The story of regime change Libya provides an interesting contrast with Iraq. At the risk of pushing the comparison too far, it seems as if the U.S. and NATO consciously set out to do the opposite of what had been done in Iraq.
Specifically:
The war in Iraq was an American war. The “coalition of the willing” really wasn’t. The British did send some soldiers and a few other American allies sent token forces, but almost all the roughly 600,000 soldiers and contractors were American. The fact that this was a unilateral American an adventure cost us a great deal in terms of international influence and leadership, not to mention the impact on the budget. (This was also a stark contrast to the first Gulf War that expelled Saddam’s army from Kuwait. The first President Bush did put together an international coalition.)
In contrast, the faces of the fighters on the ground are Libyan. Contrast the pictures from Tripoli of Libyans celebrating with the iconic shot of the American tank toppling the statue of Saddam in Baghdad. The NATO air strikes in Libya over the past five months have mattered but they are not the central story. The handful of western operatives on the ground have been nearly invisible. We have to assume that the intelligence services of several NATO countries were involved in getting arms into the rebels’ hands but that rates no more than a footnote in the drama. The NATO intervention itself was clearly collective operation, with France and Britain leading the way. Ironically that has led to criticism in the United States that Obama did too much by committing any U.S. forces without Congressional approval and that he did too little, by “leading from behind” and not using all the available aircraft. (That unfortunate phrase may be a symptom of how rapidly events moved and the U.S. policy evolved -- no one had second or third thoughts about how badly it would play.)
Operation Iraqi Freedom relied on American military might. It started with the “shock and awe” of the air assault and ended with almost 250,000 American troops on the ground. More importantly, the overall strategy in Iraq was conceived of in military terms. Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney were the chief architects, not Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. The State Department and CIA were relegated to the sidelines as the central decisions were being made. Little attention was given to post conflict issues.
In contrast, the Libyan operation seems to have been strongly focused on what happens after Gadhafi fell. For example, the military authorities running the occupation of Iraq almost immediately disbanded the army and police forces. And shortly after that, as part of the “de-Baathification” effort, essentially gutted all institutions. But even as Tripoli was under siege, the U.S. government and others were urging the Libyan rebels to maintain the few governing institutors Gadhafi had allowed to exist.
Side note: an interesting similarity between the two cases is the fact that the professional military was not very enthusiastic about either one. The objections were operational and in the Iraq case revolved around fears that we were not committing a large enough force. In the Libyan case, the concerns were not using adequate force and the inherent ambiguity in the mission. (Senator John McCain does not make things up, he frequently gives speaks for the military professionals who are constrained from speaking out.)
The U.S. was deeply involved in the organization of a new government for Iraq. The Vice President’s office, the Department of Defense, the CIA and the State Department all had their favorites among the exile community and did what they could to give them prominent roles. The interim constitution created by the Coalition Provisional Authority (i.e. the U.S. occupation) designed a political system based explicitly on ethnic and religious distinctions. That is hardly the sole cause of Iraq’s current problems but it made it nearly impossible for those politicians who sought to bridge the Shi’a-Sunni divide and the Arab-Kurd differences.
NATO and the U.S. have been scrupulous about keeping their distance from the internal workings of the National Transition Council in Libya, even though everyone has their friends among the Libyan expatriate community. The leadership has evolved largely as the result of internal Libyan politics, not the maneuvering of outside patrons. That means we know less about the key players than we did in Iraq in 2005 and that outside actors have less control over the decisions the NTC will take. But it also means the NTC does not have the albatross of foreign intervention around its neck.
A final contrast has hurt the Obama administration. The invasion of Iraq came after a prolonged campaign to justify it to the public. It was a war of choice. A variety of rationales was advanced: Weapons of Mass Destruction, complicity in 9/11, Saddam as uniquely evil, democratizing the Middle East, protecting Israel, enforcing UN Security Council resolutions. At times it almost seemed like a political campaign with a message of the week and something for everybody.
The Libyan intervention was unexpected and unplanned. The Obama administration was treating the Libyan uprising as it had treated other moments in the Arab Spring, making sympathetic noises but keeping its distance. (This, like all policies, was supported by different people for quite different reasons: avoiding the risk of having the protestors tarnished as American agents, preserving relationships and ties with incumbent regime elements, a preference for stability and the devil you know.) In general the administration was all for regime change but not via direct U.S. intervention.
I think the fears of a massacre of civilians in Benghazi created a sense of crisis and a rather hurried decision to cooperate with the French and British who were strong advocates of intervention. There was no time to lay the domestic political groundwork, no time to float various rationales to see which ones worked, no time to develop public opinion. Gadhafi the wacky goofball dictator made a far less scary villain than Saddam Hussein. The long term regime change strategy was swamped by the short term humanitarian intervention. The careful distinction between use of force to protect people and reliance on political means to support regime change is too fine a point to maintain when cruise missiles are streaking overhead and fighter planes are bombing tank columns.
The invasion of Iraq was followed by an insurgency, a near civil war, de facto separation of the Kurdish region, a large number of refugees, and an inability to resolve the most basic issues facing the country. Certainly U.S. policy was not the sole cause of all that, but it was an important contributor.
Libya faces greater challenges now than Iraq did in 2003 after the invasion. Clearly the United States, NATO and/or any other international actor are not going to step in to try to guide (or manipulate) Libya’s development. The Obama administration is hoping that a combination of humanitarian and technical aid plus coaxing and encouragement from the sidelines will be enough to help Libya avoid the doom and gloom outcomes that some analysts fear.
The long term implications for American politics are not clear. The Obama people will certainly claim this as vindication for their strategy. Rightly or wrongly, the administration will be blamed by its critics if things in Libya go badly ... with widespread bloodshed and retaliation, for example, or the emergence of a nationalist, anti-Western regime. But I am not sure this episode will make some great new departure in U.S. foreign policy, as some people have suggested. It is more likely to recede quickly into the background, much as the Clinton administration’s air war in Kosovo has been largely forgotten. Hmm ... there may be some deja vu here after all.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Comments on Syria
I’ve run across a couple of pieces that do an excellent job explaining Syria.
http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/middle-east-north-africa/iraq-syria-lebanon/syria/109-popular-protest-in-north-africa-and-the-middle-east-vii-the-syrian-regimes-slow-motion-suicide.aspx
The International Crisis Group has become a major source for understanding current conflicts around the world, combining good analysis with policy proposals. They have enough street cred that their reports are read in policy making circles.
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero081011
Middle East Research and Information Project is a little edgier than the ICG. Their stuff typically begins with good analysis but does not always make a clear separation between understanding why things are the way they are and prescribing how things ought to be. Their work topically has a “progressive” bias that is a refreshing balance to the usual conventional wisdom.
http://www.crisisgroup.org/en/regions/middle-east-north-africa/iraq-syria-lebanon/syria/109-popular-protest-in-north-africa-and-the-middle-east-vii-the-syrian-regimes-slow-motion-suicide.aspx
The International Crisis Group has become a major source for understanding current conflicts around the world, combining good analysis with policy proposals. They have enough street cred that their reports are read in policy making circles.
http://www.merip.org/mero/mero081011
Middle East Research and Information Project is a little edgier than the ICG. Their stuff typically begins with good analysis but does not always make a clear separation between understanding why things are the way they are and prescribing how things ought to be. Their work topically has a “progressive” bias that is a refreshing balance to the usual conventional wisdom.
Saturday, August 6, 2011
.... to the shores of Tripoli
Among the many important issues and events that have been shoved into the background in the past six weeks have been the messy stalemates in the Middle East. Libya and Syria have gotten some minimal attention; Yemen and Bahrain have gotten less.
Many people find Libya puzzling and somewhat disturbing. It is hard to understand what is going on and equally hard to understand what the U.S. is doing there. Let me try to clarify the major dimensions.
Libya’s Revolution
Like many countries in the Global South, “Libya” was constructed out of three distinct regions of North Africa by European colonialism. Opposition to the Italian occupation provided the primary basis for a Libyan identity. The externally imposed definition of Libya was continued during and after World War II, with British and French occupation leading to independence in 1951.
In 1969 a 27 year old colonel, Moammar Gadhafi, led a military coup against the traditional monarchy that emerged with independence. There were several sources of discontent, an important one was the feeling that Libya was locked in backwardness. Gadhafi had the personal and situational skills and resources to build a coalition of discontented fellow officers; he also saw himself as a visionary and transformative leader. Four years after taking power, he announced a total revolution, in which old political elements would be purged, formal institutions would be abolished, and the masses would rule directly through local consultative assemblies. The rationale and ideology for this attempt to create a new Libyan person in a new Libyan society was spelled out 1975 in the Green Book that proclaimed a third way, neither Communist nor capitalist.
