Reason Magazine - Staff > Michael Young

Barack's Bitter Truth

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 15:00:00 EDT

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has gotten much heat for suggesting that when people lose faith in Washington, they "end up voting on issues like guns and are they going to have the right to bear arms [and] gay marriage."

How strange, then, that during his questioning last week of the two most senior American officials in Iraq, General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Obama took a minimalist view of what America could do to help Iraqi citizens regain faith in their government. Instead, the Illinois senator lowered the criterion for American "success" in Iraq, declaring that he could live with "a messy, sloppy status quo" in the country.

Obama's line of questioning was shrewd. With Petraeus he focused on al Qaeda, pushing the general to admit that the complete elimination of the group in Iraq was not necessary. Here's how Obama put it: "Our goal is not to hunt down and eliminate every single trace, but rather to create a manageable situation where they're not posing a threat to Iraq or using it as a base to launch attacks outside of Iraq. Is that accurate?"

"That is exactly right," Petraeus replied.

Obama then turned to Iran and questioned Crocker, the point man in the America-Iranian dialogue in Baghdad. As with Petraeus, Obama sought to lower the benchmark for what the United States should define as Iraqi "success." However, Crocker was less pliable. When Obama argued that it was unlikely that Iranian influence in Iraq could be terminated, Crocker responded: "[W]e have no problem with a good, constructive relationship between Iran and Iraq. The problem is with the Iranian strategy of backing extremist militia groups and sending in weapons and munitions that are used against Iraqis and against our own forces."

Obama didn't offer a convincing rejoinder to Crocker's protest. Instead, his time almost up, he cut to the crux of the exchange: a summary of his position on the war for an electorate that, he knew, would be listening to his every word. Obama's views were best captured in this passage:

And, see, the problem I have is if the definition of success is so high, no traces of Al Qaida and no possibility of reconstitution, a highly-effective Iraqi government, a Democratic multiethnic, multi-sectarian functioning democracy, no Iranian influence, at least not of the kind that we don't like, then that portends the possibility of us staying for 20 or 30 years.

If, on the other hand, our criteria is a messy, sloppy status quo but there's not, you know, huge outbreaks of violence, there's still corruption, but the country is struggling along, but it's not a threat to its neighbors and it's not an Al Qaida base, that seems to me an achievable goal within a measurable timeframe, and that, I think, is what everybody here on this committee has been trying to drive at, and we haven't been able to get as clear of an answer as we would like.

As the Lebanese commentator Hussain Abdul-Hussain bitingly wrote: "Obama's description of a post-America Iraq looked pretty much like post-1991 Iraq under Saddam Hussein: a country 'struggling along' but that was no ‘threat to its neighbors' and was not 'an al Qaeda base.'"

Indeed, but Obama was surely right in assuming that many Americans, perhaps a majority, have no problem with this. Saddam's brutality was never something they worried about. If you moved the goalposts a bit, Obama told them, failure would magically become success. The U.S. could head toward the exit in Iraq with its conscience clear.

The difficulty with Obama's appraisal was not just that it was based on a selective reading of the situation in Iraq, so that his assertion of how the U.S. had to realistically accept continued Iranian influence in the country somehow morphed into tolerance for Iran's systematic undermining of American interests there. The difficulty was not just that Obama over-optimistically assumed that his "messy status quo" could be sustained even if the U.S. removed most of its troops from Iraq (a point Crocker tried to make, before being cut off by Senator Joe Biden); the real difficulty with Obama's case was that it revived an American reading of Iraq that treats Iraqis as secondary characters in their own drama.

For the first two years of the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration was guilty of the same behavior. Iraq was about America and American power. Iraq's 2005 elections were the first real sign that Washington understood why the Iraqis mattered. Yet it was the 2007 surge that took this realization to new heights. U.S. commanders grasped that the security of Iraqi cities and civilians had to be the centerpiece of a new counter-insurgency strategy requiring U.S. soldiers to insert themselves more than ever into Iraqi society. Iraq's complex social dynamics were studied and, as effectively as possible depending on location, acted upon. For the first time the discussion in the U.S. seriously addressed what a pullout might mean in terms of Iraqi suffering.

That's why Obama's comments were so off-putting. He effectively told the Iraqis, once again, that they weren't worth anything to America. If violence and corruption were controllable, if al Qaeda was still around but was limited to Iraq proper, if Washington could stomach the Iranian manipulation of Iraqis, then it made little difference what the deeper aspirations of Iraqis in general were. Iraq could be a suppurating wound at the heart of the Middle East—a suppurating wound, Obama has tirelessly reminded us, which the U.S. helped create—but that counted for little when faced with the American urge to get out as soon as possible.

In his own defense, Obama might remind us that he's accountable only to his countrymen, not to the Iraqis; that the "good government" he has talked about in his campaign applies to embittered Americans, not to Iraqis embittered by the prospect of a precipitous U.S. departure. He might even be elected on that basis. But this would show that Obama, who has sold himself as a man of vision at home, is selfishly unimaginative abroad. Worse, because it is unlikely he will be able to much alter U.S. policy in Iraq, since Iran will not cede much more to the next administration than it did to this one, Obama's promises are potentially deceitful.

For as long as American leaders don't treat Iraqis as important in their own right, the Iraqis will have no incentive to tie their long-term interests to America's wagon. Should that matter? Both realists and idealists would probably answer in the affirmative. But where does Barack Obama stand? It's hard to imagine that Iraqis see in him change they can believe in.

reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

No miracles in Cana

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:00:00 EDT

A determined refrain heard among those thinking about or dealing with the Middle East is that the Gordian knot of the region is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Cut it and conflict will recede everywhere, because the frustrations engendered by Arab-Israeli animosity will evaporate.

Maybe. The Bush administration partly adopted that logic several months ago when it sponsored a regional peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland. President George W. Bush promised that a final agreement would be signed between Israelis and Palestinians before he leaves office in January. Some don't buy into that deadline; many accuse Washington of being insincere in its efforts. But the real question is whether the United States can actually do anything when it comes to altering the outcomes.

The Palestinians complain that the Bush administration leans too heavily in Israel's favor, and is therefore not a credible mediator. Most egregiously, the U.S. is allowing Israel to create facts on the ground in Jerusalem and the West Bank, complicating prospects for peace. As the Palestinian-American journalist Rami Khouri has written: "There is now only one real test of progress, or criterion of political seriousness, in the Arab-Israeli conflict in the short term: Can the United States make Israel stop expanding its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories? If not, talk of peace is a cruel hoax that will only raise and then dash expectations, leading to unknown consequences when the backlash occurs."

The Israeli argument is that the Palestinians, divided between Hamas and the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority, pose a persistent security threat to Israel. Unless there is a Palestinian interlocutor who can guarantee a positive outcome in negotiations, there is little need to offer vital concessions at present. The Palestinians respond that such an attitude only strengthens Hamas by discrediting the Palestinian Authority—which supports a peace deal with Israel—making a resolution even less probable. The Israelis come back that if the Palestinian Authority is so frail, then Israel has even less of an incentive to negotiate. And on and on the exchange goes, descending into proliferating circles of disputation—all of it very logical, all of it tightening further the Gordian knot.

But what can the United States do? The reality is that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is so replete with minefields that even a concerted American push would almost certainly fail in the end.

Yet no one can deny that there is a need to break out of the sterile cycle of rhetoric afflicting Palestinians and Israelis alike. Israel's obtuseness in dealing with the Palestinians, its uninterrupted expansion of settlements, and its reluctance to dismantle even those settler outposts successive governments have declared illegal, has strengthened its most dedicated enemies. Yet no Israeli government today is likely to survive the kind of concessions needed to revive the Palestinian Authority. At the first sign of dramatic change, the right-wing parties, perhaps even cabinet ministers, would oppose major concessions. This would likely lead to early elections that could bring about the victory of Likud, which is even less enthusiastic about giving up land. We would soon be back where we started. But then even the ruling Kadima and Labor parties don't believe in the Palestinian Authority enough to conduct serious business with it.

On the Palestinian side, the situation is even more dysfunctional. The Palestinian leadership is divided between two rival governments, one dominated by Fatah, the other by Hamas, each claiming legitimacy. The president, Mahmoud Abbas, refuses to speak to Hamas unless the Islamist movement first reverses its takeover of Gaza last summer. Yet Abbas' control over armed Palestinian groups, even those opposed to Hamas, is tenuous. The international community, particularly the United States, supports the Palestinian Authority, but all that does is discredit Abbas in the eyes of his own people, because such support has not even allowed him to end Israel's physical and economic strangulation of Gaza. Everyone regards Abbas as weak, so that now even Western pundits, former officials, and think-tank mavens are calling increasingly on Israel and the international community to talk to Hamas—a step that would all but destroy what remains of the Palestinian Authority

The thing is, Abbas happens to be the one Palestinian partner willing to give up land to achieve a mutually acceptable peace pact with Israel. Hamas has no such intention and has never committed publicly to the idea. However, this hasn't prevented Israel from taking measures that, intentionally or not, have facilitated the emergence of an Islamist mini-state in Gaza, headed by a movement that considers armed struggle against Israel a quasi-religious duty. In fact, Hamas' charter tells us "that the land of Palestine is an Islamic waqf [religious endowment] consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day."

