is also supported by precedents: Twice during the last three decades Israeli warplanes destroyed nuclear facilities built by its enemies.

The first attack occurred on June 7, 1981. Eight U.S.-made F-16s, supported by eight F-15s, took off from an Israeli Air Force base near the Red Sea resort of Eilat. They penetrated Jordanian and Saudi-Arabian air spaces without permission and without detection and reached the French-made Osirak Nuclear Reactor near Baghdad, which is also known as Tammuz. The raid lasted two minutes.

“It was a piece of cake,” recalled Brigadier General Relik Shafir, who flew one of the planes. (His partner was Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who died in the Columbia Shuttle disaster in 2004.) “The planning and practicing for the Iraqi mission were meticulous,” he told me in an interview a few years ago. “The execution was relatively easy. We flew at a very low altitude, a few meters above the ground. No one saw us. There was no resistance on our way there. Only when we reached the target were we fired at. It was scattered anti-aircraft fire, nothing serious. I was more excited about the historic and national significance and symbolism of the raid than by its operational danger and risks, which were relatively low. I saw the reactor dome and dropped my bombs from a height of two miles. It was a clear and big target.”

The attack was a classic preemptive strike aiming to prevent the overly ambitious Iraqi president Saddam Hussein from producing nuclear bombs. This was also the first time one state destroyed a nuclear facility of another.

Former Israeli premier Menachem Begin, a man deeply influenced by the Holocaust, had ordered the raid. He’d had to overcome the objections of some of his cabinet colleagues and senior military and intelligence chiefs, who had feared the Arab world’s response and international condemnation.

As opposition leader at the time, Shimon Peres, who is considered the driving force behind Israel’s decision to become a nuclear power in the late 1950s, warned Begin that Israel would be internationally isolated and become “a thorn in the desert.”

Begin, however, was undeterred. He frequently used the words “never again,” which Netanyahu echoes today: “Never again” in the history of mankind would the Jewish people face an existential threat.

After the raid, Begin’s strong conviction—described by commentators as the “Begin Doctrine”—held that Israel would never allow any country in the Middle East to possess nuclear weapons that could threaten its existence.

The next time the Begin Doctrine was tested was in September 2007. This time the attack was directed at a nuclear reactor Syria was building on the banks of the Euphrates River, near its borders with Iraq and Turkey. The Syrian reactor was constructed with North Korean technology and expertise, modeled on the Pyongyang reactor, and partly financed by Iran.

Operationally, the second raid resembled the first. Formations of Israeli Air Force F-16 and F-15 fighters took off from the Ramat David base in northern Israel and flew at low altitude, this time over the Mediterranean. They penetrated Syria’s air space near its border with Turkey without being detected and fired missiles from a distance of 40 kilometers. The Syrian air defenses were blinded by electronic warfare. By the time they realized what was happening, it was too late: The reactor had been completely destroyed.

There are a few outstanding differences between the two attacks. Before the attack against the Iraqi reactor, Israel shared its intentions with no one, not even its main strategic ally, the United States. After the raid, Israel took full credit and responsibility. In the Syrian case, Israel, led by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, informed the United States a few hours before the attack and since then has neither confirmed nor denied its action.

If Netanyahu decided, this year or the next, to order the IAF to attack Iran in order to prevent it from having nuclear bombs, he would be implementing the Begin Doctrine for the third time.

***

Israel’s domestic attitude and its international image are shaped by the two successful attacks. These attacks created the belief and impression that the IAF could do anything it decided to do and that Israeli leaders, regardless of their political affiliation, were ready to make bold and risky decisions to protect Israel. Some Israeli leaders and military commanders became prisoners of these myths, as did Israel’s international reputation, especially in the popular media. The two strikes have acquired a life of their own, a legacy with no relevance to reality.

In the last year, while Netanyahu and some Israeli leaders have increased their statements about “never again,” other Israeli leaders and military chiefs have come to terms with reality. True, their public rhetoric still echoes Netanyahu’s concerns, but in private their language is cautious and less bombastic. They understand the political and diplomatic complexities of the Middle East, the operational ramifications on Israel, and the worldwide economic and strategic implications of a war against Iran.

No one better reflects this new spirit than General Shafir, now 56 years old and a high-tech entrepreneur who is well equipped by his professional experience and knowledge to assess Israel’s capabilities. “The Iranians drew lessons from our attack on the Iraqi nuclear reactor,” he told me. “Unlike Iraq, whose whole nuclear program was concentrated in the reactor, the Iranians spread their nuclear facilities around the country. Some of them are located in the eastern parts of Iran beyond the reach of Israel. They strengthened their facilities by building them in underground bunkers.” These are facilities whose existence is already known: the Isfahan uranium conversion plant; the Natanz uranium enrichment plant; the Qom enrichment plant; and a few more sites, located inside secret military bases of the Revolutionary Guards associated with “weaponization,” where Iran is clandestinely working on the “military dimensions” of its program. Some of these sites are known to the U.S., British, Israeli, and German intelligence communities but not to the public.

Another reflection of the sober mood is that of Major General Dan Halutz, the former chief of staff and a former commander of the IAF. Halutz resigned three years ago following the 2006 war in Lebanon against the Hezbollah. The war is unjustly perceived by the Israeli public as a failure, despite its strategic and diplomatic successes. In February 2010, Halutz, now a businessman, published his memoir, At Eye Level, which is very apologetic and seeks to defend the war he prepared and led. In the final chapter of the book in which he deals with Israel’s strategic 21st-century challenges, Halutz devotes a few lines to Iran. “It’s a too big a target for us,” he argues, writing in Hebrew. He explained his position in a television interview: “Israel can’t handle [Iran] on its own.”

