Fear-mongering at Yale

Flash back to 2006. Professor Marcia Inhorn, a medical anthropologist and director of the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the University of Michigan, is invited to lecture in Teheran on her field of expertise, infertility and assisted reproductive technologies in Muslim countries. On her return, she seeks to dispel misconceptions about the Middle East. Because of the "American daily diet of fearsome media discourses about the Middle East, particularly Iran," she complains, "it was difficult to convince relatives, including my 80-year-old mother, that it was safe for me, a mother of two young children, to travel to that part of the world." Landing in Detroit, she finds the same bias:

When the customs official at the Detroit International Airport asked me why I had been 'over there,' I told him it was for an academic conference. Then he asked, 'And they didn't behead you?,' to which I replied, 'No, they served me delicious food.' He retorted, 'But you never know what was in it (i.e., the food),' to which I responded, perhaps too flippantly, 'Probably uranium.' Fortunately, he returned my passport and let me proceed to baggage claim, where I retrieved my two gorgeous Persian carpets."

I would argue that such fear-mongering is very unwise. It is leading to closed minds, closed embassies, restricted visas, travel bans and demeaning airport luggage searches for those of us who overcome these travel restrictions."

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Kissed to death by America

People in and around the Obama administration are taking the position that his low key on Iran is carefully calculated. It's not that he doesn't sympathize with the protesters, he just doesn't want their cause to be identified with the United States. That would be a kiss of death. I'm not persuaded, and as I've suggested already, his real problem with Iran's turmoil is that it's just so inconvenient to a Palestine-first approach.

Laura Rozen at her blog The Cable quoted an "Iran hand in touch with the administration" as saying that Obama "is dedicated to diplomacy in a manner that is almost ideological," that he's already decided what he wants to do in the Middle East "over the next eight years" (bit of presumption there), and that he doesn't want to be "distracted" from the "larger strategic objective" or "let himself get shaken by stuff like this" - "stuff" referring to the reality in the streets of Iran and the Middle East more generally. If this spectacular hubris isn't a formula for failure in the Middle East, what is?

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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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Memo from Gulfistan

Martin Kramer made these remarks at the 8th Herzliya Conference on January 21.

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