by Mitchell Plitnick
This past Tuesday saw the latest in a horrifyingly long line of atrocities in Jerusalem. Two armed Palestinians entered a synagogue in the Har Nof neighborhood, killed five Israeli civilians and wounded six others before police gunned the murderers down. The reactions of Israeli and Palestinian leaders are worth examining.
Hamas, unsurprisingly, praised the murders. Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, equally unsurprisingly, condemned them unequivocally. In his official statement, Abbas said that he “…condemns the attack on Jewish worshippers in their place of prayer and condemns the killing of civilians no matter who is doing it.”
But this didn’t stop Israeli leaders from continuing their campaign to demonize Abbas, the Palestinian leader who has tried harder, made more compromises and sacrificed more of his own credibility to achieve a two-state solution than any of his predecessors.
“Abbas has intentionally turned the conflict into a religious one between Jews and Muslims, and the systematic incitement he leads against Jews…is the ‘go-ahead’ for these despicable terror attacks,” said Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman on Nov. 18, the day of the attack.
Economy Minister Naftali Bennett meanwhile told reporters that “Abbas, one of the biggest terrorists to have arisen from the Palestinian people, bears direct responsibility for the Jewish blood spilt… while we were busy with delusions about the [peace] process… Abbas has declared war on Israel and we must treat that accordingly.”
Not to be outdone by the rivals within his own governing coalition, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that “This [attack] is a direct result of the incitement lead by Hamas and Abu Mazen (Abbas), incitement that the international community irresponsibly ignores.” He also dismissed Abbas’ condemnation of the attack because Abbas had said: “While we condemn this incident, we also condemn the aggression toward Al-Aqsa Mosque and other holy places and torching of mosques and churches.” To Netanyahu, such a statement, though demonstrably based on factual Israeli actions and statements, is “incitement.”
Netanyahu didn’t stop there. He accused the Palestinians of “blood libel,” a term that refers to historical incidents where false charges against Jews of ritual murder were invented to incite anti-Jewish violence.
The vast majority of Netanyahu’s venom, and that of the other Israeli leaders was directed at Abbas, despite the shameful way Hamas applauded this heinous crime. There was a touch of irony to that, as on the same day of the attack, the head of the Shin Bet, the Israeli security agency charged with internal security, had declared quite clearly that “[Abbas] is not interested in terror and is not leading [his people] to terror. Nor is he doing so ‘under the table.’”
All of this raises a question: Why is the Israeli right ignoring the low-hanging fruit of Hamas and going full bore at Abbas instead? After all, Hamas praised the attack, and Netanyahu and company could easily have stopped at tainting Abbas with the argument that he was in partnership with the Islamists via the unity government. Instead, the Israelis went much farther, to the point of virtually ignoring Hamas and the other Palestinian factions who voiced support for the attack.
The explanation for this behavior involves both the long-term and the short-term. In the short run, this is all part of Netanyahu’s broader public relations campaign linking Iran, Hamas, the Islamic State and now the Palestinian Authority. This campaign has several goals: to make it politically impossible for the United States to work with Iran against Islamic State (ISIS or IS), to make a deal between Iran and the P5+1 countries more difficult, to forestall any further international scrutiny of the siege of the Gaza Strip and to legitimize harsher Israeli measures in Jerusalem, among other goals.
On most counts, the strategy is failing, with the usual exception that Israeli actions in Gaza and Jerusalem are being downplayed, although not totally ignored. But Netanyahu’s rhetoric is having more of an effect toward his long-term goal.
The endless refrain of “Iran is ISIS, ISIS is Hamas” is designed to use the universally despised Islamic State to further de-legitimize Iran and the Palestinians. The reasons for this are obvious: to paint both Hamas and Iran as such implacable enemies that Israel would be justified in any action taken against them. But Netanyahu’s rhetoric is gradually broadening its scope of Palestinian targets. By blaming incitement from Abbas and the Palestinian Authority (PA) for the recent attack in Jerusalem, and by repeatedly pointing out that the PA is now run by a unity government (however dysfunctional) that includes Hamas, Netanyahu is, in effect, subtly folding the PA into the “Hamas-ISIS-Iran” equation.
The strategy is working in Netanyahu’s target areas: Israelis at home and Israel’s supporters abroad, and Washington. After the synagogue murders in Jerusalem, John Kerry sounded just like Netanyahu when he blamed Palestinian incitement, clearly including the PA, for the attack. He was followed by a slew of Congress members from both parties, some of whom singled out Abbas by name.
This is part of the Israeli right’s “solution” to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It begins with rolling back the arrangements under the Oslo Accords. The vision is something similar to what existed before the Accords were signed in 1993. Israel would have full security control in the West Bank, and the PA would be reduced to an administrative body in the increasingly isolated Palestinian cities, towns and villages. Freedom of movement for Palestinians would be increased in the hope that their economic conditions would improve (possibly through increased Palestinian employment in Israeli businesses) and that this would be enough, with increased Israeli security, to maintain relative calm.
This is a shared vision among Netanyahu, Lieberman, Naftali Bennett, and numerous other right-wing figures in Israel, even though they each present it differently. It was sketched out in broad terms in the Israeli media recently. Another prize in the arrangement for Israel is that it would diminish the PA as the international representative of the Palestinians, thus blunting the gains the Palestinians have gotten through various international recognitions of their statehood. The PA would still exist, but it would be disconnected from the Palestinian street in the Occupied Territories. This would, indeed, resemble the pre-Oslo era.
Even if Netanyahu is ousted from the Prime Minister’s office in the near future (not likely, but possible given the current political waves in Israel), another right-wing leader would certainly be his successor. Thus, the rollback of Oslo would continue, as would the freeze in the peace process. And without a visible representative Palestinian leadership, international pressure for peace would diminish, simply because there won’t be anyone to press Israel to talk to (the United States, Europe and even the United Nations will not, in any foreseeable future, push Israel to talk with Hamas).
The Israeli right believes that this is a status quo that could be maintained indefinitely, with the occasional flare-up of violence with Gaza and sporadic, but disorganized attacks by individual Palestinians from the West Bank. And since right-wing leaders will be controlling Israel until an opposition that can sway the Israeli public toward a more moderate course coalesces, the vision will be pursued.
But we’re already seeing some of the reasons why this vision is unsustainable. Israeli radicals will continue to agitate for greater Jewish control of the Temple Mount, and any right-wing Israeli government cannot simply ignore them. That will lead to more and more individual acts of violence like the one this week in Jerusalem and the several that preceded it recently.
Perhaps the Israeli right thinks they can handle that as well, and they may be correct. But there is another aspect about the pre-Oslo existence that they may be overlooking.
The separation of the Palestinian masses from the leadership of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in the 1980s led to the development of a more grassroots, locally based Palestinian leadership. It was that leadership, not the PLO, which created the first, and by far the more successful, Intifada. Palestinians have been yearning for a new leadership, and a new generation of leaders with popular support would be most welcome among them.
