Obama's Mid-East Policy Boils Down To 3 Assumptions--All Of Them Wrong

Daled Amos
02 July '10

Tablet Magazine has a symposium of foreign policy experts on Obama’s Middle East policy. One of them, Elliott Abrams, writes in part:

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

I think we can agree that there is nothing in Obama's conduct of his Mideast policy that would contradict any of the 3 premises that Abrams ascribes to him.

Now of course, there is nothing novel in assuming that the conflict is at the center of everything that goes on in the Middle East. The problem is that considering the Israel-Palestinian conflict in particular to be the key to peace in the Middle East means conveniently forgetting that the long history of Arabs killing Arabs predates the reestablishment of the State of Israel.

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The Return of the Ottomans

The sick man of Europe is back and causing ­trouble again.


Lee Smith
The Weekly Standard
Vol. 15, No. 39
20 June '10

Beirut

A few months back, I was dining with a friend at an Armenian restaurant in Beirut, and at the end of the meal he gracefully sidestepped the Turkish question by ordering a “Byzantine” coffee. The waiter laughed grimly. “Aside from coffee and waterpipes,” asked my friend, “what did the Turks leave us? They were here for 500 years, and they didn’t even leave us their language. We speak Arabic, French, and English. No one speaks Turkish. Their most important political institutions were baksheesh and the khazouk.”

Baksheesh is bribery, and the khazouk is a spike driven through its victim’s rectum, which the Ottomans used to terrify locals and deter potential insurgents. The Ottomans were hated here and throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East, not only by the regional minorities (Christians, Jews, Shia, etc.) but also by their Sunni Arab coreligionists. All felt the heavy yoke of the Sublime Porte.

In the last few weeks, however, half a millennium’s worth of history has been conveniently forgotten, perhaps even forgiven, as Turkey has emerged as a regional power and the guarantor of Arab interests—against Israel, to be sure, but more importantly against Iran.

In truth, the wheels were in motion long before Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government sponsored the Mavi Marmara’s cruise to Gaza, which left nine activists dead after they challenged an Israeli boarding party. Erdogan’s winter 2009 performance at Davos, when he confronted Israeli president Shimon Peres in the wake of the Gaza offensive, made the Turkish Islamist a regional celebrity. And while the Arab masses were thrilled to hear Israel denounced by a Muslim leader—and an ally of the Jewish state no less—the more important work was taking place behind the scenes. After Davos, high-level political sources in Beirut let on that there’d been a meeting in Cairo with President Hosni Mubarak. “The Egyptians are very happy with Erdogan,” said one. “The Turks are trying to take the Palestinian file out of the hands of the Iranians and give it back to the Arabs.”

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The Trouble with Proxy Wars

Michael J. Totten
michaeltotten.com
02 May '10

My friend and colleague Lee Smith, author of the terrific new book The Strong Horse, is having a civil but important argument with our mutual acquaintance and colleague Andrew Exum at the Center for a New American Security. I've agreed to publish Lee's response here, not because I want to pick on Andrew—whom I like personally and whose work I appreciate even when we don't agree with each other—but because Lee presents a compelling and cogent argument in favor of fighting the Syrian and Iranian governments instead of their proxies in Iraq and Afghanistan. ....


Over at “Abu Muqawama,” Andrew Exum, whom Michael and I know from Beirut, has had some interesting things to say recently about my book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations. Andrew, as some readers will know, is an analyst and researcher at the Washington DC-based think-tank, Center for a New American Security, where he contributed to formulating the Obama administration’s counterinsurgency strategy in Afghanistan. Andrew writes that I chose not to do a Q&A with him because I knew he “would not endorse the book whole-heartedly,” but the truth is that I wrote the book in the hopes of having many arguments over the issues I discuss in it. Accordingly, I wanted to use some of the issues Andrew raises with my book, and some of the differences I have with his position, to illuminate larger concerns regarding the US’s role in the region and the current state of US regional strategy.

In his critical appraisal of my book, Andrew writes that the strong horse is not a uniquely Arab phenomenon. I do not disagree with him. Indeed the strong horse is a feature common across cultures and historical periods. However, this is not the case in the contemporary United States where, as I write in my introduction, “we are among the very few people in history who have been able to live our daily lives free, relatively speaking, from violence and the fear of violence…[I]t is difficult for us to see that our form of political organization makes us not the norm but a privileged exception, the beneficiaries of a historical anomaly.” The point I was making is that it is not the Arabs who are the exception, but Americans. I had thought I had made that point clear enough, but perhaps the problem is that Andrew is just plain uncomfortable with the idea of the strong horse, especially insofar as it requires punishing one’s enemies and rewarding one’s friends.