Libya in the Gadhafi Era
Setting out to change everything, from institutions to people’s beliefs in the name of the Truth, led to the creation of a highly repressive, highly intrusive police system. Politics became top down dictation (if I’ve got the Truth, you either see it and agree fully with me or you are mired in lies and evil and need to be dealt with.) In addition to its domestic enemies, “the Third Way” was threatened by traditional Middle Eastern regimes, global Imperialism, and global Communism. The unholy alliance of traditional monarchies and U.S.-led Imperialism was the major external enemy. This led to direct action such as the Lockerbie bombing, assassination attempts on Mubarak and others, and intervention in Chad. It led to indirect actions such as supporting the Irish Republican Army, the Bader-Menihoff Gang, the North Korean regime, among a host of other presumptive revolutionary anti-Imperialists.
The Green Book is quite short and provides little detail on how to run a country. Gadhafi’s regime did not ever generate a coherent strategy for economic development. While oil revenues have been constrained by an international embargo and lack of maintenance for facilities, sizable amounts of money have been poured into the economy with precious little to show for it.
We’re Mad as Hell and We’re Not Going To Take It Any More
The failure of the economy to generate enough jobs for the youth who entered it each year, plus the repressive state apparatus, plus regionalism led to the 2011 rebellion. It is not accidental that it is centered in Benghazi, capital of the easternmost region. Gadhafi’s greatest support is in the westernmost section of the country. The fact that, despite rhetoric about the rule of the masses, Libyan politics is centered on Gadhafi and his personal allies and is almost exclusively top down, has meant that Libyans have had no opportunity to develop organizations or alliances or experiment with the various institutions we usually lump under the head of “civil society.” The lack of organized opposition has meant that the rebellion has suffered from lack of leadership and unity. In March almost everyone outside as well as inside Libya could echo Butch Cassidy, “Who are those guys?”
The rebels’ initial successes came in areas where traditional ties to the capital were weak and there were few personal or tribal links to the regime or to the tribes that most closely identified with the regime. But when the rebellion moved closer to Tripoli and Gadhafi deployed his elite troops, the untrained, undisciplined rebel soldiers were repeatedly routed. As rebel forces retreated to the East, Gadhafi threatened massive and bloody retaliation against “disloyal” elements. This was widely understood inside and outside Libya to portend indiscriminate violence against the citizens of Benghazi and surrounding towns.
NATO gets involved
The decisions to get involved were complex and differed somewhat from country to country. For the United States, I think a very important factor is the personal and professional backgrounds of many of the key policy makers. The Rwandan genocide happened back in 1994 and the Srebenica massacre in 1995, thousands of miles from Libya. But these atrocities, especially Rwanda, are widely regarded as a shameful failure on the part of the international community. They are particularly painful for former members of the Clinton administration (many of whom are part of Obama’s foreign policy team.) The conventional wisdom in the foreign policy establishment is that the United States could and should have exerted leadership to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths. When it appeared that Gadhafi’s elite army units were on the verge of unleashing mass killings in Benghazi, the choice seemed to be between a potentially messy intervention and the specter of a preventable massacre.
There were, of course, other motives and rationales. Everyone involved in policy making brings their own personal and professional interests and judgements to the table; no foreign policy action is ever taken for a single reason. [Quick, stifle the “It’s all about oil!” chants ... if it were all about oil, we’d have been rooting for Gadhafi to win.] For a variety of reasons, from short term questions of available resources to longer term questions of the future of NATO, the U.S. worked actively to make the intervention an international action. Hence NATO states were encouraged to take the lead and the UN Security Council was used to confer international legitimacy. Skillful diplomacy got approval from the Arab League and tacit support from the African Union and token participation from Turkey and Qatar.
A Fine Distinction
From the beginning of talk about intervention in Libya there were two issues, conceptually distinct but damnably hard to separate in practice. One issue was humanitarian intervention: the use of force by outside actors to prevent heinous actions by a government. The other issue was regime change: aiding and abetting an internal political process that would oust Gadhafi and his cronies.
This is not the time or place to discuss in detail the emerging norm in international relations of a “Responsibility to Protect.” The traditional view in international law and politics has been that sovereignty, flowing from the fact that the state is the highest moral authority, means that states must recognize the right of each government to rule its country and treat its people any way it sees fit. A growing body of scholarly analysis and political rhetoric has argued that like all rights, sovereignty comes with a corresponding responsibility. If the state has a right to run its internal affairs any way it sees fit, it has a correspponding duty to protect the well being of its people. This is seen as providing a moral and legal basis for violating the right of sovereignty in egregious cases.
So the U.S. and NATO and a few other states launched a military operation to enforce a no-fly zone over rebel held territory. That quickly morphed into a mission to destroy the ability of the Libyan armed forces to undertake offensive actions on the ground as well. And lots of stuff happened and didn’t happen ... I think it is probably fair to say that the original rosy scenario: some well placed cruise missiles and a moderate number of air strikes against military formations would erase the threat of massive casualties inflicted on civilians, was grossly over optimistic. (So what else is new? SNAFU and FUBAR are far more common than “Golly, that was easier than we thought.”)
At the same time, the U.S., NATO and other states undertook an active campaign to get Gadhafi out of power. This campaign was meant to be political not military and to involve the usual combination of sanctions, overt and covert support for opponents, and widespread condemnation. The aim was to topple Gadhafi from within by encouraging the regime to crumble and collapse. It was expected this would take time, although perhaps not as long as it has.
When tomahawk cruise missiles are exploding in Tripoli and French and British jets are dropping bombs or launching air to ground missiles, it can be darn hard to remember that nice distinction between humanitarian intervention and regime change. What began as a rebellion has grown into a civil war, with two distinct territories, two militaries, and two bodies claiming to be the government of Libya.
There is a military stalemate on the ground (although the rebels are claiming significant progress in the past few days) and slowly increasing support for the rebel government in the international community (most importantly those parts of the community, like the U.S. and UK who have possession of money belonging to Libya.) There is also widespread confusion, ranging from popular opinion in the countries involved to uncertainty about the eventful winners in a factional struggle within the Transitional Government, to when and how this might all end.
The Two Most Critical Issues
The Libyan episode raises a number of questions. The most important issues are: when and where to intervene and the War Powers Resolution.
Virtually no one consistently argues that sovereignty is the only value and any outside intervention in the internal affairs of another state is always wrong. For a considerable period of time the Chinese foreign ministry and its UN delegation actively promoted the widest possible definition of sovereign rights. But China, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council has declined to veto a number of actions, both military and civilian, that appear to violate an absolutist view of sovereignty. Leaving aside the normative arguments, states act as if sovereignty were contingent and other values can sometimes trump it. You don’t have to accept all the arguments advanced by proponents of the strong version of a Right to Protect to arrive at the conclusion that sometimes intervention is OK. Clearly, I think, not every injustice or violation of human rights justifies, let alone demands, an external intervention. But I do not think a contemporary American can argue that the U.S. should never intervene in the affairs of other countries. A moral argument, based on a common humanity and America’s founding values, may or may not be persuasive. There is a hard nosed, eminently practical reason as well. We are the single largest economic unit in a global economy. We are at the center of the global political system. We should understand that the quality of our future depends on the state of the rest of the world. We are a status quo power. We do not want massive change in the distribution of wealth and influence in the world. Injustice breeds instability. A government that harshly abuses many of its own citizens is ultimately a threat to its neighbors and the system as a whole.
The question, then, is not should we or should we not ever intervene. The question is prudence. Given the scope of the evil in another country, given our coercive resources and the resources of the other state, given our ability to bring other countries along (both for leveraging their coercive resources and the legitimacy an international consensus supplies), given the probability that an intervention can be designed and executed that will not cause more harm than it was meant to stop, is this particular intervention a good idea? This means it may be prudence, not hypocrisy, that expalins why we send missiles and planes into Libya but not Syria.
Saying “it depends” is not the easy way out. It is a recipe for soul searching, deep analysis, and spirited debate for each potential situation.
A uniquely American aspect to the Libyan situation is the War Powers Resolution of 1973. [The most relevant provisions allow the President to deploy U.S. armed forces for up to 60 dayus with prior Congressional authorization. The President must inform Congress of the action within 48 hours and seek specific authorization if the use of force lasts longer than 60 days.] It began as a joint resolution of the House and Senate, was vetoed by Richard Nixon. Congress overrode the veto and enacted the Resolution. [Thus it is sometimes referred to as the “War Powerd Resolution” and sometimes “War Powers Act.”] Every Administration since then has sooner or later argued that this is an unconstitutional infringement on Executive Power and every Congress has rejected that argument. Several Presidents have sent formal notifications to Congress after initiating the use of military force, always insisting that they are “consistent” with the legislation , not “pursuant” to it.
President Obama has argued that the initial use of U.S. forces in Libya was terminated before the 60 day notification deadline and U.S. direct involvement in the NATO operation is minimal. The House of Representatives has “rebuked” the President.
It seems to me that one could argue for or against the War Powers Act on legal and Constitutional grounds (it has never been tested in court.) One can also argue both the principle and the application in a specific case on prudential grounds. Declared wars between states are increasingly rare in international politics. The majority of conflicts in the world today are civil wars or insurgencies within a state, often with a lot of involvement by outsiders. If nothing else, I that guarantees that the debate over War Powers and humanitarian intervention will not die down.
