Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Mideast and American Thinking
Today's NY Times brings an Op-Ed by Thomas Friedman entitled "Mideast Rules to Live By". He prefaces his remarks by saying that he had hoped so much for a good outcome in Iraq that he forgot what he had learned by covering Lebanon's civil war in the past. My experience reinforces what Friedman has to say. Let me mention just a few of the "rules".
(1) Although we are used to politicians lying in public and telling what they really believe in private, in the Middle East, they often tell you what they think you want to hear in private and say what they really think in public.
(2) If you can't explain something with a conspiracy theory, don't try, they won't believe it.
(3) In the ME, the extremists go all the way and the moderates just go away.
(4) Civil Wars in the area are seldom about ideas. They are about which tribe (I would change that to "group") gets to rule.
(5) (modified) ME civil wars end either with one side vanquishing the other, or someone taking absolute power and ruling with an iron fist.
(6) Our first priority is democracy, theirs is "justice" (as the competing groups define it). If democracy helps in getting what a group feels is theirs, fine; if not they will quickly set democracy aside.
(7) Finally (in my version) Friedman writes (condensed version): "The most underestimated emotion in Arab politics is humiliation. Israel's existence is a daily humiliation to the Muslims. The West's problem is that it does not understand this."
The last point brings us back to the Iraq Study Group Report. The report insists that we have to solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem before we can hope to have peace in Iraq or any place in the Middle East. This position is one of those most quickly rejected by the Report's critics. It was rejected either because the critic could not understand the linkage or because he did not want to understand the linkage.
The essential linkage is based on the fact that too many Iraqis simply hate Americans and our apparent siding with the Israelis and/or our inability to solve what they see as the "Israeli problem". Their dislike makes any cooperation they might give us provisional, dissolving quickly as soon as what we are doing to help them in a situation is no longer relevant. This is the essential reason why many good plans to find a way forward in Iraq are bound to fail. This, by the way, is the essential basis of General Abizaid's criticism of the plan to bring in more troops to secure Baghdad.
Incidentally, we are fortunate to have Abizaid as Commander of the Central Command, which includes Iraq. Abizaid comes of Lebanese background, and aside from the usual military training has a masters degree in Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard (as do I incidentally) and was an Olmsted Scholar at the University of Jordan. Too bad, he is in a tough position that has not allowed him to really approach Iraq as he might have liked to.
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