By James Glanz
The New York Times
October 25, 2009
Maisoncelle, France — The heavy clay-laced mud behind the cattle pen on Antoine Renault’s farm looks as treacherous as it must have been nearly 600 years ago, when King Henry V rode from a spot near here to lead a sodden and exhausted English Army against a French force that was said to outnumber his by as much as five to one.
No one can ever take away the shocking victory by Henry and his “band of brothers,” as Shakespeare would famously call them, on St. Crispin’s Day, Oct. 25, 1415. They devastated a force of heavily armored French nobles who had gotten bogged down in the region’s sucking mud, riddled by thousands of arrows from English longbowmen and outmaneuvered by common soldiers with much lighter gear. It would become known as the Battle of Agincourt.
But Agincourt’s status as perhaps the greatest victory against overwhelming odds in military history — and a keystone of the English self-image — has been called into doubt by a group of historians in Britain and France who have painstakingly combed an array of military and tax records from that time and now take a skeptical view of the figures handed down by medieval chroniclers.
The historians have concluded that the English could not have been outnumbered by more than about two to one. And depending on how the math is carried out, Henry may well have faced something closer to an even fight, said Anne Curry, a professor at the University of Southampton who is leading the study.
Those cold figures threaten an image of the battle that even professional researchers and academics have been reluctant to challenge in the face of Shakespearean prose and centuries of English pride, Ms. Curry said.
“It’s just a myth, but it’s a myth that’s part of the British psyche,” Ms. Curry said.
The work, which has received both glowing praise and sharp criticism from other historians in the United States and Europe, is the most striking of the revisionist accounts to emerge from a new science of military history. The new accounts tend to be not only more quantitative but also more attuned to political, cultural and technological factors, and focus more on the experience of the common soldier than on grand strategies and heroic deeds.
The approach has drastically changed views on everything from Roman battles with Germanic tribes, to Napoleon’s disastrous occupation of Spain, to the Tet offensive in the Vietnam War. But the most telling gauge of the respect being given to the new historians and their penchant for tearing down established wisdom is that it has now become almost routine for American commanders to call on them for advice on strategy and tactics in Afghanistan, Iraq and other present-day conflicts.
The most influential example is the “Counterinsurgency Field Manual” adopted in 2006 by the United States Army and Marines and smack in the middle of the debate over whether to increase troop levels in Afghanistan.
Gen. David H. Petraeus, who oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan as the head of the United States Central Command, drew on dozens of academic historians and other experts to create the manual. And he named Conrad Crane, director of the United States Army Military History Institute at the Army War College, as the lead writer.
Drawing on dozens of historical conflicts, the manual’s prime conclusion is the assertion that insurgencies cannot be defeated without protecting and winning over the general population, regardless of how effective direct strikes on enemy fighters may be.
Mr. Crane said that some of his own early historical research involved a comparison of strategic bombing campaigns with attacks on civilians by rampaging armies during the Hundred Years’ War, when England tried and ultimately failed to assert control over continental France. Agincourt was perhaps the most stirring victory the English would ever achieve on French soil during the conflict.
The Hundred Years’ War never made it into the field manual — the name itself may have served as a deterrent — but after sounding numerous cautions on the vast differences in time, technology and political aims, historians working in the area say that there are some uncanny parallels with contemporary foreign conflicts.
For one thing, by the time Henry landed near the mouth of the Seine on Aug. 14, 1415, and began a rather uninspiring siege of a town called Harfleur, France was on the verge of a civil war, with factions called the Burgundians and the Armagnacs at loggerheads. Henry would eventually forge an alliance with the Burgundians, who in today’s terms would become his “local security forces” in Normandy, and he cultivated the support of local merchants and clerics, all practices that would have been heartily endorsed by the counterinsurgency manual.
“I’m not one who sees history repeating itself, but I think a lot of attitudes do,” said Kelly DeVries, a professor of history at Loyola College in Maryland who has written extensively on medieval warfare. Mr. DeVries said that fighters from across the region began filtering toward the Armagnac camp as soon as Henry became allied with their enemies. “Very much like Al Qaeda in Iraq, there were very diverse forces coming from very, very different places to fight,” Mr. DeVries said.
But first Henry would have his chance at Agincourt. After taking Harfleur, he marched rapidly north and crossed the Somme River, his army depleted by dysentery and battle losses and growing hungry and fatigued.
At the same time, the fractious French forces hastily gathered to meet him.
It is here that historians themselves begin fighting, and several take exception to the new scholarship by Ms. Curry’s team.
Based on chronicles that he considers to be broadly accurate, Clifford J. Rogers, a professor of history at the United States Military Academy at West Point, argues that Henry was in fact vastly outnumbered. For the English, there were about 1,000 so-called men-at-arms in heavy steel armor from head to toe and 5,000 lightly armored men with longbows. The French assembled roughly 10,000 men-at-arms, each with an attendant called a gros valet who could also fight, and around 4,000 men with crossbows and other fighters.
Although Mr. Rogers writes in a recent paper that the French crossbowmen were “completely outclassed” by the English archers, who could send deadly volleys farther and more frequently, the grand totals would result in a ratio of four to one, close to the traditional figures. Mr. Rogers said in an interview that he regarded the archival records as too incomplete to substantially change those estimates.
Still, several French historians said in interviews this month that they seriously doubted that France, riven by factional strife and drawing from a populace severely depleted by the plague, could have raised an army that large in so short a time. The French king, Charles VI, was also suffering from bouts of insanity.
“It was not the complete French power at Agincourt,” said Bertrand Schnerb, a professor of medieval history at the University of Lille, who estimated that there were 12,000 to 15,000 French soldiers.
Ms. Curry, the Southampton historian, said she was comfortable with something close to that lower figure, based on her reading of historical archives, including military pay records, muster rolls, ships’ logs, published rosters of the wounded and dead, wartime tax levies and other surviving documents.