Many people find Libya puzzling and somewhat disturbing. It is hard to understand what is going on and equally hard to understand what the U.S. is doing there. Let me try to clarify the major dimensions.
Libya’s Revolution
Like many countries in the Global South, “Libya” was constructed out of three distinct regions of North Africa by European colonialism. Opposition to the Italian occupation provided the primary basis for a Libyan identity. The externally imposed definition of Libya was continued during and after World War II, with British and French occupation leading to independence in 1951.
In 1969 a 27 year old colonel, Moammar Gadhafi, led a military coup against the traditional monarchy that emerged with independence. There were several sources of discontent, an important one was the feeling that Libya was locked in backwardness. Gadhafi had the personal and situational skills and resources to build a coalition of discontented fellow officers; he also saw himself as a visionary and transformative leader. Four years after taking power, he announced a total revolution, in which old political elements would be purged, formal institutions would be abolished, and the masses would rule directly through local consultative assemblies. The rationale and ideology for this attempt to create a new Libyan person in a new Libyan society was spelled out 1975 in the Green Book that proclaimed a third way, neither Communist nor capitalist.
Libya in the Gadhafi Era
Setting out to change everything, from institutions to people’s beliefs in the name of the Truth, led to the creation of a highly repressive, highly intrusive police system. Politics became top down dictation (if I’ve got the Truth, you either see it and agree fully with me or you are mired in lies and evil and need to be dealt with.) In addition to its domestic enemies, “the Third Way” was threatened by traditional Middle Eastern regimes, global Imperialism, and global Communism. The unholy alliance of traditional monarchies and U.S.-led Imperialism was the major external enemy. This led to direct action such as the Lockerbie bombing, assassination attempts on Mubarak and others, and intervention in Chad. It led to indirect actions such as supporting the Irish Republican Army, the Bader-Menihoff Gang, the North Korean regime, among a host of other presumptive revolutionary anti-Imperialists.
The Green Book is quite short and provides little detail on how to run a country. Gadhafi’s regime did not ever generate a coherent strategy for economic development. While oil revenues have been constrained by an international embargo and lack of maintenance for facilities, sizable amounts of money have been poured into the economy with precious little to show for it.
We’re Mad as Hell and We’re Not Going To Take It Any More
The failure of the economy to generate enough jobs for the youth who entered it each year, plus the repressive state apparatus, plus regionalism led to the 2011 rebellion. It is not accidental that it is centered in Benghazi, capital of the easternmost region. Gadhafi’s greatest support is in the westernmost section of the country. The fact that, despite rhetoric about the rule of the masses, Libyan politics is centered on Gadhafi and his personal allies and is almost exclusively top down, has meant that Libyans have had no opportunity to develop organizations or alliances or experiment with the various institutions we usually lump under the head of “civil society.” The lack of organized opposition has meant that the rebellion has suffered from lack of leadership and unity. In March almost everyone outside as well as inside Libya could echo Butch Cassidy, “Who are those guys?”
The rebels’ initial successes came in areas where traditional ties to the capital were weak and there were few personal or tribal links to the regime or to the tribes that most closely identified with the regime. But when the rebellion moved closer to Tripoli and Gadhafi deployed his elite troops, the untrained, undisciplined rebel soldiers were repeatedly routed. As rebel forces retreated to the East, Gadhafi threatened massive and bloody retaliation against “disloyal” elements. This was widely understood inside and outside Libya to portend indiscriminate violence against the citizens of Benghazi and surrounding towns.
NATO gets involved
The decisions to get involved were complex and differed somewhat from country to country. For the United States, I think a very important factor is the personal and professional backgrounds of many of the key policy makers. The Rwandan genocide happened back in 1994 and the Srebenica massacre in 1995, thousands of miles from Libya. But these atrocities, especially Rwanda, are widely regarded as a shameful failure on the part of the international community. They are particularly painful for former members of the Clinton administration (many of whom are part of Obama’s foreign policy team.) The conventional wisdom in the foreign policy establishment is that the United States could and should have exerted leadership to prevent hundreds of thousands of deaths. When it appeared that Gadhafi’s elite army units were on the verge of unleashing mass killings in Benghazi, the choice seemed to be between a potentially messy intervention and the specter of a preventable massacre.
There were, of course, other motives and rationales. Everyone involved in policy making brings their own personal and professional interests and judgements to the table; no foreign policy action is ever taken for a single reason. [Quick, stifle the “It’s all about oil!” chants ... if it were all about oil, we’d have been rooting for Gadhafi to win.] For a variety of reasons, from short term questions of available resources to longer term questions of the future of NATO, the U.S. worked actively to make the intervention an international action. Hence NATO states were encouraged to take the lead and the UN Security Council was used to confer international legitimacy. Skillful diplomacy got approval from the Arab League and tacit support from the African Union and token participation from Turkey and Qatar.
A Fine Distinction
From the beginning of talk about intervention in Libya there were two issues, conceptually distinct but damnably hard to separate in practice. One issue was humanitarian intervention: the use of force by outside actors to prevent heinous actions by a government. The other issue was regime change: aiding and abetting an internal political process that would oust Gadhafi and his cronies.
This is not the time or place to discuss in detail the emerging norm in international relations of a “Responsibility to Protect.” The traditional view in international law and politics has been that sovereignty, flowing from the fact that the state is the highest moral authority, means that states must recognize the right of each government to rule its country and treat its people any way it sees fit. A growing body of scholarly analysis and political rhetoric has argued that like all rights, sovereignty comes with a corresponding responsibility. If the state has a right to run its internal affairs any way it sees fit, it has a correspponding duty to protect the well being of its people. This is seen as providing a moral and legal basis for violating the right of sovereignty in egregious cases.
So the U.S. and NATO and a few other states launched a military operation to enforce a no-fly zone over rebel held territory. That quickly morphed into a mission to destroy the ability of the Libyan armed forces to undertake offensive actions on the ground as well. And lots of stuff happened and didn’t happen ... I think it is probably fair to say that the original rosy scenario: some well placed cruise missiles and a moderate number of air strikes against military formations would erase the threat of massive casualties inflicted on civilians, was grossly over optimistic. (So what else is new? SNAFU and FUBAR are far more common than “Golly, that was easier than we thought.”)
At the same time, the U.S., NATO and other states undertook an active campaign to get Gadhafi out of power. This campaign was meant to be political not military and to involve the usual combination of sanctions, overt and covert support for opponents, and widespread condemnation. The aim was to topple Gadhafi from within by encouraging the regime to crumble and collapse. It was expected this would take time, although perhaps not as long as it has.
When tomahawk cruise missiles are exploding in Tripoli and French and British jets are dropping bombs or launching air to ground missiles, it can be darn hard to remember that nice distinction between humanitarian intervention and regime change. What began as a rebellion has grown into a civil war, with two distinct territories, two militaries, and two bodies claiming to be the government of Libya.
There is a military stalemate on the ground (although the rebels are claiming significant progress in the past few days) and slowly increasing support for the rebel government in the international community (most importantly those parts of the community, like the U.S. and UK who have possession of money belonging to Libya.) There is also widespread confusion, ranging from popular opinion in the countries involved to uncertainty about the eventful winners in a factional struggle within the Transitional Government, to when and how this might all end.
The Two Most Critical Issues
The Libyan episode raises a number of questions. The most important issues are: when and where to intervene and the War Powers Resolution.
Virtually no one consistently argues that sovereignty is the only value and any outside intervention in the internal affairs of another state is always wrong. For a considerable period of time the Chinese foreign ministry and its UN delegation actively promoted the widest possible definition of sovereign rights. But China, as a permanent member of the UN Security Council has declined to veto a number of actions, both military and civilian, that appear to violate an absolutist view of sovereignty. Leaving aside the normative arguments, states act as if sovereignty were contingent and other values can sometimes trump it. You don’t have to accept all the arguments advanced by proponents of the strong version of a Right to Protect to arrive at the conclusion that sometimes intervention is OK. Clearly, I think, not every injustice or violation of human rights justifies, let alone demands, an external intervention. But I do not think a contemporary American can argue that the U.S. should never intervene in the affairs of other countries. A moral argument, based on a common humanity and America’s founding values, may or may not be persuasive. There is a hard nosed, eminently practical reason as well. We are the single largest economic unit in a global economy. We are at the center of the global political system. We should understand that the quality of our future depends on the state of the rest of the world. We are a status quo power. We do not want massive change in the distribution of wealth and influence in the world. Injustice breeds instability. A government that harshly abuses many of its own citizens is ultimately a threat to its neighbors and the system as a whole.
The question, then, is not should we or should we not ever intervene. The question is prudence. Given the scope of the evil in another country, given our coercive resources and the resources of the other state, given our ability to bring other countries along (both for leveraging their coercive resources and the legitimacy an international consensus supplies), given the probability that an intervention can be designed and executed that will not cause more harm than it was meant to stop, is this particular intervention a good idea? This means it may be prudence, not hypocrisy, that expalins why we send missiles and planes into Libya but not Syria.
Saying “it depends” is not the easy way out. It is a recipe for soul searching, deep analysis, and spirited debate for each potential situation.