Both of Israel’s current defense leaders—the chief of staff, Major General Gabi Ashkenazi, and Defense Minister Ehud Barak—are considered cautious by nature and checks on the sometimes hasty Netanyahu. Both played key roles in the decision to bomb Syria’s reactor, and both expressed private doubts and reservations about the wisdom of an Israeli attack on Iran. The fact that Ashkenazi will be replaced by the end of the year, after four years in office, might also indicate that Barak has no plans to send Israeli pilots and missile operators into action. At the end of 2010 all major Israeli military and intelligence chiefs will be replaced: Meir Dagan, head of Mossad; Yuval Diskin, head of Shabak, the domestic security service; General Amos Yadlin, head of military intelligence; and Ashkenazi. Such wholesale changes at the top of the military command are hardly evidence of a nation that is seriously preparing for a military assault. While it is not known who will replace Ashkenazi, one of the leading candidates is Yoav Galant, the current commander of the Southern Command and the executor of the last war of January 2009 in Gaza. There is no evidence that Galant is more adventurous or militant than Ashekenazi.

Even the controversial foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman—whose domestic and international image and reputation are of a militant war-monger—understands the reality. He told me three years ago that he believed that Israel had missed its opportunity to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities: “We could have done it when President George Bush, Israel’s best friend, was in the White House. He would have sanctioned such an operation.” Recently, during a June 2009 visit to Moscow, Lieberman reiterated his position, saying that “Israel would not bomb Iran, and the problem would have to be dealt with by the international community.”

Israel’s ultimate consideration regarding its vital national security interests has always been and will be the position of the United States. Israel launched its preemptive strike in June 1967 against the Egyptian army only after consultations with Washington. Israel decided not to preempt in October 1973 because its leaders realized that the United States would not support it. Israel raided Lebanon in June 1982 to destroy the PLO once Begin and then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon realized that the U.S. Administration, led by President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State Alexander Haig, gave it the green light. While it is true that Israel has defied United States before, those incidents happened in cases where Israeli leaders believed that vital American interests were not at stake and that punitive measures would be relatively weak. Examples include the continuing defiance of U.S. policy when it comes to settlements in the occupied West Bank or even the decision to bomb Osirak, after which the Reagan Administration suspended shipments of fighter planes to Israel.

Today the answer to the question of how the United States feels about an Israeli attack on Iran is very clear. Since the beginning of 2010, the Obama Administration has sent numerous officials to visit Netanyahu and convey the clear message that an assault on Iran is against U.S. interests. The list of visiting dignitaries includes CIA Director Leon Panetta; Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate’s Foreign Affairs Committee; Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and, most recently, Vice President Joseph Biden.

Kerry said publicly that he “doesn’t believe that Israel would attack Iran soon.” During his short February visit, Mullen, in an unusual step, asked to meet Israel’s defense correspondents to tell them in so many words that a strike against Iran would not be “decisive” in countering Tehran’s nuclear program. “No strike, however effective, will be an end in itself,” Mullen said.

***

There are several reasons why the United States and the European Union so strongly oppose the execution of a military option. Iran would undoubtedly respond to an attack and would use its ground-to-ground missiles to try to hit U.S. troops and bases in Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. “They can really raise hell for our boys there,” says Bruce Riedel, a former senior CIA researcher and Obama adviser.

An attack on Iran may increase instability throughout the Middle East, rally support for Shiite Iran among Sunni Muslims around the globe, and endanger the existence of the pro-Western regimes in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, and Iraq. Iranian officials have made it clear that they would try to halt oil supply from the shores of the Persian Gulf via the narrow, strategically important Strait of Hormuz. “If the Americans make a wrong move toward Iran, the shipment of energy will definitely face danger and the Americans would not be able to protect energy supply in the region,” Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, warned in a 2006 speech. Nearly 40 percent of the world’s seaborne oil flows through the strait. Mining and sealing the strait, as Iran plans to do in case it is attacked, could cause chaos in the world’s economies and raise oil prices as high as $200 per barrel. This, Iran believes, would be lethal to the health of Western economies.

Visits by U.S. officials also allow the United States to use the threat of Israeli action as a whip against Russia, China, and Iran: The United States is warning Russia and China that Israel will in fact strike if they do not support the draft proposal to toughen sanctions. Even Iran’s foreign minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, seems to have swallowed the bait, having declared in late February in Geneva, “Israel is a crazy state and can do foolish and crazy things. Hard to know.”

Thus, at the moment, Israel is playing the role of the apparently fearsome and unpredictable neighborhood bully who is actually well aware of his real capabilities; all he wants is to be stopped. Israeli leaders and military strategists still say publicly that “all options are on the table” when asked about a military option. But privately they admit that the military option is not real. What they really wish is that Iran would be dealt with by the international community, by imposing tough and effective sanctions aiming at its energy sector, which is the country’s main source of revenue. A U.S. military strike is deemed a last resort.

However, assuming that maybe in the future the United States reaches the conclusion that sanctions are useless and decides to condone an Israeli attack: Would Israeli leaders have the guts to order such an attack? Is Israel really capable of it? What would Israel’s considerations be?

Israel would have to consider four aspects of an attack: the quality of the intelligence it possesses, its operational capabilities, and the regional and international implications of a strike with Iranian retaliation.