On the English side, Ms. Curry calculates that Henry probably had at least 8,680 soldiers with him on his march to Agincourt. She names thousands of the likely troopers, from Adam Adrya, a man-at-arms, to Philip Zevan, an archer.
And an extraordinary online database listing around a quarter-million names of men who served in the Hundred Years’ War, compiled by Ms. Curry and her collaborators at the universities in Southampton and Reading, shows that whatever the numbers, Henry’s army really was a band of brothers: many of the soldiers were veterans who had served on multiple campaigns together.
“You see tremendous continuity with people who knew and trusted each other,” Ms. Curry said.
That trust must have come in handy after Henry, through a series of brilliant tactical moves, provoked the French cavalry — mounted men-at-arms — into charging the masses of longbowmen positioned on the English flanks in a relatively narrow field between two sets of woods that still exist not far from Mr. Renault’s farm in Maisoncelle.
The series of events that followed as the French men-at-arms slogged through the muddy, tilled fields behind the cavalry were quick and murderous.
Volley after volley of English arrow fire maddened the horses, killed many of the riders and forced the advancing men-at-arms into a mass so dense that many of them could not even lift their arms.
When the heavily armored French men-at-arms fell wounded, many could not get up and simply drowned in the mud as other men stumbled over them. And as order on the French lines broke down completely and panic set in, the much nimbler archers ran forward, killing thousands by stabbing them in the neck, eyes, armpits and groin through gaps in the armor, or simply ganged up and bludgeoned the Frenchmen to death.
“The situation was beyond grisly; it was horrific in the extreme,” Mr. Rogers wrote in his paper.
King Henry V had emerged victorious, and as some historians see it, the English crown then mounted a public relations effort to magnify the victory by exaggerating the disparity in numbers.
Whatever the magnitude of the victory, it would not last. The French populace gradually soured on the English occupation as the fighting continued and the civil war remained unresolved in the decades after Henry’s death in 1422, Mr. Schnerb said.
“They came into France saying, ‘You Frenchmen have civil war, and now our king is coming to give you peace,’ ” Mr. Schnerb said. “It was a failure.”
Unwilling to blame a failed counterinsurgency strategy, Shakespeare pinned the loss on poor Henry VI:
“Whose state so many had the managing, That they lost France and made his England bleed.”
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Iraq. Show all posts
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Finding my roots in Tel Aviv
Raised in England by Iraqi Jewish parents, Rachel Shabi 'blanded out' her family heritage to fit in with her peers. Years later, she has finally learned to embrace her parents' values and her own rich cultural mix.
By Rachel Shabi
The Guardian (UK)
16 May 2009
On television news, Arabs and Jews look as though they've been at each other's throats for ever. Fortunately, there are people around us with longer memories — people who, by the arc of their own lives, prove that this wasn't always the case.
People such as my parents: Iraqi Jews who migrated to Israel in the early 1950s and to England during the 1970s. My family, just like thousands of other Jewish families, had been at home in Middle Eastern countries for centuries; Jews neighbouring Arabs, co-nationalists living for the most part cordially and in peace. It seemed easy, instinctive and eternal — until it all fell apart.
Recently, I went back to Israel, where I was born, to research the stories of these Jews from Arab countries and find out what happened to them in the Jewish state. I wanted to bring their experiences back into the frame. In the process, I brought my parents, and my own family history, into much sharper focus, too.
If there was a defining moment, it came in a scruffy trade union building in Tel Aviv. A group of Israeli musicians gathers here in a boxy room each week — classically trained performers of a vintage that was adored in their country of birth, Iraq, but whose musical style did not quite fit the tastes of the Jewish state. It's sort of an all Iraqi-Jewish jam session, although they play a lot of Egyptian classics and the percussionists tap out oriental rhythms on darbukas, tambourines or tabletops. As I sat among them, it dawned on me that my mother — forever clapping an alien-sounding, misfit beat over western music while I was growing up in England - was simply marking out a rhythm that I couldn't hear. Her clapping retroactively became normal.
By the time my family moved to England, my father had lived in Turkey and France as a student, as well as Iraq and Israel — and had a fair idea of the social values he rated in a country. England ticked the right boxes. My mother had some reservations: wouldn't it be tough to raise children so far from a sprawling, close-knit family in Israel, whose love and support were surely more important than abstract ideals?
Those reservations about being far from "home" (I was never sure which one — Iraq or Israel) were sometimes nudged by the sort of migrant experiences that were typical of British life in the 1970s. Back then, Britain wasn't especially interested in my parents being Iraqi, or Israeli, or whatever. Perhaps they were just "foreign" — at any rate, that was how I tended to perceive them as a child. There were long trips in search of pitta bread and long waits for visiting relatives to bring us bottles of amba, the radioactively bright mango pickle that Iraqis seem addicted to. My mum admits that she would go to a pet-food shop for the unhusked sunflower seeds that she'd roast for us to crack open between our teeth as a snack. ("Yes, that's right, for the budgie," she'd tell the shopkeeper.)
I didn't realise then that the seed-cracking was a hallmark oriental habit — or that, in early Israel, public transport operators were so confounded by the carpets of seed husks that lined the buses, courtesy of passengers, that they erected signs to discourage the practice. When I was young, I didn't know the pet-shop story, either. Had my mum told me then, I'd have been embarrassed, as I was by all things that made me appear "foreign". A migrant kid, I assumed that blanding out my background would somehow make me more British, whereas all it could possibly achieve was to make me more bland.
I grew up with Arabic (or Judaeo-Arabic) cuisine: Iraqi breakfasts on Saturdays of overnight-boiled eggs, fried eggplants, mango pickle and salad stuffed into pitta pockets; ba'ba beh tamur, homemade date pastries that would surface around the Jewish festival of Purim; slow-cooked marrows that had been carefully emptied and restuffed with fragrant rice, meat and pine nuts; falafels and hummus in my lunchbox. The Arabic language was ever present — because my parents were always speaking it, or quoting parables or bits of poetry in it, or reading Jewish religious texts in Arabic over the Passover table. Arabic music was always in the background at home, either via treasured, battered cassettes or on crackly long-wave. There was never any doubt that Arab culture was an integral part of our Jewish home: respected, enjoyed and admired. But growing up, I wasn't really into it.