A uniquely American aspect to the Libyan situation is the War Powers Resolution of 1973. [The most relevant provisions allow the President to deploy U.S. armed forces for up to 60 dayus with prior Congressional authorization. The President must inform Congress of the action within 48 hours and seek specific authorization if the use of force lasts longer than 60 days.] It began as a joint resolution of the House and Senate, was vetoed by Richard Nixon. Congress overrode the veto and enacted the Resolution. [Thus it is sometimes referred to as the “War Powerd Resolution” and sometimes “War Powers Act.”] Every Administration since then has sooner or later argued that this is an unconstitutional infringement on Executive Power and every Congress has rejected that argument. Several Presidents have sent formal notifications to Congress after initiating the use of military force, always insisting that they are “consistent” with the legislation , not “pursuant” to it.
President Obama has argued that the initial use of U.S. forces in Libya was terminated before the 60 day notification deadline and U.S. direct involvement in the NATO operation is minimal. The House of Representatives has “rebuked” the President.
It seems to me that one could argue for or against the War Powers Act on legal and Constitutional grounds (it has never been tested in court.) One can also argue both the principle and the application in a specific case on prudential grounds. Declared wars between states are increasingly rare in international politics. The majority of conflicts in the world today are civil wars or insurgencies within a state, often with a lot of involvement by outsiders. If nothing else, I that guarantees that the debate over War Powers and humanitarian intervention will not die down.
Wednesday, July 27, 2011
International Implications of the Debt "Crisis"
Since everyone else is talking ... or talking about how they’re not talking ... or not talking about how they’re talking ... figure I might as well talk about the debt ceiling kerfuffle. Since I can’t claim any real expertise in American politics or economics, not sure I can say much about the domestic ramifications that hasn’t been said better several other places.
But I think there are some things to be said about the international implications of the spectacle. If there is a failure to raise the debt ceiling, the implications for America’s position in the international system and ability to exert positive leadership will be serious and dramatic. Even if the worst outcome is avoided, this sorry episode will still mark another increment in the changing relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.
There are, I think, three distinct dimensions to this summer’s spectacle, each of which is having a negative affect on the United States in the world: the long term implications of rising deficits, the immediate impact of the dangerous flirtation with default, and the consequences of failed governance.
Funding the National Debt: a problem, not a flaming crisis
The long term implications of budget deficits are not a new issue nor a “crisis” that demands immediate resolution. Lots of folks have pointed out for the much of the past decade (since the twin impacts of the Bush tax cuts and blank check financing for war in Iraq began to be felt) that at some point the deficit would be a problem because of the cost of borrowing on global markets to cover it. The U.S. treasury sells bonds to generate the revenue needed to make up the difference between spending in a given year and revenue (the deficit). The total of all those outstanding bonds is the National Debt. The bonds get sold to investors, including rich folks, money managers, international banks, and foreign governments. It costs you and me as tax payers a little something to meet the interest on those bonds.
[side note -- or rant -- the beguilingly simple comparison to the family budget that some folks love to make, as they piously intone “live within your means” is pretty lame. For starters, there aren’t too many Americans who do not borrow money to buy things they could not otherwise afford, like houses and cars. Secondly, governments are NOT like mom and pop sitting around the kitchen table ... Some pretty powerful economic analysis suggests that effective governments should generally NOT balance their budgets, but should spend more to stimulate the economy when times are bad and build up a surplus to cool off inflation when times are good.]
When it comes time to borrow, the United States has been in a uniquely enviable position since the end of the World War II when the dollar became the international reserve currency. Almost every country wants to have some dollars in its treasury so it and its citizens can do business with the rest of the world. This means the U.S. can sell Treasury bonds with dollar amounts with lower interest than, say, Poland whose bonds come in zlotys. (Zlotys aren’t very useful outside Poland except at selected arcades with old school zlot car tracks.) The second major advantage to the U.S. of the fact that foreigners buy so much of our debt is that they are motivated to avoid screwing up the U.S. economy. Yes, China already owns a large chunk of the U.S. debt and yes, China could really mess us up by refusing to buy any more. But if the dollar collapses then China loses a great deal of money.
There is some point, and no one knows where it is, where U.S. debt gets so large that foreigners start to worry that we won’t pay off our bonds and begin to drive up interest rates on bonds. That makes the debt bigger, of course, and worries foreigners even more, and raises interest rates and that hurts the U.S. economy and slows growth, etc.
The size of the debt needs to be addressed, but not in a fevered panic in the next two weeks.
The “crisis” of 2011 could become real
The current hassle over raising the debt ceiling is a manufactured “crisis,” driven by domestic political calculations. But it is pushing the U.S. and the world much closer to a genuine crisis of confidence.
And that could be a major negative consequence of the debt ceiling brouhaha on America’s international position. One of the things that has made U.S. bonds attractive is the belief that they are as good as gold. Actually, they’re better than gold because bonds pay interest. But if the U.S. cannot pay interest when it is due, even if it is only temporary, then the value of bonds themselves (some part of which rests on the fact that they always pay interest) drops. So all of a sudden folks who hold a lot of Treasury bonds, like big global banks and major countries, realize they had less money than they thought and that affects lending and spending around the world.
What could and should have been a small, short term event threatens to mutate into a much larger, far more serious problem if it raises any doubt about the value of U.S. bonds.
America as a circular firing squad
The second major negative consequence of the current debacle for our position in the world is the perception that the U.S. has a dysfunctional political system. The spectacle of a paralyzed United States government, the concern that even the most routine issues may threaten Armageddon, and the inability of presumptive leaders to lead hurts America’s image and interests.
The damage comes in two ways, I think. At the elite level in foreign countries, it undermines leaders’ confidence in the U.S. as a consistent actor, a country that says what it means and means what it says. At the level of everyday people, it gives “democracy” a bad name. The argument people in the Third World (aka Global South) hear most often from authoritarian leaders is that “democracy” means chaos. Everyday people in the Global South are no more, nor less, sophisticated than everyday people in the United States. They are not deeply immersed in the ins and outs of issues and institutions, they’d rather watch CSI: Las Vegas, Desperate Housewives, or the Bold and Beautiful [the drama, comedy and telenovelas/soap opera series with the largest global audiences in 2010] than CSPAN or a lecture on the difference between a presidential and a parliamentary system. But they do have images of other countries, they do think they know something about the world. And many of them are aware of some kind of political imbroglio in the U.S. This episode by itself is not going to change anyone’s mind, but it is going to have an erosive effect on perceptions of the U.S. as a beacon and model for how to organize a society.
But I think there are some things to be said about the international implications of the spectacle. If there is a failure to raise the debt ceiling, the implications for America’s position in the international system and ability to exert positive leadership will be serious and dramatic. Even if the worst outcome is avoided, this sorry episode will still mark another increment in the changing relationship between the United States and the rest of the world.
There are, I think, three distinct dimensions to this summer’s spectacle, each of which is having a negative affect on the United States in the world: the long term implications of rising deficits, the immediate impact of the dangerous flirtation with default, and the consequences of failed governance.
Funding the National Debt: a problem, not a flaming crisis
The long term implications of budget deficits are not a new issue nor a “crisis” that demands immediate resolution. Lots of folks have pointed out for the much of the past decade (since the twin impacts of the Bush tax cuts and blank check financing for war in Iraq began to be felt) that at some point the deficit would be a problem because of the cost of borrowing on global markets to cover it. The U.S. treasury sells bonds to generate the revenue needed to make up the difference between spending in a given year and revenue (the deficit). The total of all those outstanding bonds is the National Debt. The bonds get sold to investors, including rich folks, money managers, international banks, and foreign governments. It costs you and me as tax payers a little something to meet the interest on those bonds.
[side note -- or rant -- the beguilingly simple comparison to the family budget that some folks love to make, as they piously intone “live within your means” is pretty lame. For starters, there aren’t too many Americans who do not borrow money to buy things they could not otherwise afford, like houses and cars. Secondly, governments are NOT like mom and pop sitting around the kitchen table ... Some pretty powerful economic analysis suggests that effective governments should generally NOT balance their budgets, but should spend more to stimulate the economy when times are bad and build up a surplus to cool off inflation when times are good.]
When it comes time to borrow, the United States has been in a uniquely enviable position since the end of the World War II when the dollar became the international reserve currency. Almost every country wants to have some dollars in its treasury so it and its citizens can do business with the rest of the world. This means the U.S. can sell Treasury bonds with dollar amounts with lower interest than, say, Poland whose bonds come in zlotys. (Zlotys aren’t very useful outside Poland except at selected arcades with old school zlot car tracks.) The second major advantage to the U.S. of the fact that foreigners buy so much of our debt is that they are motivated to avoid screwing up the U.S. economy. Yes, China already owns a large chunk of the U.S. debt and yes, China could really mess us up by refusing to buy any more. But if the dollar collapses then China loses a great deal of money.
There is some point, and no one knows where it is, where U.S. debt gets so large that foreigners start to worry that we won’t pay off our bonds and begin to drive up interest rates on bonds. That makes the debt bigger, of course, and worries foreigners even more, and raises interest rates and that hurts the U.S. economy and slows growth, etc.
