Middle East

Crossroads Arabia focuses on Saudi Arabia from the perspective of an American who has lived there and speaks the language. It is very well done and I have added it to our “Muslim Middle East & War” links.

Wretchard has an insightful post discussing the meta view of the war. He concludes:

Ledeen’s boilerplate closing ‘Faster. Please.’ is less a demand for reckless adventure than a warning against stasis. One of the reasons the Cold War lasted so long was that the United States could muster neither the will nor the method to undermine Communism’s strategic rear in Eastern Europe or the Soviet Union. It was content, for the most part, to embark on a strategy of containment by challenging its foe on circumscribed battlefields lest things ‘escalate’, where it typically won, at least in the military sense. The historical Communist response was counterattack on the domestic American political front, a strategy which, until Ronald Reagan, proved largely successful. The deep seated Leftist belief that ‘Time is not on America’s side” arises from the conviction that that no series of foreign military victories can offset a determined depiction of defeat at home. For it is not only America, but terrorism and before it Communism, which wields the weapon of the ‘deep strike’. Its goal is identically to destroy the fabric on which America’s war-making potential rests and it succeeded once in Vietnam. The challenge then, is for America to find ways to dramatically speed up the collapse of the despotic systems from which the enemy draws his strength. This is far from impossible. Only a small fraction of America’s strength consists of direct military power and only a small fraction of that military power has been employed against the enemy. By any accounting, the US is still only fighting the War on Terror with its little finger. But it will require creative strategic thinking to mobilize and employ the untapped wellsprings of the nation’s strength. US troops in Iraq are doing well. But the nation owes them better than use them to attrit the enemy. Faster. Please.

I think Wretchard frames the issues accurately. It is tempting to think we will muddle through in realpolitik fashion and reach some kind of accommodation with the Iranian mullahs. They will have nuclear weapons but we will be OK, because they won’t dare to use them, because we would respond with overwhelming force, etc.

That’s wrong. We already tried containment and it didn’t work. For years we were attacked by terrorists and looked the other way, or interpreted the attacks as criminal in nature (and therefore lacking in broader geopolitical implications), or rationalized non- or token reactions. The attacks were trivial in the scheme of things, but our enemies interpreted our responses as weakness and repaid us with Sept. 11. (That their interpretations of our behavior were wildly inaccurate made everything worse. Disarmament enthusiasts are always fretting about warmongers on their own side, but in reality having a reputation as a country that won’t fight is much more likely to lead to war.)

A policy of containment by us, toward Iran, now, would be interpreted by Iran and our other enemies as weakness. Sure, there are good reasons for us not to expand our military operations now: we’re overstretched on personnel, lots of our people are being killed and maimed, it’s difficult enough to be involved in the places where we already are. But the bottom line is that the mullahs interpret our willingness to fight as strength and any sign that we are backing away from a fight, or from our stated commitments, as weakness.

Bush laid down a marker in his Sept. 20, 2001 speech. He said that governments are either with us or with the terrorists. I think he was right, and I think we will not have won this war until the governments that are with the terrorists are either reformed or replaced. But it’s been several years, and we are approaching a point, if we haven’t already passed it, where our fastidiousness in conducting this war begins to appear as weakness to our enemies. Cleaning up Afghanistan and Iraq and getting out, and relying on a policy of containment to deter subsequent threats, in my view raises the risk of continued struggle and, in the longer term, nuclear attacks on western cities.

Israel blundered by withdrawing from Lebanon — probably a good idea in principle — at the wrong time. The Israeli govt rationalized the withdrawal in terms that made sense according to its internal logic. The problem is that Israel’s enemies followed a different logic and interpreted the withdrawal as a surrender. If we try too hard to reach an accommodation with Iran, without first defeating/replacing its govt, the Iranians (and Syrians, North Koreans and others) are likely to interpret our action as a victory for them. We must avoid such an outcome.

The Council on Foreign Relations has sponsored a new report. It seems that most college educated people in Egypt, Morocco and Indonesia have a great deal of hostility towards the United States. The headlines of the news stories about the report say “Muslim World Largely Anti-American”.

The report goes on to say pretty much what one would expect. The people surveyed rejected the US reasons for the Iraq invasion, voiced strong anti-Semitic stereotypes, and were either unaware of the aid that the United States has provided to the Muslim world or underestimated it by at least two orders of magnitude.

CoFR says that these attitudes can be changed by long term diligence. America has to listen, draw attention to the good works that we perform, and assume a “humbler tone”. They also say that we have to tolerate disagreement on key security issues.

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If you live in the Washington DC metro area, or reasonably close….the organization called Free Muslims Against Terror is holding a March Against Terror on Saturday, May 14. You do not need to be Muslim or of Middle Eastern descent in order to attend–the group says: “We request anyone and everyone who supports our message to join us at the rally.”

I just came across two news reports about the same event. It’s interesting to make note of the way that the info is presented.

The event in question was the release of the third Arab Human Development Report. (Sorry, I can’t find a copy of it online as of this writing.) The previous reports were rather heartening to people who genuinely want to see the Arab world embrace democracy and economic progress, since they recognized the fact that it was mainly Arab culture that was holding them back.

This BBC item about the latest report has the headline REPORT URGES ARAB WORLD REFORMS. The author, Jon Leyne, states that the problems facing Arab culture come from within, mainly due to a lack of human rights and an abundance of judicial compliance. He goes on to note in passing that the AHDR also condemns the US for our support of Israel, and the invasion of Iraq. But the criticisms of the US and Israel are hardly the main subject of the news item.

Then we have this rather shrill item from Reuters, written by Suleiman al-Khalidi. (The full text is cut-n-pasted below, because both Reuters and Yahoo have a habit of changing the content of their news items without explanation or apology.)

The headline reads ARAB REPORT SEES LITTLE REFORM, FAULTS US ACTION. It looks to me that the author was rather desperate to find something critical to say about the US, and even goes so far as to accuse the United States of wide scale theft. Abu Ghraib is mentioned as well, although it’s very unclear how a scandal in one prison could keep the entire Arab world from enacting reforms.

It looks to me that the Reuters report is a prime example of how Arab culture will only improve after they start to take responsibility for their own actions.

Remember the BBC reaction to the invasion? How they were practically begging their imbedded reporters to find atrocities committed by US troops, or instances where Saddam’s soldiers defeated American units?

I never would have thought that I’d think of the BBC as the voice of reason when it came to the Middle East.

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