As it turns out, scores of Israeli children were experiencing something similar at that time. Approximately half the population of Israel is from Arab or Muslim countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen. Known as Mizrahi ("Eastern") or Sephardi Jews, they arrived in Israel during various periods following its creation in 1948. Jews of Mizrahi origin were for many years the majority in Israel — until the arrival of just under a million migrants from the former Soviet bloc during the early 1990s reshuffled the ethnic pack. Mizrahis grew up in a Jewish society that was desperate to yoke to Europe and belittled the Arab world as an uncivilised cultural desert. The majority Mizrahis were assumed by the ruling European minority to be bearers of an inferior culture that should not come to represent or define the Jewish state. And, inevitably, many of those Mizrahi children internalised this story.
Interviewing for my book, it was easy to understand the Mizrahis who described how they had spent childhoods faking their own identities — in a country that encouraged its Mizrahi population to ditch those "backward" oriental habits. One professor told me he'd badgered his father into changing the family surname to something that wasn't a telltale mark of Mizrahi origin, and now feels shame each time he visits his father's grave and sees the bogus name on the headstone. Another, of Moroccan origin, described how she invented a French persona for herself, forbidding her parents from speaking Arabic or playing oriental music. Others described how they erased their guttural oriental accent: vocals that are integral to Hebrew — a Semitic language, the sister of Arabic, but which Israel decided would be tonally "wrong" for the Jewish state. (I remember how I used to practise my English vowels until they lost the slightest foreign twang.) And these stories repeat so many times over in Israel — recollections of masked origins, buried roots, trashed biographies; blanded-out backgrounds.
This wasn't uniformly the case. Countless Mizrahis retained their home culture in Israel, often in defiance and against the odds. When their Europeanised co-nationalists pronounced Mizrahi culture to be inferior, some just said: "And who are you, exactly, to decide on that?" Meanwhile, many of those Mizrahis who did sever roots are now trying to reconnect with those forsaken origins — reclaiming their real family names, reinstating the oriental vocals, rediscovering their home culture. Yair Dalal, a world-acclaimed Israeli musician of Iraqi origin, describes a realignment process that occurs when he sends his Mizrahi students home to practise a piece of oriental music. "They come back a week later and say: 'My dad started to sing the song I was playing.' And that's the connection. That person is back on track."
Getting back on track means that — to my good fortune — I now appreciate more fully my parents' Iraqi dimension. I'm aware of the irony: that researching a book on how Israel patronised its Mizrahi citizens made me realise how I'd patronised my Mizrahi parents. But, as my good-natured parents might say in Iraqi Arabic: "Ahsan min maku." (Better than nothing.)
They remain dedicated followers of Iraqi and other Arabic culture in the UK. They shop for favourite foods at Iraqi grocers, chronicling the storekeeper's arrival in England, lamenting the tragedy of Iraq and raising colourful Arabic curses to the foolish western interference in that country. They remain forlorn at the closure of London's Kufa gallery, an Iraqi cultural centre that shut down a few years after the second Gulf war. They loved the British Museum's recent Babylon exhibition and attended many of the related events.
My parents remain absorbed in the small print of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the wider region. They're connected to and care about Israel — it was home — but still it bugs them, politically and culturally: "Why don't they pronounce this word properly, as it is written in Hebrew?"; "Why can't they spell Arabic street signs correctly?"; "Why, in the name of God, do they care so little about the Middle East?"
Happy Englanders, they are equally invested in and committed to British politics and culture — they won't miss Question Time; they are friends of the Opera House; they are as likely to bemoan politically spineless New Labour policy as they are morally bankrupt Israeli policy. They span these worlds effortlessly, showing how easy it can be to bridge binaries, how seemingly polar opposites — Arab or Jew, east or west — can reside together comfortably in the same space, the same skin.
• Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands by Rachel Shabi (Yale University Press, £18.99).
By Rachel Shabi
The Guardian (UK)
16 May 2009
On television news, Arabs and Jews look as though they've been at each other's throats for ever. Fortunately, there are people around us with longer memories — people who, by the arc of their own lives, prove that this wasn't always the case.
People such as my parents: Iraqi Jews who migrated to Israel in the early 1950s and to England during the 1970s. My family, just like thousands of other Jewish families, had been at home in Middle Eastern countries for centuries; Jews neighbouring Arabs, co-nationalists living for the most part cordially and in peace. It seemed easy, instinctive and eternal — until it all fell apart.
Recently, I went back to Israel, where I was born, to research the stories of these Jews from Arab countries and find out what happened to them in the Jewish state. I wanted to bring their experiences back into the frame. In the process, I brought my parents, and my own family history, into much sharper focus, too.
If there was a defining moment, it came in a scruffy trade union building in Tel Aviv. A group of Israeli musicians gathers here in a boxy room each week — classically trained performers of a vintage that was adored in their country of birth, Iraq, but whose musical style did not quite fit the tastes of the Jewish state. It's sort of an all Iraqi-Jewish jam session, although they play a lot of Egyptian classics and the percussionists tap out oriental rhythms on darbukas, tambourines or tabletops. As I sat among them, it dawned on me that my mother — forever clapping an alien-sounding, misfit beat over western music while I was growing up in England - was simply marking out a rhythm that I couldn't hear. Her clapping retroactively became normal.
By the time my family moved to England, my father had lived in Turkey and France as a student, as well as Iraq and Israel — and had a fair idea of the social values he rated in a country. England ticked the right boxes. My mother had some reservations: wouldn't it be tough to raise children so far from a sprawling, close-knit family in Israel, whose love and support were surely more important than abstract ideals?