The size of the debt needs to be addressed, but not in a fevered panic in the next two weeks.
The “crisis” of 2011 could become real
The current hassle over raising the debt ceiling is a manufactured “crisis,” driven by domestic political calculations. But it is pushing the U.S. and the world much closer to a genuine crisis of confidence.
And that could be a major negative consequence of the debt ceiling brouhaha on America’s international position. One of the things that has made U.S. bonds attractive is the belief that they are as good as gold. Actually, they’re better than gold because bonds pay interest. But if the U.S. cannot pay interest when it is due, even if it is only temporary, then the value of bonds themselves (some part of which rests on the fact that they always pay interest) drops. So all of a sudden folks who hold a lot of Treasury bonds, like big global banks and major countries, realize they had less money than they thought and that affects lending and spending around the world.
What could and should have been a small, short term event threatens to mutate into a much larger, far more serious problem if it raises any doubt about the value of U.S. bonds.
America as a circular firing squad
The second major negative consequence of the current debacle for our position in the world is the perception that the U.S. has a dysfunctional political system. The spectacle of a paralyzed United States government, the concern that even the most routine issues may threaten Armageddon, and the inability of presumptive leaders to lead hurts America’s image and interests.
The damage comes in two ways, I think. At the elite level in foreign countries, it undermines leaders’ confidence in the U.S. as a consistent actor, a country that says what it means and means what it says. At the level of everyday people, it gives “democracy” a bad name. The argument people in the Third World (aka Global South) hear most often from authoritarian leaders is that “democracy” means chaos. Everyday people in the Global South are no more, nor less, sophisticated than everyday people in the United States. They are not deeply immersed in the ins and outs of issues and institutions, they’d rather watch CSI: Las Vegas, Desperate Housewives, or the Bold and Beautiful [the drama, comedy and telenovelas/soap opera series with the largest global audiences in 2010] than CSPAN or a lecture on the difference between a presidential and a parliamentary system. But they do have images of other countries, they do think they know something about the world. And many of them are aware of some kind of political imbroglio in the U.S. This episode by itself is not going to change anyone’s mind, but it is going to have an erosive effect on perceptions of the U.S. as a beacon and model for how to organize a society.
Friday, July 22, 2011
More On Political Islam
As a way of following up and extending the discussion of political Islam let me respond to some questions Cathy raised in an email:
What I think would be helpful as a follow-up would be some explanation of: since these groups and countries are incredibly diverse, how does an outside observer know when “political Islam” IS potentially dangerous to Western democracies? Are there buzzwords to worry about, or others that should be reassuring?
I don’t think it is political Islam that is a threat to the West, but individuals and groups who advocate violence against either us or democratic movements in Muslim countries. The causal dynamics of political violence are complex (hey, they’d try to take back my Political Science degree if I didn’t say that), like all human behavior. And there are major differences between leaders who advocate and organize political violence and followers who carry it out. But neither fits the one dimensional caricature of a simple and simple minded) direct link from a religious commitment to terrorist attacks. Religion, ideology, nationalism, a code of personal honor, among many other value systems, can provide a rationalization for behavior. I don’t mean “rationalization” in the everyday language pejorative sense of a bogus veil of platitudes hiding one’s “true” motives. We have multiple motives, at varying levels of awareness, behind any behavior and underlying every emotion. We use the various ways we think about the world to explain our actions and feelings to ourselves and to others. The buzzwords to watch out for are the exhortations to violence. And you don’t have to be carefully attuned to the nuances of Arabic to pick those up.
Is “jihad” always to be interpreted as calling for physical violence against non-Islamic societies (my guess is not, but I don’t know!).
“Jihad” is typically taken to mean “struggle”. The pious person wages jihad against her or his vices and imperfections. The community is called to jihad against injustice. “Jihad” can also be used in the same ways we use “war” ... as in war on drugs or poverty, as well as war as military conflict. Lots of good Christians still sing “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before” without thinking they are advocating invasion and conquest.
Do Americans just need to educate themselves better about strains of Islam and the cultural background of individual societies? I don’t see THAT happening, unfortunately.
No, I do not think it is necessary for people to become conversant with Islam, let alone hundreds of more or less distinctive cultures. I’m not real fond of the much abused notion of “common sense” but it may be applicable here. Simplistic, sweeping generalizations about other people ought to be always suspect. If you assume that at some deep level all people are alike, that there is only one standard model of “human being,” then you will less likely to buy a superficial account or accept an alien devil image of others.
And what are the alternatives to the “war” paradigm and how can they be couched in a way that people with very little knowledge about Islam or the Middle East can grasp them and be comfortable with them? And if not “war,” how should we respond to groups like Al Quaeda?
If it isn’t “war”, what is it? Crime. Terrorist attacks and threats in Europe are treated as police problems. The attacks on the Madrid and London subways were horrible crimes, not acts of war. And it was the police, not the army, who found the perpetrators. There was no question of making up some special tribunals for trying the accused. (And no hysteria that if we bring a terrorist to the U.S. to try them in court all their friends will come and wreak unspeakable revenge on us!!) The regular courts worked quite well. It’s not that the English and Spanish are more tolerant or more knowledgeable or less frightened by potential terrorism. But it is that their politicians have defined and framed the situation as dealing with crime, not fighting a war.
I don’t mean to gloss over real differences in world views and values. Many people outside North America and Western Europe have profound disagreements with our values and are determined to resist becoming just like us. It is important to know that the aspects of the West that non-Westerners most often reject: materialism, hyper-individualism, moral laxity, hypocritical foreign policies, are the same aspects we ourselves criticize.
What I think would be helpful as a follow-up would be some explanation of: since these groups and countries are incredibly diverse, how does an outside observer know when “political Islam” IS potentially dangerous to Western democracies? Are there buzzwords to worry about, or others that should be reassuring?
I don’t think it is political Islam that is a threat to the West, but individuals and groups who advocate violence against either us or democratic movements in Muslim countries. The causal dynamics of political violence are complex (hey, they’d try to take back my Political Science degree if I didn’t say that), like all human behavior. And there are major differences between leaders who advocate and organize political violence and followers who carry it out. But neither fits the one dimensional caricature of a simple and simple minded) direct link from a religious commitment to terrorist attacks. Religion, ideology, nationalism, a code of personal honor, among many other value systems, can provide a rationalization for behavior. I don’t mean “rationalization” in the everyday language pejorative sense of a bogus veil of platitudes hiding one’s “true” motives. We have multiple motives, at varying levels of awareness, behind any behavior and underlying every emotion. We use the various ways we think about the world to explain our actions and feelings to ourselves and to others. The buzzwords to watch out for are the exhortations to violence. And you don’t have to be carefully attuned to the nuances of Arabic to pick those up.
Is “jihad” always to be interpreted as calling for physical violence against non-Islamic societies (my guess is not, but I don’t know!).
“Jihad” is typically taken to mean “struggle”. The pious person wages jihad against her or his vices and imperfections. The community is called to jihad against injustice. “Jihad” can also be used in the same ways we use “war” ... as in war on drugs or poverty, as well as war as military conflict. Lots of good Christians still sing “Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before” without thinking they are advocating invasion and conquest.
Do Americans just need to educate themselves better about strains of Islam and the cultural background of individual societies? I don’t see THAT happening, unfortunately.
No, I do not think it is necessary for people to become conversant with Islam, let alone hundreds of more or less distinctive cultures. I’m not real fond of the much abused notion of “common sense” but it may be applicable here. Simplistic, sweeping generalizations about other people ought to be always suspect. If you assume that at some deep level all people are alike, that there is only one standard model of “human being,” then you will less likely to buy a superficial account or accept an alien devil image of others.
And what are the alternatives to the “war” paradigm and how can they be couched in a way that people with very little knowledge about Islam or the Middle East can grasp them and be comfortable with them? And if not “war,” how should we respond to groups like Al Quaeda?
If it isn’t “war”, what is it? Crime. Terrorist attacks and threats in Europe are treated as police problems. The attacks on the Madrid and London subways were horrible crimes, not acts of war. And it was the police, not the army, who found the perpetrators. There was no question of making up some special tribunals for trying the accused. (And no hysteria that if we bring a terrorist to the U.S. to try them in court all their friends will come and wreak unspeakable revenge on us!!) The regular courts worked quite well. It’s not that the English and Spanish are more tolerant or more knowledgeable or less frightened by potential terrorism. But it is that their politicians have defined and framed the situation as dealing with crime, not fighting a war.
I don’t mean to gloss over real differences in world views and values. Many people outside North America and Western Europe have profound disagreements with our values and are determined to resist becoming just like us. It is important to know that the aspects of the West that non-Westerners most often reject: materialism, hyper-individualism, moral laxity, hypocritical foreign policies, are the same aspects we ourselves criticize.
Monday, July 18, 2011
Is "polticial Islam" Really So Scary?
Preface
Thinking and talking about Islam and politics is not at all that easy. It is further complicated and confused by the way things are simplified, distorted and reduced to slogans in everyday political conversation.
