Middle East

Hello all, my name is Susan and I am the new Middle East blogger at FPA. You can refer to the About page to see the list of places that I lived/studied. I am replacing Brian, who has moved on from FPA to a new job, so I will be writing daily about news and developments in the region. My background is in Arabic, so expect more on the Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East, with some coverage of Iran and Israel as well.

It’s my feeling that blogs work best when they provide a space for dialogue, so I hope that readers will share their thoughts in comments, or, if you prefer, via email. You can reach me at fpamiddleeast@gmail.com. I will do my best to respond to all comments and emails.

Welcome, me.

Stratfor.com is an international security site, and one for which you have to pay.   But here is a freebie. 

 The article, by George Friedman, is trying to discuss the balance of geopolitics and politics, a fascinating topic and one we have touched on a little here.  Despite a somewhat inauspicious start- “Nowhere is that more important than in the Middle East, which increasingly has come to be defined in terms of the Arab-Israeli equation for reasons we don’t fully understand”- the article touches base on things it does understand: how geopolitics imposes on politics.  Concisely:

Geopolitics is being sucked into politics, and apparent breakthroughs are being turned into routine nonevents. The Israeli-Palestinian talks are being sucked into Palestinian politics. The Syrian-Israeli talks are being sucked into Lebanese politics and the complexities of American regional politics. The entire package of opportunities is being sucked into internal Israeli politics.

I would like to see more on how local political concerns influence international ones, but overall it is a good article and worth the read.

Readers of this blog know that, along with Yemen, Lebanon is a particular obsession here, for reasons both strategic and emotional.   I’ll still do an occasional piece here and there, mostly about Lebanon’s role in the region, but highly suggest checking out Daniel Graeber’s new FPA blog on Lebanon.  Highly readable and informed, it has quickly become a must-read for anyone who cares about the fate of that troubled, volatile, impossible country.

The Washington Post has a pair of editorials on the Middle East today.  Oneis by Amr Hamzawy and Mohammed Herzallah about democracy in Egypt, and how it is honored more in breach than in practice.

The other is by David Ignatius about moderates in the Arab world being squeezed out.  Not exactly revolutionary, but still interesting.

 Finally, the author has a piece on the three rebellions facing Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen in the Jamestown Review’s Terrorism Monitor.  It has been called “breathtakingly perfect” by the author’s mother.

Fred Kaplan at Slate has a great article about the relationship between Iraq and Iran, as well as Iran and the US, especailly relating to the battle of Basra.   Here’s the money quote.

Since the start of the offensive in Basra, Sadr’s Mahdi Army has resumed shooting at American soldiers in the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad—and, interestingly, in that fight, the Iranians are supporting Sadr.

In other words, we find ourselves lassoed into an armed intra-Shiite power struggle on two fronts—and the Iranians are positioned to benefit from one or both contests, no matter whether the side we’re backing wins or loses.

Sorry for the lack of posts this week.  Working on a big post on Egypt that should be up tomorrow.  Selah.

The story of Nojoud, the serial-raped 8-year-old forced bride in Yemen, has a happy ending.   Someone paid her wretched husband for a divorce, and she is now free and something of a celebrity, taken care of and showered with affection.  Unfortunately, many girls in similar situations still face the same problem.  From the Yemen Times:

Eight-year-old Nojoud is now safe after an anonymous donor paid her 30-year-old husband to divorce her. Although this chapter of her life has closed, there are many other Yemeni girls who still suffer from early marriage and its consequences. Feminist groups in Yemen are urging the Parliament to legally define a minimum marriage age. However, there is a long way to go before girls like Nojoud can be free from detrimental early marriages.

An anonymous Emirate donor gave the husband 100,000 Yemeni rials (right about 500 US dollars) to set her free.  This is frustrating, because the husband made himself a nice little deal, but it was perhaps necessary to secure her freedom.   Hopefully, this story won’t go away, and will provide an impetus to the Parliament to change an archaic practice.

Nojoud, after her divorce (Yemen Times)

Self-promotion?  No.  An educational opportunity.

Your author has a new article up on Yemen in the Jamestown Foundation’s Terrorism Focus. 

Want a teaser?  Why not?