Those reservations about being far from "home" (I was never sure which one — Iraq or Israel) were sometimes nudged by the sort of migrant experiences that were typical of British life in the 1970s. Back then, Britain wasn't especially interested in my parents being Iraqi, or Israeli, or whatever. Perhaps they were just "foreign" — at any rate, that was how I tended to perceive them as a child. There were long trips in search of pitta bread and long waits for visiting relatives to bring us bottles of amba, the radioactively bright mango pickle that Iraqis seem addicted to. My mum admits that she would go to a pet-food shop for the unhusked sunflower seeds that she'd roast for us to crack open between our teeth as a snack. ("Yes, that's right, for the budgie," she'd tell the shopkeeper.)
I didn't realise then that the seed-cracking was a hallmark oriental habit — or that, in early Israel, public transport operators were so confounded by the carpets of seed husks that lined the buses, courtesy of passengers, that they erected signs to discourage the practice. When I was young, I didn't know the pet-shop story, either. Had my mum told me then, I'd have been embarrassed, as I was by all things that made me appear "foreign". A migrant kid, I assumed that blanding out my background would somehow make me more British, whereas all it could possibly achieve was to make me more bland.
I grew up with Arabic (or Judaeo-Arabic) cuisine: Iraqi breakfasts on Saturdays of overnight-boiled eggs, fried eggplants, mango pickle and salad stuffed into pitta pockets; ba'ba beh tamur, homemade date pastries that would surface around the Jewish festival of Purim; slow-cooked marrows that had been carefully emptied and restuffed with fragrant rice, meat and pine nuts; falafels and hummus in my lunchbox. The Arabic language was ever present — because my parents were always speaking it, or quoting parables or bits of poetry in it, or reading Jewish religious texts in Arabic over the Passover table. Arabic music was always in the background at home, either via treasured, battered cassettes or on crackly long-wave. There was never any doubt that Arab culture was an integral part of our Jewish home: respected, enjoyed and admired. But growing up, I wasn't really into it.
As it turns out, scores of Israeli children were experiencing something similar at that time. Approximately half the population of Israel is from Arab or Muslim countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen. Known as Mizrahi ("Eastern") or Sephardi Jews, they arrived in Israel during various periods following its creation in 1948. Jews of Mizrahi origin were for many years the majority in Israel — until the arrival of just under a million migrants from the former Soviet bloc during the early 1990s reshuffled the ethnic pack. Mizrahis grew up in a Jewish society that was desperate to yoke to Europe and belittled the Arab world as an uncivilised cultural desert. The majority Mizrahis were assumed by the ruling European minority to be bearers of an inferior culture that should not come to represent or define the Jewish state. And, inevitably, many of those Mizrahi children internalised this story.
Interviewing for my book, it was easy to understand the Mizrahis who described how they had spent childhoods faking their own identities — in a country that encouraged its Mizrahi population to ditch those "backward" oriental habits. One professor told me he'd badgered his father into changing the family surname to something that wasn't a telltale mark of Mizrahi origin, and now feels shame each time he visits his father's grave and sees the bogus name on the headstone. Another, of Moroccan origin, described how she invented a French persona for herself, forbidding her parents from speaking Arabic or playing oriental music. Others described how they erased their guttural oriental accent: vocals that are integral to Hebrew — a Semitic language, the sister of Arabic, but which Israel decided would be tonally "wrong" for the Jewish state. (I remember how I used to practise my English vowels until they lost the slightest foreign twang.) And these stories repeat so many times over in Israel — recollections of masked origins, buried roots, trashed biographies; blanded-out backgrounds.
This wasn't uniformly the case. Countless Mizrahis retained their home culture in Israel, often in defiance and against the odds. When their Europeanised co-nationalists pronounced Mizrahi culture to be inferior, some just said: "And who are you, exactly, to decide on that?" Meanwhile, many of those Mizrahis who did sever roots are now trying to reconnect with those forsaken origins — reclaiming their real family names, reinstating the oriental vocals, rediscovering their home culture. Yair Dalal, a world-acclaimed Israeli musician of Iraqi origin, describes a realignment process that occurs when he sends his Mizrahi students home to practise a piece of oriental music. "They come back a week later and say: 'My dad started to sing the song I was playing.' And that's the connection. That person is back on track."
Getting back on track means that — to my good fortune — I now appreciate more fully my parents' Iraqi dimension. I'm aware of the irony: that researching a book on how Israel patronised its Mizrahi citizens made me realise how I'd patronised my Mizrahi parents. But, as my good-natured parents might say in Iraqi Arabic: "Ahsan min maku." (Better than nothing.)
They remain dedicated followers of Iraqi and other Arabic culture in the UK. They shop for favourite foods at Iraqi grocers, chronicling the storekeeper's arrival in England, lamenting the tragedy of Iraq and raising colourful Arabic curses to the foolish western interference in that country. They remain forlorn at the closure of London's Kufa gallery, an Iraqi cultural centre that shut down a few years after the second Gulf war. They loved the British Museum's recent Babylon exhibition and attended many of the related events.
My parents remain absorbed in the small print of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and the wider region. They're connected to and care about Israel — it was home — but still it bugs them, politically and culturally: "Why don't they pronounce this word properly, as it is written in Hebrew?"; "Why can't they spell Arabic street signs correctly?"; "Why, in the name of God, do they care so little about the Middle East?"
Happy Englanders, they are equally invested in and committed to British politics and culture — they won't miss Question Time; they are friends of the Opera House; they are as likely to bemoan politically spineless New Labour policy as they are morally bankrupt Israeli policy. They span these worlds effortlessly, showing how easy it can be to bridge binaries, how seemingly polar opposites — Arab or Jew, east or west — can reside together comfortably in the same space, the same skin.
• Not the Enemy: Israel's Jews from Arab Lands by Rachel Shabi (Yale University Press, £18.99).
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Saddam revisited as Iraq accuses Syria of sheltering Baathist bombers (and my comments)
In the Saddam-Hafez era, they hanged each other's bombers
By Robert Fisk
The Independent (UK)
September 11, 2009
In Damascus and Baghdad, it almost feels like the old days. Mutual abuse and recriminations, the recalling of ambassadors — and only a matter of time, perhaps, before Syria and Iraq break diplomatic relations.