In recent years the quality of the information gathered by Israel on Iranian nuclear capabilities and sites has improved. Israel’s foreign espionage agency, Mossad, and its military intelligence, known as Aman, have increased their infiltration of Iran’s units involved in the nuclear program, which is run mainly by the Revolutionary Guards. More agents have been recruited to provide better information, and coverage of Iran has improved. So has the intelligence cooperation and coordination between the Mossad, the CIA, Britain’s MI6, Germany’s BND, and other friendly security services with access to Iran. Through these channels, the Mossad and its partners have been able to disrupt several significant attempts by Iranian intelligence—in Spain, Switzerland, Austria, Germany, China, Taiwan, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan—to purchase equipment vital to its nuclear program.

Some of these joint operations resulted in setting up “front” companies, which gained the trust of Iranian agents seeking to purchase technology, materials, and equipment, sold them genuine goods, and, eventually, damaged ones, thus poisoning Iran’s nuclear installations. Flawed components have hampered Iran’s uranium enrichment centrifuges in Natanz. Further cooperation includes the sharing of information and analysis and the introduction of preventive and offensive joint operations against Iran’s nuclear program. For example, the CIA and Mossad conspired in the first half of last decade to sabotage the electrical grids near nuclear sites in Iran. The plans didn’t materialize because of logistical and accessibility difficulties.

Together, the Mossad and the CIA have successfully persuaded some Iranian scientists and top officials to defect to the West. Defectors provide insights about the program and the intentions of the leadership. The best source was General Ali Reza Asgari, a senior officer in the Revolutionary Guards and former defense minister, who defected to Turkey in 2007. There have been at least two mysterious assassinations of Iranian scientists whose deaths are attributed to the Mossad. Yet despite its feats and achievements, the Mossad has not fulfilled the promise made by its director, Meir Dagan, to Israeli cabinets since he came to office in 2002. Dagan committed himself to preventing Iran’s nuclear program from materializing. Eight years later, the Mossad has failed to fulfill this commitment. Iran’s program may have been delayed, but it is still on target. In other words, Mossad’s knowledge about the program is fairly good but not complete. Israel realizes that if it wants to stop Iran, its intelligence is insufficient. It will still need to rely mainly on the IAF.

But the IAF has limited capabilities. How will its planes reach Iran without being detected? There are three routes, all of them tricky. The Jordanian and Iraqi corridor is the shortest and is preferred, but requires advance coordination at least with the United States, which controls the Iraqi airspace. The route via Saudi Arabia is the longest and would force the pilots to carry fewer bombs. The Northern route, near Turkey and over Syria—both on good terms with Iran—is the most dangerous, since both states would not tolerate the violation of their space and warn Iran if they discover air movement. But even if the Israeli planners overcome these obstacles and take the risk, the IAF can fly no more than 120 or so fighters and bombers that can run maybe one or two sorties each.

Some U.S. and European strategists have raised the possibility that Israel might use its substantial arsenal of ground-to-ground Jericho missiles instead of its air force. Yet these analysts show no real understanding of Israeli military thinking and capabilities. Israel has never used the Jericho missile, which has never been displayed publicly. Israeli planners and strategists see the missile as a deterrent force and might contemplate its use only as an additional measure to the air force, which has always been and will be Israel’s central strategic weapon. The same argument applies to Israel’s small fleet of submarines, which have a very limited capability to launch missiles. U.S. strategist Anthony Cordesman recently wrote that Israel may consider using nuclear warheads to destroy deeply buried Iranian nuclear facilities. But he didn’t discuss the question of whether there is even the slightest chance that Israel’s leaders would consider ordering the use of nuclear weapons, which the entire world believes and assumes Israel has, for the purpose of an attack. But Israel is developing a large inventory of nuclear weapons only for the purposes of deterrence and defense and perhaps as doomsday weapons—as in Samson’s famous last words, “Let me die with the Philistines”—for a moment when there is a clear and present danger of Israel being destroyed. An Israel that uses nuclear weapons for a preemptive strike would cease to exist as a nation among the nations of the world.

“Frankly,” said General Shafir, the onetime Osirak pilot, “the IAF doesn’t have real strategic capability to bomb distant targets for a prolonged period of time with the required intensity and firepower. To accomplish that there is need for long-range bombers that can carry a heavy load of bombs of the bunker-buster type and the capability to execute what is called carpet bombing,” which means dropping many bombs of up to 40 tons on a single target. Israel already has some heavy bunker-buster bombs acquired recently from the United States. But most military experts in Israel and abroad tend to believe that this capacity will, at best, cause severe damage to some of Iran’s nuclear sites but will not be sufficient to destroy them completely. “Is it worth it to take all these risks just to hold up Iran’s program for one or two years?” asked a senior military officer. No one in Israel dares to mention the likelihood that many pilots may not return from the mission and die in air battles with the weak Iranian air force and its air defenses.

The ramification expressed most vociferously in public by many Israelis is that the price Israeli society may have to pay in the case of any attack would be war. All war games and war simulations conducted by Israeli military and academics take for granted that Iran would retaliate with every force at its disposal. This would include launching long range ground-to-ground Shahab-3 and -4 missiles at Israel’s urban centers, military bases, and strategic sites, including the nuclear reactor in Dimona; the unleashing of Hezbollah’s and Hamas’s missiles against Israel’s northern and southern cities and villages; and, possibly, Syria’s direct participation in the conflict. Simultaneously, it is assumed, Iran would send or activate its sleeper agents to hit Israeli and Jewish targets abroad with acts of terrorism. True, intelligence experts believe that Iran’s ability to inflict heavy damage on Israel is limited, but the Israeli public has a different view: There are growing signs that it fears Iran’s revenge. This fear is magnified by declarations made by Iranian leaders and military generals that Israel would pay a heavy price for an attack. Many Israelis believe Iran’s threats.