The first intifada was certainly not non-violent, but it relied much more on strikes, protests and civil disobedience than the second one did. Violence was a very minor aspect of it at first, until Yitzhak Rabin’s policy of “breaking the Palestinians’ limbs” increased it. Even so, the non-violent aspects of that uprising remained front and center. It was then that the United States, and soon after, Israel, embraced the idea of peace with the PLO, in order to end the intifada and to blunt and co-opt that new Palestinian leadership.
If such a leadership arose again, it would be impossible to ignore politically, even in Washington and Tel Aviv. But Palestinians need to hope for it, because if the Obama administration is so removed from this issue that it is willing to blame Abbas for acts that he has strongly condemned, then the Oslo rollback-vision will prove successful, and there will be even less pressure on Israel to compromise. But that would also present an opportunity for the new Palestinian leadership to encourage renewed international activism aimed at economically pressuring Israel. And that could bring real change.
There is, however, a very long road between that sort of hope and where we are right now.
]]>ISIS and Bahrain’s F-16
by Matar E. Matar
For the second time in recent history, the United States is trading away support for democracy and fundamental human rights protections in Bahrain as part of an effort to establish democracy and human rights protections in another Muslim country.
In March 2011, while the Obama administration was building a coalition to defeat Qaddafi in Libya, Saudi and Emirati troops were rolling toward Bahrain to reinforce a massive crackdown against unarmed pro-democracy protesters.
In her book, Hard Choices, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reveals how a very senior Emirati official pressed her to mute US opposition to this invasion if she wanted the UAE to join the anti-Qaddafi campaign. “Frankly, when we have a situation with our armed forces in Bahrain it’s hard to participate in another operation if our armed forces’ commitment in Bahrain is questioned by our main ally,” she quotes him as saying. It worked. Later that same day, in stark contrast to the US State Department’s response to the Russian intervention in the Crimea, Clinton issued a statement intended to soothe Saudi/Emirati concerns, saying in essence that their intervention in Bahrain was legitimate.
At that same time, large parts of the Bahraini population were being subjected to beatings, torture and imprisonment that had never occurred in the history of our country. Given our inability to protect our people from such abuse, several colleagues and I decided to resign our positions in Parliament in protest. I was then arrested while trying to inform the world about the casualties from excessive force and extensive torture. But Secretary Clinton was at peace with the trade-off: “I felt comfortable that we had not sacrificed our values or credibility,” she wrote in her memoir.
Today Bahrain is facing a similar situation. The US needs the appearance of strong Arab cooperation against the Islamic State (not because the US actually needs assistance from Bahraini F-16s), giving the Bahraini regime an opportune time to force bad deals on the people of Bahrain without criticism from Washington.
This time the regime is moving ahead, claiming that it has achieved consensus through what has clearly been a phony “National Dialogue”—the government’s response to international pressure for reconciliation after the repression of the pro-democracy movement.
The country’s absolute monarch, King Hamad bin Isa, dominates all power centers. He appoints all senior judges, members of the upper house of Parliament, and members of the cabinet, which is headed by the world’s longest-serving prime minister, Khalifa bin Salman (first appointed when Nixon was president). In addition, the King has given himself the right to grant public lands and citizenship to whomever he wants. He has abused these powers in a wide and systematic manner by concentrating wealth among his family and allies including within Bahrain’s minority Sunni population.
On October 12, 2011, half a year after the Bahraini uprising, opposition parties representing well over half of the country’s population issued a blueprint for democratic reform in Bahrain, the Manama Document. This paper identified a path toward an orderly transition to a constitutional monarchy, ensuring an inclusive government that represents all Bahrainis in the cabinet, parliament, and security and judicial institutions. Specifically, it called for the establishment of representative electoral districts; free elections; a single elected chamber in Parliament instead of the current bi-cameral arrangement, where the upper house is appointed by the king and only the lower house is elected; an independent judiciary; and the inclusion of Shia among all ranks of the military and security forces.
Instead of embracing any of these ideas, the unaccountable king has offered up pretend reforms, and the US government, with an eye to keeping the Fifth Fleet’s headquarters in Bahrain and now on keeping Bahraini F-16s in the air over Iraq and Syria, pretends that these reforms are real. Central to this pretense is the “national dialogue” that has been running in fits and starts since July 2011. In reality, it has been a one-sided conversation, since key leaders of the opposition have been systematically arrested.
Last month, the king tapped Crown Prince Salman Bin Hamad to assume his first real political role in the government—namely taking the lead in closing the door on the dialogue and submitting what he considered to be its “common ground.” Among other things, the crown prince proposed a meaningless plan for redistricting that was later imposed by the king by royal decree. Under this plan, Shia constituencies, which comprise about 65% of the total population, would receive only about 45% of the seats in Parliament. The redistricting plan was apparently designed to reduce the variation in the size of districts by scattering the opposition throughout majority loyalist districts. Moreover, the variation in the size of districts would remain huge. For example, a loyalist-majority district of less than 1,000 voters would elect one MP while an opposition-majority district with more than 10,000 voters would receive the same representation in Parliament—a ratio of more than ten to one. In fact, 13 opposition-majority districts with more than 10,000 voters each would be treated this way under the plan.
Another part of the supposed “common ground” relates to the formation of the cabinet, which must be approved by the majority of the elected chamber of Parliament. If Parliament fails to approve the appointed government three times, then Parliament would be dissolved.
Thousands of Bahrainis rejected this proposal Sept. 19 by marching in western Manama in a demonstration of determination on the part of pro-democracy forces that have not diminished despite the repression of the last three and a half years.
Nonetheless, based on the purported “common ground,” the government now intends to hold elections on Nov. 22.
Time is short for constructive engagement between the opposition and the regime to resolve these political disputes, and the US needs to be heard. Washington should not think that its interests require it to remain silent about the need for real democratic reform in Bahrain. In fact, failing to speak out is detrimental to its own stated interests in Iraq and Syria. While the regime in Bahrain is participating in F-16 sorties against the Islamic State, its policies of systematic discrimination against its majority Shia population and its ongoing incitement in the media against Bahraini Shia (as agents of Iran and the US at the same time!) create a perfect environment for incubating terrorists who consider Americans and Shia their greatest enemy. Moreover, while the US government trains Bahraini “security forces” that exclude Shia (on sectarian grounds), it appears that some Bahrainis working for these same forces have left to fight with the Islamic State.
Yet when Nabeel Rajab, a prominent human rights activist, recently tweeted that the security institutions were the ideological incubator of sectarianism and anti-American attitudes in Bahrain, he was arrested on the grounds that he had “denigrated government institutions.”
Bahrain is a small country, but it represents a major test for US credibility. The Obama administration has traded Bahraini democracy away once before. Three years of bloodshed in Bahrain has not only radicalized elements of the opposition there but has also instilled a culture of abuse and impunity in Bahrain’s government and security forces, some of whom are now looking to the Islamic State to satiate their new-found appetite for violence. Any potential benefit the US thinks it might gain from an unaccountable (Sunni) autocrat’s F16s in the bombing campaign against the Islamic State is more than offset by the sectarian extremism that these alleged allies continue to provoke (and promote) at home.
Washington should not sell out democracy in Bahrain again. With a little attention and encouragement, President Obama could help bring democracy to this Arab country and claim at least one good result for his (currently empty) “win” category.
