America's interests: a bedside briefing

I've already prepared my briefing for the next president. No point in waiting until he calls me at 3 a.m., which he certainly will. Of course, I could leak it then, but Bob Woodward is already working on his next book, so I might as well leak it now. Here we go.

Thank you for the White House invitation, Mr. President. You don't know how much I appreciate this appointment as your advisor - my talents were wasting away in that think tank. You've asked me to give you a ten-minute briefing on our interests in the Middle East, in a way even a community organizer or small-town mayor or US senator can understand. You've asked for an unvarnished telling - no lipstick. No problem. Here's what you need to know.

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Intimidation at Georgetown

Back in the spring, some students at Georgetown University took umbrage at a celebration of Israel's sixtieth anniversary, organized by a pro-Israel student group. Their protest took the form of sitting on the lawn next to the revelers, mouths taped shut. The student newspaper The Hoya covered the demonstration, and described it thus:

About 30 demonstrators, many of whom were graduate students, wore black shirts, tape over their mouths and, in many cases, neck scarves. They did not speak but handed out quarter sheets with a cartoon and short message; one held a poster-sized version of the quarter sheet which began, "Our presence is a gesture toward the many for whom the passing of these 60 years is not marked by celebration."

There is nothing unusual about this scene at Georgetown or any campus. Student demonstrations for and against political causes are a staple of campus life.

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Obama buys the myth

In one of my earlier posts The Myth of Linkage, I brought a number of exemplary quotes from figures such as Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski to illustrate my point. Now another quote can be added to the collection - this one from Barack Obama, fresh from his quick tutorial in the Middle East:

I think King, King Abdullah [of Jordan] is as savvy an analyst of the region and player in the region as, as there is, one of the points that he made and I think a lot of people made, is that we've got to have an overarching strategy recognizing that all these issues are connected. If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian process, then that will make it easier for Arab states and the Gulf states to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan.

It will also weaken Iran, which has been using Hamas and Hizbullah as a way to stir up mischief in the region. If we've gotten an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal, maybe at the same time peeling Syria out of the Iranian orbit, that makes it easier to isolate Iran so that they have a tougher time developing a nuclear weapon. "

Is America washed up in the Middle East?

Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH) is running a pile-on over this Fourth of July question: Has the American era in the Middle East ended? It's in response to the arguments of Richard Haass, Fareed Zakaria, and others, that America just doesn't have the pulling power it once had in the Middle East. There are twelve outstanding contributions in the MESH discussion at the moment. The sweeping consensus is that this sort of declinism is a cyclical fashion, and that America isn't finished in the Middle East--not by a long shot. Read the entire post.

Below is my own contribution. Not only do I think the American era hasn't ended. I suggest that America hasn't even begun to fight.

America's era in the Middle East has only just begun. Until 2003, the United States was positioned off-shore, attempting to manage the region through diplomacy, aid, arms sales, and the occasional cruise missile. Since the Iraq invasion, the United States has immersed itself in the nitty-gritty of engineering the reconstruction of a major Arab state. In the process, it has made just about every possible mistake, but it has also learned almost every possible lesson, and we see the results in gains made in Iraq. The knowledge acquired in Iraq, by trial and error, has put the United States on par with Britain and France at the height of their sway over the Middle East.

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The myth of linkage

If only we could solve the Israeli-Palestinian problem... (Ask Jimmy Carter.) The "peace process" assumes that the conflicts in the Middle East are linked. Martin Kramer shows the flaws in the notion, and traces its origins to a faulty analogy.

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Are Columbia's Palestinians...Palestinian?

You will remember the case of Nadia Abu El-Haj, the anthropologist who last year received tenure at Barnard after a furious controversy over her book, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society. Jane Kramer has written a panegyric to her for The New Yorker, simply brushing off serious-minded criticisms of Abu El-Haj's book.