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, demands an international tribunal because Syria won't hand over a couple of Iraqi Baathists whom he blames for the suicide bombing deaths of at least 100 civilians in Baghdad. Syria snaps back that it's always been a refuge for those facing "injustice".
Twenty years ago, Saddam Hussein and Hafez el-Assad sent bombers to Damascus and Baghdad to blow up each other's cities. Now Maliki and Hafez's son, Bashar, are attacking each other. For all the tribal connections, historical relations, the "fraternal" love of Arab unity — Syria likes to call itself the "beating heart of Arabism" — it seems the two neighbours will go on roaring at each other in time-honoured fashion.
In the Saddam-Hafez era, they hanged each other's bombers in public, Syria's agents swinging slowly in the breeze in Baghdad's public squares while Saddam's killers performed the same act in Damascus. These days, things are a little more civilised. The Iraqis don't actually capture any bombers — they have already vaporised themselves — but they call upon international law while the Syrians pose as the refugee safe haven of the Middle East.
Yet Syria clearly has the better memory, Maliki the shorter. Back in the bad old days of mutually hostile Syrian-Iraqi Ba'athism, Maliki and Jalal Talabani — now the President of Iraq — sought refuge in Damascus from the fury of Saddam's regime. Both were grateful — or at least they were then — that Hafez had taken mercy on their souls and welcomed them to the "mother of the Arab nation" (another Syrian sobriquet). Today, the Syrians have been quick to remind the pair of this act of generosity — and to point out their hypocrisy.
"Syria never handed over people who took shelter from the threat of injustice, arbitrary acts and death," the official Al-Thawra newspaper announced. "... they [Maliki and Talabani] all know what their fate would have been if Syria had such political morals." The Syrians have not denied that Mohamed al-Younis and Satam Farhan are in Damascus — al-Younis was a senior member of Saddam's Ba'ath party — but have demanded proof of their involvement in the Baghdad bombings, something which Damascus believes (correctly) that the Iraqis will find it hard to provide.
But the hypocrisy that Syria condemns can be discovered on both sides of the border. I met the Syrian general in charge of building barriers and watchtowers along the Syrian-Iraqi frontier in what he clearly believed was a genuine effort to prevent the transit of insurgents into Iraq. But the last time I met the family of a suicide bomber in Lebanon — he assaulted an American convoy in western Iraq, very close to the Syrian border — I was told by his uncle that the man had "gone to Iraq because it was easier to cross the Syrian border to attack American soldiers than it was to cross the Lebanese border and attack the Israeli enemy".
In truth, there was always a gritty, no-nonsense but sometimes understanding relationship between Ba'athists in Iraq and Syria, even when Saddam was ruling. The founder of the party, Michel Aflaq, was a Syrian Christian who ended his days in Iraq. According to his family, his tomb was badly damaged after the 2003 American invasion — it lies in what is now the American-controlled Green Zone. As Ba'athists themselves, therefore, al-Younis and Farhan are merely "brothers" — brothers, indeed, who can no doubt add to Syria's formidable intelligence about American military strategy and Maliki's forces inside Iraq.
But Al-Thawra's praise of Syria's political integrity needs to be read with an eye on history. Syria never handed over people threatened with death, it tells us. But wasn't there a Kurdish guerrilla leader — a man called Abdullah Ocalan — who was nurtured by the Syrians, supported by the Syrians, threatened with death by the Turks, and then summarily told to leave Damascus when the Turks threatened military action against the Assad regime? And after various peregrinations in Africa, did he not end up in the hands of the Turkish secret service? He languishes to this day in a Turkish jail.
Mark says:
Robert Fisk has been routinely denounced over the years as being "anti-Israel" and "anti-Arab." Conversely, he's also been denounced for being "pro-Israel" and "pro-Arab." Of course, those who denounce him for being one can't conceive of him being denounced for being the other.
I don't think Fisk is really any of those. If you follow his columns over the long run — and not go by just one or two that are chosen to "conclusively demonstrate" that he is "pro-Arab" or "pro-Israel" — it is possible to conclude that he is really just very cynical and takes the attitude of "a pox on all your houses." That is neither "pro" nor "anti."
I often disagree with Fisk, but as my faithful readers know from this blog and from my previous e-mail postings which preceded the blog, my purpose is to provide insights and explanations into views and and perceptions — not to convince or change minds or propagandize. Therefore I find it useful to occasionally draw your attention to one of his columns.
In the case of the preceding article, I think it's a case of "the more things change the more they remain the same."
By Robert Fisk
The Independent (UK)
September 11, 2009
In Damascus and Baghdad, it almost feels like the old days. Mutual abuse and recriminations, the recalling of ambassadors — and only a matter of time, perhaps, before Syria and Iraq break diplomatic relations.
Iraq's Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, demands an international tribunal because Syria won't hand over a couple of Iraqi Baathists whom he blames for the suicide bombing deaths of at least 100 civilians in Baghdad. Syria snaps back that it's always been a refuge for those facing "injustice".
Twenty years ago, Saddam Hussein and Hafez el-Assad sent bombers to Damascus and Baghdad to blow up each other's cities. Now Maliki and Hafez's son, Bashar, are attacking each other. For all the tribal connections, historical relations, the "fraternal" love of Arab unity — Syria likes to call itself the "beating heart of Arabism" — it seems the two neighbours will go on roaring at each other in time-honoured fashion.
In the Saddam-Hafez era, they hanged each other's bombers in public, Syria's agents swinging slowly in the breeze in Baghdad's public squares while Saddam's killers performed the same act in Damascus. These days, things are a little more civilised. The Iraqis don't actually capture any bombers — they have already vaporised themselves — but they call upon international law while the Syrians pose as the refugee safe haven of the Middle East.