***

There is one more factor. Many Arab countries—including Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and the United Arab Emirates—fear nuclear Iran and whisper privately in U.S. ears their hope that Israel could knock Iran down. They fear the Shiite nuclear bomb even more than Israel. They fear that a bomb in Iranian hands would turn the Shiite state into a regional superpower. And yet they would refuse to lend a hand to Israel in public. They would neither allow Israel’s air force to pass over their air space nor support military action.

Therefore, because of the great risks and the low likelihood of an Israeli attack, Israel has to take into consideration that Iran won’t be prevented from obtaining the bomb. Indeed, experts in Israel and the United States argue that the decision to produce the bomb belongs solely to Iran. The U.S. intelligence community sees Iran as approaching having the capability and the means to produce the bomb; the decision to actually have it is then purely political and will be made by the political and clerical echelon. This decision has not been made yet.

But what if the U.S. intelligence analysis is once again wrong, as it was in 2007 when it concluded that Iranians stopped working on weaponization in 2003? What if the Iranian leadership has already made such a decision? Nuclear Iran no doubt would create a new strategic reality in the Middle East. Some Sunnite Arab countries—possibly Turkey, Egypt, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia—would develop bombs of their own to counter Shiite hegemony. Signs point to all the Arab countries already initiating or renewing nuclear programs for civilian purposes. Iran and Pakistan of the 1970s provide living examples of how easy it is to move civilian nuclear programs into the military sphere.

A Middle East with several nations possessing nuclear bombs would be one of the most unstable and volatile regions on earth, much more dangerous than it is now. Most experts believe that even if Iran does acquire nuclear weapons, its leadership would not be suicidal enough to use them against Israel or any other nation. Yet a nuclear Iran would have a serious psychological effect on the Israeli populace. Israelis are afraid of living in an uncertain environment where their future and the future of their children are at the mercy of messianic demagogues such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has called for the destruction of the state of Israel. Fear of a nuclear-armed Iran may itself have an adverse effect on the ability of Israel to maintain the strategic balance in the region.

In short, the dilemma facing Israel and the international community is to bomb or not to bomb. This decision will be crucial to future Israeli governments and far more difficult than that made by Israel’s first prime minister and founding father David Ben Gurion in 1948, when he took it upon himself to declare, against all odds, Israel’s independence. The decision that faces Israel now is not one between good and bad, but between bad and worse.

Yossi Melman, a senior writer on strategic affairs, intelligence, and nuclear issues for Haaretz, is the author of The Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran: Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran.

Recently, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton explained that the biggest threat to America’s national security comes not from Iran but al-Qaida. “Most of us believe the greater threats are the trans-national non-state networks,” Clinton said, referring to “the fundamentalist Islamic extremists who are connected to al-Qaida.”

What Clinton meant certainly seems straightforward enough. Transnational, nonstate Sunni jihadi networks like al-Qaida are responsible for not only 9/11 but also attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have dispatched at least one suicide attacker, the Detroit Christmas bomber Omar Faruq Abdulmuttalab, and apparently have plans to send more. While it is arguable whether a shadowy network of terrorists led by a man who may or may not be alive is more dangerous than an Iranian regime with terrorist assets throughout the Middle East and a nascent nuclear program, Clinton’s assertion is hardly ridiculous. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that we could still sit down and strike a Grand Bargain with the Islamic Republic, whereas we don’t even have a working phone number for al-Qaida.

For the interpretive community that forms itself around the products disseminated by the American media—that is, for New York Times readers, Washington Post readers, and the CNN audience—Washington’s apparent about-face is due to the desire of the current White House to do the exact opposite of its unpopular predecessor. But a Middle Easterner hears something else.

For the interpretive communities of the Middle East, who watch Al Jazeera and are acutely sensitive to sectarian language that may well affect their lives and the fate of their communities, “al-Qaida” is shorthand for Saudi Arabia and the Sunnis. So, when Hillary Clinton talks about the dangers posed by al-Qaida being greater than the dangers posed by Iran, a Middle Easterner hears that the Americans are dropping the Sunnis and siding with the Shia. That is to say, what a Middle Easterner hears is the beginning of a new chapter in the grand narrative of strategic realignment—the epic poem of today’s Middle East.

The real question in the region, as Middle Easterners understand it, isn’t on the daily agenda of Washington policy chatter about whether to engage Iran or talk to terrorists. Rather, it’s the very practical and immediate question of how the Americans will use their power to tilt the regional order. Will the United States stick with the Saudis or throw its weight behind Iran?

The Sunni-Shia split goes back 1,400 years, and the conflict pitting the Saudis against the Islamic Republic of Iran dates to the 1979 revolution. But the campaign for strategic realignment began in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11. With the Americans angry at the Sunnis, and Riyadh in particular, over the attacks, the Iranians saw a window of opportunity to push their case that, despite their recent differences, they were America’s logical strategic partner in the region. U.S. policymakers who wanted rapprochement with Tehran agreed.