Matar Ebrahim Matar is a former Member of Parliament who served as Bahrain’s youngest MP representing its largest constituency. In February 2011, along with 18 other members from his Al-Wefaq political party, he resigned from Parliament to protest the regime’s crackdown against pro-reform demonstrators. During the Feb. 14 uprising, he served as a major spokesman for the pro-democracy movement. Matar was subsequently arbitrarily detained, and, after his release, left Bahrain for exile in the United States. In 2012, he received the “Leaders for Democracy Award” from the Project on Middle Democracy (POMED).
]]>The Obama administration has admitted that it misjudged the extremists who set up the Islamic State in chunks of territory torn from Iraq and Syria. The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, confessed that his analysts underestimated the “will to fight” of the jihadists. He also linked it to intelligence failures of the past, such as similar underestimations of the Vietnamese in the 1960s.
At the same time, critics have castigated the Obama administration for its apparent lack of a “will to fight.” According to this line of argument, the president should have armed the moderate Syrian rebels back when the civil war broke out in that country. He should have bombed the country when Syrian President Bashar al-Assad used chemical weapons against his opponents. He shouldn’t have withdrawn U.S. troops from Iraq.
The Islamic State has shown a passionate devotion to struggle. The Obama administration has shown an equally passionate devotion to conflict avoidance. In making this stark contrast, U.S. hawks pay a backhand compliment to the Islamic State: at least they are fighting for what they fervently believe in.
This failure to fight in the Levant is part of a larger critique of Obama as an agnostic. He doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism or the American economic system (no matter how many times Obama has in fact reaffirmed his faith in both). He wasn’t even born in this country, two out of five Americans still suspect, so how could he fully embrace America? And on war and peace issues, he has emerged as the ultimate betrayer of the national interest by giving ground to America’s enemies across the globe. He is a wimp, a traitor, the “coward-in-chief.”
There are two possible responses to this inaccurate picture. The first is to paint a picture of Obama as a president who judiciously uses military force. He has, for instance, been very clear about not sending ground troops into the fight against the Islamic State, even though the top brass believes that destroying IS—as opposed to simply degrading its capabilities—will eventually require “boots on the ground.” The president has also carefully assembled a coalition of international actors to provide multilateral cover in the latest escalation of the conflict in the region. Elsewhere in the world, the administration hasn’t intervened in Ukraine or gone head to head with China in the South China Sea. It has made strong statements, reassured allies, upped arms transfers, and even resorted to various covert strategies. But the president has generally avoided direct confrontation.
Combine this trajectory of restraint with the president’s statements on prioritizing diplomacy and you get the image that the administration would like to cultivate: the current government is committed to “smart power” as opposed to the blunt application of “dumb power” that previous presidents (i.e., George W. Bush) wielded. There is some truth to this picture.
But let’s consider the other alternative: President Obama is no less committed to military action than any of his predecessors. He might personally have a less gung-ho disposition than, say, George W. Bush. But Obama’s personality is only a small part of the equation. Despite the putative end of the Cold War, the United States has remained on a war footing. The national security apparatus is programmed for intervention. What we see now taking place in the skies above Syria and Iraq is not an exception to the Obama-as-pacifist rule. It is a summation of a particular evolution in U.S. militarism toward the asymmetrical warfare of dispensing death at a distance.
For those who doubt the “will to fight” in the White House today, a quick glance at a recent Congressional Research Service report—Instances of Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-2014—should dispel the misconception. Approximately 31 pages cover this 216-year history. The first 18 pages take the reader from the undeclared war between the United States and France in 1798 to the first deployments of the George W. Bush era. The next five pages list the military engagements of Bush’s two terms. Which leaves roughly eight pages for the as-yet-uncompleted Obama tenure.
By the end of Obama’s second term, he’ll likely be responsible for more than a quarter of all uses of the armed forces abroad in the history of the United States. It should be noted that this list also includes U.S. military participation in peacekeeping missions, earthquake relief, and the like. On the other hand, it doesn’t include the widespread use of air strikes and missile attacks, which have increasingly substituted for the deployment of U.S. armed forces.
In 2014 alone, the Obama administration sent an additional battalion to South Korea in January, several hundred U.S. personnel to pursue the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda in March, several hundred advisors to Iraq in June to assess the threat of the Islamic State, another 130 “assessors” to Iraqi Kurdistan in August to deal with the Yazidi problem, and 600 soldiers also in August to Poland as “reassurance” in the wake of the civil war in Ukraine. The list doesn’t include the air strikes in Syria and Iraq against the Islamic State and several other targets, recent drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, or the dispatch of 3,000 U.S. soldiers to Liberia to address the Ebola epidemic.
So, despite the rants of those hoping to goad the president into buying his very own piece of quagmire in the Middle East, the Obama administration has shown considerable “will to fight.” The problem with the current fight against the Islamic State is that, the adversary’s obvious barbarism notwithstanding, U.S. objectives are not entirely clear. Here are four concerns that should indeed undercut any thinking person’s “will to fight” in this particular situation:
The threat of terrorism – The Islamic State has decapitated its hostages, including American journalists, and routinely engages in atrocities against a wide variety of people. But it has no capability of launching any attacks on the United States. Indeed, the furthest it has gone has been to incite people within the countries arrayed against it to launch “lone wolf” attacks. To justify its latest strikes in Syria, the Obama administration held up “imminent” terrorist attacks devised by a shadowy organization called the Khorasan Group. But even these “imminent” attacks, in the wake of the Syria strikes, were downgraded to merely “aspirational.” It’s easier, of course, to justify a war if Americans feel directly threatened, as they did from al-Qaeda in Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction in Iraq (though the former turned into a fight against the Taliban and the latter never materialized). IS will continue to make threats as long as they produce the result it wants: American soldiers to fight against on the battlefield and a “crusade” it can rail against to drum up more support.
The benefits for Assad – War is never an easy sell, but it’s particularly difficult if it’s against an enemy of your enemy. The Obama administration naturally has not emphasized the benefits that accrue to Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad when U.S. air strikes degrade the capabilities of one of his leading opponents. But Syrian diplomats have not been shy to trumpet this self-serving interpretation.
The nature of the “moderate” Syrian forces – The air attacks against Syria are part of a larger policy that includes training Syrian rebels in Saudi Arabia and other countries in the region. The program, which will cost $500 million, is slated to train 5,000 rebels in the first year. The trainees are naturally expected to fight against the Islamic State. But frankly their main objective has been to topple the Assad regime, and it’s not inconceivable that at some point they might team up with the extremists if that advances their prime directive.
It doesn’t help that the United States is wading into a situation where alliances and ideologies seem to change on a daily basis. Case in point: the Nusra Front (Jabhat al-Nusra). It’s affiliated with al-Qaeda, but it also has fought alongside the Free Syrian Army (FSA). When the United States listed the Nusra Front as a target of air strikes, many FSA fighters balked. “As long as al-Nusra, whose members are mostly Syrians, did not attack the Syrian people while fighting the regime, we are against targeting it,” explained an FSA leader on the northern front. It’s a war going on over there: “moderate” is a word that juts doesn’t make sense in an increasingly brutal environment.