For instance, Andrew writes of how he had once asked my opinion concerning what sort of advice he might give to US policymakers in the event they were to solicit his recommendations on Lebanon. I suggested he tell them that we should bomb Syrian targets, including the Presidential Palace in Damascus. To me, the prospect of the gilded, gaudy residence of a man responsible for so much death, suffering and repression in ruins was a cheery one indeed, a prospect that apparently left Andrew flummoxed.

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The dishonesty of Dalia Mogahed

Elder of Ziyon
07 April '10

Dalia Mogahed is an adviser to President Obama who was one of the two people behind a poll on worldwide Muslim attitudes in 2008 that spawned a very flawed book, "Who Speaks for Islam?"

She responds to a Lee Smith piece in Tablet that portrays her as very influential in the White House and also criticizes the poll. While I am qualified to comment on her influence with Obama, the other part of her response is interesting to me.

She cuts and pastes from a Gallup FAQ about her book:

In the book Who Speaks for Islam?, we define the "politically radicalized" as respondents who A) answered a "5" when asked to rate the extent that 9/11 could be morally justified on a 5-point scale, where "1" is "cannot be justified at all" and "5" is "completely justifiable," and B) said they view the United States unfavorably. A population-weighted average of 7% fit these criteria. We labeled those who said 9/11 could not be completely justified as "moderates." We further broke this group down into those who were pro-United States and those who were anti-United States.

The decision as to where to break out the "politically radicalized" from the rest was data-driven. It was based on several analyses of where the data clustered for a natural breaking point. The analyses showed that the people who responded with a "5" (completely justifiable) to the question on the justifiability of 9/11 as a group were distinctly different from the groups who responded with a "1", "2", "3" or "4." The idea here is not that we are judging who or what a "moderate" or "radical" is, but rather assigning labels to statistical groups that we clearly define.

The term "moderate" is more of a placeholder label than a value judgment. It is similar to calling one clustering in the data "group A" and another "group B." We simply used labels that a broad audience can easily understand and remember.

This is how Gallup justified calling people who thought that the 9/11 attacks were "mostly" or "partially" justified as "moderate."

It is the bolded sentence that is dishonest. Mogahed and Gallup are claiming that the word "moderate"is not a value judgment, and that they could have just as easily called the groups "group A" and "group B."

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Middle East Scorecard

An Interview with Lee Smith


Matthew RJ Brodsky
inFocus
Spring '10

Posted before Shabbat

On February 28, inFOCUS Editor Matthew RJ Brodsky interviewed Lee Smith, author of the new book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations. Smith writes a weekly column called "Agents of Influence" for Tablet Magazine, and is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute. He has worked at a number of journals, magazines, and publishers, including GQ Magazine, the Hudson Review, and Talk Magazine. He was also editor-in-chief of the Voice Literary Supplement, the Village Voice's national monthly literary magazine. Smith has been a frequent guest on radio and television, including Fox News and National Public Radio, and has contributed articles on Arab and Islamic affairs to, among other publications, the Weekly Standard, the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Boston Globe.

iF: What inspired the title of your new book, The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations ?

LS: The title comes from Osama Bin Laden's observation, "when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse."

iF: What is your book's central thesis and why did you decide to write it?

LS: I was raised in New York City and wanted to understand and explain why almost 3,000 of my neighbors were killed on 9/11. So I sought to explain the centrality of violence in Middle Eastern politics and society to an American audience that is freakishly lucky insofar as we are able, unlike the majority of human beings throughout history, to conduct our political lives free of bloodshed, repression and coercion. Because we have inherited this system we tend to assume that most of the world's other political cultures are similar to ours. Some are but many more are not; the political culture of the Arabic-speaking Middle East is one that has no mechanism for sharing power, or transmitting political authority from one governing body to another except through inheritance, coup or conquest.

iF: A cornerstone of Obama's foreign policy has been engagement based on the idea of "resetting" our relations with certain countries. Does such a metaphorical reset button exist and how does it work in the Middle East?

LS: Such a button could only exist, even metaphorically, if American interests and policies were subject to change every time a new president came to office. Since they are not, all the "reset" button did was to inadvertently make explicit what everyone already knows about the United States: new administrations typically ignore the lessons of their predecessors and have to make their own mistakes before they are capable of dealing with the reality that is, rather than the reality they promised on the campaign trail.

Let's hope the administration has learned from its errors over the past year. Among others, they should have discovered that: 1) despite the counsel of academic experts and media pundits, there is a point past which you cannot "strong-arm" an Israeli government; 2) the Saudis do not offer confidence-building gestures toward Jerusalem and it is unwise to push them on this in public; 3) the Iranians do not wish to have normal bilateral relations with Washington, a preference they have made clear to five different U.S. administrations over the last 30 years.

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