Yet Syria clearly has the better memory, Maliki the shorter. Back in the bad old days of mutually hostile Syrian-Iraqi Ba'athism, Maliki and Jalal Talabani — now the President of Iraq — sought refuge in Damascus from the fury of Saddam's regime. Both were grateful — or at least they were then — that Hafez had taken mercy on their souls and welcomed them to the "mother of the Arab nation" (another Syrian sobriquet). Today, the Syrians have been quick to remind the pair of this act of generosity — and to point out their hypocrisy.
"Syria never handed over people who took shelter from the threat of injustice, arbitrary acts and death," the official Al-Thawra newspaper announced. "... they [Maliki and Talabani] all know what their fate would have been if Syria had such political morals." The Syrians have not denied that Mohamed al-Younis and Satam Farhan are in Damascus — al-Younis was a senior member of Saddam's Ba'ath party — but have demanded proof of their involvement in the Baghdad bombings, something which Damascus believes (correctly) that the Iraqis will find it hard to provide.
But the hypocrisy that Syria condemns can be discovered on both sides of the border. I met the Syrian general in charge of building barriers and watchtowers along the Syrian-Iraqi frontier in what he clearly believed was a genuine effort to prevent the transit of insurgents into Iraq. But the last time I met the family of a suicide bomber in Lebanon — he assaulted an American convoy in western Iraq, very close to the Syrian border — I was told by his uncle that the man had "gone to Iraq because it was easier to cross the Syrian border to attack American soldiers than it was to cross the Lebanese border and attack the Israeli enemy".
In truth, there was always a gritty, no-nonsense but sometimes understanding relationship between Ba'athists in Iraq and Syria, even when Saddam was ruling. The founder of the party, Michel Aflaq, was a Syrian Christian who ended his days in Iraq. According to his family, his tomb was badly damaged after the 2003 American invasion — it lies in what is now the American-controlled Green Zone. As Ba'athists themselves, therefore, al-Younis and Farhan are merely "brothers" — brothers, indeed, who can no doubt add to Syria's formidable intelligence about American military strategy and Maliki's forces inside Iraq.
But Al-Thawra's praise of Syria's political integrity needs to be read with an eye on history. Syria never handed over people threatened with death, it tells us. But wasn't there a Kurdish guerrilla leader — a man called Abdullah Ocalan — who was nurtured by the Syrians, supported by the Syrians, threatened with death by the Turks, and then summarily told to leave Damascus when the Turks threatened military action against the Assad regime? And after various peregrinations in Africa, did he not end up in the hands of the Turkish secret service? He languishes to this day in a Turkish jail.
Mark says:
Robert Fisk has been routinely denounced over the years as being "anti-Israel" and "anti-Arab." Conversely, he's also been denounced for being "pro-Israel" and "pro-Arab." Of course, those who denounce him for being one can't conceive of him being denounced for being the other.
I don't think Fisk is really any of those. If you follow his columns over the long run — and not go by just one or two that are chosen to "conclusively demonstrate" that he is "pro-Arab" or "pro-Israel" — it is possible to conclude that he is really just very cynical and takes the attitude of "a pox on all your houses." That is neither "pro" nor "anti."
I often disagree with Fisk, but as my faithful readers know from this blog and from my previous e-mail postings which preceded the blog, my purpose is to provide insights and explanations into views and and perceptions — not to convince or change minds or propagandize. Therefore I find it useful to occasionally draw your attention to one of his columns.
In the case of the preceding article, I think it's a case of "the more things change the more they remain the same."
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Iraq’s Ambivalence About the American Military
By Rod Nordland
The New York Times
August 29, 2009
BAGHDAD — Iraqi military officials often refer to their American counterparts as “the friends,” a circumlocution full of Eastern subtlety that is often lost on the friends themselves. Add some more quotation marks, and it comes closer to the sense intended, “the ‘friends.’ ” Not sarcastic, exactly, but rather colored with mixed emotions, as in the sentence, “The ‘friends’ came by yesterday to complain again about payroll skimming.”
Americans find this hard to understand about the Iraq war, that their trillion-dollar enterprise in Iraq has made Iraqis and particularly the Iraqi military not only deeply dependent on America, but also deeply conflicted, even resentful about that dependency. After all, we saved them from defeat at the hands of a ruthless insurgency that a few years ago indeed could have destroyed them, and we spent 4,000 lives doing it, left probably 10 times that many young Americans crippled for life, and they’re not grateful?
That is not, at bottom, how the Iraqis see it. They are grateful, many of them, but gratitude is a drink with a bitter aftertaste. They also chafe at the thousands of daily humiliations they endure from a mostly well-meaning but often clueless American military. An Iraqi politician who wishes to remain nameless (“I have to deal with the friends,” he explains) tells of traveling with the Iraqi Army’s chief of staff, a general in uniform, epaulets bristling with eagles, stars and swords. They were at the Baghdad airport, about to get on one of the few Iraqi military planes, when an American sergeant stopped him and refused to allow him to board. Despite the general’s remonstrations of rank and privilege, the sergeant made sure the plane took off without him.
“Once I had a meeting with the division commander in charge of Baghdad,” the politician went on. “A private meeting. In walks an American colonel and sits there with a translator, taking notes on our conversation. He apologized and said ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do anything about this.’ ”
This indirectly explains a lot about the current state of affairs, post June 30. Iraqis have enthusiastically embraced their newfound military sovereignty, even when, as is often the case, they’re not really ready for it. They can field troops who can fight, but they can’t fix their Humvees. They can mount their own operations against insurgents, but are reluctant to do so without air cover — which so far only the Americans can provide. They can marshal large numbers of soldiers — their army now is more numerous than America’s in Iraq — but they depend on the Americans to handle most of their logistics, since their own are plagued by corruption and mismanagement.
Under the new Status of Forces Agreement between the countries, not only did American troops leave all population centers after June 30, but they’ve also agreed not to get involved, in or out of the cities, unless invited to do so by the Iraqis. And the Iraqi inclination has been not to invite them, partly out of pride, partly out of concern for the political blowback from their own public when they do ask for help.