The slippery slope of advisors – Although the president has drawn a red line on the issue of U.S. boots on the ground in this conflict, he has fudged the issue by sending over advisors to help with the targeting. He has also warned the U.S. public that this will not be a quick mission, like the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden. It’s useful to remember that U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War also began with advisors—in 1950. At that time, we were helping the French in what would be a losing effort. Later, after the partition of the country in 1954, Washington tried to keep the South Vietnamese government afloat (sound familiar?). By 1963, 16,000 U.S. advisors were in country. So, considering the complexity of the war in Syria and Iraq, we might well see a similar “advisor phase” that grows and grows until, surprise: boots on the ground.
These four caveats make the application of “smart power” by the Obama administration look increasingly dumb. There were good reasons for the president to hesitate before intervening directly in the past. He was not Hamlet seized by an existential crisis. He understood the significant trade-offs and calculated that intervention was not worth it.
But that was before domestic political pressure combined with the demands of a national security state still geared to fight a long war on terror. Obama, in the end, indeed showed that he did not have the will to fight. He was willing to stand up against the Islamic State. But he didn’t have the courage to stand up against his more hawkish opponents in Congress and the media.
—John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus. This article was first published by FPIF and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>by Mark N. Katz
All the major actors in the Middle East oppose the rise of the extremist group that calls itself the Islamic State (ISIS). In fact, ISIS has managed to incur the enmity of a highly diverse set of actors who often oppose one another. These include several sets of antagonists such as the United States and the West on the one hand and Russia on the other; Iran and the Assad regime in Syria on the one hand and Sunni states like Saudi Arabia on the other; Israel on the one hand and Hezbollah on the other; and the Kurds on the one hand and Turkey (which fears Kurdish nationalism) on the other. Even al-Qaeda opposes ISIS.
The fact that all the important actors in the region oppose ISIS has given rise to the hope that this radical Sunni group can be defeated. The experience of the Bolsheviks nearly a century ago, however, shows that this might not occur. Indeed, the current situation is reminiscent of Russia after the Bolsheviks seized power there in late 1917. The harshness of their rule quickly resulted in numerous opposition groups rising up against them inside the country. External powers also recognized the Bolsheviks as a threat, and several supported their internal opponents or even directly intervened both in the final year of World War I and for a few years afterward. But even though many internal and external actors wanted to defeat the Bolsheviks, these actors ultimately worked at cross-purposes, which helped the Bolsheviks not only survive but also gain control over most of the former Tsarist Empire and pose a threat to many other nations for years.
Today, as with the threat posed by the Bolsheviks, the common threat posed by ISIS provides no guarantee that the groups who oppose it will put aside their differences and work together to defeat it. Indeed, while hopes for a grand alliance against ISIS have been expressed in many quarters, the achievement of this goal has so far proven elusive—and will likely remain so.
Many of the principal actors in the region are worried not only about ISIS, but also other threats, including one another. Iran and Russia in particular regard the Syrian government—a minority Alawite regime—as an ally and do not want to see it replaced by a Sunni majority regime that would be hostile toward them. Saudi Arabia and several other Sunni Arab states, in contrast, see Iran—along with its Shi’a allies in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen—as the principal threat and accordingly regard the replacement of the Assad regime as important for their security as the defeat of ISIS. Turkey, for its part, sees ISIS as a threat but apparently regards the possibility of Kurdish forces in Syria (and, as a result, in Turkey itself) growing stronger from ISIS’s defeat as an even greater one.
The Obama administration is pursuing three contradictory sets of goals in the Middle East. First, while Washington wants to preserve American relations with Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states, it also wants to improve ties with Iran with which it hopes to achieve a nuclear accord. Secondly, while the US wants to preserve ties with a Turkish government that very much fears the growth of Kurdish separatism, Washington also sees Kurdish forces in Northern Iraq and in Syria as allies against ISIS. Finally, while the Obama administration genuinely wants to combat ISIS (and has, along with some of its Arab and European allies, launched airstrikes against ISIS positions in both Iraq and Syria), it also wants to do so without sending American ground forces back to Iraq. Yet it will be difficult for Washington to resolve any one of these contradictions—and may well be impossible to resolve all three.
Thus, while everyone wants to see ISIS defeated, the fact that so many of the actors in the region are working at cross-purposes could result in ISIS surviving and prospering despite universal opposition. Just this possibility should focus the minds of policymakers in different countries on how they can work together against the common threat before it grows even worse and becomes, like the Bolsheviks did almost a century ago, even more difficult to deal with.
]]>by Chas Freeman
Negotiators from Iran and the P5+1 are meeting amidst rapidly evolving international and regional circumstances. Whether they succeed or fail, their discussions will have an impact on much more than just nuclear proliferation in the Middle East. They will affect the geopolitics of that region, relations between the world’s greatest powers, and the emerging pluripolar world order.
Ironies of the Current Situation
1) Despite international anxieties about Iran’s nuclear weapons program, the program itself remains a conjecture and allegation rather than an established fact. The world’s most highly regarded intelligence agencies affirm only that some Iranians were doing some work on nuclear weapons until 2003, when the Islamic Republic ended this venture. The official worry is now that Iran’s mastery of the full nuclear fuel cycle and its development of missiles will give it “nuclear latency”—the future capacity to weaponize nuclear materials on short notice. The intelligence agency consensus is that Tehran has not made a decision to do this. Still, the seldom-rebutted popular narrative is that Iran is going all out to build a bomb. Even those who reject this narrative do not trust Iran not to make a decision to acquire nuclear weapons in future. This distrust is deep-rooted. It will not be easy to overcome.
2) Iran’s supreme authorities have proclaimed that nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction are forbidden by Islam. They say that Iran is morally barred from building the bomb. Iran’s history makes it hard to dismiss this declaration out of hand. After all, despite an estimated 100,000 deaths from Iraqi nerve gas attacks, it was on this basis that Tehran declined to develop its own chemical weapons capability during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
The only threats to Iran from countries wielding weapons of mass destruction now come from those most agitated about Iran’s possible acquisition of them—Israel, the United States, and (to a lesser extent) France and neighboring Russia—all of which have nuclear arsenals and a record of assaulting Muslim states. It is logical that Iran should want a nuclear deterrent to bar attack by such nuclear-armed enemies. Powerful interest groups and politicians in Israel, Saudi Arabia, France, and the US assign more weight to this logic than to the findings of their own intelligence agencies. Israelis recall that they ran their own clandestine nuclear weapons program decades ago amidst constant denials that they had such a program. Israel’s government doubts that Iran is any more truthful about its nuclear programs and their objectives than Israel was in the past.
3) Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the other Gulf Arabs don’t want a deal that allows Iran to continue to enrich but, in the absence of a deal, Iran would certainly continue to develop its nuclear sector without effective international constraint.
Current Geo-Political Trends
1) There is a lot at stake in the current negotiations. Recent international trends and developments are both adding to their complexity and magnifying the consequences of their outcome. But the world, the region, and all the parties to the negotiations need a deal.