The Islamists believe history is on their side, and see a region shaping up in their favor. In Egypt, the government faces a potent and rising challenge from the Muslim Brotherhood, as does the monarchy in Jordan. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is deployed along Israel's northern border with tens of thousands of rockets in its arsenal. Hamas, observing the heightening of contradictions all around, but also sensing that it may be close to overwhelming its rivals within Palestinian society, feels it can wait Israel out and one day push for victory in collaboration with its allies elsewhere. The movement's charter also outlines steps toward this end by asking "Arab countries surrounding Israel...to open their borders to the fighters from among the Arab and Islamic nations so that they could consolidate their efforts with those of their Muslim brethren in Palestine."

Faced with this mess, the Bush administration has few ways to succeed. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is today a perfect storm of unfeasible diplomacy. No one wants to give up the fight, because a vacuum may be far worse than keeping up some kind of dialogue, whatever the results; but no one has much of a clue about how to reach the endgame either.

When in a stalemate, the theory goes, try something new—anything. Take the idea of talking to Hamas, now all the rage. No one has defined what Israel or the international community should talk to Hamas about, let alone what Hamas would agree to discuss, given that the movement refuses to even recognize Israel's right to exist. So, the prevailing outlook is that Israel and Hamas should avoid the matter of recognition now and agree to a long-term truce, allowing a revived peace process to kick in. But giving precedence to the gesture of talking over the substance of recognizing the other party means that Hamas has everything to gain from continuing to deny recognition. The signs are that it hopes to do just that while imposing a ceasefire during which it could rout its Palestinian foes and rearm for a final showdown with Israel in future decades.

How can the U.S. address all this? Trying to stifle Hamas isn't working. Talking to the movement will go nowhere, but will kill Abbas politically. Forcing Israel to make serious land concessions would bring down the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert—to be replaced by one bound to be even more intransigent. And expecting the Palestinian Authority to impose its will on all Palestinian factions is laughable. So the short answer is that the U.S. has little to offer any of the parties. Blame Bush for many things; blame him for acting too late on the Israeli-Palestinian front. But don't seriously expect him to produce a miracle.

reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon

The Short Goodbye

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 15:07:00 EDT

There is a passage in Samantha Power's A Problem from Hell, her Pulitzer Prize-winning book on how the United States dealt with genocide throughout the 20th century, worth pondering for what it says about hypocrisy in the formulation of foreign policy. It is also worth pondering for what it tells us about Power herself, an academic who resigned recently as an advisor to Barack Obama after calling his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton a "monster" in an exchange with a Scottish newspaper.

Here, Power is writing about Anthony Lake, who in 1970 resigned from the National Security Council in protest against the Nixon administration's expansion of the Vietnam War into Cambodia. A year after his departure, Lake and a colleague published an article describing what they viewed as a problem in the way America shaped its overseas behavior. Power quotes a paragraph from that article in her own chapter on the war in Bosnia, management of which landed in Lake's lap after he became national security advisor to President Bill Clinton in 1993.

In their article, Lake and his colleague argued, "A liberalism attempting to deal with intensely human problems at home abruptly but naturally shifts to abstract concepts when making decisions about events beyond the water's edge. ‘Nations,' ‘interests,' 'influence,' 'prestige,' are all disembodied and dehumanized terms which encourage easy inattention to the real people whose lives our decisions affect or even end."

Power follows this observation with an admonition. She reminds us that "When Lake and his Democratic colleagues were put to the test"—in other words when Lake was appointed a senior Clinton administration official—"although they were far more attentive to the human suffering in Bosnia, they did not intervene to ameliorate it."

You have to wonder how Lake feels about Power's phrase today, because if Power was an advisor to Obama, Anthony Lake happens to still be one. In reading her criticism, what comes to his mind? That Power, even if what she said was partly justified, went a bit overboard in picking Lake as the exemplar of American lethargy in Bosnia? That she misleadingly depicted him as an armchair moralist, when the fact is he had written his article after years of being "put to the test" at the State Department, and had even interrupted a promising career out of a sense of moral compunction? That Power, though a journalist in the former Yugoslavia from 1993 to 1996, was herself perhaps something of an armchair moralist for having distributed stern moral verdicts from a safe perch at Harvard University, where she wrote her book, which included the type of uncompromising verdicts she would later measure and dilute once she had stepped into the pit of political calculation as an Obama confidante?

The dilutions notwithstanding, weeks before her resignation Power had become a lighting rod for criticism directed against Obama. Her outlook on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict had provoked the ire of supporters of Israel, amid signs that Obama was having trouble with Jewish voters. Obama's case was not helped any by the unearthing of a comment Power made in 2002, seemingly advocating American military intervention on the Palestinians' behalf. So bizarre was her proposal that Power later told an Israeli reporter, "Even I don't understand it...This makes no sense to me."

Power's self-immolating comment on Clinton was made during a trip to the United Kingdom. She had the good grace to end it all quickly, though another Obama advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, insisted an apology would have been enough. However, Power showed more political acumen than he did. By hanging on, she would have only remained a magnet of controversy, detracting from Obama's homilies, with the likelihood that the campaign would have eventually jettisoned her anyway.

But Power made a much more significant statement in London, one in which she talked about Obama and Iraq. That the Clintonites brought out their knives in response, that what Power said was valuable only as a weapon in the ongoing pursuit of convention delegates, a weapon doubly lethal for being added to her rash attack on Hillary Clinton, showed how incapable the Democrats are of debating Iraq's future in a forthright way.

In an interview with the BBC program HARDtalk, Power was asked about Barack Obama's plan to remove American troops from Iraq. In her response, she described the candidate's tight withdrawal timetable as "a best case scenario," which he would "revisit" once elected. That sliced and diced answer prompted the show's host to inquire whether Obama's commitment to withdraw most soldiers within 16 months was, actually, no commitment at all. Power's reply was revealing:

You can't make a commitment in March 2008 about what circumstances will be like in January of 2009. He will, of course, not rely on some plan that he's crafted as a presidential candidate or a U.S. Senator. He will rely upon a plan—an operational plan—that he pulls together in consultation with people who are on the ground to whom he doesn't have daily access now, as a result of not being the president. So to think—it would be the height of ideology to sort of say, 'Well, I said it, therefore I'm going to impose it on whatever reality greets me.'

Between Power's "monster" quote and her admission that Barack Obama was being less than candid about his intentions in Iraq, suddenly there was too much light shining onto Obama's studied ambiguities. Campaign manager David Plouffe denied there was any change in the candidate's thinking on Iraq, then welcomed Power's exit. Yet Power had not said anything much different than Obama himself. For example, asked in February by Steve Kroft of CBS whether he would stick to his withdrawal timetable even if sectarian violence ensued, Obama had responded: "No, I always reserve, as commander-in-chief, the right to assess the situation."

And that was nothing compared to what Obama said in 2004, the day after his keynote address at the Democratic national convention in Boston. Speaking at a lunch sponsored by the Christian Science Monitor, he had declared: "The failure of the Iraqi state would be a disaster. It would dishonor the 900-plus men and women who have already died...It would be a betrayal of the promise that we made to the Iraqi people, and it would be hugely destabilizing from a national security perspective."

Power's sin was to be frank, as the debate over Iraq continues to be distorted by falsehood. What none of the Democratic candidates will admit to, even as they deftly contradict themselves to later justify an about-face, is that there is little prospect of the U.S. leaving Iraq without sectarian conflict ensuing. Allowing this outcome would indeed be the betrayal Obama warned against in Boston, before betraying his rejection of such a betrayal by issuing his promise of a timed pullout that he is again likely to betray.

But thanks to Anthony Lake's 1971 co-authored essay, we now know that the human implications of withdrawal will carry less weight than the withdrawal's bearing on U.S. national interests. And what is the appeal to U.S. interests in Iraq? That Washington cannot afford to leave the country because that would favor Iran, which would interpret an American exit as the long-awaited opening to impose itself as the paramount power in the Persian Gulf, possibly with a nuclear weapons capacity in the coming years.

It's difficult to brand Power a victim, however, because she added to the ambient deceit on Iraq. In an interview with Salon in February, for example, she answered a question as to how the U.S. would get out of Iraq by glutinously suggesting that Washington might have to accept the "idea of sectarian or ethnic relocation if people are in a mixed neighborhood and feel that they'd be safer in a more homogenous neighborhood." She also strongly favored doling out a lot of money—to Iraq's neighbors for having taken in refugees (though Power failed to consider their contribution to the carnage in Iraq) and to internally displaced people.