This was brought into sharp relief by the two ministry truck bombings on Aug. 19, which succeeded because fortifications had been prematurely removed from in front of those ministries. “It was Iraqi aspirations exceeding their ability to secure their country on their own,” says John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and an author of influential works on counterinsurgency. “The Iraqi government and the Iraqi security forces are improving steadily but they’re not yet able to handle these threats responsibly,” Mr. Nagl says.
He argues that the Iraqi and American militaries need to set up standing pre-arrangements by which the United States can intervene in an emergency on the ground; such arrangements are entirely possible under the terms of the forces agreement, even if they may cause political difficulties, especially in an election year.
“The government of Iraq is going to have to ask us for our help, and it takes a while for the Iraqi government to process that,” he says. “The Iraqi government is not yet able to make a quick decision. This whole incident should serve as a wake-up call that the U.S. still has a very important role to play in Iraq’s security.”
The tension between Iraq’s desire to embrace its sovereignty and its continuing military shortcomings is likely to last many years, Mr. Nagl says, because the United States has done little so far to give the Iraqi military the ability to defend its country against external threats once Americans leave by the end of 2011.
The most glaring shortcoming is the almost complete lack of an air force, aside from a few transport and reconnaissance aircraft; there is not a single jet. The first T-6 jet trainer, a propeller- driven aircraft that simulates a jet, is on order for next December. Training pilots will take many years more. In a modern world, Mr. Nagl says, “You can’t defend the sovereignty of your country if you can’t defend your air space.”
Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick, commander of the American military’s training command, says that was inevitable in the rush to build large army and police ground forces to counter the insurgency.
General Helmick says he is unconcerned about the lack of an international defensive capability. “What do they need to defend themselves against?”
Nothing, so long as American troops are there in such numbers, but once they’re gone, Iraq will remain surrounded by potential enemies. Turkey has been regularly bombing Iraqi territory in the north, in an effort to wipe out Kurdish guerrillas who use the area as a sanctuary for attacks in Turkey. Iran is a friend now, but in the 1980s it fought a decade-long war involving many divisions of tanks, airstrikes and even chemical warfare. The Sunni Arab regimes to the west and south, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, are all nervous about a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq, and relations have been strained with all of them at times over issues ranging from support for insurgents to war reparations.
In recent days, Iraq and Syria recalled their ambassadors for consultations after Iraq accused Syria of harboring two Baathists it believes are responsible for the truck bombings.
At the highest levels, despite the bluster and the perennial ill-feeling, Iraqis know they will remain dependent on the United States for a very long time, even after the internal insurgency is vanquished. Nationalism, though, can be a dangerous and deluding force. It has, writes the analyst Kenneth Pollack in the forthcoming issue of The National Interest, “led many Iraqi politicians, including the prime minister, to take public positions unsupportive of the American presence, even though most know that America’s role as peacekeeper, mediator, adviser and capacity-builder remain critical to Iraq’s stability and progress.”
There’s an old saying that if you save someone’s life, they become your responsibility forever. It seems counterintuitive, but those it happens to know how true it is. Having interfered so intimately in another person’s fate, or another nation’s fate, it becomes very hard just to turn away.
The New York Times
August 29, 2009
BAGHDAD — Iraqi military officials often refer to their American counterparts as “the friends,” a circumlocution full of Eastern subtlety that is often lost on the friends themselves. Add some more quotation marks, and it comes closer to the sense intended, “the ‘friends.’ ” Not sarcastic, exactly, but rather colored with mixed emotions, as in the sentence, “The ‘friends’ came by yesterday to complain again about payroll skimming.”
Americans find this hard to understand about the Iraq war, that their trillion-dollar enterprise in Iraq has made Iraqis and particularly the Iraqi military not only deeply dependent on America, but also deeply conflicted, even resentful about that dependency. After all, we saved them from defeat at the hands of a ruthless insurgency that a few years ago indeed could have destroyed them, and we spent 4,000 lives doing it, left probably 10 times that many young Americans crippled for life, and they’re not grateful?
That is not, at bottom, how the Iraqis see it. They are grateful, many of them, but gratitude is a drink with a bitter aftertaste. They also chafe at the thousands of daily humiliations they endure from a mostly well-meaning but often clueless American military. An Iraqi politician who wishes to remain nameless (“I have to deal with the friends,” he explains) tells of traveling with the Iraqi Army’s chief of staff, a general in uniform, epaulets bristling with eagles, stars and swords. They were at the Baghdad airport, about to get on one of the few Iraqi military planes, when an American sergeant stopped him and refused to allow him to board. Despite the general’s remonstrations of rank and privilege, the sergeant made sure the plane took off without him.
“Once I had a meeting with the division commander in charge of Baghdad,” the politician went on. “A private meeting. In walks an American colonel and sits there with a translator, taking notes on our conversation. He apologized and said ‘I’m sorry, I can’t do anything about this.’ ”
This indirectly explains a lot about the current state of affairs, post June 30. Iraqis have enthusiastically embraced their newfound military sovereignty, even when, as is often the case, they’re not really ready for it. They can field troops who can fight, but they can’t fix their Humvees. They can mount their own operations against insurgents, but are reluctant to do so without air cover — which so far only the Americans can provide. They can marshal large numbers of soldiers — their army now is more numerous than America’s in Iraq — but they depend on the Americans to handle most of their logistics, since their own are plagued by corruption and mismanagement.
Under the new Status of Forces Agreement between the countries, not only did American troops leave all population centers after June 30, but they’ve also agreed not to get involved, in or out of the cities, unless invited to do so by the Iraqis. And the Iraqi inclination has been not to invite them, partly out of pride, partly out of concern for the political blowback from their own public when they do ask for help.
This was brought into sharp relief by the two ministry truck bombings on Aug. 19, which succeeded because fortifications had been prematurely removed from in front of those ministries. “It was Iraqi aspirations exceeding their ability to secure their country on their own,” says John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and an author of influential works on counterinsurgency. “The Iraqi government and the Iraqi security forces are improving steadily but they’re not yet able to handle these threats responsibly,” Mr. Nagl says.