2) Over the past year, relations among the P5+1 (US, UK, France, Russia, China plus Germany) and the situation in the region have both changed substantially. Tensions between the EU, US, and Russia have become acute and have reduced Russian interest in deferring to Western policies when its own interests in the Middle East and elsewhere suggest a different course. In August, Russia reportedly agreed to buy an initial 500,000 barrels of Iranian oil for resale on world markets, including China, with an option for twice as much. In the absence of UN legitimation of sanctions, China has been importing about 675,000 barrels of Iranian oil a day. India imports almost 300,000. Russia and China are unlikely to cooperate with further sanctions.
The EU has little appetite for more sanctions against Iran. European interest in trade and investment in Iran is all the greater because the EU now needs more than ever to reduce its energy dependence on Russia. Israel’s influence in France, Germany, and the UK has weakened. In this atmosphere, an Israeli effort to block or sabotage agreement would potentially split the P5+1 along yet another axis.
3) The structure of the global economy is changing in ways that reduce American power. US dollar hegemony, the basis for the effectiveness of the current sanctions regime, has begun to visibly erode. New trade settlement mechanisms that avoid the dollar are becoming available. The Indo-Pacific region’s economies are already 1.5 times the size of NAFTA or the EU and are growing more rapidly. The implications of this are clear. The era in which the United States and/or Europe can effectively sanction other countries without the support of the UN Security Council and the great non-Western powers is drawing to a close. Despite Congressional hubris, which is boundless, efforts to tighten sanctions probably won’t work.
Meanwhile, the rise of the group that calls itself the Islamic State and the drawdown of Western forces in Afghanistan have made cooperation with Iran on regional issues more attractive.
The net effect of these changes has been to create new diplomatic options and opportunities for future sanctions avoidance by Iran. Given the strategic situation, Iran is in a seller’s position for the first time.
Bottom Line
A breakdown in the negotiations or an agreement that falls apart due to opposition from Israel’s American partisans would see the US Congress seek to ratchet up sanctions against Iran. Israel would be forced to decide whether to mount a unilateral attack on Iran or suffer a loss of credibility as its repeated threats to do so were revealed to be a bluff. Iran would have to choose between its professed aversion to weapons of mass destruction and its need to deter attack by Israel or the United States. Iran might follow North Korea in withdrawing from the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). The role of international law in non-proliferation efforts would suffer a debilitating setback. The prospects for the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the Middle East would be greatly enhanced. The struggle to craft a strategy to deal with the spreading phenomenon of Islamist extremism, including the so-called “Islamic State” now straddling the Iraq-Syria border, would be further complicated. Another extension of the negotiating deadline would lack credibility and—to one degree or another—entail some of the same negative consequences as a failure to close a deal or to implement one.
An agreement between Iran and the P5+1 that survived Israeli and Gulf Arab second-guessing could (and likely would) stall, if not preclude, further nuclear proliferation in the region. It could also catalyze progress toward Iranian rapprochement with the United States and other Western countries. Its regional impact would depend in part on whether it was judged as likely to prove effective in curbing Iran’s presumed nuclear ambitions. If so, it could facilitate the regional accommodations necessary to restore stability in the Middle East and wider Muslim world.
One way or another, an agreement would produce a chance for all parties to discover common interests in combating and containing extremism, whether Sunni or Shia in origin, and an opportunity for creative diplomacy to replace military contention with peaceful coexistence and competition. These opportunities might not be seized, of course. But they would not exist at all in the absence of a successful outcome to the current negotiations.
– Chas Freeman served as US ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the war to liberate Kuwait and as Assistant Secretary of Defense from 1993-94. Since 1995, he has chaired Projects International, Inc., a Washington-based firm that creates businesses across borders for its American and foreign clients. He was the editor of the Encyclopedia Britannica entry on “diplomacy” and is the author of five books, including “America’s Misadventures in the Middle East” and “Interesting Times: China, America, and the Shifting Balance of Prestige.” This essay is based on remarks presented at a Sept. 29 panel at the 2014 Leadership Conference of the National Iranian American Council (NIAC).
]]>by Wayne White
Alongside the wave of Syrian Kurdish refugees into Turkey this month is an equally unsettling story: alarming gains by the Islamic State in an offensive against a potential ally. Syria’s Kurds carved out their own regional bastion extending west from their main base in the extreme northeast corner of Syria. For two years they have fiercely defended their lands against the Islamic State and other extremists, employing many thousands of veteran Kurdish fighters.
Yet due to these fighters’ ties with the militant leftist Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK)—a designated terrorist organization in the United States and Turkey—and an alliance of convenience of sorts with the Assad regime, the US and the Islamic State’s (ISIS or ISIL) other foes have held them at arm’s length. Stemming from all this could be severe damage to, and possibly the eventual loss of one of the most effective contingents of indigenous anti-ISIL boots on the ground in Syria.
The Syrian Kurdish World
Comprising roughly 9 percent of the Syrian population, Syrian Kurds mostly inhabit the country’s extreme northeast al-Hasakah Governorate wedged between Iraq and Turkey, plus large swathes of real estate across northern Syria extending westward. Since 1970, the Kurds have had profound differences with the authoritarian Assad regime, toward which their leading parties pose a threat. So the PKK and other Kurdish parties seeking independence or greater autonomy were banned and suppressed.
Still, given Syria’s adversarial relationship with Turkey, Damascus turned a turned a blind eye toward (or was unable to prevent) PKK operations against Turkish targets during various periods, especially between 1980-99. With or without central government approval, many PKK elements have also been sheltered in Kurdish northwestern Iran and northern Iraq (the latter resulting in numerous Turkish anti-PKK air strikes in Iraqi Kurdistan over the past 20 years).
Despite past differences, Syrian Kurds opted not to attack Syrian forces and maintained a rather distant relationship with Damascus. Since Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria have had an uneasy relationship with non-Kurdish rulers and local communities for a very long time, Syrian Kurds were wary of Sunni Arab Syrian rebels. That fear grew with the increasing Muslim militancy of large numbers of rebels. So, for over two years, markedly secular Kurds, mostly alone, successfully fought off first the al-Nusra Front and then ISIL.
Although limited passenger flights from Damascus (along with a few scattered aerial deliveries of supplies and ammunition) have occurred, the regime and the Kurds remain wary of each other.
In mid-2012, a number of Syrian Kurdish militias formed an interim administration for an autonomous region, the Kurdish Supreme Committee (KSC). The unity initiative was taken despite opposition from the rival PKK-allied Syrian Democratic Union Party (PYD) but with reluctant agreement from Damascus, which pulled most Syrian troops out of Syria’s Kurdish region, and released over 600 Kurdish political prisoners.
After clashes between KSC forces and the PYD’s robust militia, an accord was reached for joint rule. Despite the Assad regime’s tentative cooperation, both the KSC and PYD are well aware that if Damascus ever regains its pre-rebellion sway across Syria, it almost certainly would try to repose central control over Hasakah and other Kurdish areas.