Kramer (no relation to me) also has given the back story to her piece in a radio interview (from minute 21:00), where she makes a telltale confession: "I felt a deep commitment to write this piece, part of it having to do with being Jewish myself, and I thought to myself, Jewish people also have to stand up for her integrity." Ah, another Jew working through an identity complex on a Palestinian canvas. "Guilt-saddled New Yorker, Jewish, seeks stylish, well-bred Palestinian-American academic to love, admire, share Darwish and opera. Make me feel chosen again."

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Terrorism's false numbers

Professor John L. Esposito runs a slick operation at Georgetown with $20 million of funding from Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal. The shared agenda of these two is to make us all feel guilty for having wondered, after 9/11, about Saudis, Muslims, and the contemporary teaching of Islam. Esposito now has a new book (with co-author Dalia Mogahed, who runs something called the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies), bearing the pretentious title Who Speaks for Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. It's based on gleanings from the Gallup World Poll.

The core argument of the book is that only 7 percent of Muslims are "politically radicalized," and that "about 9 in 10 Muslims are moderate." On what does this factoid rest? The authors explain (pp. 69-70):

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Disraelia

Walter Laqueur, at 86, continues in his prolific and provocative ways. In the past couple of years, he's published a memoir, a book on the new antisemitism, and another on the demise of Europe. It's been quite a performance by any standard. Now, with a nod to April Fools' Day and Israel's 60th anniversary (the two are not to be confused), he's produced a striking short paper, entitled Disraelia: A Counterfactual History, 1848-2008, for the new Middle East Papers series of Middle East Strategy at Harvard. It's not so much a narrative history as a collection of "documents," premised on a "what-if." What if antisemitism - the modern ideology of hate and the resulting pogroms - had appeared not toward the end of the nineteenth century, but closer to its beginning? What if Disraeli then, rather than Herzl later, had seized the moment and inspired a mass migration of Jews to Ottoman Palestine? What if two million of them had made their way to the country by 1855? I won't say more so as not to spoil the scenario. You can download the paper here.

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Esposito's predictions, right and wrong

At Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH), John L. Esposito has revisited a prediction he made over five years ago, in the lead-up to the Iraq war. "Five years after a US war with Iraq," he wrote in November 2002, "it is likely that the Arab world will be less democratic than more and that anti-Americanism will be stronger rather than weaker." (Read his 2002 prediction here, and his new MESH post here.) Below I reproduce a comment I offered on his post:

John Esposito was prescient to predict that the Iraq war would damage America's standing in the eyes of Muslims. There are different measures of the damage, and the Gallup World Poll is just one of them. But it's indisputably the case that the Iraq war represented a blow to US prestige in Muslim public opinion.

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Confusion at Columbia

On Friday, the Columbia Spectator ran an article by its "news staff" under the headline: "Yiddish Prof Named Acting Director of Israel Institute After False Media Speculation." The Yiddish professor is Jeremy Dauber, and the institute is the Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies. Mazel tov to Professor Dauber.

The article then adds the following:

Last week, the New York Sun reported that sociology professor Yinon Cohen was appointed permanent director of the institute. The article quoted several professors upset by Columbia's decision to appoint Cohen, who signed a letter condemning Israel's policies concerning 2002 military operations in Gaza. The Sun also wrote that it found the information about Cohen on a blog named Sandbox, written by academic Martin Kramer who obtained his master's degree in history from Columbia in 1976.

[Columbia Vice President for Arts and Sciences Nicholas] Dirks said the Sun's article was completely false. "I don't know what the basis for the attack on Professor Cohen is," he said.

Cohen came to Columbia in fall 2007 as a visiting professor from Tel Aviv University. While Cohen was never appointed director of any institute at Columbia, he recently received the endowed position of Yosef Haim Yerushalmi professor of Israel and Jewish studies - a name similar to that of the institute, which may have been the source of confusion.

The report leaves the vague impression that I contributed to that confusion.