The State Department Policy Planning staff drafted a recommendation to the president for an opening to Iran in response to Sept. 11, says Steven Rosen, director of the Washington Program at the Middle East Forum. “Richard Haass and Flynt Leverett stayed up all night to write it on Sept. 11, and the next morning Secretary Powell walked it over to the White House. While the rest of the country was reeling from the attacks, they saw in 9/11 an opportunity for engagement with Iran. They assumed the Iranians would of necessity be opposed to a Sunni organization like al-Qaida, and here was a way for Iran to prove its bona fides with the U.S. President Bush accepted the idea of testing the Iranians’ intentions, but the White House was much less hopeful about Iran’s response than Leverett and Haass.”

A number of stories surfaced to explain why U.S.-Iranian rapprochement hit a wall. “It seems there has been a debate inside the [U.S.] government over what’s the biggest danger—Iran or Sunni radicals,” Vali Nasr, then a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and now an adviser to top U.S. diplomat Richard Holbrooke, told The New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh in 2007. “The Saudis and some in the Administration have been arguing that the biggest threat is Iran and the Sunni radicals are the lesser enemies. This is a victory for the Saudi line.”

While this perspective dovetails nicely with the struggle over strategic realignment narrative, it is an inaccurate appraisal of what really happened. The previous Bush administration did not view the issue in terms of Sunnis vs. Shia or Saudi vs. Iran. Rather, it believed that the most serious strategic threats to U.S. interests could be found in places where state sponsors of terror intersected with transnational terrorist groups. In theory, Tehran and Riyadh were equally problematic. In practice, however, the Iranians and their Syrian allies were fighting the United States in Iraq while their assets, like Hezbollah and Hamas, were challenging American allies in the Palestinian territories, Israel, Lebanon, and Egypt. Meanwhile the Saudis, the world’s swing producer of oil, were at least nominally on our side. Indeed, in May 2003, an operation against Saudi Arabia that was planned and directed by al-Qaida leadership in Iran killed eight Americans.

If Vali Nasr was correct, Hillary Clinton’s statement is evidence of a major victory for the Iranian line—and Nasr, the Iranian-American author of The Shia Revival, seems like one of the messengers. As an advocate of U.S. realignment with Iran, he has a personal stake in such an outcome—and as a Holbrooke aide in the State Department he’s also well placed to shape the secretary of State’s message to the world. Game and set—if not yet the entire match—to Iran.

But Clinton meant nothing like that. In plain American-speak, she was simply saying that the Obama administration has accepted the inevitability of an Iranian nuclear program and is now hard at work getting American citizens and U.S. allies comfortable with that unpleasant fact. The Middle Eastern interpretation of her remarks is simply wrong.

But, in a sense, it doesn’t matter what Clinton meant to say: The meaning of a text is not up to its author alone; rather, its meaning is the product of an open-ended communal process. Reading like a Middle Easterner means believing that every story in the U.S. press about the Middle East is the fruit of a long campaign involving competing interests who operate in a conspiratorial way, whether those interests are different branches of the U.S. government, agents of foreign governments, or both. For instance, a 2007 Thomas Friedman column in the New York Times arguing that Iran’s history and culture make it a much more likely U.S. ally than obscurantist Saudi Arabia signals that Tehran is winning the case in Washington for strategic realignment. A column his colleague Maureen Dowd wrote earlier this month, praising the Saudis for their liberal reforms, shows that Riyadh is fighting back and has powerful bureaucratic allies on its side, too.

We know that columnists like Friedman and Dowd are merely private citizens whose arguments are not being crafted in the State Department or the Pentagon. However, it is precisely our certainty that U.S. journalists are working within the norms of American media that makes us vulnerable to information operations—instruments of political subterfuge employed by all Middle Eastern regimes and intended to shape perceptions, and, therefore, real events.

Reading like a Middle Easterner requires a discriminating taste for conspiracy that enables the reader to separate the real conspiracies from the false ones. A corollary of this fact is that sometimes the paranoid style of the Middle East is much more suitable than the American faith in transparency for understanding what we read.

A few weeks ago, for example, I got a call from pro-government friends in Lebanon who wanted to know when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad gave his most recent interview to Seymour Hersh. The date, they believed, would indicate whether or not one of Assad’s statements in that interview was a threat to destabilize Lebanon. Clearly the Hersh interview was not the final straw that broke the will of Lebanon’s pro-democracy movement and compelled them to make amends with Damascus, but it was part of a long and successful information operations campaign waged by Syria against U.S. allies—a campaign that included Hersh’s interview with Assad, which appeared on the The New Yorker’s website.

“I love Seymour Hersh,” a friend told me one night in Beirut. “It doesn’t matter if what he writes is nonsense, I love the storytelling.” Hersh, perhaps only half consciously, has been the main chronicler of the struggle for strategic realignment, its bard, over the better part of the last decade. It’s well known in Washington that his New Yorker stories serve as an instrument for those on the losing side of the Beltway’s bureaucratic wars. What’s less obvious is that Hersh’s hostility toward the Bush administration signaled to publicists in the Middle East that he was a likely channel for a pro-Iran narrative about a dim-witted American president who was steering the United States toward disaster through his poor taste in regional allies.

As is the case with other Western journalists who write about Iran’s allies and assets in the Eastern Mediterranean, Hersh’s access to high-profile figures like Assad and Hezbollah General Secretary Hassan Nasrallah is controlled by Lebanon’s former minister of information, the pro-Iranian, pro-Syrian, and pro-Hezbollah apparatchik Michel Samaha. This leverage gives Samaha, as it would for any celebrity publicist, a significant role in shaping Hersh’s stories. In 2004, Samaha told Hersh that Israel had “programmed” the Kurds to do “commando operations” throughout the region. At the time, this well-placed piece of gossip was useful to Samaha’s clients. The same was true of the message that al-Qaida is equivalent to Saudi Arabia, which Hersh has also transmitted. Think of Hersh as a celebrity profile artist for Vanity Fair and Samaha as a powerful Hollywood publicist like Pat Kingsley, except one whose associates assassinate rivals.