Yemen is running out of water. Its economy is one of the weakest in the world. Its second-most powerful and influential political figure, Shaykh Abdullah al-Ahmar, recently died, and Saleh is trying to manage the transition to his own successor. These are fragile and trying times in the country. The attacks were a message to Saleh, and to the global community, that the chaos-producing strategy of al-Qaeda in Iraq, achieved despite being only a small part of the insurgency, is now being exported to the militants’ homelands.

Enjoy!

I’m going to quibble here with an article I really enjoyed and found useful.  I hope you don’t mind.   I don’t want to leave the impression that it was a bad article.   It is one you should read, if you have the time.

 And time is the most important thing here.   The Carnegie Endowment has a long, 40-some page report on what the authors describe as “The New Middle East”.  (link goes site with .pdf link)  If, like me, you fancy staying at home one night and reading about the Middle East, this is for you.

Basically the authors postulate that we are entering a new era in the Middle East, albeit one with most of the older pathologies still in place.  They identify three “clusters” of problems- the Iran/Iraq cluster, the Lebanon/Syria cluster, and (of course) the Israeli/Palestinian cluster.  All of these are informed by and still affect each other, of course.   They also get into issues of nuclear confrontation with Iran, and the idea of proliferation from Morocco to Riyadh.   All of these are underlined by US policy throughout the Bush years, which has tended to make things far worse with what the authors describe variously as disinterest, unmet threats, and too much force.   This to me sums things up nicely.

 What I like about this approach is how they are able to make us see clearly the new era we are entering.  It is hard to judge history while you are living in it, especially when things seem to happen so fast, and are so quickly analyzed, dissected and then discarded by news outlets, talking heads and (um) blogs.   Our attention can whiplash from Syria to Baghdad to Sana’a in an instant; it is hard to make a cohesive outlook of the region.  This article is instructive in making sense of these maddening and tumultuous times. 

But, as I said, it is not without its flaws.  I am going to bring up three: two specific to the discussion,  one an aside that I think is deeply misguided.  Both are indicative of larger problems when discussing the Middle East, so I think it is important.

The first specific one is their solutions, particularly regarding Iran.   The authors do an excellent job of explaining why the nuclear issue is so difficult.

At the same time, the
United States needs to keep in mind that
Iran will never agree to anyarrangement in which it is expected to publicly retreat or admit defeat, nor can it be forcedto compromise through pressure alone. Besides the issue of saving face,
Iran’s political elite—chiefly Ayatollah Khamenei—believe that compromise as a result of pressure projects weaknessand will only encourage the
United States to demand more.But not as good a job as explaining what needs to be done. 

To be sure, engagement offers no guarantees of success. It is the Iranian government thatultimately must make a strategic decision to change its own policies. The best thing
Washingtoncan do is maintain dialogue with
Iran, simultaneously present it with two distinct pathsforward, and let it be known that when
Tehran is ready to rethink its policies and emerge fromisolation, there will be a partner in
Washington ready to welcome it.This is: true.  But- not helpful.  “Dialogue” is a great buzzword, signifying everything but containing nothing.   There is no discussion of what can and can’t be taken off the table.  There are no words about inviolable lines in the sand for either party.   I think this is kind of a cop-out, but it also might be because no one really knows what can bring Iran to the table, much less what needs to be on it. 

Another flaw also has to do with Iran- the authors dismiss the idea of a rising Shi’ite Crescent, and do so with logic, reason, facts, and a fundamental blind spot.  

But the formation of a Shi’i crescent is a far-fetched idea. Although there is a great deal of discontentamong Shi’a, particularly in the Gulf countries and, of course,
Lebanon, as already discussed,such discontent is not likely to translate into a grand regional alliance dominated by
Iran.And then they do a great and instructive job of pointing out the grievances Shi’a have in various countries.  This is often over-looked but vitally important.  Many countries, especially Saudi Arabia, have problems with oppressed Shi’ite communites.  Many think Iran is looking to exploit this. 

The authors shluff this off, but they do so in a way that is inaccurate.  The idea of the Shi’ite Crescent they conjure up is one of unstoppable unity, a turbo-charged scimitar sweeping over the sand, lopping off heads like a bearded Queen of Hearts.  In other words: a strawman.   I don’t think many see this as the case.  I doubt even Bill Kristol, in his most fervid, quinine-induced psycho-sexual military fantasies, believes that would be the case.