It was a pitiful response from someone who had written so effectively about how American inaction, even mendaciousness, had allowed mass murder to go on in such places as Nazi-controlled Europe, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Rwanda—not to mention Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Yet here Power was with not a word to say about the possibility of mass murder in a post-American Iraq, proposing instead that the U.S. essentially consent to ethnic cleansing. There was nothing in what she told Salon about ignoring "some plan" that Obama had crafted as a candidate. There was nothing about relying on the sound judgment of people on the ground in Iraq. You could almost hear Tony Lake laughing out loud as Power's crystal ball of self-righteousness shattered into a thousand little shards of duplicity and elision.

But we have to hand it to Power that she subsequently blundered into coming clean. We have to hand it to her that she realized that coming clean meant she couldn't last in the Obama campaign. And we have to admit that her BBC comments were about as close to the truth on America's choices in Iraq as we're going to hear from any of the Democratic campaigns.

reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Nothing Left

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

When Hezbollah official Imad Mughniyeh was assassinated earlier this month in Damascus, the collateral damage was felt in academic departments, newsrooms, think tanks, and cafes far and wide. That's because it quickly became apparent how wrong many of the alleged "experts" writing about the militant Shiite organization had been.

At Mughniyeh's funeral, Hezbollah leaders placed him in a trinity of party heroes "martyred" at Israeli hands. The secretary general of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, vowed "open war" against Israel in retaliation. Tens of thousands of people attended the ceremony, and for days Hezbollah received condolences. Iranian officials stepped over each other to condemn the assassination, many of them affirming that Israel's demise was inevitable. In the midst of all this one thing was plain: Mughniyeh was a highly significant figure in Hezbollah, and the party didn't hide it.

And yet over the years, an embarrassing number of writers and academics with some access to Hezbollah dutifully relayed what party cadres had told them about Mughniyeh: He was unimportant and may even have been a figment of our imagination. It was understandable that Hezbollah would blur the trail of so vital an official, but how could those writing about the party swallow this line without pursuing the numerous sources that could confirm details of Mughniyeh's past? Their fault was laziness, and at times tendentiousness.

Hezbollah is adept at turning contacts with the party into valuable favors. Writers and scholars, particularly Westerners, who lay claim to Hezbollah sources, are regarded as special for penetrating so closed a society. That's why their writing is often edited with minimal rigor. Hezbollah always denied everything that was said about Mughniyeh, and few authors (or editors) showed the curiosity to push further than that. The mere fact of getting such a denial was considered an achievement in itself, a sign of rare access, and no one was about to jeopardize that access by calling Hezbollah liars.

But there was more here than just manipulation. The Mughniyeh affair highlights a deeper problem long obvious to those who follow Hezbollah: The party, though it is religious, autocratic, and armed to the teeth, often elicits approval from secular, liberal Westerners who otherwise share nothing of its values. This reaction, in its more extreme forms, is reflected in the way many on the far left have embraced Hezbollah's militancy, but also that of other Islamist groups like Hamas or Islamic Jihad—thoroughly undermining their ideological principles in the process.

The primary emotion driving together the far-left and militant Islamists, but also frequently prompting secular liberals to applaud armed Islamic groups as well, is hostility toward the United States, toward Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians, and, more broadly, toward what is seen as Western-dominated, capitalist-driven globalization.

Fred Halliday, himself a man of the left, wrote scathingly of the dangers in the accommodation between Islamists and the left based on a perception of shared anti-imperialism: "All of this is—at least to those with historical awareness, skeptical political intelligence, or merely a long memory—disturbing. This is because its effect is to reinforce one of the most pernicious and inaccurate of all political claims, and one made not by the left but by the imperialist right. It is also one that underlies the U.S.-declared ‘war on terror' and the policies that have resulted from 9/11: namely, that Islamism is a movement aimed against 'the west.'"

A bizarre offshoot of this trend has been the left's elevation of Islamist "resistance" to the level of a fetish. You know something has gone horribly wrong when the writer and academic Norman Finkelstein volunteers to interpret Hezbollah for you, before prefacing his comments with: "I don't care about Hezbollah as a political organization. I don't know much about their politics, and anyhow, it's irrelevant. I don't live in Lebanon."

In a recent interview on Lebanese television, Finkelstein made it a point of expressing his "solidarity" with Hezbollah, on the grounds that "there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question."

It is indeed uncomplicated if you remain mulishly unwilling to move beyond the narrow parameters you've set for discussion. But the reality is that Hezbollah is an immensely complicated question in Lebanon, where a majority of people are at a loss about what to do with a heavily armed organization that has no patience for state authority, that refuses to hand its weapons over to the national army, that is advancing an Iranian and Syrian agenda against the legal Lebanese government, and that functions as a secretive Shiite paramilitary militia in a country where sectarian religious assertiveness often leads to conflict. That many Lebanese should have seen Finkelstein praise what they feel is Hezbollah's most dangerous attributes was surpassed in its capacity to irritate only by the fact that he lectured them on how armed resistance was the sole option against Israel, regardless of the anticipated destruction, "unless you choose to be [Israeli] slaves—and many people here have chosen that."

But Finkelstein is no worse than Noam Chomsky, or that clutter of "progressive" academics and intellectuals who, at the height of the carnage during the 2006 Lebanon war, signed on to a petition declaring their "conscious support for the Lebanese national resistance," described resistance as "an intellectual act par excellence" and condemned the Lebanese government for having distanced itself from Hezbollah, even though the party had unnecessarily provoked a devastating Israeli military onslaught that led to the death of over 1,200 people.

This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left's view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.

Blind faith in the service of total principle is what makes those like Finkelstein and Chomsky so vile. But their posturing is made possible because of the less ardent secular liberal publicists out there who surrender to the narratives that Islamists such as Hezbollah, Hamas, or others peddle to them—lending them legitimacy. That's because modern scholarship, like liberalism itself, refuses to impose Western cultural standards on non-Westerners. Fine. But as the Mughniyeh case shows, when Islamists dominate the debate affecting them, there are plenty of fools out there dying to be tossed a bone.

reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

In Stable Condition

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:00:00 EST

For months, we've been hearing the presidential candidates promise American voters "change." But as the U.S. primaries move beyond their half-way point, here is a prediction: Whoever becomes president in 2008 will pursue the same policies as the Bush administration in the Middle East, because there is little latitude to do otherwise.

Iraq is the rare regional issue about which one sees some sunshine between the candidates' positions. On the Republican side, John McCain's view is similar to that of the Bush administration. The war has to be won, and the military "surge", which McCain backed, has been a success. For the Republican frontrunner, "a greater military commitment now is necessary if we are to achieve long-term success ... [and] give Iraqis the capabilities to govern and secure their own country." McCain prefers honesty to deadlines, and believes Americans need to be told that the war will be a long one, because "defeat ... would lead to much more violence in Iraq, greatly embolden Iran, undermine U.S. allies such as Israel, likely lead to wider conflict, result in a terrorist safe haven in the heart of the Middle East, and gravely damage U.S. credibility throughout the world."

Mike Huckabee's chances of being nominated are so slender as to make a rundown of his Middle East policies unnecessary. But on the whole, his approach to Iraq is little different than that of the administration. He too supports the surge, opposes establishing a withdrawal schedule, and sees the war in Iraq as part of the war on terror.

The Democrats, in contrast, have focused their Iraq strategy on setting a withdrawal timetable. Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton promise to begin an immediate pullout of troops after their election. Obama wants to do this at the rate of one or two brigades every month, to be completed by the end of 2009. Clinton is less specific, but promises to direct the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the defense secretary, and the National Security Council "to draw up a clear, viable plan to bring our troops home starting with the first 60 days" of her administration.

Both candidates leave themselves wiggle room in the event they win the presidency. As Clinton understands, drawing up a plan to remove troops is different than setting a deadline for finalizing a withdrawal. The senator also intends to stabilize Iraq as American soldiers head home. But that link between stability and withdrawal can cut both ways. If a pullout generates instability, this would undermine the logic of Clinton's plan, justifying a delay. Indeed, both she and Obama have waffled on whether they would go ahead with a withdrawal in such a case. When the Illinois senator was asked by 60 Minutes whether he would stick to his timetable even if there was sectarian violence, he replied: "No, I always reserve, as commander in chief, the right to assess the situation."

The candidates also differ over whether to engage Syria and Iran in assisting to normalize Iraq. Obama has often said he would talk to the two countries, while Clinton vows to "convene a regional stabilization group composed of key allies, other global powers, and all of the states bordering Iraq." McCain disagrees, refusing to enter into "unconditional dialogues with these two dictatorships from a position of weakness." He insists that "the international community [needs] to apply real pressure to Syria and Iran to change their behavior."