The dark power behind Samaha’s PR operation is Jamil al-Sayyid, a former Lebanese security chief who is believed to be involved in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq al-Hariri. Accordingly, part of the Samaha group’s message is to suggest that Hariri’s son Saad, Lebanon’s current prime minister, funds al-Qaida affiliates, another campaign helpfully conveyed by the prize-winning reporter. Hersh has even internalized the slogans of his handlers, excitedly explaining to CNN that the Bush administration and the Saudis were backing al-Qaida via the Lebanese government. Four months after the interview on CNN, Hersh’s account was exposed as a fabrication when Lebanon’s Sunni prime minister ordered the army to take down a Sunni jihadi group in a bloody battle that was won thanks in part to generous U.S. arms shipments to the Lebanese Army.

Gullible New Yorker readers and CNN viewers were never the primary audience for the message Hersh carried. Rather, when the pro-Iran media turned and quoted Hersh on a story fed to him by the pro-Iran camp, the point of the operation was to get two of the U.S. media’s flagship organizations to whitewash a disinformation campaign intended for internal consumption in the Middle East, a operation whose goal was to convince swing states in the region to move away from the United States and its allies.

In recent weeks, the Iranian narrative of strategic realignment has hit the mainstream again, in a Washington Post op-ed by Robert Malley and a long analytical article from Stratfor’s George Friedman. Savvy American readers are likely to regard the apparent coincidence as another media trend. But if you’re a Middle Easterner seeking to make sense of the statements of American public officials and editorialists, the resurgence of the Iranian line is a clear sign that the Obama administration’s regional policy is a mess and that the grand narrative of realignment is once again in play.

ADL Gives Obama An ‘F’ For Failing to Deliver in ME [JPost]

Recently, Syrian President Bashar Assad, who once held out hope for negotiations with Israel, said that peace will only come “through resistance.” Earlier this week, Hassan Nasrallah, the Iran-backed head of the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, which now holds 10 of the 30 seats in the Lebanese government, upped his rhetoric against President Barack Obama, who he says has facilitated “absolute American commitment to Israeli interests, Israeli conditions, and Israeli security … while disregarding the dignity or feelings of the Arab and Muslim people.” Even Israel’s old friend Egypt has increasingly turned against it, both culturally and politically. Also not helping: The fact that the Obama administration has increasingly backed away from its initial insistence on an Israeli settlement freeze in the Palestinian territories, not to mention Israel’s hawkish Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, who, says the AP, “has said Israeli-Arab lawmakers who meet Palestinian militants should be executed and the president of Egypt could ‘go to hell.’”

All of this is music to Iran’s ears: “[W]ith peace efforts stalled, the first time Iran uses its leverage in the Arab world to support another armed conflict against Israel, the election debacle will be quickly forgotten.”

Mideast Radicals Fill Space Left by Peace Impasse [AP]

Midknight (who is, presumably, writing under a pseudonym and is identified on Gather.com with little more than his assertion that “I still wouldn’t join an organization that would have me as a member”) cites at least one compelling piece of evidence: “Writing in the pan-Arab newspaper Al Quds Al Arabi, Abdel-Beri Atwan, the editor, said with recent developments ‘the Arab regimes, and the gulf ones in particular, will find themselves part of a new alliance against Iran alongside Israel.’”

While he maintains a smidgen of skepticism—“I can’t believe the possible scenarios currently unfolding will lead to respect for the Jews in any Arab country”—even his most cautious optimism (“the very fact many Arabs are now considering Israel as their best hope for stopping Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons seems to indicate, at the very least, in the short term, Arabs and Jews could become partners in ways ancient feuds would not have allowed in the past”) stems from a frightening proposition: “let’s hope Israel is ready to assume the role some Arabs now consider vital, and will attack Iran within a matter of weeks.”

Will Iran Solve the Arab-Jewish Problem? [Gather]

Lucette Lagnado was only six years old when she left Cairo with her family. It was 1963, seven years after Gamal Abdel Nasser had begun to nationalize Egyptian businesses and to force out the country’s once-thriving Jewish community, along with other supposed foreign influences. Leon Lagnado, Lucette’s father, already in his 60s by then and in ill health, had been a debonair merchant and stockbroker, who strutted through Cairo wearing immaculate white suits. He had clung to his beloved city for as long as he could. As the Lagnado family boarded the boat to France they were forced to sign a document promising never to return.

Lagnado’s memoir, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, is as much about her father’s love affair with the city as it is about one family’s painful exile from the Middle East. Lagnado resurrects a cosmopolitan Cairo that managed to be “both old-fashioned and libertine”—where her father attended services every morning, even if he’d spent the night gambling and dancing with his mistresses (one was said to be the legendary Egyptian singer Om Kalsoum.) In Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where the family ultimately landed after a brief stop in Paris, Leon Lagnado was reduced to selling fake French ties on subway trains and in the stations, mourning for his lost community, never fully accepting that the family could never go home.

Lagnado, an investigative reporter at The Wall Street Journal, is the author of Children of the Flames: Dr. Josef Mengele and the Untold Story of the Twins of Auschwitz.