Prospects and Barriers
Displeasing Damascus, but with the ISIL threat clearly growing, PYD-affiliated units farther to the west partnered on Sept. 10 with several Free Syrian Army (FSA) brigades in a coordinated effort called the “Joint Operations Room.”
In addition, since June, a contingent of Syrian Kurdish combat veterans was rushed over to Iraqi Kurdistan to bolster the sagging Kurdish defenses. A large number of crack PYD militiamen also participated in cutting an escape corridor through ISIL defenses to save Iraq’s besieged Yazidis on Sinjar Mountain.
Turkey naturally holds Syria’s Kurds in low regard for harboring the PKK (and related groups), which is why Turkey initially refused to allow large numbers of Syrian Kurds fleeing ISIL to take refuge across the border (until Sept. 19 after 3 days of balking). The Turks also have been wary of the many hundreds of young Kurdish males heading into Syria to bolster desperate Syrian Kurdish forces trying to hold back ISIL. Turkish security forces have even blocked quite a few who are now camped out along the border.
The PKK warrants its branding in the West as a terrorist group. A 2013 PKK assassination in Paris, albeit part of internecine Kurdish feuding, showed the group remains active. However, now facing an existential threat from ISIL (the main driver behind its alliance of convenience with Damascus), the entire Syrian Kurdish community of many political tendencies has one focus: defense of its homeland against a more menacing ISIL.
The US and the West have had no meaningful contacts with Syrian Kurdish forces because of past attacks by the PKK against Turkey, in Western Europe, and, most recently, Kurdish links to the Assad regime. The PYD representative in France, Khaled Eissa, told Reuters early this month, however, that there had been Western signals of changing positions. US military officers met with PYD military counterparts on Mount Sinjar last month, but conversations only concerned the Yazidi evacuation. Some of Turkey’s NATO allies, according to Eissa, were apparently trying to reassure the Turks enough to initiate meaningful contacts with Syrian Kurdish leaders.
Exploding Crisis
While diplomacy stalled, ISIL struck. Focusing on less concentrated Syrian Kurds west of Hasakah, ISIL knifed deeply into Kurdish holdings (employing heavy weapons so close to the border today that two shells fell into a Turkish vineyard). The offensive’s main objective is Kobani (Ayn al-Arab), Syria’s third largest Kurdish town, driving over 150,000 Kurds into Turkey.
Despite desperate Syrian Kurdish pleas for airstrikes by the US-led coalition against ISIL forces (particularly heavy weapons) in Kobani for some days, no air support was provided until Sept. 25 when three strikes hit that area. Reports from Kobani indicate those strikes were ineffective (hitting empty ISIL positions). So far today there apparently have been none—only strikes far to the east near Hasakah. ISIL currently appears to be squeezing Kobani from three sides.
The White House has repeatedly emphasized the need for (and shortage of) indigenous boots on the ground to capitalize on airstrikes to hold, surround, and drive back ISIL. In this instance a combative secular military force numbering in the tens of thousands has been left to fend for itself because of its tentative alliance of convenience with the Assad regime and the association of some of its cadres with terrorism (although a brand far less malignant than that of ISIL). And yet this force has come to the aid of coalition forces twice.
Well beyond the question of aiding Syria’s Kurds against ISIL, Ankara has been a disappointment. Although a longstanding NATO member, it refused to host NATO combat aircraft operating against ISIL. It had also shown little interest in making a serious effort to block the export of ISIL oil products into Turkey or the influx of foreign fighters to ISIL. Only on Sept. 25 did the Turkish army finally crack down on oil and related ISIL smuggling. Ironically, the more ISIL benefits from Turkish resistance to taking risks, the greater the tsunami of Syrian refugees descending into Turkey becomes.
]]>On Sunday a Reuters report quoting unnamed “senior Iranian officials” suggested Tehran was trying to use the crisis posed by the group that calls itself the Islamic State (ISIL or ISIS) in Iraq to increase Iran’s leverage in negotiations over its nuclear program.
But a senior Iranian official directly involved in the talks denied the claim that Iran was trying to mix the two issues, insisting in an email to me that “We have enough on our plate with the nuclear issue.”
The French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius supported the Iranian official’s comments in remarks made at the Council of Foreign Relations on Sept. 22, which I included in my piece. (France has been a challenging negotiating partner for Iran and has even been accused of impeding the interim nuclear deal reached in Geneva last November during the second to last session of talks.)
But in a strange update of its story, Reuters argued that the White House’s insistence today that the issues are being kept separate confirmed Reuter’s initial premise.
“While not surprising, the U.S. response suggests the White House feels a need to tell Iran publicly that it wants other issues kept away from the nuclear talks,” said the Reuters report.
When I heard the full quote by White Press Secretary Josh Earnest, it sounded like he was actually denying the premise of Reuter’s initial report.
Here’s the full response by Earnest with the one quote Reuters used in bold. (I wasn’t at the briefing so I won’t know the question that preceded Earnest’s response until the transcript becomes available.)
The conversations related to the P5+1 talks have to do with resolving the international community’s concerns about the Iranian nuclear program. Those conversations to try to resolve those concerns are entirely separate from any of the overlapping interests that Iran may have with the international community as it relates to ISIL. As you’ve heard me discuss on at least a couple of other occasions, it is not in the interest of the Iranian regime for this extremist organization to be wreaking havoc on its doorstep. So, like the international community, the Iranians are understandably concerned about the gains that ISIL has made in Iraq and they have indicated that they are ready to fight ISIL. But the United States will not coordinate any of our military activities with the Iranians, the United States will not be involved in sharing intelligence with the Iranians and the United States will not be in the position of trading aspects of Iran’s nuclear program to secure commitments to take on ISIL. These two issues are entirely separate.
Considering the strained state of the negotiations, it’s certainly possible that both sides are keeping the talks solely focused on Iran’s nuclear program to prevent further complications.
Read more about this story and where the talks stand in my piece today for IPS News.
]]>Imagine hearing news that North Korea was planning to organize an international conference on criminal justice reform, or being invited by Cuba to a conference promoting political freedom. The likely reaction would be incredulity, followed by laughter. Well, those conferences are imaginary, but here’s a real one: a “Global Conference on Human Rights,” sponsored by Saudi Arabia.
Saudi Arabia? That absolute monarchy where political parties and labor unions are prohibited, religions other than Islam are forbidden, women are second-class citizens, and human rights activists are routinely locked up?
Yes indeed, unlikely as it may seem. Saudi Arabia’s official Human Rights Commission, a government organization, and the Gulf Research Center, a think tank, have announced that they will organize a three-day international rights conference, to be held in Riyadh in December, “under the patronage” of King Abdullah. The announcement says the event “will gather together Heads of States and representatives of national ministries, members of Parliaments, international, regional, and inter-governmental organizations, religious scholars, academics, national Human Rights Commissions, and NGOs.”
Given Saudi Arabia’s unsavory reputation on this subject—it is routinely denounced in the State Department’s annual human rights report and by activist groups such as Human Rights Watch—Riyadh might seem to be an unlikely venue for such an event. But the key to understanding the rationale for this conference lies in the announced theme: “Promoting a Culture of Tolerance.” This is not about individuals’ freedom of expression, or the status of women, or freedom of assembly. This is about the Islamic State, or ISIS.