Much of this is bluster. For Obama, the rationale to talk to Syria has declined since Iraqi tribes began defeating Al-Qaeda in Anbar province. The Syrian card in Iraq is much weaker than it was when the senator first formulated the idea, making the political cost of opening up to Damascus—at a time when it is actively undermining Lebanese sovereignty and is isolated in the Arab world—significantly higher. Clinton's proposal, meanwhile, is mostly old hat. Iraq's neighbors already meet periodically to discuss the situation in the country, and the U.S. too has participated in these gatherings. As for McCain, his instincts are right, but he has no good reason to abandon the current dialogue taking place between Iran and the U.S. in Baghdad. The Iraqis back it and it might calm the situation on the ground.

In the shadow of Iran's growing power in the Gulf, there is no realistic withdrawal option in Iraq. The United States fought a war against Saddam Hussein's army in 1991 to deny Iraq hegemony over the oil-rich region after the invasion of Kuwait. That goal hasn't changed with respect to Iran. Washington is boosting arms sales to its Gulf allies, but knows that without a U.S. military presence such assistance only has a limited impact. The U.S. also continues to warn of Iran's nuclear ambitions, with even Russia openly questioning why Iran needs intercontinental ballistic missiles if it doesn't seek a nuclear military capacity.

There is also the matter of Israel. All the candidates loudly support the security of Israel, which regards Iran's nuclear capacity as a strategic threat. To cede ground to Iran in Iraq could harm Israeli interests, justifying the candidates' eventually backtracking on withdrawal.

In the Palestinian-Israeli peace process, don't expect much new either. All the candidates support negotiations (who wouldn't?) and Israel's right to live in peace and security. Depending on who gets elected, the president might push a bit more or a bit less for a se ttlement. But the U.S. has limited scope to do very much, because, more than ever before, the dynamics of the process are much less Washington's to manipulate.

The Palestinian territories are physically and ideologically divided, with rival Hamas and Fatah governments ruling over Gaza and the West Bank. Hamas offers a menu of armed struggle, while the mainstream Fatah movement (the party of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas) defends peace talks. But Israel, wracked by its own internal divisions, will not significantly bolster Fatah's fortunes by ceasing settlement building until the Palestinians put their house in order. Palestinian moderates respond that unless Israel makes serious concessions, they will lose all credibility. It's a Catch-22, and U.S. pressure to force a solution would only exacerbate internal contradictions in both societies.

Facing such obstacles, a new administration can, at best, actively pursue the negotiating process in the hope that some breakthrough will take place. But that's what the Bush administration is already doing today.

A new administration is also as unlikely as the present one to subordinate political interests to defending freedom and human rights. President George W. Bush is as good as it gets on that front. He may be responsible for what, until recently, was a full-blown fiasco in Iraq, but his actions did overthrow a tyrant, while in Lebanon the U.S. played a key role in forcing the Syrians out of the country. But Bush's rhetoric on liberty notwithstanding, the deterioration in Iraq and Iran's rise have prompted him to again rely on autocratic U.S. allies such as Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan as a counterweight. This situation will only persist in a polarized Middle East, and none of the presidential candidates has expressed particular displeasure with Bush's conduct on this front.

Things are more likely to change, however, on the specific issue of how to deal with terrorist suspects. None of the candidates care for the Bush administration's "extraordinary rendition" policy, or its ambiguous position on torture. This will have a marginal impact on human rights in general in the region, but discontinuing such practices will be sold by a new administration as a sign that America cares, even as Arab regimes resort to their old habits by brutalizing their foes.

On Lebanon, expect little transformation as well. The country is not high on the list of priorities of any of the candidates, which means that no one feels strongly about altering the current approach. To quote a former U.S. ambassador in Beirut, Washington for once has a Lebanon policy. It is mainly focused on consolidating the gains of the so-called Cedar Revolution of 2005. This means that the U.S. will continue to block escalating Syrian efforts to return to Lebanon; it will pursue efforts to contain Hezbollah and limit its military activity, particularly through the United Nations; and it will press forward with the Lebanese-international court now being set up in The Hague to try suspects in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

Though continuity is likely, candidates will sell this as difference. For example, recently Obama issued a statement on the occasion of the third anniversary of the Hariri assassination. The senator praised the Cedar Revolution, condemned Syrian actions in Lebanon, and backed U.N. resolutions seeking to prevent Hezbollah from rearming. However, he framed his proposals as a stark contrast with those of the Bush administration. But what Obama prescribed was almost exactly what the administration has been doing for the past three years.

That's very much a paradigm for how all the candidates approach the Middle East: they differentiate themselves from Bush without acknowledging that even his administration has been compelled in the last three years to behave like its predecessors, once the supposed neoconservative interregnum ended. The region has always been adept at imposing its rhythms on others as a means of resisting change. Barring something dramatic, none of the candidates will disturb that stasis.

Contributing Editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Under Suspicion

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 15:07:00 EST

In February 2005, the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, was assassinated, along with 21 others, in a massive truck bomb explosion in Beirut. Most observers blamed Syria for the crime, and in the aftermath hundreds of thousands of Lebanese took to the streets in what was later dubbed the "Cedar Revolution," demanding a Syrian military withdrawal from their country. The United Nations Security Council set up a special independent commission to investigate the murder and identify the guilty. Last year, the U.N. took the additional step of establishing, under Chapter VII of its charter, a special tribunal, currently being set up near The Hague, to try the suspects.

The first commissioner of the U.N. investigation team was, Detlev Mehlis, a Berlin native who is now a senior prosecutor at the city's Superior Prosecutor's Office. His successor was the Belgian Serge Brammertz, who recently left the Hariri investigation to take up duties as prosecutor of the special tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. A Canadian, Daniel Bellemare, has replaced Brammertz, and once the investigation is completed he is expected to become the first prosecutor of the Hariri tribunal. After two years of virtual silence, Mehlis agreed to go on the record for a Wall Street Journal interview I conducted with him, in which he criticized the slow progress in the investigation. This is an expanded version of that interview, which took place in Berlin.

reason: For a long time after you left your post as commissioner of the United Nations-mandated Hariri inquiry in December 2005, you refused to go on the record to talk about the case. Why do so now?

Detlev Mehlis: My successor, Serge Brammertz, has just left after two years on the job, and a new commissioner, Daniel Bellemare, has been installed. So it's a good time for a summing up on my part. To have spoken up earlier would have created an impression of interfering in the investigation. I also feel I owe it to the people I worked with during my eight months as commissioner. This is my final statement, except for one exception when I will be interviewed by a German newspaper.

reason: Recently, however, you did go on the record to tell a Frankfurt daily that you "regretted" having left the investigation in December 2005. Why did you say this?

Detlev Mehlis: From what I am hearing, the investigation has lost all the momentum it had [when Brammertz took over] in January 2006. Had I stayed on, I would have handled things differently. But I couldn't stay because the U.N. told me that for security reasons I could no longer remain in Lebanon after January 2006. They offered to relocate me outside the country, but this was impossible for me. The permanent representative of Germany at the U.N. told the organization that it would be unacceptable for a German prosecutor to stay away from his team in Beirut. I fully agreed with this. I also left for professional and family reasons.

reason: What would you have done differently than Brammertz?

Detlev Mehlis: Above all I would have continued informing the U.N. Security Council and the Lebanese on progress in the investigation. When I arrived in Beirut, I said that participation of the media was central for democracy. The Lebanese public has to be informed, even if there are setbacks in the investigation. In a democracy people have the right to know, particularly when a prime minister was murdered and people don't trust the authorities. This was an opportunity to restore credibility to the justice system.

There is also a practical rationale: To have the support of the public, to encourage witnesses to come forward with information, and for governments to send specialized investigators, you need to give them an idea of what you are doing.

reason: What makes you think that Brammertz has not moved forward? After all, he wrote in his reports that he had identified "persons of interest"?

Detlev Mehlis: Unfortunately, I haven't seen a word in his reports during the past two years confirming that he has moved forward. When I left we were ready to name suspects, but [the investigation] seems not to have progressed from that stage. There is no judicial term that I have ever heard of called a "person of interest." You have suspects, and a "person of interest" is definitely not a suspect. If you have identified suspects in a case like this one, you don't allow them to roam free for years to tamper with evidence, flee the country, or commit similar crimes.

reason: But what if Brammertz did not reveal his information for tactical reasons? He has defended preserving the "secrecy of the investigation."

Detlev Mehlis: I don't accept the concept of the "secrecy of the investigation," nor is it a judicial principle that I know. For me, as a German, the notion of a secret investigation sounds ominous. For the reasons I outlined earlier, the public has the right to know and the U.N. commission has to inform without endangering its investigation.

reason: Brammertz reopened the crime scene after he took over from you. What was your reaction to that move?

