David Makovsky summarizes the arguments in the book he and Dennis Ross co-authored at MESH.

in the March/April Foreign Affairs, by Bernard Lewis. The title is “Free at Last?” (You’ll have to pay/go to the library to read it … I’m sorry). Since it’s Bernard Lewis, a desire to avoid that awkward moment at a cocktail party with other politics nerds where this article is referenced and you look blank should be sufficient reason to take a look. It offers plenty of choice phrases to bring up at that moment, as well, such as “[After decolonization] Arab governments and, to a limited but growing extent, the Arab peoples were at last able to confront their own problems and compelled to accept responsibility for dealing with them.”

The subtitle, The Arab World in the Twenty-First Century, suggests a wildly ambitious agenda for eleven large-print pages, and that is exactly what we get: a summary of the end of the colonial period, the Cold War, and the rise of political Islam; a short treatment of sectarianism and its influence on the region; several paragraphs on rentierism in the Gulf; a list of the statistics suggesting a lack of economic and human development in the Arab world; and so on. I mention this not to criticize the article, as summarizing issues at this sort of broad-brush level is something Foreign Affairs does on purpose to remain relevant to the policy community. It helps to explain the bluntness of the thesis, which is, the Middle East is now suspended between the competing forces of tolerance/progress/democracy and traditionalism/rigidity/Islamism.

Of course, it still advances that thesis, which a. places religion in opposition to democracy b. divides thought processes in a region of over 20 countries and 300 million people into one sharp binary and c. is frankly not that productive. (See Fareed Zakaria’s Newsweek article of last week for an argument in favor of disaggregating different strains of radical Islam). I don’t see the need to further contest these ideas, as there are plenty of sources to visit with more authority than a grad student blogger that have done so quite deftly. I am curious, though, why this argument continues to be reproduced as if it were new. If I were Bernard Lewis, I certainly would not while away my retirement from an illustrious and influential academic career reproducing a highly politicized and false-binary-dependent argument like this one. What is it about the American reading public that makes this type of narrative so appealing?

… including “In Gaza, it is possible to work with the PA and avoid Hamas” and “The ‘West Bank first’ strategy of building up the PA is working”.

… according to a recent interview with economist Edward Sayre by Brookings scholar Navtej Dhillon. His overview of the Palestinian economy, with a focus on Gaza and its future, sheds some light on just how intractable a problem the “peace process” has become. Really fascinating reading.

This is not a tradition, so don't expect any funny jokes next Tuesday.

Quote Peter Feaver, on my new favorite FP blog (or second fave, after Madam Secretary, especially the post about Hillary and knee-high boots):

Walt may be guilty of a common academic fallacy of inference: if I did not read about it in the New York Times, it must not be happening. 

Low blow? for sure. Gratuitous? possibly. Hilarious? yes. Feel free to repeat and pass off as your own - I will definitely be doing so.

Samuel Huntington, political scientist and author of the influential and controversial book/Foreign Affairs article Clash of Civilizations, died on Christmas Eve 2008. Many thoughtful obituaries in major news outlets recognize his accomplishments and contributions, including the Economist, the Associated Press, the UK's Independent and the UAE's National.

Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, professor of comparative literature and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, died on December 2. She made significant contributions to the study of women in the Middle East, communicating their humanity to Western audiences in her ethnographies, the most famous of which is probably Guests of the Sheikh. She will be missed.

Times of London reports that terrorists and child pornographers overlap in the recesses of the internet, using some of the same tactics to transmit incrimination information without being caught. Quote:

The realisation that there might be something in common between violent Muslim fanatics known for their supposed piety and sexual deviants who prey on children has only slowly dawned on officers. Cracking the mystery of how these worlds overlap is expected to improve understanding of the mindsets of both types of criminals and has been hailed as a potentially vital intelligence tool to undermine future terrorist plots. "A way of finding who the extremists and terrorists are", an anti-terror source said, "is to go through the child-porn sites."

The surprise with which this is met indicates that the “war of civilizations” paradigm can be limiting as it shapes how we think about terrorism. The War v. Crime debate has certainly raged in America at a higher pitch than it has in Europe, but Europeans are certainly not immune to letting cultural stereotypes dominate their thinking about terrorists who use Islam as justification for their actions:

Stefano Dambruoso, Italy's anti-terror magistrate, said: "In our experience in investigating Islamic cells linked to al-Qaeda, they use pornographic images simply to camouflage the content of their messages. They use the images ‚ of men, women and children ‚ as an instrument to hide messages of quite a different content.

"I would exclude the idea that they have paedophile tendencies. The most you can attribute to them is a relationship between men and women different from that of us Westerners, in which ‚ as in many parts of the Arab world ‚ wives are often very young girls of 11, 12 or 13 who because of family negotiations are given in marriage to men much older than them. But that is not paedophilia, it is a question of Arab culture."

Pedophilia is a facet of Arab culture. Wow. In addition to being obviously offensive, these sorts of enforced boundaries between different types of criminals will make it more difficult to make connections between groups like pedophiles and terrorists. Conceiving of criminals as being outside the boundaries of social morality more generally, rather than adhering too closely to the social prescriptions associated with a religion of over 1 billion people. Construing terrorists as a unique, Muslim kind of criminal may make it more difficult intellectually to realize the following similarities:

One area that British anti-terror investigators are now keen to look at is the startling similarity in the way that jihadis and paedophiles target vulnerable young people, first befriending them and then slowly introducing them to warped behaviour that comes to be seen as normal. "What we were starting to see was a similarity in grooming that goes on in paedophilia and grooming that goes on in extremism," said the anti-terror source.