Political Islam, Radical Islam, Islamic Fundamentalism, Salafism, Wahabbism ... terms used almost interchangeably. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Jihadis, Taliban ... all somehow “Islamic” and they all seem to be against us.
Europeans, especially Germans, French and British, worry about the presence of Muslim communities and often see them as a threat to their identity. The long discussions about Turkey joining the European Union have often had a tacit sub text of “Is a Muslim country compatible with ‘European’ values?”
And for those impatient with details and academic niceties, there’s the late Samuel Huntington’s thesis of an inevitable clash of civilizations, focusing heavily on the presumptive fault lines between Islam and Christianity over the past 1200 years.
One way to understand how all this works from the perspective of political psychology might be to go find some of the more alarmist and paranoid literature from the height of the Cold War and substitute “Islam” for “Communism” and “Muslims” for “Reds.”
The final complication in trying to discuss this is that it is going to be dry and boring compared to the lurid image of “Fanatical Jihadists with Medieval ideology who reject everything about the West and modern life and who hate our freedom waging war around the world .”
Religion and Politics
One way to start Thinking about Islam and politics is to consider the consequences of European expansion on the Middle East. In 1500 the Islamic world (the Middle East and North Africa, Persian Empire, much of the Indian subcontinent, large parts of South and Southeast Asia) was in general superior to Europeans in military prowess, intellectual sophistication, science and technology, and consumer goods. The French and British conquest of Egypt at the end of the 18th Century was a dramatic demonstration that was no longer true. As Europeans came to control more and more of the world and especially after World War I when the Middle East was divided into colonial holdings by the British and French, there was a search for answers to the question of how Islamic societies had come to be weak militarily and comparatively impoverished economially and intellectually.
Broad brush, three answers emerged among Muslim intellectuals and politicians. One, reflecting the secularism of The Enlightenment, was to see Islam as the problem and the relegation of religion to the realm of individual piety and Friday practice. A second response was to maintain the importance and centrality of Islam in society but to call for sweeping reforms to make it compatible with “modernity.” The third response was to argue that the real problem was that much of Islam itself had become corrupt and degenerate and the solution was to return to an earlier, purer, more righteous way of life.
Human beings are delightfully more subtle and complex than this near caricature of broad schools of thought. Individual thinkers, political leaders, or everyday folks don’t think so simplistically. These discussions have always had a very practical orientation, an emphasis on what is to be done here and now. They have reflected the dictum that all politics is local and have had as much to do with regime politics or the issues of the day as they have with abstractions and theological or philosophical fine points. But most of the time one can see someone putting more emphasis on one response over the other two and some people clearly flatly reject one or more of the positions.
Real people in the real world do not sit around making careful distinctions between different dimensions of their lives, or reasoning from ideological first principles to what is to be done . You and I do not say, “Ah yes, this attitude of mine is derived from the Western Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, with a soupcon of the Kantian imperative thrown in for seasoning, along with lingering echoes of the American interpretation of Christianity.” Scholaris and Constitutional lawyers may debate the concept of separation of church and state but you and I are busy living our lives and do not worry about the sacred or profane provenance of a given custom or social norm. Nonetheless, it is as if people in Muslim countries (like people in other countries around the world including the U.S.) have experimented with these three broad approaches to the relationship of religion to politics.
In those countries where resistance to colonialism took the form of a nationalist movement, there was a strong tendency for post colonial governments to reflect a secular, rationalist set of values. The leaders of most of these movements were from families who were not tradition al wealthy land owners. They were from the middle strata of their societies, heavily exposed to Western education and values. Traditional elites and religious leaders were often distrustful of the movements and at times even openly opposed. Turkey under Mustafa Kemal was the first, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Algeria are among many subsequent examples. It is not surprising that these regimes treated religion as part of the background to be tolerated or as a potential source of opposition. Over time secular nationalists and major religious leaders either came to an accommodation, as in Western Africa or Southeast Asia, or religious institutions became centers of anti-regime sentiment.
The traditional monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and the oil rich states of the Persian Gulf, either did not experience direct colonial rule or achieved independence by mutual consent between traditional elites and the colonial power without a mass based independence movement. The legitimacy of the monarchy rests on traditional values which often equate to an apolitical mainstream Islam, social conservatism, and preservation of the old class structure. But most of the monarchies reflect some willingness to accommodate economic and social reforms and adaptation of religious traditions to modernity.
Saudi Arabia is an extreme case. The country owes its origin to an alliance between one set of tribal leaders (the al-Sauds) and a powerful Islamic reformist movement (the Wahabbis.) The royal family and religious establishment remain mutually interdependent. Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia is much more rigid and austere than Islam almost anywhere else and exemplifies the third response: the times are corrupt and decadent because believers have become lax and sinful. Osama bin Laden was initially driven by the conviction that the Saudi royal family was the primary target because it had become corrupt and had to be replaced by a more faithfully Wahabbi elite.
Talking Politics
OK, so Islam is intellectually diverse, there are a variety of ways of thinking about the relationship between one’s religious commitments and the rest of one’s life, and most people are busy doing rather than drawing fine intellectual distinctions or articulating coherent ideologies. If that is not enough to suggest that “political Islam” is a many splendored thing with enough diversity to fit almost any taste, there’s an additional complication for outsiders. That’s the fact that Islam provides the vocabulary of politics.
In the U.S., liberals and conservatives (with the exception of the vocal evangelical Christians) share a common set of terms and labels, even as they disagree about what they mean and which are the good ones. Everyday people use the same terms to argue with each other. One of the good things about a shared vocabulary is that you can do a fair amount of “Ya know what I’m sayin’?” and your listener does. Our political vocabulary comes from some 2500 years of the Western tradition.
Islam predominates in quite different societies that are quite different from the advanced capitalist milieu of North America and Western Europe, whether we think of the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent or Southeast Asia. Islam and the cultures of its members provides the vocabulary for much of politics in these countries. For someone to couch a political or social argument in terms of what is and is not properly Islamic can be, at best, odd and at worst off putting to you and me because most of us don’t routinely frame issues in terms of what is or isn’t “American.” Debates about what is and what is not “Islamic” are typically ignited by ideas or behaviors that are coming into Islamic societies from outside. Some people use “Islam” to argue against innovation and change or the foreign (like the Saudi Arabian cleric who condemned Pokemon as “un-Islamic”) while others use the argument to justify change. A good recent example is the argument made by the head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo (the preeminent university in Islam for the past several centuries) in support of the changes and reforms in Egypt. The document states that democracy is “the modern formula for the Islamic precept of shura (consultation),” and the author supports “the people’s representatives endowed with the power of legislation in accordance with the precepts of true Islam—a religion which has never throughout its history experienced a religious or a theocratic state.”
It is hard for us outsiders to follow the intellectual currents in the long running debate about Islam and politics, and the very language of the discussion further clouds the issues. It gets very hard to remember that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is not identical to the Brotherhood in Syria or Jordan. The distinctions between the Sunni political tradition in most of the Muslim world and Shi’i tradition in Iran and its neighbors is hugely important to insiders but largely opaque to most outsiders. The debate over religion and politics is sometimes an intellectual exercise and more often the context for rough and tumble practical politics. Positions held by individuals and groups evolve and mutate depending on their political fortunes. Individual human beings always have multiple motives behind what they do but you and I are prone to thinking other people have one “true” motive for their behavior and prone to accept a simplistic account. Consider a suicide bomber who exclaims “God is Great” as he detonates the dynamite vest. It is all too easy to cast him as an Islamic extremist whose religious convictions led him to murder innocent people.
Another unfortunate casualty of language is Islam itself. It is not just that Arabic is the language of Islam, albeit not the language of the majority of Muslims. Even in English, the terms of the discussion are unfamiliar. The result is that Islam is seen as exotic and almost disturbingly alien to many in the West. The critical fact that Islam’s vision of the good person and people’s relationship to God is very similar to Christianity’s gets lost.
No wonder people who are trying to make some sense of America’s relationship to the Middle East and Islam in general fall back on some simplistic version of “radical Islam” or “fundamentalism” and urge us to struggle against, if not go to war with, this pernicious ideology.
The Point Is
First (and maybe foremost) a caution. Political Islam has received a great deal of attention in the last few years and some people are greatly concerned about its potential impact on the Arab Spring. But the rallying cries and slogans during the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt were couched in liberal democratic language. Although the regimes in both Syria and Bahrain have tried to paint their opponents as Iranian-inspired Islamists, and even Muammar Qhadafi has tried to portray himself as the last bastion against “extremism”, the opposition is motivated by a wide range of political ideas and interests. “Political Islam” is not a simple, unified world view nor is it the only major context for the next stage of political development for the 1.6 billion people in the world who are Muslims.
There are some conclusions that can be drawn from this very sketchy overview:
“Political Islam” covers a wide range of positions, from support for liberal democratic institutions to attempts to rethink “democracy” to calls for a theocracy;
Some versions of political Islam are associated with violence directed against both internal enemies and the West, most are not;
The way we in the West think and talk about Islam and politics may be as consequential as the ways people in Islamic communities think and talk about it.