Detlev Mehlis: I wondered what he was doing. We already had Swiss, French, and German expert opinion indicating that the explosion that killed Hariri was beyond doubt an above-ground explosion. By reopening the crime scene he cast doubt on the credibility of the investigation that I had led. He also wasted valuable time and manpower. All this only to end up confirming our initial findings. But this is typical of a broader problem, namely that in the past two years the U.N. investigation has told us little we didn't already know before Brammertz became commissioner. We are now told that Hariri was killed for political reasons and that there were several layers of participation in the conspiracy. We needed two years of investigative endeavor to discover this?

But let me hasten to add that my criticism is not personal. I'm the one who recommended Brammertz, among others, for the post of commissioner, so I must bear some responsibility for what happened afterward.

reason: Do you feel Brammertz's silence may have been due to his fear that being more open about the inquiry might have led to political conflict inside Lebanon?

Detlev Mehlis: I don't buy the argument. The assassination was always going to have political repercussions. It was a political crime. We had to accept this and it came with the territory. For many Lebanese we did too little; for the United Nations we did too much. Many at the U.N. would have preferred a softer approach. I understood this. The U.N. didn't want another problem.

reason: So, was there interference by the Secretary General's office in your work, particularly from then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan?

Detlev Mehlis: Annan made it clear to me that he did not want another trouble spot. I respected this but he also respected my point of view. Traditionally, there is tension between politics and justice, and I accepted that Annan did not want more problems because of the Hariri case. Relations are helped little when a prosecutor [like Brammertz] uses terms such as the "secrecy of the investigation." Yet Annan was always very supportive of my work and well-being. The U.N. did not interfere in my efforts and had no leverage over me, as I was not after a position in the organization. Even had the U.N. tried, there were investigators from 17 countries who might have thought differently, making this impossible.

reason: There was the famous case where, in your first report, one could access through the track changes command the edits in the initial draft of the document. It was clear that you had edited out the names of two very senior members of the Syrian leadership mentioned by a Syrian witness. Was leaving the track changes in intentional, so people could see which officials might have been implicated?

Detlev Mehlis: Not at all. When I prepared the original report, it was my impression that it would be confidential; that we would release to the public a version containing fewer details. However, in New York I learned that Annan wanted to make the report public. I intervened to say that, therefore, we needed to remove the names in question, because the persons mentioned were not suspects, but had merely been mentioned by a witness. Only the names of suspects and certain prominent witnesses were in the report. The U.N. press office made an unfortunate mistake in releasing the document with the track changes. It was definitely not intentional.

reason: Your reports, the fact that you asked the Lebanese authorities to arrest four pro-Syrian Lebanese intelligence chiefs, and your requests to interview Syrian officials and intelligence officers all showed whom you suspected of being involved in the crime. What was it like dealing with the Syrians, and how many times did you travel to Syria?

Detlev Mehlis: My interlocutors always treated me courteously and professionally, even in a friendly way. But they also made it clear to me that there were limits to their cooperation. I twice went to Syria: once for preliminary talks and once to interview witnesses.

reason: Before leaving, you had put in a request to interview Syrian President Bashar Assad as a witness. The Syrians were quite bothered by this. In the end you never spoke to President Assad. What happened?

Detlev Mehlis: I left before the process could go through and don't know what later happened. There were reports that Brammertz held a meeting with President Assad, but that is legally quite different than taking down a witness statement. In fact I took down the statements of many Lebanese politicians, who did not seem especially keen to put their signature on a document having legal repercussions. I also interviewed the Lebanese president, Emile Lahoud, who seemed to have no problem with this.

reason: Two of your key Syrian witnesses did not seem particularly reliable. One told a press conference in Damascus that his testimony was fraudulent; the other, a former intelligence officer, later became a suspect in Hariri's murder, and has made contradictory statements.

Detlev Mehlis: In such crimes you cannot be choosy about whom you are dealing with. What do you expect, white angels, coming out from the blue? Those two gave us a lot of information, which we could sometimes corroborate with information received elsewhere. In the end, the tribunal will determine their credibility, and ask why they agreed to sign their statements. Maybe the witnesses were there to discredit the investigation, but that can help us determine who wants to discredit the investigation.

reason: The four intelligence chiefs you asked the Lebanese authorities to arrest are still in jail. Their lawyers are saying that they are entitled to be set free, pending a trial. What are your thoughts about this?

Detlev Mehlis: That is one reason why it's important to accelerate the trial process, to protect the rights of the accused. At the same time, we did find sufficient evidence that all four generals were involved in the Hariri case. This was not my assessment alone, but also that of my commission's investigators and the Lebanese judiciary. Recently, I was accused in press reports in Beirut of having interviewed one of the suspects--Jamil al-Sayyed--without his lawyer. That is nonsense. But there has been a lot of media misinformation on my participation in the Hariri case in order to derail the investigation.

reason: Last week there were reports that judges had been appointed to the Hariri tribunal, which will try suspects identified in the ongoing investigation. The tribunal was established last year under Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter and will be based near The Hague. This suggests that there is progress.

Detlev Mehlis: Perhaps, but because I haven't seen a word on new suspects in the past two years, I have my doubts. I think people should not expect a trial within the next two to three years, unless the investigation regains momentum. I fear that the suspects will end up in a judicial no-man's land, with Lebanon claiming they are under the U.N.'s jurisdiction, and the U.N. saying that they must remain under Lebanese jurisdiction.

reason: You seem to believe that the problem with the Hariri tribunal is not so much the likelihood of a cover-up, but that the process will stall. Do you think a cover up, like Lockerbie bombing, is possible?

Detlev Mehlis: The Hariri case is an unusual one. Usually in investigations you start at the bottom and work your way up. In the Hariri case we started pretty much at the top and worked down. We had an accurate view of how the assassination took place from above, but less clear a view of what happened on the ground. That is why the investigation was supposed to continue [when I left].Therefore I think that it would be very difficult to have a Lockerbie II.

reason: There is palpable international reluctance to carry the Hariri case to its conclusion, and you alluded to this earlier. Few at the U.N., for example, are particularly eager to destabilize Syria's regime, assuming its involvement in the Hariri murder is proven. Do you think this might derail the case?

Detlev Mehlis: You can't prosecute governments and countries; you prosecute individuals. When I headed [the U.N. investigation], there was a will to get to the bottom of the crime—shown in all the Security Council resolutions on the matter. Why not now? One of the most helpful [member nations] was Russia, which persuaded Syria to comply with the resolutions. Even with states having different interests, common understandings can be reached.

reason: What do you know of Daniel Bellemare, the new commissioner?

Detlev Mehlis: I have never met him, heard of him, or been contacted by him.

reason: What advice would you give to Bellemare?

Detlev Mehlis: Concentrate on the Hariri case itself; don't try to write a history book. Focus on the whos, hows and whys of the crime. Analysis can never replace solid investigative police work. As my top Swedish investigator once put it, "A case like this cannot be solved through a PowerPoint presentation."

reason: What does the Hariri case mean for the U.N.?

Detlev Mehlis: This can either be an example of efficient U.N. involvement or a one-time experiment. The U.N.'s image is at stake, particularly in Lebanon, where people put high hopes—perhaps too high—in the Hariri investigation.

reason: It took you nine years to bring convictions for the 1986 bombing of the LaBelle discotheque in Berlin, in which you accused Libyan officials of being behind the attack. What did that experience teach you?

Detlev Mehlis: That justice prevails, but you have to have patience. I also recall that for years the LaBelle case dragged on with small successes and failures, but it was always kept alive on the prosecution's side by my working to inform the media; and on the victims' side because their families created pressure groups. I feel that in the [Hariri] case, the families of the deceased can certainly play a much more active role. It's important to keep such cases in the public eye.

reason: In conclusion, do you feel the Hariri tribunal will go forward?

Detlev Mehlis: Someone committed a terrible crime and someone is responsible. Definitely, no one can abolish this tribunal. I may not be happy about the time frame, but am deeply convinced the case can be solved and will be solved.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Pop Goes the President

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:56:00 EST

History, even trivial history, does indeed repeat itself as farce. In December 1995, Francois Mitterrand traveled to Aswan in southern Egypt to spend his Christmas holidays. It was a fittingly Wagnerian ending for the dying former French president—a last communion with timelessness through contact with a timeless culture, before Mitterrand met the real thing in Paris a week later.

Cut to last Christmas. French President Nicolas Sarkozy also decides to holiday in Egypt. He stays at Luxor—not Aswan but close enough. Descending from a private jet, Sarkozy, his Ray Bans tilted forward, his shirt opened an extra button, looks more like a Corsican hoodlum than the president of a venerable nation. At his arm is new girlfriend Carla Bruni, whom no one seems quite sure what to describe as. Model? Singer? Next First Lady? This is their first overseas expedition together, after the media discovered they were an item during an outing to EuroDisney.