What Iran cando is fund, arm and train militant groups of Shi’ites inside countries opposed to its regional dominance.   Even if the groups are outside the mainstream Shi’ite community inside, say, Bahrain, they are able to cause trouble and keep Arab countries more concerned with internal affairs than with their giant neighbor to the East. Iran does not want chaos in the region, especially in Iraq, but wants to be the dominant force.  Owning militia groups throughout the area is a good way to start.   The problem with this kind of analysis is its either/or nature: either Iran wants its armies to march clear to Casablanca, or it is staying home.  The authors don’t exactly fall into this trap, but the strawman they set up helps to lead readers into this kind of thinking.

The final problem I have is one that is common to read, and isn’t even a major point in the article (though it is repeated).  It is basically one sentence.

The United States needs to recognize that terrorism is not the result of blind hatred of Western civilization, as the Bush administration insists, but rather an extreme response by a few to U.S. policies that most Arabs see as hostile.

Neither is actually the case here, and both are incredibly parochial ways to look at the issue.  Yes: there is much hatred toward US policy in the region, and much of it justified.  And yes: there is blind hatred.  But the underlying dogma behind militant Islam existed long before the US became a global power, and before anyone could hate it blindly.   Different policies, especially on the Israeli/Palestinian issues (though moreso on economic ones) would help to negate the pull that violence has on young, bored and desperate young men.   But the ideology would still exist.   It is easy, and justified, to label George Bush as a Manichean politician, but we also need to be careful not to react with the other extreme.  Understanding the New Middle East is difficult enough without letting blind hatred toward those that don’t understand it lead us to an equal level of confusion.   

Good article from The Middle East Times about Iraqi journalists defying death threats.   I don’t know if this qualifies as “good news” or not, given the circumstances, but it is pretty inspiring. 

Clearly, not everything in the Middle East centers around terrorism, despite the impression one might get from the news or even at times this blog.  However,  it obviously is a very real phenomenon, and understanding it is key.  In light of that, I’m linking today to a fairly new publication called Perspectives on Terrorism, the journal of the Terrorism Research Initiative (disclosure: the current author is a new member and will have an article on al-Qaeda in Yemen published there in February, but he urges readers not to hold that against them).   This journal does not deal entirely with the Middle East, which is right, but there is a good bit about it, including Robert Kelly’s look at Iraq’s tribal structure and Nicole Stracke’s discussion of Arab prisons.  

The Yemen Times has a recent profile on Sheik al-Ahmar’s son, a very relevant man following the recent death of his father, the second-most powerful person in Yemen.   The author, Abdullah al-Faqeh, is a professor of politics at Sana’a University and very clearly a fan of young Hamid.  In the last post on the al-Ahmar clan, commentor Gregory postulates that Hamid is the best bet of the late Sheik’s six sons to assume power over the Hashid tribal federation, but thinks that his image of a modern and international businessman might hurt him.  While al-Faqeh doesn’t address this, he clearly thinks Hamid al-Ahmar can be a bridge between Yemen’s past and present.  Here is a longish quote.

While accompanying the Joint Meeting Parties’ presidential candidate engineer Faisal bin Shamlan in his camping trail across Yemen, Hameed seemed to have redefined the contemporary politics of Yemen. He proved the old slogan of tribal politics, which states “my nephew and I are against the outsider,” to be inaccurate. The most telling moment, probably in the politics of modern Yemen, occurred in the summer of 2006 when Hameed with the support of some of his brothers mobilized tens of thousands of Hashid’s tribesmen for the opposition parties’ presidential candidate bin Shamlan’s campaign stop in the city of Amran to the north of the capital of Yemen—Sana’a.

It is true that Saleh is the one who decided to shift from the politics of consensus to the politics of competition. It is truer, however, that junior Al-ahmer is the one who defined what the politics of competition looks like today and will look like in the future. And, while the door for reconciliation of differences among the younger generation of Hashid is not completely closed, the likelihood of reconciliation and a return to the politics of consensus seems remote. The best the sons of Hashid can hope for in the future is not the impossible return to the politics of consensus, but the attainable goal of acceptance of the right and legitimacy of the role of each other.
This puts Hamid in a very interesting light, one where it may not be a question of whether or not he can consolidate support like his father, but where he may in fact reshape the idea of the tribal and political system in Yemen.  I can’t even begin to speculate if he is up to it- power corrupts, after all, and even if it doesn’t not everyone lives up to their early potential.   And, as discussed below, the avalanche of disaster Yemen is facing may prevent everything.   But he is worth keeping his eye on.