This book focuses more on your family, less on the political shifts that led to their expulsion from Egypt. The narrative is tightly focused, first in your apartment in Cairo, and then in Bensonhurst. Was that a conscious choice not to dwell on the politics?

There had to be a kind of an emotional truth to the book and a little girl of five and six—no matter how precocious—doesn’t understand politics. She doesn’t understand the bigger context. What a little child can understand is emotional turmoil. So I wanted to write about the exile, but I wanted to do it very much in the terms of a child and any child, even if they’re in privileged America, their world is small—it’s their house, their garden, whatever. Well, in Cairo, I didn’t have a garden, I had a balcony, and an alleyway. To me, it was very precious. I would spend hours on the balcony holding my cat Pouspous. I was completely charmed by the life below. Sometimes there would be joyous celebrations, tents put up for engagements. And sometimes they were for sad and lugubrious occasions, there would be rugs brought in and there would be cries and mourning sounds. I liked my little alleyway.

It was a mixed neighborhood.

That was what was wonderful about life in the Middle East for Jews. There was an old ghetto but most of the Jews lived outside the ghetto—like my family did. As far as I know it was utterly and completely harmonious. The synagogues were mixed in with mosques; we were mixed in with Muslims.

Your father would often take you along with him on his jaunts around Cairo. He took you to the bar at the Nile Hilton, where he did business, to Groppi’s café where he’d buy you sweets.

My father was impassioned by the city. It was like he owned that city, and he spoke beautiful English. The Jews of Egypt, the educated classes, spoke multiple languages. What was most neat about my father is that he was able to totally deal with the Brits, but he was also able to develop a relationship—when he sold olive oil—with simple merchants on the street. It was a magical world. I am obsessed with the bar in the Nile Hilton. It was swank, and then the pebbled garden of Groppi’s where you sat outdoors and had Chantilly cream.

Your family stayed in Cairo after many Jews had already left.

A lot of people left after 56, after the Suez War, because there were ousters of the Brits and the French, and some of the Jews had British and French passports. There was a lot of fear, but I don’t think the government was heavyhanded. My father loved Egypt. He didn’t want to go. He was a broker, always negotiating, and thought he could maneuver his way out of the situation. Eventually, my father accepted that we needed to leave, so he tells everybody, “Leave. Go to Israel. I will find you there.” The plan was that we were going to go to Israel, and he was going to rejoin his brothers and sister.

But you didn’t go to Israel, why not?

We come from a Syrian family where the sons are like gods. My oldest brother and my other brother really wanted to go to America. There was a real passion for American culture in Egypt.

How did you end up in Bensonhurst?

It was sort of a faux Cairo when we moved there. These ten sleepy little blocks of prefab houses. I can conjure no glamour about life in Bensonhurst, but all those refugees from the Levant were there. We tried to have what we had before. Little groceries opened up with Middle Eastern food.

But then this Jewish neighborhood became Italian, and your family didn’t want to leave their home.

When we got there, the Syrian Jews were moving to Ocean Parkway. We didn’t want to move again. When we had a hope and a prayer of being with our kind we let it slip away, and we ended up alone again. Even the other day, I invited a friend of mine from the Syrian community to my book launch. She had read my book and she said to me, “The problem is you’re an outsider. You’re not really a part of the community. You left.” And I’m thinking, “I’m an outsider? My family, we’re Lagnados. We were the Rabbis of Aleppo! I’m not an outsider.”

Why did she see you that way?

Because you can’t leave the community and I didn’t marry a Syrian Jew.

I would imagine it would be a bit difficult to approach this memoir with André Aciman’s Out of Egypt already out there as the definitive memoir about Jews in Egypt.

For eight or nine years I wanted to write this book, and every time I would tell people, they would say, “But you know, there’s André Aciman.” It made me crazy. First of all, I love André. But then I think about the lost worlds of the Jews of Eastern Europe and Europe. How many writers did it take to recreate the little shtetls? We start with I.B. Singer and then we go on into the modern, new generation. And yet, we had equally magical, quirky, special, soulful, extraordinary worlds in the Middle East. The Jews of Iraq. The Jews of Iran. The Jews of Algeria. The Jews of Morocco. The Jews of Tunisia. We were this unbelievably cultured place. Why can’t we produce a body of literature? And why haven’t we?

Was it in part because the European narrative of exile and the Holocaust came first? Perhaps there was no room for another narrative?

We’ve all been consumed by the Holocaust, by the evisceration, disappearance, and destruction of the communities of Europe. In the same way, we should be concerned and consumed by the Palestinian refugee narrative, where there was and is a lot of suffering. But the idea that there was, as you put it, no room for another one. I actually found myself talking to a colleague when I dared to use the term “cultural holocaust” for the exile of Jews from the Middle East. She is a Jewish reporter, Orthodox. She said to me, “Well, forgive me, but you weren’t wiped out, you weren’t slaughtered.” And I said, “No we weren’t. But communities were wiped out culturally.” To me that’s a tragedy. My first book was about the Holocaust. I was totally consumed. But until recently, the Arab-Jewish refugees weren’t a story. It wasn’t even a graceful term, “Arabic Jews.” To me it was an extraordinary accomplishment when recently I stood in front of my synagogue and said, “I was a refugee from Egypt.” It’s sort of like saying, “I’m an alcoholic.”

Why?

From the first days I came to America, my mother whispered, “Don’t say you’re from Egypt.” Egypt was this backward, primitive country. I had to be the Parisian schoolgirl. I could play the part, “My name is Lucette. I’m from France.” I didn’t out and out say I was born in France. I would say I’m from France, and that was technically true.