By that I mean that if we frame the question as a struggle or “war” with an ideology, it has two detrimental consequences. One, the “enemy” becomes a ghostly abstraction, a frightening chimera, instead of specific individuals or groups with concrete capabilities and intentions to harm people. Second, the metaphor of “war” has profound ramifications. It is “war” then it is a military struggle and violent coercion takes priority over persuasion and subtlety. The “war on terror” launched after 9/11 has accelerated and deepened the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.
Thinking and talking about Islam and politics is not at all that easy. It is further complicated and confused by the way things are simplified, distorted and reduced to slogans in everyday political conversation.
Political Islam, Radical Islam, Islamic Fundamentalism, Salafism, Wahabbism ... terms used almost interchangeably. Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Jihadis, Taliban ... all somehow “Islamic” and they all seem to be against us.
Europeans, especially Germans, French and British, worry about the presence of Muslim communities and often see them as a threat to their identity. The long discussions about Turkey joining the European Union have often had a tacit sub text of “Is a Muslim country compatible with ‘European’ values?”
And for those impatient with details and academic niceties, there’s the late Samuel Huntington’s thesis of an inevitable clash of civilizations, focusing heavily on the presumptive fault lines between Islam and Christianity over the past 1200 years.
One way to understand how all this works from the perspective of political psychology might be to go find some of the more alarmist and paranoid literature from the height of the Cold War and substitute “Islam” for “Communism” and “Muslims” for “Reds.”
The final complication in trying to discuss this is that it is going to be dry and boring compared to the lurid image of “Fanatical Jihadists with Medieval ideology who reject everything about the West and modern life and who hate our freedom waging war around the world .”
Religion and Politics
One way to start Thinking about Islam and politics is to consider the consequences of European expansion on the Middle East. In 1500 the Islamic world (the Middle East and North Africa, Persian Empire, much of the Indian subcontinent, large parts of South and Southeast Asia) was in general superior to Europeans in military prowess, intellectual sophistication, science and technology, and consumer goods. The French and British conquest of Egypt at the end of the 18th Century was a dramatic demonstration that was no longer true. As Europeans came to control more and more of the world and especially after World War I when the Middle East was divided into colonial holdings by the British and French, there was a search for answers to the question of how Islamic societies had come to be weak militarily and comparatively impoverished economially and intellectually.
Broad brush, three answers emerged among Muslim intellectuals and politicians. One, reflecting the secularism of The Enlightenment, was to see Islam as the problem and the relegation of religion to the realm of individual piety and Friday practice. A second response was to maintain the importance and centrality of Islam in society but to call for sweeping reforms to make it compatible with “modernity.” The third response was to argue that the real problem was that much of Islam itself had become corrupt and degenerate and the solution was to return to an earlier, purer, more righteous way of life.
Human beings are delightfully more subtle and complex than this near caricature of broad schools of thought. Individual thinkers, political leaders, or everyday folks don’t think so simplistically. These discussions have always had a very practical orientation, an emphasis on what is to be done here and now. They have reflected the dictum that all politics is local and have had as much to do with regime politics or the issues of the day as they have with abstractions and theological or philosophical fine points. But most of the time one can see someone putting more emphasis on one response over the other two and some people clearly flatly reject one or more of the positions.
Real people in the real world do not sit around making careful distinctions between different dimensions of their lives, or reasoning from ideological first principles to what is to be done . You and I do not say, “Ah yes, this attitude of mine is derived from the Western Enlightenment tradition of rationalism, with a soupcon of the Kantian imperative thrown in for seasoning, along with lingering echoes of the American interpretation of Christianity.” Scholaris and Constitutional lawyers may debate the concept of separation of church and state but you and I are busy living our lives and do not worry about the sacred or profane provenance of a given custom or social norm. Nonetheless, it is as if people in Muslim countries (like people in other countries around the world including the U.S.) have experimented with these three broad approaches to the relationship of religion to politics.
In those countries where resistance to colonialism took the form of a nationalist movement, there was a strong tendency for post colonial governments to reflect a secular, rationalist set of values. The leaders of most of these movements were from families who were not tradition al wealthy land owners. They were from the middle strata of their societies, heavily exposed to Western education and values. Traditional elites and religious leaders were often distrustful of the movements and at times even openly opposed. Turkey under Mustafa Kemal was the first, Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and Algeria are among many subsequent examples. It is not surprising that these regimes treated religion as part of the background to be tolerated or as a potential source of opposition. Over time secular nationalists and major religious leaders either came to an accommodation, as in Western Africa or Southeast Asia, or religious institutions became centers of anti-regime sentiment.
The traditional monarchies like Saudi Arabia, Morocco, and the oil rich states of the Persian Gulf, either did not experience direct colonial rule or achieved independence by mutual consent between traditional elites and the colonial power without a mass based independence movement. The legitimacy of the monarchy rests on traditional values which often equate to an apolitical mainstream Islam, social conservatism, and preservation of the old class structure. But most of the monarchies reflect some willingness to accommodate economic and social reforms and adaptation of religious traditions to modernity.
Saudi Arabia is an extreme case. The country owes its origin to an alliance between one set of tribal leaders (the al-Sauds) and a powerful Islamic reformist movement (the Wahabbis.) The royal family and religious establishment remain mutually interdependent. Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia is much more rigid and austere than Islam almost anywhere else and exemplifies the third response: the times are corrupt and decadent because believers have become lax and sinful. Osama bin Laden was initially driven by the conviction that the Saudi royal family was the primary target because it had become corrupt and had to be replaced by a more faithfully Wahabbi elite.
Talking Politics
OK, so Islam is intellectually diverse, there are a variety of ways of thinking about the relationship between one’s religious commitments and the rest of one’s life, and most people are busy doing rather than drawing fine intellectual distinctions or articulating coherent ideologies. If that is not enough to suggest that “political Islam” is a many splendored thing with enough diversity to fit almost any taste, there’s an additional complication for outsiders. That’s the fact that Islam provides the vocabulary of politics.
In the U.S., liberals and conservatives (with the exception of the vocal evangelical Christians) share a common set of terms and labels, even as they disagree about what they mean and which are the good ones. Everyday people use the same terms to argue with each other. One of the good things about a shared vocabulary is that you can do a fair amount of “Ya know what I’m sayin’?” and your listener does. Our political vocabulary comes from some 2500 years of the Western tradition.
Islam predominates in quite different societies that are quite different from the advanced capitalist milieu of North America and Western Europe, whether we think of the Middle East and North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, the Indian subcontinent or Southeast Asia. Islam and the cultures of its members provides the vocabulary for much of politics in these countries. For someone to couch a political or social argument in terms of what is and is not properly Islamic can be, at best, odd and at worst off putting to you and me because most of us don’t routinely frame issues in terms of what is or isn’t “American.” Debates about what is and what is not “Islamic” are typically ignited by ideas or behaviors that are coming into Islamic societies from outside. Some people use “Islam” to argue against innovation and change or the foreign (like the Saudi Arabian cleric who condemned Pokemon as “un-Islamic”) while others use the argument to justify change. A good recent example is the argument made by the head of Al-Azhar University in Cairo (the preeminent university in Islam for the past several centuries) in support of the changes and reforms in Egypt. The document states that democracy is “the modern formula for the Islamic precept of shura (consultation),” and the author supports “the people’s representatives endowed with the power of legislation in accordance with the precepts of true Islam—a religion which has never throughout its history experienced a religious or a theocratic state.”
It is hard for us outsiders to follow the intellectual currents in the long running debate about Islam and politics, and the very language of the discussion further clouds the issues. It gets very hard to remember that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is not identical to the Brotherhood in Syria or Jordan. The distinctions between the Sunni political tradition in most of the Muslim world and Shi’i tradition in Iran and its neighbors is hugely important to insiders but largely opaque to most outsiders. The debate over religion and politics is sometimes an intellectual exercise and more often the context for rough and tumble practical politics. Positions held by individuals and groups evolve and mutate depending on their political fortunes. Individual human beings always have multiple motives behind what they do but you and I are prone to thinking other people have one “true” motive for their behavior and prone to accept a simplistic account. Consider a suicide bomber who exclaims “God is Great” as he detonates the dynamite vest. It is all too easy to cast him as an Islamic extremist whose religious convictions led him to murder innocent people.
Another unfortunate casualty of language is Islam itself. It is not just that Arabic is the language of Islam, albeit not the language of the majority of Muslims. Even in English, the terms of the discussion are unfamiliar. The result is that Islam is seen as exotic and almost disturbingly alien to many in the West. The critical fact that Islam’s vision of the good person and people’s relationship to God is very similar to Christianity’s gets lost.
No wonder people who are trying to make some sense of America’s relationship to the Middle East and Islam in general fall back on some simplistic version of “radical Islam” or “fundamentalism” and urge us to struggle against, if not go to war with, this pernicious ideology.