"Vulgar!" was how many Frenchmen described their president after witnessing all this. And vulgar Sarkozy surely is. There is little gravitas to a hyperactive man present everywhere and nowhere, with a strong opinion on just about everything; someone evidently enjoying his recent divorce, who seems as bored with high culture as he delights in the favors and company of the affluent, of pop singers and actors.

But that's missing the significant point that Sarkozy has skillfully used his relentless presence in the media as a source of political advantage, while redefining what the presidency can be all about. By being a pop figure himself, ever-present in the minds of his countrymen, publicly and personally, Sarkozy has managed to retain the initiative. With much in the media about Sarkozy, his leadership has turned into a reality show and the president is writing the script. So ubiquitous is Sarkozy that he is the state and the state is he. How better to define political power?

Those now moving through the U.S. primaries might want to investigate. Sarkozy, often referred to as the most "American" of French politicians, has until now juggled paradoxes. He was elected as the candidate of a conservative party, peddling a message that France needed to return to traditional values. Yet he is anything but conservative in his avidness for luxury and attention; and anything but an agent of traditional morality in his private life. However, that doesn't much differentiate him from, let's say, the former Italian prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, still Europe's archetype of schlock. What does is that Sarkozy is who he is in France, where presidents invariably act like republican monarchs

There is more to that kind of presidential behavior than old Europe stuffiness. To act like a monarch without being one, to play the members of their court off against each other, is a way French presidents have had of maintaining control over an unruly political class and society. Mitterrand was an expert at dividing his supporters to boost his authority; Charles de Gaulle so naturally behaved like a man of destiny that the French created a new republic to accommodate him. Even Jacques Chirac, who earlier in his career had also sold himself as an "American" politician because of his fondness for pressing the flesh and his informality, by the end had morphed into a detached royal in the public consciousness—stuck in a gloomy palace with a wife he could neither stomach nor divorce, whom he was said to address with the formal "vous."

Sarkozy has taken a different tack. He's still all-dominating and has demoted his prime minister to little more than an assistant's role. But that domination comes not from pulling the strings from a high perch, but from the president's getting personally involved in the muck of politicking. So, for example, although he named Bernard Kouchner as his foreign minister, Sarkozy has blocked him out of his highest-profile overseas undertakings—whether relations with the United States, or Libya, the fate of French aid workers detained until recently in Chad, and contacts with the Syrian regime over the presidential election in Lebanon.

There is risk here, because the president himself might rise or fall with the outcome of his actions. In Lebanon, Sarkozy was so keen to arrive at a deal with Syria to enhance his personal prestige, that he completely ignored a United Nations resolution co-sponsored by France in 2005 that sought to prevent involving Damascus in Lebanon's presidency. It didn't matter: Syria humiliated the French anyway by undermining their scheme to resolve the Lebanese crisis. The recent visit to Paris of Libya's leader Moammar al-Qaddafi turned into a public relations disaster for Sarkozy when even government ministers expressed their distaste. And Sarkozy's involvement of his wife in negotiations with Libya over the release of Bulgarian nurses last summer looked disturbingly like an effort to save his failing marriage by handing her a sensitive mission.

Yet Sarkozy's breaking of taboos, his imposition of a public and personal narrative to keep his political adversaries off balance, makes you wonder whether his strategy can be applied by politicians elsewhere who want to remain on top. France is very different than other countries, particularly the United States. But maybe not as much as we think. Americans may not soon take to a president gallivanting with his latest girlfriend, whose nude photos circulate freely on the Internet. However, they were surprisingly tolerant when a president of theirs lied by suggesting that the blowjob he had been provided did not really qualify as sex. Americans are also more likely than the French to appreciate a celebrity-president who likes popular culture—indeed who is popular culture--because that's far closer to the nature of their society than it is of French society.

As for the pull of traditional "values," so central to political life in America, Sarkozy has shown that politicians can maneuver in the gap between rhetoric and behavior, and still remain credible. The continued devotion to the Kennedy fable is as good an American illustration of this proposition. John F. Kennedy paid any price and bore any burden to get laid, but still remains among the most respected of U.S. presidents. As Gore Vidal has written, describing JFK's reaction after being elected: "'Mass every Sunday,' Jack would moan, 'for four years.'" The lesson is that if you play to the gallery on values, you can do what you want in private. At least Sarkozy's conduct is offered up minus the hypocrisy.

In his way, Sarkozy is quite invigorating: a post-modern president in what is sometimes, oddly, a pre-modern society—all baroque rules, obstinate certitudes, veiled prejudices, and a surprising affection for hierarchy. In an American campaign where some candidates have latched onto the catchword of "change", without daring to change much, Sarkozy's dissidence is instructive. Times are changing, thank heavens for that.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Soundbite: Al Queda's Forerunner

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 20:59:00 EST

Not many people can tell you much about the takeover of the Grand Mosque in Mecca by Islamist militants in November 1979. The Saudi authorities kept a tight lid on information during that fateful two-week period when the regime’s survival seemed to be in danger. They didn’t grow much more transparent afterwards.

That is why Yaroslav Trofimov’s just-published The Siege of Mecca (Doubleday) is so valuable, not only as a description of the murky events surrounding the takeover but as a backgrounder on the depth of fundamentalist tendencies in Saudi Arabia and the later emergence of Al Qaeda. Contributing Editor Michael Young spoke with Trofimov, an Asia-based reporter for The Wall Street Journal, in September.

Q: What was the Grand Mosque siege?

A: The group that took over the mosque was led by Saudi preacher Juhayman Al-Utaybi, a former corporal in the Saudi National Guard, and consisted of several hundred gunmen from many countries. The group abhorred the Saudi state and other Arab regimes as infidel and bitterly objected to any Western presence in the Arabian Peninsula.

The battle for the Grand Mosque started on November 20, 1979—at the first dawn of Islam’s year 1400—and lasted precisely two weeks. The total number of officially reported deaths, including the rebels, stands at about 330. But many believe that the true number of fatalities is significantly above 1,000.

Q: Though Juhayman and his co-conspirators were executed, their ideas paradoxically triumphed. Can you explain why?

A: As Prince Khaled Al-Faisal, the governor of Asir province and son of King Faisal, put it a few years ago, “We have eliminated the individuals who committed the Juhayman crime, but we have overlooked the ideology that was behind the crime. We let it spread in the country as if it did not exist.”

He said this because in order to secure religious assent from the clergy, or ulama—assent without which many Saudi troops refused to fight in the holy shrine—the royal family had to promise the clerics that it would reverse the slow modernization that had been occurring in the kingdom up until then. In the weeks after the siege ended, female newscasters were taken off television; the enforcement of the ban on alcohol became much more severe; and vast amounts of oil money started flowing into the clerics’ Wahhabi proselytizing campaign around the world. And it’s precisely this missionary effort all over the Muslim world that subsequently created a pool of eager recruits for Al Qaeda.

Q: What was Osama bin Laden’s reaction to the takeover?

A: Osama bin Laden was deeply scarred by these events. In an audio message to the Muslim world released in 2004, he spoke at length about how the Al Saud had “defiled” the shrine. To him, Juhayman’s gunmen may have made a mistake in occupying the Grand Mosque, but the Al Saud committed an unforgivable crime by retaking the shrine by force.

Q: It must not have been easy to find sources for your book, given that the Grand Mosque takeover remains a taboo subject in Saudi Arabia.

A: The hardest part was tracking down surviving gunmen. Almost all the adult ones were killed after the siege, either in public beheadings or secret executions. I found a few who were 15 or 16 years of age at the time of the uprising. Having survived long prison terms, many of them were too scared to talk. But some opened up, with one staying in my hotel room the entire night and recounting the horrors of the siege blow by blow as he emptied my minibar of its (strictly nonalcoholic) contents.

Q: Ultimately, who was the net loser in the Grand Mosque affair?

A: The net losers were the forces of secularism and liberalism within Saudi Arabia.

Long, Gone Neocons

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 13:20:00 EST

Maybe 2008 will be the year when we will finally be rid of that vacuous belief that "the neocons" are in control of the Bush administration's foreign policy, particularly in the Middle East. Habits are hard to break, particularly lazy ones, but if anyone bothered to look more closely, they would see that the United States has not really engaged in what we might call a neoconservative approach to the region since at least 2004, when the situation in Iraq took a sudden turn for the worse.

What are, or were, the highlights of a neocon approach to the Middle East and the world before 2003, when American forces invaded Iraq? Looking back at that most prominent post-9/11 neocon statement of purpose, the administration's National Security Strategy released in September 2002 (an assemblage of contradiction in which neocon ideas were recorded alongside classical liberal internationalist ones), they were roughly the following: a desire to maintain American paramountcy at the expense of the more traditional concept of a balance of power; greater reliance on the use of force and unilateralism in America's defense, through preemptive measures if necessary; and a more activist bent in spreading democracy, freedom, and free markets throughout the world.