According to the announcement, “The objectives of the conference are to consolidate efforts to promote and protect human rights with a special focus on the promotion of a culture of peace, tolerance, dialogue and mutual understanding among people at the national, regional and global levels…Given the ever growing increase in cases of intolerance, discrimination, social exclusion and acts of violence including those motivated by religious and political extremism, this conference seeks to provide recommendations to be implemented by at the policy level.”
That language is entirely consistent with the ideological position Saudi Arabia has sought to stake out as the threat from the Islamic extremist group has spread across neighboring Iraq and in Syria. The Saudis, who find their position as the worldwide leaders of Sunni Islam challenged by ISIS’s proclamation of itself as a “caliphate,” or trans-national Muslim state, are preaching that the ISIS message is a perversion of Islam, unjustified by religious texts or by history, and that its ruthless violence contravenes the principles of the faith.
Last month, Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdul-Aziz Al al-Sheikh, the highest religious authority in the country, said ISIS and its ideological parent al-Qaeda, were “enemy number one of Islam,” not representatives of the faith. “Extremist and militant ideas and terrorism which spread decay on Earth, destroying human civilization, are not in any way part of Islam, but are enemy number one of Islam, and Muslims are their first victims,” he said in a statement carried by the official Saudi Press Agency. King Abdullah and other senior princes of the ruling al-Saud family have issued similar statements. Earlier this year the government made it a crime for Saudi citizens to support ISIS or to go to Iraq or Syria to join the group’s military ranks.
Saudi Arabia is a conservative Sunni state that adheres to the most rigid form of the religion, known to outsiders as Wahhabism, and enshrines religion as a cornerstone of national policy. All citizens must be Muslims. In the last two decades of the 20th century, the kingdom spent billions of dollars of its oil wealth to promote that version of Islam across the Arab world, in Africa and Asia, and even in the Americas. But the rulers got a rude awakening in 2003 when al-Qaeda, denouncing them as corrupt agents of the West, began an armed uprising inside Saudi Arabia. It took the Saudis more than three years, punctuated by gunfire in the streets, to suppress that challenge.
Since then, they have been preaching a modified version of Islam that might be described as softer at the edges: the rules of personal and social behavior remain strict, as dictated in the Koran, but the religion favors tolerance, understanding, and non-violence. The Ministry of Islamic Affairs has published a “Platform of Moderation,” which declares that “beneficial knowledge and good deeds are the key to happiness and the basis of Deliverance.” King Abdullah even promoted an “Interfaith Dialogue” and allowed himself to be photographed with Pope Benedict XVI.
That is the context in which the agenda for the planned conference should be understood. Topics to be discussed include “national policies and strategies aiming to combat all forms of intolerance, discrimination, ethnic exclusiveness, and acts of violence based on religion or belief,” and establishment of an “international partnership for the promotion of a culture of tolerance, dialogue among civilizations, and combatting hatred.”
Saudi Arabia has never deserved to be included among the ranks of the world’s most oppressive regimes, as it is every year by Parade magazine. Life is restricted for women, and discrimination against the kingdom’s Shia majority is entrenched, but male Sunni citizens have far greater freedom than people in Cuba or North Korea. They are allowed to travel abroad, live where they like, take whatever jobs they find suitable, make money and keep it, interact with foreigners, have as many children as they want, attend any university they can get into, take their families to the amusement park or the beach, and—with some restrictions—surf the Internet. But those freedoms are granted by the regime, which can revoke them at any time for any reason, or for no reason. Public actions or statements that the authorities interpret as challenging the monarchy or promoting terrorism are likely to result in harsh punishment. Apostasy—a term that is interpreted broadly—is punishable by execution.
The announcement of the December rights conference makes no mention of any of Saudi Arabia’s domestic policies.
]]>Last week I commented on the unhelpful habit of throwing everything Islamist, no matter how extreme or moderate, into a single conceptual bucket and writing off the whole lot as incorrigible adversaries. That habit entails a gross misunderstanding of events and conflicts in the Middle East, and has the more specific harm of aiding extreme groups at the expense of moderate ones. Shortly afterward Dennis Ross of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy presented a piece titled “Islamists Are Not Our Friends,” which illustrates almost in caricatured form some of the misleading attributes of the single-bucket attitude that I was discussing.
Ross’s article probably is not grounded in Islamophobia, although it partly appeals to such sentiment. The piece ostensibly is about how “a fundamental division between Islamists and non-Islamists” is a “new fault line in the Middle East” that provides “a real opportunity for America” and ought to guide U.S. policy toward the region. In fact it is a contrived effort to draw that line—however squiggly it needs to be—to place what Ross wants us to consider bad guys on one side of the line and good guys on the other side. The reasons for that division do not necessarily have much, if anything, to do with Islamist orientation. Thus anyone who has been unfriendly to Hamas or to its more peaceful ideological confreres in the Muslim Brotherhood are placed on the good side of the line, Iran and those doing business with it are put on the bad side, and so forth.
Ross tries to portray something more orderly by asserting that “what the Islamists all have in common is that they subordinate national identities to an Islamic identity” and that the problem with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood was that “it was Islamist before it was Egyptian.” What, exactly, does that mean, with particular reference to the short, unhappy presidency of Mohamed Morsi? There were several reasons that presidency was both unhappy and short, but trying to push an Islamist-more-than-Egyptian agenda was not one of them. (And never mind that Ross is risking going places he surely would not want to go by making accusations of religious identification trumping national loyalty on matters relevant to U.S. policy toward the Middle East.) It would make at least as much sense to say that the current president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, was more authoritarian and more in tune with fellow military strongmen than he was Egyptian.
Where Ross’s schema completely breaks down is with some of the biggest and most contorted squiggles in the line he has drawn. He places Saudi Arabia in the “non-Islamist” camp because it has supported el-Sisi in his bashing of the Brotherhood and wasn’t especially supportive of Hamas when Israel was bashing the Gaza Strip. Saudi Arabia—where the head of state has the title Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, the country’s constitution is the Koran, and thieves have their hands amputated—is “non-Islamist”? Remarkable. Conversely, the Assad regime in Syria, which is one of the most secular regimes in the region notwithstanding the sectarian lines of its base of support, is pointedly excluded from Ross’s “non-Islamist” side of the line because of, he says, Syrian dependence on Iran and Hezbollah. Of course, any such alliances refute the whole idea of a “fundamental division” in the region between Islamists and non-Islamists, but Ross does not seem to notice.
Getting past such tendentious classification schemes, we ought to ask whether there is a more valid basis on which we ought to be concerned about states or influential political movements defining themselves in religious terms. If we are to be not merely Islamophobes but true children of the Enlightenment, our concern ought to be with any attempt, regardless of the particular creed involved, to impose the dogma of revealed religion on public affairs, especially in ways that affect the lives and liberties of those with different beliefs.