The social worker that managed your family’s case here saw your father as very backward.

They wanted to make sure that you’re assimilated. And then you get a man like my father, and he doesn’t want to assimilate. So I have these single-spaced notes by the social worker from the New York Association for New Americans and she records him telling her, “We are Arab, madam. We are Arab, madam.” My father loved Muslims. He loved Egyptians. He felt at one with them.

That’s quite a contrast to Aciman’s family. His family was Sephardic and they were always trying to distinguish themselves from the Arabs in their midst—to distinguish even between Syrian and Egyptian Jews. Your family didn’t seem to have such an identity crisis in Egypt.

Synagogue in downtown Cairo, 2006

My parents were really religious. My father may have been a boulevardier, a womanizer, a sinner, a pleasure seeker, and a gambler, but come morning, he was in shul. Faith was a significant issue as I approached this work; I’m not sure it is for André.

You were able to go back to Cairo in 2005, with the permission of the Egyptian government. One of the things that surprised you was that after all this time, you felt at home there.

I am an angst-ridden person, and I felt angst-free in Egypt—it seems bizarre. I would look at the Nile, and how calm it was, and I thought the people were awfully nice. If I had my own way, I’d sit with everybody and say, “Now wait a minute, wait! It worked 60 years ago, you know? We got along fine. Why, why can’t we redo that?”

What did older Egyptians say about the Jews who had left?

They never talked about missing Jews, but they all had memories. It was almost like in Germany, where I did reporting for my other book, where they say, “I knew a Jewish family.” In Egypt it was at a more human level. I spoke with our former neighbor. The old woman said, “I liked your mother. She was very sweet to children.” That was the nicest part about it. We weren’t Yehudi. We were simply neighbors and then we had to leave. They were probably bewildered, as bewildered as anybody.

How did you come to the title, The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit?

My father died in January 1993 after a very long illness. Just after he died, I went to a Moroccan synagogue in the East 70s. I was totally broken, and this old woman comes over to me after services, and she says, “Are you the daughter of Leon Lagnado?” And I said, “Yeah.” And she says, “You know, I knew your father as a young girl in Cairo. He would come to my house and he always wore white. He always wore white sharkskin.” That was an amazing moment. She and I became unbelievable friends. I found her this supremely comforting figure. I started going to shul, would sit next to her, and always ask the same question, almost like a child, “Tell me about the white sharkskin.”

Claudia Roden’s education started at an early age. Raised in Cairo, she grew up watching the women of her family pound lamb and wheat into kibbeh, and wrap delicate sheets of pastry around mashed dates. Over the years, she’s made her way into countless kitchens, from Turkey to Poland, Lebanon to Spain, and written several histories of Mediterranean cuisine, most recently, Arabesque: A Taste of Morocco, Turkey, and Lebanon.

In 1996, after 15 years of research, she wrote the book on Jewish food—literally. Her genre-busting The Book of Jewish Food weaves 800 recipes into a vast narrative of the Diaspora, from the chicken dumplings created by the Jews of Tibet to the almond cake favored by Jews of Italy.

This week, we make our way into Claudia’s kitchen in London. She talks with reporter Hugh Levinson about her search for melokheya, the truth behind British take-out, and the culinary acrobatics of today’s most innovative chefs.

Here’s what Claudia Roden cooked up for Hugh Levinson.

Poulet aux Dattes

(Chicken with Dates)

SERVES 6

6 chicken quarters

4 tablespoons peanut or sunflower oil

2 large onions, 1 lb (500 g), coarsely chopped

2 teaspoons cinnamon

� teaspoon mace

� teaspoon nutmeg

1 tablespoon honey

Salt and plenty of black pepper

� lb (250 g) dates, pitted

Juice of � – 1 lemon

A pinch of saffron

� cup (100 g) blanched almonds, toasted or fried

In a large pan, sauté the chicken pieces in the oil for a few minutes, until lightly colored, turning them over once. Remove them and put the onions in. Cook them on low heat until soft, then stir in the cinnamon, mace, nutmeg, and honey, and pour in about 1� cups (400 ml) of water. Stir well and put in the chicken pieces. Bring to the boil, add salt and pepper, and simmer for 25 minutes. Now add the dates, lemon juice, and saffron and cook for another 5—10 minutes, or until the chicken is tender. It is important to taste and adjust the seasoning, for the right balance of flavors is a delicate matter in this dish. It usually needs plenty of black pepper to counteract the sweetness. Serve with the almonds sprinkled on.

Salade de Tomates et Poivrons Grillés

(Grilled Tomato and Pepper Salad)

SERVES 6

3 red or green bell peppers

3 tomatoes

4 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil

1—2 tablespoons wine vinegar

Salt and pepper

Broil or roast the peppers and tomatoes. Take the tomatoes out after about 10 minutes, when the skin is loosened and they are only a little soft. Peel the peppers and tomatoes and cut them into pieces. Dress with oil, vinegar, salt, and pepper.

VARIATIONS

For a flavorsome Moroccan version, add 2—3 chopped garlic cloves, 1 teaspoon cumin, the chopped peel of 1 preserved lemon, and 1—2 hot chili peppers, seeded and finely chopped. If you have an opportunity to buy the rare argan oil, it is wonderful with this, as well as with most salads.

You may grill or roast a head of garlic at the same time, then peel the cloves. Garlic needs 10 minutes in the oven to become soft.

Photo: Red Saunders, courtesy of Knopf.