But the truth is that soon after the takeover of Iraq, the administration gradually began acting in the Middle East pretty much like its predecessors. It was compelled to rely on the multilateral institutions it had spurned in the run-up to the Iraq war, implicitly accepting that U.S. military might was not enough to resolve all problems. As for its commitment to an agenda of democracy and freedom, while officially this was at the heart of American concerns after Bush's second inaugural address, in reality by then it was already in decline as a policy guide.

For example, in May 2003, the U.S. was compelled to seek an international resolution to govern its military presence in Iraq. While the Security Council, in Resolution 1483, recognized Coalition forces as a ruling authority, it labeled them an "occupying authority", with both the legal obligations under that status, and the stigma. The resolution was a compromise: the U.N. pragmatically acknowledged that it had to work with the U.S. in Iraq, and used this to try shaping political outcomes in its favor; the Bush administration realized that it needed international cover, even if in September 2004, U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan again reminded Washington that its invasion had been "illegal."

Only days after the Security Council authorized the creation of a United Nations Assistance Mission in Iraq on August 14, 2003, a bomb attack targeted U.N. headquarters in Baghdad, killing the organization's representative there, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and almost 20 other people. The U.S. was then still trying to rule over Iraq on its own, with Paul Bremer as high commissioner. Yet it was immediately clear to the Bush administration that the attack had harmed American efforts to normalize the situation on the ground in Iraq. The subsequent dramatic drawdown of U.N. personnel denied the U.S. a valuable partner in distributing much-needed aid to an impoverished Iraqi population, as well as an often useful mediator with Iraqi leaders who refused to meet with American officials.

By 2004, the U.S. was resorting to the U.N. in other Middle Eastern crises as well. For example, the Security Council was the preferred route for U.S. efforts in 2004 to push for a Syrian military withdrawal from Lebanon. Far from going it alone, the Bush administration, in collaboration with France, its bitterest foe over Iraq, sponsored a Security Council resolution to that end. The U.S. didn't try to impose the resolution by force, even though American troops were on the Syrian border and had every reason to attack Syria because of the way it was infiltrating fighters and Al-Qaeda suicide bombers into Iraq. In fact, under even a loose interpretation of the National Security Strategy, the administration would have been justified in preemptively striking against the regime in Damascus for what it was doing to its eastern neighbor. But the U.S. held back.

Whenever Lebanon circa 2005 is mentioned, images of a "popular revolution" come to mind. The mass demonstrations against Syria after the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, were a powerful democratic moment for the country, and for the Arab world as a whole. The term "Cedar Revolution" was even coined by an American official looking for a serviceable tagline to compare what was happening in Beirut to democratic uprisings elsewhere in the world.

But the reality is that the Bush administration only latched onto the democracy imagery after the anti-Syrian rallies had started, then used these to bolster the argument that, together with the parliamentary elections in Iraq earlier that year, a democratic wave was sweeping Arab societies. Between the moment in September 2004 when the U.S. backed the U.N. resolution demanding a Syrian pullout from Lebanon and the moment of Hariri's assassination in February 2005, Washington had no clue how to implement the resolution. Lebanon was not an American priority, Iraq was. The administration didn't even realize that Lebanese democracy was something it could seize upon until the Lebanese took advantage of the American democratization mood (and military presence in Iraq) to buttress their own demands for a Syrian withdrawal.

In other words, for all the talk of a neocon cabal advancing Middle Eastern democracy, the administration was mostly unaware of the democratic potential in Lebanon until the Lebanese took to the streets. Only then did the U.S. provide the vital push, with others, to force the Syrians out. The moral of the tale: that you didn't necessarily have to believe the American democracy message to profit from it, was one that Arab liberals elsewhere ignored. Most amusing, American indecision in the period before Hariri's murder resulted from Washington's adhering to the consensual internationalism it had dismissed before the Iraq war.

One can go on. Since 2006, the Bush administration has all but abandoned the democracy agenda to rally the despotic Arab regimes against Iran. Containment is the new catchword and, no surprise, it is pretty much what the Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton administrations spent two decades applying to post-revolution Iran. The U.S. has also returned to an old "realist" template in selling sophisticated new weaponry to the Arab Gulf monarchies to partly balance Tehran's power. Neocon aversion to Saudi Arabia, a focal point of post-9/11 disputation (even if it was never as significant as some imagined), has evaporated.

Similarly, the Bush administration now finds itself back in the oldest gig in town: the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. That a settlement is necessary goes without saying, but how unexpected that the most bureaucratically cautious operator in the Bush administration, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, should have tied her fate to resolving what many regard today as an irresolvable conflict. In so doing, Rice has applied a lesson taught by her realist predecessors: that the key to normalcy in the Middle East is peace between Israelis and Palestinians. That may be true or not, but it was always rubbish to the neocons.

So maybe it's time to stop referring to the neocon policies of the Bush administration. The neocons are gone, many for so long that no one seems to remember their leaving. What we now have in Washington is a mishmash of old political realism and improvisation, topped with increasingly empty oratory on freedom and democracy. That should please quite a few of Bush's domestic critics. He's returned to the futile routine in the Middle East that they always urged him to.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

Love Thy Enemy

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 13:45:00 EST

It's not often that one has the stomach to call on political realists—all too frequently purveyors of foreign policy stalemate and pals of despots worldwide. However, realism was called for last week when American intelligence agencies released a National Intelligence Estimate claiming that Iran had halted work on its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Even half-hearted assessments of the national interest would have produced more insightful responses to the NIE than the ones that we got.

With everyone focusing on the nuclear issue, few noticed that regardless of whether Iran produces atomic weapons or not, its acrimonious rivalry with the United States in the Middle East is bound to escalate. Given that the U.S. went to war in 1991 to prevent Iraq from imposing its hegemony in the Persian Gulf area, does it make sense to assume that Washington would readily allow a threatening Iran to do what the Iraqis failed to?

There were two types of reactions to the NIE, both inadequate for dealing with the real stakes in American-Iranian hostility throughout the Middle East. The first focused on the fact that President George W. Bush, as well as Vice President Dick Cheney, had in recent months amplified their war rhetoric against Iran, even though Bush was told last August by the director of national intelligence, Michael McConnell, that Iran's nuclear program "may be suspended." This seemed to contradict an earlier statement by the president that McConnell had told him no such thing.

The second reaction was rather different. With the nuclear threat allegedly on hold, politicians and commentators suddenly began advising the administration to engage Iran in some sort of discussion. Senate majority leader Harry Reid called on Bush to do what President Ronald Reagan had done with the Soviet Union and push for "a diplomatic surge necessary to effectively address the challenges posed by Iran." Republican senator Chuck Hagel asked the administration to show the same flexibility toward Iran that it had shown toward North Korea. Rand Beers, who served as national security advisor to John Kerry's presidential campaign, observed: "Simply put, we have an imminent need for a real dialogue with Iran, not a military confrontation."

It was certainly unsettling that Bush and Cheney were talking about a war with Iran when they knew, or should have known, that their stated justification for war was no longer valid. However, the rush toward advocating dialogue and flexibility was equally incomprehensible.

A dialogue over what? No one seemed particularly clear on that point. Suddenly, it seemed, the problem was not power politics and the thrusts and parries of the U.S.-Iranian quarrel, but the Bush administration's stubborn refusal to be conciliatory. During the 1980s, in the midst of the debate over nuclear missiles in Europe, French President Francois Mitterrand famously declared: "The pacifists are in the West but the missiles are in the East." Of course there were missiles in the West then, just as there are those in Washington now who still favor war against Iran; but it's also undeniable that those wanting to open up to Iran are mostly on the American side, while Iran's leaders continue to relentlessly pursue strategic advantage in their own neighborhood.

The Iranian's are playing three-dimensional chess in the Middle East, while the U.S. is playing with its hankie. American policy in the region suffers from a lack of ideas. The administration's disorientation after the release of the NIE report showed that in the absence of a war option (and an unpersuasive war option at that), the U.S. remains unsure what to do about Iran. But the Democrats are equally at sea. Even administration critic Flynt Leverett, a former National Security Council adviser on the Middle East, admitted recently that "[r]egrettably, opposition Democrats are not defining a genuine alternative. Beyond criticism of President Bush's ‘saber rattling,' Democratic presidential candidates offer, for the most part, only vacuous rhetoric about ‘engaging' Iran."

