Saturday, December 23, 2006
Our Iraqi Allies
Recently, security in the Najaf area was handed over formally from the Coalition forces to a unit of the new Iraqi army (NYT, December 20). Let me quote from the description of the ceremonies:
“The general public did not attend. Much of the audience was made up of powerful tribal leaders, who sat beneath a sign that read: ‘We are the sons of those who drove the British out in 1920.’
. . .
As soldiers paraded by a reviewing grandstand, commandos with their faces blackened gathered for a demonstration of their courage.
Each man reached into his right pocket, pulled out a frog and bit its head off. They threw the squirming legs to the ground as the group’s leader held aloft a live rabbit. He slit the belly and plunged his mouth into the gash. The carcass was then passed around to the rest of the soldiers, who took their own bites.
It was explained later that this practice was especially popular among Saddam Hussein’s feared Fedayeen militia, whose members had done the same thing with live snakes and wolves.”
Let me not comment on courage Iraqi-style. But it is instructive that this supposedly Shiite dominated army unit was more than happy to reflect in their actions the methods of the supposedly hated true believers in Saddam’s forces. One should also notice that their elders identify with the nationalist movement, when they say that they “drove out the foreigners in the 1920s”. Of course, the rebellion failed and they did not “drive out the foreigners”. Never mind. They want to believe it and we are now the foreigners. (And a faction in Washington suggests that we end the war by siding with the Shiites? The Americans appear to be truly lost in the desert.)
For an interesting comparison of British problems in the 1920s with our present problems the reader might be interested in comments by T. E. Lawrence. The reader should remember that the British were putting down their insurgency with 90,000 troops against a population of three million; we are trying to cope with 26 million Iraqis. When Lawrence writes, the British were planning on sending more troops. Of course, there are differences, but still worth pondering.
Negotiating with the Iranians
Repeated suggestions that the United States should negotiate with the Iranians seem to come to naught. President Bush has somehow gotten it into his head that Iran is an "evil state" on a par with Saddam Hussein's Iraq before our invasion. He wonders how such an evil government can be negotiated with. Sometimes he insists that if Iran changes, or if Iran renounces its present policies, then perhaps we could have something to talk about. One suspects that his demonization of Iran is a reflection through intermediaries of the bitter hostility of Israel to Iran, because of Hezbollah and because of a real fear that Iran might develop a nuclear weapon that would threaten the existence of Israel. The close connection between the thinking of the neocons that has been so influential in this administration and support of Israeli objectives is well known. (Incidentally, it is odd that concern for Pakistan's already existing nuclear capability remains muted, in spite of the fact that Musharref might be unseated by an Islamist coup at any time and Pakistan has a record of sharing nuclear information with other states.)
Two recent events have affected the possibility and usefulness of negotiations. First, nationwide local elections including an election of the "experts" who choose the actual head of state has resulted in a setback for Ahmadinejad in Iran. The moderates and reformists have made critical gains. This would seem to offer an opening to any power that really wanted to engage the Iranians. Moreover, the exercise itself has once again shown that Iran is in no way in the league with North Korea and Saddam's Iraq. It is a much more modernized and vibrant state, with possibilities for real choice and discussion, in spite of the continuation of controls over the media and the jailing of opposition figures.
Second, and less promising, the United States and Great Britain have announced that they are increasing the size of their fleets in the Persian Gulf. This reversion to "gunboat diplomacy" will hardly make Iran's leaders anxious to negotiate about anything. Neither is it likely to be well received by the Iranian opposition that remains hotly nationalist in spite of everything.
At this juncture, two American diplomats who have participated in past negotiations with Iran have published an Op-Ed in the New York Times (December 22, 2006) that argues persuasively that the Iranians are never going to be willing to negotiate about particular items in an American agenda. They have been repeatedly disappointed by narrower agreements. For example, they cooperated with us in the defeating the Taliban, but in the end received nothing in return but hostility. Against this background Iran will need to be offered a broad and open agenda. In particular, it wants security guarantees from the United States and a guarantee that we will respect its borders, and no longer work for "regime change". (The authors of the Op-Ed tell us that what they print is a censored version of what they wanted to say. But for our purposes here, the question of censorship is irrelevant. Their main points get through.)
As Baker, in discussing his Report, has pointed out: "If you have problems in a relationship, you sit down and discuss them. And you cannot have such a discussion if you insist that your partner yield on major points before the discussion begins." One can only hope that this administration reconsider the Report's recommendations for talks, and not just talks to avert catastrophe in Iraq. Iran and the United States share many more interests than that.
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.