The source explained that both types of criminal also share a need for great secrecy and indeed it is the paedophiles’ status as outcasts as well as their expertise in encryption techniques that may have first attracted the terrorists. Hardline Muslim recruits are often given passwords and keycodes to terrorism sites via internet chatrooms, although sometimes they come from sympathisers in local mosques. But recently British police have managed to crack some of the codes that prohibit outsiders from accessing the more hardcore jihadi sites. Using child porn sites might be one way round this.

The Hoffman/Sageman debate over whether terrorism/jihad - pick your term - is best combated through a paradigm of local crime or organized global crusade certainly comes to bear in this issue. In the words of Balthasar Garzon:

"The danger of this "either-or' argument could lead us to the mistakes of the past," said Baltasar Garzon, Spain's leading antiterror investigatory magistrate. "In the '90s, we saw atomized cells as everything, and then Al Qaeda came along. And now we look at Al Qaeda and say it's no longer the threat. We're making the same mistake again."

Thinking of terrorists as either typical criminals or typical Islamic fundamentalists may lead to the same sort of limiting thinking.

As a testament of their commitment to the liberal arts tradition in their new satellite campus, NYU has named Alfred H. Bloom, former president of Swarthmore, the head of its new Abu Dhabi campus.

This is interesting because I am pretty sure the Swarthmore version of a liberal arts tradition looks totally different than the NYU version. Which brand are they really trying to duplicate? I take issue with the way that “liberal arts education” is used at many major American universities, including my own alma mater Northwestern, so I’m curious to see whether NYU Abu Dhabi will prove any more traditional in its approach to delivering a liberal arts education than NYU New York is. (Which, based on my admittedly imprecise research, is ‘not very traditional’). This exporting of campuses seems to give American universities an oppportunity to re-brand themselves in a foreign market as much as it allows for cultural exchange.

The NYT explains this decision thus:

By naming Mr. Bloom, who has been the president of Swarthmore College since 1991, N.Y.U. officials said they hoped to signal their commitment to creating a traditional liberal arts school in a part of the world where academic freedom is a relatively new concept.

I think that this sentence says it all. Is Swarthmore any more academically free than, say, UCLA? It would be tough to design a compelling argument that either institution is more free, but if you were really set on doing so you could say that research universities are MORE academically free than small liberal arts institutions because, well, they produce more new material. Why is it more difficult to have academic freedom in “a traditional liberal arts school” (which, with respect to undergraduate curricula, is sufficiently nebulous as to be, in my opinion, practically meaningless anyway) than in a less traditional liberal arts school, of which NYU is a great example? But “liberal arts” and “academic freedom” have been rolled into one tight little package of “American” and, necessarily, “not Middle Eastern”.

NYU seems to be capitalizing not just on its own brand but on the brand of the American university and the American education system. Is this a good or bad sign for the Emiratis and other Arabs who will be educated and who will do research and teach there?

The NYU Center for Global Affairs hosted an event recently called CGA Scenarios: Iran 2015. The goal of the event was to produce a publication that examined three different possible scenarios for the US relationship with Iran over the next 7 years in a manner cognizant of the complex nature of Middle East politics and of US policy trade-offs; clearly principles are not the only criteria that the President and his supporting staff use to make decisions about policy. The report examines three scenarios, summarized by the CGA as follows:

•       U.S. Led Coalition Contains Iran: Here the US organizes a broad coalition to thwart Iranian ambitions for regional hegemony. This requires that intra-Arab and Arab-Israeli tensions be subordinated, if not resolved; that regional powers be sufficiently reassured by US security commitments to live with a higher level of tension with Iran; and that global cooperation is effective enough to deny Iran a nuclear weapons capability. Implicitly it assumes continued bluster from Iran, rather than a more "moderate' leadership pursuing nuclear weapons and regional dominance with greater skill. It assumes an Iraq with a government prepared to confront Iran, or still up for grabs and a battleground for the wider regional confrontation. And it assumes that this higher level of tension can be managed without resort to war.

•       U.S. Drawdown from Iraq Triggers Regional Balancing: Here regional actors, in anticipation of a diminished US role in Iraq and a reduced on the ground presence generally, strengthen their own individual and collective abilities to defend their security, as they partially engage Iran to blunt Iranian hostility. In reducing its footprint, the US acknowledges its inability to control local events and to democratize the region, at least over the short term. In doing so, it frees up resources to address other policy priorities in Pakistan, Afghanistan and outside the region. While arguably advantageous from a US perspective, the nuclear proliferation risk in this scenario is high, as Arab states with nuclear weapons potential confront Iran with less US reassurance, and Israel operating under less US restraint.

•       U.S. Engages Iran: Factors operating in both the US and Iran coincide to enable this scenario: a new US administration committed to cutting losses in Iraq, looking for a dignified retrenchment and revamped priorities; Iran in deepening economic crisis, imposed by Western sanctions and its own failures of economic policy and governance. With both states chastened by recent experience, their latent common interests become more apparent: stability in the region, increased energy production, economic modernization and growth. The result is a process of engagement (by no means a resolution of all issues) that incentivizes moderation. While the advantages for both states in this scenario are apparent, the list of spoilers is long: radical Islamists benefiting from Iranian support and the US-Iran conflict; Israel and the Arab states with deepening fears of Iranian nuclear capabilities, domestic opponents in both states.

On the one hand, it doesn't really take on the consequences of the preemptive-strike business on US credibility internationally. On the other, it treats the US taking on a diminished role in the Middle East as a possibility and not an apocalyptic one. Those two things might be the same - perhaps the simple consideration of the US taking on a diminished role and, as they phrase it, making a virtue of necessity constitutes an implicit acknowledgement of America's diminished power and influence.

Click here to download the report. Thanks to the Center on Global Affairs for bringing it to my attention.