Much of the president's speeches during his tour of the Middle East have involved rallying the Arab states to guard against the threat of Iran. However, according to Shibley Telhami at the Brookings Institution, Iran is indeed a threat to many Arab regimes, but not in the way you think. Although the article looks more at how Arab-Israeli peace making is the key to security rather than countering Iran, I'm going to focus on the disparity between the publics and their governments.
Its safe to say that there are more dictatorships disguised as democracies in the Middle East than there are actual democracies. Each of these regimes sees a common threat in Iran, Islamic fundamentalism. But they are not threatened by in the same way we here in the West are. The Iranian Revolution has been a scary thing for many nation states in the Middle East. Perhaps the only thing scarier than free elections for these governments is the idea of another Islamic revolution happening within their own borders.
The more the autocrats try to hold on to power by supressing the more radical Islamist movements, the stronger those movements become. And in many cases, as with Hamas and Hezbollah, those movements begin to provide the populations with what the government does not: hospitals, education, etc.
A US military presence is required to provide security for the governments, but as Telhami points out, those forces are not there with the mission to protect anything other than American interests. And then we come to a paradox. Military bases in the Middle East protect countries from militants (in theory at least) but the American presence creates a lot of resentment amongst the public and provides fuel for the militants who can say, "Look, Americans are everywhere, they're evil overlords who control everything." So the threat, or perceived threat amongst the people, isn't Iran, it us.
I don't have the answer to that puzzle yet. But I'll let you guys know when I do. In the meantime, add your own thoughts.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Oh noes! Its a paradox!
Posted by The Odalisque at 10:42 AM
Labels: brookings institution, bush's tour of the middle east, hamas, hezbollah, iran, paradox, shibley telhami
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5 comments:
It could be that the strategy of US military involvement in various Middle Eastern countries is analogous to the containment strategy of the Cold War. Countries in that geographic region are, because of the cultural history of their populations, somewhat susceptible to revolutions of the sort that happened in Iran. A modified counterinsurgency plan might inhibit this, and isolate Iran as a political center of this ideology. The question you raise is a very serious one for a plan conceived this way. Any solution that maintains an American security presence threatens to look like cultural imperialism; I imagine a few subversive strategies to emphasize Western values in communities could be instituted on a paramilitary or civilian level by American specialists and politicians. The economic pressure to comport one's country to Western standards from the top down is already present and could be likewise enhanced. These general descriptions of more thorough methods might be effective, but in the long run could be challenged with claims of aggressive cultural interference, to the point of intentionally watering down the aspects of Islam and Middle Eastern culture in general that are undesirable to Western powers and the value systems they embody. Another serious problem, which may not be realistic for some time, is the undue emphasis a plan conceived this way places on geography. Assuming continued telecommunications innovation, expansion, and densification, not only fringe terrorist cells but even relatively mainstream nonstate actors might be able to effectively decentralize, both hierarchically and physically. A strategically located military base slowly loses that quality of strategic location. Security concerns will level out across the territory controlled by any given state or alliance, or through the world at large. This may not be realistic for radical Islamic groups that try to use traditional or reinterpreted traditional narratives to give their programs legitimacy, but adaptation is possible, and certainly other resistance groups in general might use strategies like this. I admit I hurried through this explanation (much like I did on my Strategy, Policy, and War final exam last semester), but if that wasn't very clear I could try again. This isn't something I've had time to deeply research, but it's one of the areas I'm very interested in, and with some luck I could look at with the eyes of a graduate student next year and do more for it.
I think what Joe is trying to say is that the U.S.' conflict with the Mid East can't be fought on purely military (or economic) grounds; And indeed doing so would create a greater cultural backlash.
The conflict is an ideological one and must be won on ideological grounds. For this reason, the U.S. is in danger of losing.
"Subversive strategies" to influence Mid East culture have been used for some time now by U.S. forces (belatedly, for sure). However, any such efforts will be confounded by the fact that the Islamic extremists have a clearly articulated ideology (Islam as supreme law in all aspects of life both public and private), goals (world domination of Islam, among other political goals), and a righteousness the U.S. can't hope to match.
Until the United States identifies ideologically what has made this nation great and the direction we hope to go, radical Islam will continue to attract supporters, especially among the idealistic young.
Not quite. For one, I am rather confident that the US, as a major component of Western culture and values as a whole, is not going to be in a position to 'lose' as such. Not that I see it as a conflict in those terms. Western culture as an ideology won't 'win' either, it will simply disassemble and assimilate the cultural identifiers of Islam, Middle Eastern tribes and proto-nations, and basically everything else it comes to surround (which seems to be everything). I'm not saying this is desirable, or that any particular self-identifying faction will stand to benefit or direct this, just that the social structures and technological developments of the current age make this fairly likely. The age of youtube, wikipedia, blogs, viral advertising, etc. Clearly articulated ideology they do have, but many aspects of it are rather rigid and at odds with more flexible values and modes of interaction that are the hallmarks of the kind of society the US is becoming.
#1. Joe, you seem to have a very good grasp of on the ground military and intelligence tactics that I do not. Go you.
#2 I have to disagree with both you and Charles with the notion of this being an ideological war. A war of ideologies implies that one is good and one is bad, and that everyone on the planet must adapt into the "good" ideology. I don't think the world is all that black and white. Radicalism has existed in every civilization in every century from the dawn of time (or thereabouts). Islamic radicalism has become a huge issue today because of compounding social, political, and economical factors. If I had to label the current global crisis I might label it as an identity war, where various peoples are fighting over who they are in relation to themselves and their neighbors and are using various ideas to distinguish themselves. The main two ideas that are dominating conflicts today, as I see it, are ethnicity and religion.
#3 I don't know if I'd go far as to say The West will disassemble into non-western modifiers, at least not in the next few centuries. I'm actually not so good at predicting the future, so I don't know what would be the alternative. But in any case, I don't think that's it.
I have a handful of .pdf files of various articles on the subject of counterinsurgency warfare, if you're interested, but the primary text I learned the classical application of it from was David Galula's "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice." It's only about a hundred pages and is actually dated to the 60s, but it's very straightforward and gives a good place to start looking at more recent situations. PSI republished it in 2006, so your school library should have it available somewhere. Other than that, I'm going to have to brush off the suggestion that I have a settled evaluation of these ideologies, at least not in this kind of arena. For now I'm just interested in sorting out what I see.
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