The Point Is
First (and maybe foremost) a caution. Political Islam has received a great deal of attention in the last few years and some people are greatly concerned about its potential impact on the Arab Spring. But the rallying cries and slogans during the demonstrations in Tunisia and Egypt were couched in liberal democratic language. Although the regimes in both Syria and Bahrain have tried to paint their opponents as Iranian-inspired Islamists, and even Muammar Qhadafi has tried to portray himself as the last bastion against “extremism”, the opposition is motivated by a wide range of political ideas and interests. “Political Islam” is not a simple, unified world view nor is it the only major context for the next stage of political development for the 1.6 billion people in the world who are Muslims.
There are some conclusions that can be drawn from this very sketchy overview:
“Political Islam” covers a wide range of positions, from support for liberal democratic institutions to attempts to rethink “democracy” to calls for a theocracy;
Some versions of political Islam are associated with violence directed against both internal enemies and the West, most are not;
The way we in the West think and talk about Islam and politics may be as consequential as the ways people in Islamic communities think and talk about it.
By that I mean that if we frame the question as a struggle or “war” with an ideology, it has two detrimental consequences. One, the “enemy” becomes a ghostly abstraction, a frightening chimera, instead of specific individuals or groups with concrete capabilities and intentions to harm people. Second, the metaphor of “war” has profound ramifications. It is “war” then it is a military struggle and violent coercion takes priority over persuasion and subtlety. The “war on terror” launched after 9/11 has accelerated and deepened the militarization of U.S. foreign policy.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
The Hard Road Ahead for South Sudan
After over 20 years of brutal civil war and excruciatingly difficult negotiations that succeeded only because of overwhelming pressure on Khartoum from much of the rest of the world, South Sudan has proudly taken its place as a sovereign state. That was the easy part. The next stage, creating a viable state that meets the economic, political and social needs of its people is a daunting project that will require unmatched courage and sacrifice from an entire generation of both leaders and ordinary citizens.
The conflict -- more precisely, conflicts -- in Sudan have never been simply North versus South, Arab versus African, or Muslim versus non-Muslim, nor good versus evil (although given the behavior of the government in Khartoum it is very hard to avoid that frame.) Sudan, like so many countries in the global South, is a largely artificial set of borders imposed on a complex and diverse set of pre-existing communities. In many countries in Africa and elsewhere leaders have at least tried to create a sense of national identity, of membership in a new community that transcended older, narrower identities, but not in Sudan. Since independence in 1956 successive governments have taken a page out of the British colonial playbook and kept the various communities divided. Because the government in Khartoum, controlled by a rigid Islamist ideology, tried to impose Islamic sharia law throughout the country, the primary fault line of conflict for the past 40 years has been along the divide between those groups in the North of the country most heavily influenced by Arab culture and Islam and those in the South whose cultures are closer to those of their neighbors in Kenya, Uganda, and Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The North-South conflict transcended and muted other conflicts, such as that between village farmers and pastoral nomads, or between large “tribal” communities in the South such as the Nuer and Dinka. By the time a loose coalition of international actors, including Sudan’s African neighbors, the United States, and several Western European countries, had brokered peace talks, there were two main protagonists. The government of Sudan and its military (“Khartoum”) and the major opposition movement, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement and its military wing, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLM/A).
On a side note, the ongoing conflict in Darfur revolves around the success of the Khartoum government in exploiting tensions between village farmers and nomads with their herds of goats and camels. It is not “Arabs” versus “Africans” or Muslims versus non-Muslims.
On a side note to a side note, the theme of conflict between nomadic herders and settled farmers is ancient and seemingly universal. The conflict makes a dramatic entry in Western literature with the fratricidal clash between Cain the farmer and Abel the shepherd (originating, I’d guess in the period in which the Children of Israel were wandering the desert.) Oklahoma! is a more modern version.
The challenges facing the newly independent South Sudan are both external and internal. The external challenges are unresolved issues with the North, including continued armed conflict in the contested areas of Abiyea, Kordofan, and the Blue Nile. The exact terms and conditions under which North and South would cooperate and share oil revenues were only vaguely defined in the 2005 peace agreement and will have to be worked out quickly because oil represents the major (in the cased of the South, virtually the only) source of revenue for the government. (There is a large cautionary literature on oil as a curse rather than a blessing for a poor country.)
The internal challenges are staggering. Aside from oil, the South has no natural resources and what little infrastructure existed at one time has been severely eroded by the decades of war. Subsistence agriculture and animal herding employ almost all South Sudanese. Almost all manufactured goods are implored via the North. The international community has contributed billions of dollars through the UN and other agencies over the years and major donor countries have promised to continue aid. The diaspora community, largely in Britain and the U.S., has been a source of aid. A number of young men and women who have returned from the diaspora to provide the new government with significant expertise.
Regardless of regime type or ideology, ultimately governments have to deliver the goods and make people feel that they are better off now than they were. Poverty exacerbates frictions between communities and fuels suspicions that “those people” are getting more than their fair share or are undermining “our” progress. Poverty can make politics a zero sum game where benefits for one group come at the expense of everyone else. The challenges of poverty heighten the temptation to create a single party state and have it degenerate into a wealth producing mechanism for a ruling elite. Poverty makes it that much more difficult for the government of South Sudan to reintegrate demobilized soldiers into civilian life and meet the needs of the thousands of veterans of the long conflict.
The great hope for the future, I think, is the immense enthusiasm and optimism of the people. If today’s euphoria and zeal can be channeled into a patient, determined commitment to a long, incremental process of growth and development, the great promise of the South can be realized.
The conflict -- more precisely, conflicts -- in Sudan have never been simply North versus South, Arab versus African, or Muslim versus non-Muslim, nor good versus evil (although given the behavior of the government in Khartoum it is very hard to avoid that frame.) Sudan, like so many countries in the global South, is a largely artificial set of borders imposed on a complex and diverse set of pre-existing communities. In many countries in Africa and elsewhere leaders have at least tried to create a sense of national identity, of membership in a new community that transcended older, narrower identities, but not in Sudan. Since independence in 1956 successive governments have taken a page out of the British colonial playbook and kept the various communities divided. Because the government in Khartoum, controlled by a rigid Islamist ideology, tried to impose Islamic sharia law throughout the country, the primary fault line of conflict for the past 40 years has been along the divide between those groups in the North of the country most heavily influenced by Arab culture and Islam and those in the South whose cultures are closer to those of their neighbors in Kenya, Uganda, and Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The North-South conflict transcended and muted other conflicts, such as that between village farmers and pastoral nomads, or between large “tribal” communities in the South such as the Nuer and Dinka. By the time a loose coalition of international actors, including Sudan’s African neighbors, the United States, and several Western European countries, had brokered peace talks, there were two main protagonists. The government of Sudan and its military (“Khartoum”) and the major opposition movement, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Movement and its military wing, the Sudanese Peoples Liberation Army (SPLM/A).
On a side note, the ongoing conflict in Darfur revolves around the success of the Khartoum government in exploiting tensions between village farmers and nomads with their herds of goats and camels. It is not “Arabs” versus “Africans” or Muslims versus non-Muslims.
On a side note to a side note, the theme of conflict between nomadic herders and settled farmers is ancient and seemingly universal. The conflict makes a dramatic entry in Western literature with the fratricidal clash between Cain the farmer and Abel the shepherd (originating, I’d guess in the period in which the Children of Israel were wandering the desert.) Oklahoma! is a more modern version.
The challenges facing the newly independent South Sudan are both external and internal. The external challenges are unresolved issues with the North, including continued armed conflict in the contested areas of Abiyea, Kordofan, and the Blue Nile. The exact terms and conditions under which North and South would cooperate and share oil revenues were only vaguely defined in the 2005 peace agreement and will have to be worked out quickly because oil represents the major (in the cased of the South, virtually the only) source of revenue for the government. (There is a large cautionary literature on oil as a curse rather than a blessing for a poor country.)
The internal challenges are staggering. Aside from oil, the South has no natural resources and what little infrastructure existed at one time has been severely eroded by the decades of war. Subsistence agriculture and animal herding employ almost all South Sudanese. Almost all manufactured goods are implored via the North. The international community has contributed billions of dollars through the UN and other agencies over the years and major donor countries have promised to continue aid. The diaspora community, largely in Britain and the U.S., has been a source of aid. A number of young men and women who have returned from the diaspora to provide the new government with significant expertise.
Regardless of regime type or ideology, ultimately governments have to deliver the goods and make people feel that they are better off now than they were. Poverty exacerbates frictions between communities and fuels suspicions that “those people” are getting more than their fair share or are undermining “our” progress. Poverty can make politics a zero sum game where benefits for one group come at the expense of everyone else. The challenges of poverty heighten the temptation to create a single party state and have it degenerate into a wealth producing mechanism for a ruling elite. Poverty makes it that much more difficult for the government of South Sudan to reintegrate demobilized soldiers into civilian life and meet the needs of the thousands of veterans of the long conflict.
The great hope for the future, I think, is the immense enthusiasm and optimism of the people. If today’s euphoria and zeal can be channeled into a patient, determined commitment to a long, incremental process of growth and development, the great promise of the South can be realized.
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