Such attempts by Christians, as far as the Middle East is concerned, are to be found these days mainly among dispensationalists in America rather in the dwindling and largely marginalized Christian communities in the Middle East itself. In a far more strongly situated community, that of Jewish Israelis, the imposition of religious belief on public affairs in ways that affect the lives and liberties of others is quite apparent. Indeed, the demographic, political, and societal trends during Israel’s 66-year history can be described in large part in terms of an increasingly militant right-wing nationalism in which religious dogma and zealotry have come to play major roles. Self-definition as a Jewish state has been erected as a seemingly all-important basis for relating to Arab neighbors, religion is in effect the basis for different classes of citizenship, and religious zeal is a major driver of the Israeli colonization of conquered territory, which sustains perpetual conflict with, and subjugation of, the Palestinian Arabs.
When religious zealotry involves bloodshed, especially large-scale bloodshed, is when we when ought to be most concerned with its infusion into public affairs. The capacity for zealotry and large-scale application of violence to combine has increased in Israel with the steady increase of religiosity in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and its officer corps. A prominent exemplar of this trend is Colonel Ofer Winter, commander of the IDF’s Gilati Brigade, who has received attention for the heavily religious content of his instructions to his troops. With his brigade poised near the Gaza Strip before the most recent round of destruction there, Winter said in a letter to his troops that he looked forward to a ground invasion so that he could be in the vanguard of a fight against “the terrorist enemy that dares to curse, blaspheme and scorn the God of Israel.” After Winter’s brigade did get to join the fight, he said that a mysterious “cloud” appeared and provided cover for his forces, an event he attributed to divine intervention. Quoting from Deuteronomy, he said, “It really was a fulfillment of the verse ‘For the Lord your God is the one who goes with you to give you victory.’”
Winter’s brigade was involved in what could be described as a culmination of the synthesis of zealotry and bloodshed. When an Israeli soldier was missing and suspected (incorrectly, as it later turned out) to have been captured alive by Hamas in a battle at Rafah, Winter executed the “Hannibal” directive, an Israeli protocol according to which as much violence as necessary is used to avoid having any Israeli become a prisoner, no matter how many civilians or others are killed and no matter that the captured Israeli soldier himself is killed. Over the next several hours a relentless barrage of artillery and airstrikes reduced this area of Rafah to rubble, while Israeli forces surrounded the area so that no one could escape it alive. This one Israeli operation killed 190 Palestinians, including 55 children. There may have been other implementations of the Hannibal directive in the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza; this one is confirmed because Winter himself later spoke openly and proudly about it. Although some secular-minded private citizens in Israel have objected to the heavily religious content of Winter’s leadership, officially there does not appear to be anything but approval for anything he has said or done. He is an exemplar, not a rogue.
In short, an operation officially sanctioned and led in the name of a national god was conducted to slaughter scores of innocents as well as one of the operators’ own countrymen. We ought to think carefully about this incident and about what Colonel Winter represents when we decide how to conceive of fault lines in the Middle East, what it means to insert religion into politics or to be a religious zealot, exactly what it is we fear or ought to fear about religiosity in public affairs, and which players in the Middle East have most in common with, or in conflict with, our own—Enlightment-infused, one hopes—values.
This article was first published by the National Interest and was reprinted here with permission.
]]>As the wobbly anti-ISIS coalition is being formed with American prodding, the Obama administration should take a strategic look at the future of the Arab world beyond the threat posed by the self-declared Islamic State. Otherwise, the United States would be unprepared to deal with the unintended chaos.
Driven by ideological hubris, the Bush administration on the eve of the Iraq war rejected any suggestions that the war could destabilize the whole region and rock the foundations of the Arab nation-state system.
That system, which was mostly created under the colonial Sykes-Picot treaty of 1916, is now being severely stressed. The Obama administration should avoid repeating the tragic mistake of its predecessor. While trying to halt the advance of ISIS by focused airstrikes, and regardless of the coalition’s effectiveness in “degrading” and “defeating” ISIS, President Obama should instruct his senior policymakers to explore possible architectures that could emerge from the ashes of Sykes-Picot.
The stresses and fault lines we are witnessing in the region today could easily lead to implosions tomorrow. Rightly or wrongly, Washington would be blamed for the ensuing mayhem.
As Secretary of State John Kerry shuttles between countries chasing the elusive coalition to fight ISIS, the administration seems to be unclear even about terminology. Is it a war or a multifaceted counter-terrorism strategy against ISIS? Whatever it’s called, if this strategy fails to eradicate the Islamic State and its Caliphate, is there a “Plan B” in the making?
Briefing senior policymakers on the eve of the Iraq war, I pointed out the possible unintended consequences of the invasion. George Tenet, former CIA Director, alludes to several of these briefings in his book, At the Center of the Storm.
One of the briefings discussed the possibility that the Iraq invasion could fundamentally unsettle the 100-year old Arab nation-state system. National identity politics, which heretofore has been managed and manipulated by autocratic regimes—tribal, dynastic, monarchical, and presidential—could unravel if the Bush administration failed to anticipate what could happen following Saddam’s demise.
The artificiality of much of those states and their boundaries would come unhinged under the pressures of the invasion and the unleashing of internal forces that have been dormant. National loyalties would be replaced by religious and sectarian affiliations, and the Shia-Sunni disputes that go back to the 7th century would once again rise to the surface albeit with more violence and bloodshed.
The briefings also emphasized Iraq’s central Islamic dilemma. While for many Sunni Muslims Baghdad represents the golden age of Islam more than 1,200 years ago, Iraq is also the cradle of Shia Islam.
Najaf and Karbala in southern Iraq are sacred for the Shia world because it was there where the fourth Caliph Ali’s son Hussein was “martyred” and buried. Iran, as the self-proclaimed voice of Shia Islam all over the world, is deeply embedded in Iraq and will always demand a central role in the future of Iraq.
Bush administration senior policymakers ignored these warning, arguing Iraqis and other Muslim Arabs would view American and coalition forces as “liberators” and, once the dictator fell, would work together in a spirit of tolerance, inclusion, and compromise. This view, unfortunately, was grounded in the neocons’ imagined ideological perception of the region. As we now know, it was utterly ignorant of ground truths and the social fabric of the different Arab Islamic societies.
Many Bush White House and Defense Department policymakers generally dismissed briefings that focused on the “morning after.” It’s safe to say they cared less about the post-Saddam Middle East than about toppling the dictator.
The region still suffers from those disastrous policies.
ISIS did not emerge in a vacuum, and its transnational ideology, warped as it may be, seems to appeal to Arabs and Muslims who have become disenchanted with the existing political order in Arab lands.
Many citizens view their states as fiefdoms of the ruling elites with no genuine respect for individual rights, personal freedoms, and human dignity. The “securitization” of politics has alienated many young Arabs and is driving them toward extremism.
If the borders between Syria and Iraq are erased by the transnational “Caliphate,” what will become of the borders of Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Iraq? Is the Obama administration ready to pick up the pieces when these nation-states disintegrate?
These are the critical questions the Bush administration should have pondered and answered before it invaded Iraq. They are the same questions the Obama administration should ponder and answer before chasing after ISIS in the Iraqi/Syrian desert.
Photo: Then President-elect Barack Obama before taking the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2009. Credit: White House/Pete Souza
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