For example, what is the U.S. doing about Iran's alliance with Syria, and their joint patronage of Hamas and Hizbullah? Hamas is dead set on wrecking American efforts to bring about a settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and several months ago the movement mounted a successful coup against the Fatah movement in Gaza. Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal lives in Damascus, is a frequent visitor to Tehran, and although Syria will send sporadic signals that it is displeased with the Islamist group, this is chaff designed to keep alive the illusion that Syria and Iran are on different wavelengths. Nothing will divide Syria from Iran when the relationship brings so many foreign supplicants to Damascus with offers of concessions to President Bashar Assad, if only he would consider abandoning Iran. Assad takes the concessions, offers none of his own, and yet the visitors still keep coming.

Similarly, Iran and Syria are putting on a "good cop, bad cop" routine in Lebanon. Damascus is steadily re-imposing its hegemony over its smaller neighbor, neutralizing or assassinating those who oppose a Syrian return. Iran is backing Syria up because Hizbullah will benefit. The Shiite group knows that the stabilization of Lebanon under a sovereign government would force it to surrender its weapons; and without weapons Hizbullah would cease to be Hizbullah. Iran needs the party and its arms to sustain its influence in the Levant, as well as to preserve a deterrence capability at Israel's doorstep. Damascus, in turn, needs Hizbullah to intimidate Syria's Lebanese foes. The Iranians are proving almost as instrumental as the Syrians in reversing the gains of the 2005 Cedar Revolution.

The U.S., meanwhile, continues to back Lebanon's anti-Syrian March 14 coalition. However, it is increasingly doing so from a distance. The Bush administration has spent much less money than Iran in Lebanon, and has not pressed its wealthier Arab allies to make up for the deficit. In fact it has been remarkably silent as one such ally, Qatar, has played an essential role in bolstering the Assad regime and Hizbullah. Worse, in the run-up to the ongoing crisis over choosing a new Lebanese president, Bush endorsed what would prove to be a disastrous French diplomatic initiative to facilitate an election. The initiative, in practical terms, invited the Syrians back into Lebanese presidential politics, undermining Washington's and Paris' declared aim of defending Lebanese sovereignty.

The Bush administration has also been catatonic in Congress. For example it has done nothing to press for passage of the Syria Accountability and Liberation Act, legislation that would substantially strengthen and widen U.S. sanctions against Syria. The law is blocked in the House Foreign Affairs Committee because of disagreement over wording between the ranking Democrat and Republican members. The reasons for this are mainly domestic and electoral. Yet thanks to parochial politicking, the U.S. government has been denied a valuable stick with which to defend its interests in the Middle East.

So, how does a dialogue look now? Iran would gladly draw the U.S. into a lengthy discussion of everything and nothing, and use this empty gabfest as a smokescreen to advance its agenda. But diplomacy is not an end in itself; to be meaningful it has to achieve specific aims and be based on confidence that both sides seek a mutually advantageous deal. Nothing suggests the Iranians have reached that stage yet.

That's because Iran believes it is winning in the region. The U.S. seems unable to deploy the same array of foreign policy instruments as the Iranians, even if it is vastly more powerful; America's principal Arab allies are anemic, their mostly geriatric regimes illegitimate; and America's attention span abroad often seems so limited that an adversary's favored tactic is to just wait until its officials lose interest and head for the lecture circuit. The Iranians are right, they are winning; at least for the time being.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.

White Flag Over Iraq

myoung@reason.com (Michael Young) — Thu, 11 Oct 2007 15:34:00 EDT

For a long time and until 2003, the Iraqi writer Kanan Makiya was a critical filter through which supporters of war in Iraq channeled their most potent arguments in favor of an invasion. Makiya's obsessive plea for the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship on moral grounds, his credibility gained from publishing books on the foulest effects of the tyranny in Iraq, earned him considerable influence in American political and intellectual circles—if also malicious animosity from those opposed to the Bush administration's ambitions in the Middle East.

Now, the situation has been mostly reversed. Makiya is struggling to determine if he was initially right in backing an American war to overthrow the Ba'ath regime, and his torment is being plundered by those making the case that war was a bad idea. In the New York Times magazine this past Sunday, Dexter Filkins wrote a profile of Makiya in a similar vein. One particular exchange caught by Filkins has Makiya capitulating even to his most depraved critics.

"People say to me, ‘Kanan, this is ridiculous, democracy in Iraq, a complete pipe dream,'" Makiya said when I visited him one day. "That's realism."
He got up from his chair and walked to a window.
"You know, in a way, the realists are right, they are always right. Even when they are morally wrong."

Makiya was already expressing growing doubts early last year. For example, in April 2006 he told reason that he had been wrong in a number of his assessments of Iraq. However, Makiya still expected that "in the long run history will judge this to have been a morally just war, one that will in time produce a better Iraq than the one ruled over by the Ba'ath Party." He added that in the prewar period, "[t]o just leave the situation to fester, as the Arab world and Europe seemed to want to do, was in my opinion more immoral than regime change, however badly this was handled by the United States government and the new class of Iraqi politicians who today rule over Iraq."

Yet Makiya's conclusion that the realists were always right happened to represent the utter collapse of opinions he had previously defended. The reason is that when it came to pre-2003 Iraq, the realists were not only morally wrong, they were politically wrong as well. It was the realists who in the late 1980s imagined that Saddam could be a force for stability in the Middle East—someone who might even consider entering into some negotiating process with Israel. It was the realists who looked the other way in 1988 when Saddam unleashed the genocidal Anfal campaign against the Kurds, which played so essential a role in convincing him that the West would tolerate his worst abuses. And it was the realists who were caught with their pants down before the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990, imagining that Saddam was only bluffing in his quarrel with the Kuwaitis.

Similarly, it was the realists during the Clinton years who, as Makiya observed, allowed the situation in Iraq to fester, so that the Iraqi population suffered terrible hardship under United Nations sanctions. Saddam further tightened his hold over his people during that time, while growing fat thanks to the corruptions of the oil-for-food program.

There is much to admire in forensic self-doubt, but in giving his ideological adversaries credit they don't deserve, Makiya is overdoing things. On the realists' watch, Iraq was no less the monumental catastrophe that it is today; it fact it was a catastrophe that largely made possible the catastrophe of today. The difference then was that Iraqis were bludgeoned into silence—stability being shorthand for mass intimidation.

In moments of self-doubt, Makiya should reread the second half of his brilliant Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising, and the Arab World, a withering denunciation of Arab intellectuals who, by action or omission, somehow sustained the Ba'athist regime and gave it legitimacy. As Makiya wrote: "I am aware of no community of Arab intellectuals, however small, that could make a meaningful political distinction between the interests of the suffering people of Iraq, who had just lost a whole generation in eight years of grueling warfare with Iran, and the tyrant, who was sacrificing them on the altar of yet another adventure."

In endorsing that artificial unity between leader and society, many Arab writers and commentators not only reinforced the intellectual scaffolding of the totalitarian Iraqi system, they also echoed an essentially realist approach to foreign policy that judges other societies from the vantage point of power relations—therefore views them mainly through the prism of the interests of their political elites and regimes. Makiya would do well to remember how that implicit alliance—between a class of complicit publicists and of ethically indifferent policy-makers—has been instrumental in extending the lives of numerous dictatorships.

However, Makiya reflects only one side of the story. The intellectuals and commentators on the other side, for whom Iraq was always going to be a letdown, can take pleasure in seeing their predictions proven correct. However, many of them displayed less moral and political clarity than Makiya on what should have been done with Saddam; and remain as lost as he in determining what to do next in Iraq. In the debate over the war, intellectuals have become increasingly irrelevant in shaping policy outcomes. But why blame them? Even in Congress, those opposed to the administration's Iraq policy have offered no viable alternatives, as was plain last month after Gen. David Petraeus' congressional testimony.

Ironically, the real debate over ideas when it comes to Iraq appears to be taking place in the one institution generally (and unfairly) considered a graveyard for lateral thinking: the U.S. military. If there is a community of people that has tried to grasp the reality of Iraq in practical ways, in all its complexities, and that has climbed the steepest of learning curves in the past four years, it is the armed forces. That's not to say that soldiers are or should be a model for how all Americans approach Iraq; but in its quest to understand the conflict environment better, the military has had to immerse itself in the sociology of Iraq like no other. And because of that, its intense discussions of the war, by rarely descending into flagellation or self-flagellation, remain alive with opportunity. The topic remains Iraq, not parochial American disputation over Iraq.

In his book Colossus, historian Niall Ferguson wrote that America's defeat in Vietnam showed that "[o]n balance, Americans preferred the irresponsibilities of weakness" to the "responsibilities of power." America will not achieve victory in the foreseeable future in Iraq, if it ever does. But embracing weakness would be irresponsible not only toward America itself but toward Iraqis as well. Members of the military have been trained to avoid the irresponsibilities of weakness. That is precisely why their conversations today are so much more interesting than those of the disoriented intellectuals on either side of the Iraq divide.

Reason contributing editor Michael Young is opinion editor of the Daily Star newspaper in Lebanon.