He argues that the Iraqi and American militaries need to set up standing pre-arrangements by which the United States can intervene in an emergency on the ground; such arrangements are entirely possible under the terms of the forces agreement, even if they may cause political difficulties, especially in an election year.
“The government of Iraq is going to have to ask us for our help, and it takes a while for the Iraqi government to process that,” he says. “The Iraqi government is not yet able to make a quick decision. This whole incident should serve as a wake-up call that the U.S. still has a very important role to play in Iraq’s security.”
The tension between Iraq’s desire to embrace its sovereignty and its continuing military shortcomings is likely to last many years, Mr. Nagl says, because the United States has done little so far to give the Iraqi military the ability to defend its country against external threats once Americans leave by the end of 2011.
The most glaring shortcoming is the almost complete lack of an air force, aside from a few transport and reconnaissance aircraft; there is not a single jet. The first T-6 jet trainer, a propeller- driven aircraft that simulates a jet, is on order for next December. Training pilots will take many years more. In a modern world, Mr. Nagl says, “You can’t defend the sovereignty of your country if you can’t defend your air space.”
Lt. Gen. Frank Helmick, commander of the American military’s training command, says that was inevitable in the rush to build large army and police ground forces to counter the insurgency.
General Helmick says he is unconcerned about the lack of an international defensive capability. “What do they need to defend themselves against?”
Nothing, so long as American troops are there in such numbers, but once they’re gone, Iraq will remain surrounded by potential enemies. Turkey has been regularly bombing Iraqi territory in the north, in an effort to wipe out Kurdish guerrillas who use the area as a sanctuary for attacks in Turkey. Iran is a friend now, but in the 1980s it fought a decade-long war involving many divisions of tanks, airstrikes and even chemical warfare. The Sunni Arab regimes to the west and south, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, are all nervous about a Shiite-dominated government in Iraq, and relations have been strained with all of them at times over issues ranging from support for insurgents to war reparations.
In recent days, Iraq and Syria recalled their ambassadors for consultations after Iraq accused Syria of harboring two Baathists it believes are responsible for the truck bombings.
At the highest levels, despite the bluster and the perennial ill-feeling, Iraqis know they will remain dependent on the United States for a very long time, even after the internal insurgency is vanquished. Nationalism, though, can be a dangerous and deluding force. It has, writes the analyst Kenneth Pollack in the forthcoming issue of The National Interest, “led many Iraqi politicians, including the prime minister, to take public positions unsupportive of the American presence, even though most know that America’s role as peacekeeper, mediator, adviser and capacity-builder remain critical to Iraq’s stability and progress.”
There’s an old saying that if you save someone’s life, they become your responsibility forever. It seems counterintuitive, but those it happens to know how true it is. Having interfered so intimately in another person’s fate, or another nation’s fate, it becomes very hard just to turn away.
Rod Nordland is Newsweek's Chief Foreign Correspondent, based in London, after serving two years as Baghdad Bureau Chief.
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Obama's Mideast vision: Confusion
By Michael Young
The Daily Star (Lebanon)
August 27, 2009
There is great discomfort these days among those who backed Barack Obama’s “new” approach to the Middle East when he took office 10 months ago. That shouldn’t surprise us. Everything about the president’s shotgun approach to the region, his desire to overhaul all policies from the George W. Bush years simultaneously, without a cohesive strategy binding his actions together, was always going to let the believers down.
As the president’s accelerated pullout from Iraq begins to look increasingly ill-thought-out, as his engagement of Iran and Syria falters, as Arab-Israeli peace looks more elusive than ever, and as Americans express growing doubts about the war in Afghanistan, Obama is discovering that personal charisma is not enough to alter the realities of a Middle East that has whittled down better men than he.
For the US president, the clearest articulation of his approach to the region was his speech in Cairo last June. However, there was always more mood to that address than substance. The president put out a wish-list of American objectives, padded with reassurances and self-criticism, but there was no solid core to what he said — a discernible sense of the values and overriding political ambitions the United States was building toward. As Obama himself admitted, no single speech could answer all the complex questions the Middle East has tossed up. However, American behavior on the ground has made things no easier to understand, which is why regional uncertainties are turning to bite the administration in the leg.
For example, what is the policy in Iraq? In recent weeks, following the American military withdrawal from Iraqi cities, the upsurge in devastating suicide attacks has threatened to reverse years of efforts by Washington to stabilize the country. Ultimately, Obama’s priority can be summed up in one word, reflecting his psychological hesitation to commit to an enterprise that he associates, in a dangerously personalized way, with his predecessor. That word is “withdrawal,” and Obama described his Iraqi policy this way in Cairo: “Today, America has a dual responsibility: to help Iraq forge a better future — and to leave Iraq to Iraqis. I have made it clear to the Iraqi people that we pursue no bases, and no claim on their territory or resources. Iraq’s sovereignty is its own.”
Those were noble thoughts, but how do they square with other American concerns, such as the containment of Iran, the avoidance of sectarian conflict that might engulf the region, the stability of oil supplies, and much else? Obama feels that an America forever signaling its desire to go home will make things better by making America more likable. That’s not how the Middle East works. Politics abhor a vacuum, and as everyone sees how eager the US is to leave, the more they will try to fill the ensuing vacuum to their advantage, and the more intransigent they will be when Washington seeks political solutions to prepare its getaway. That explains the upsurge of bombings in Iraq lately, and it explains why the Taliban feel no need to surrender anything in Afghanistan.
Engagement of Iran and Syria has also come up short, though a breakthrough remains possible. However, there was always something counterintuitive in lowering the pressure on Iran in the hope that this would generate progress in finding a solution to its nuclear program.
Engagement is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end among countless others. Where the Obama administration erred was in not seeing how dialogue would buy Iran more time to advance its nuclear projects, precisely what the Iranians wanted, while breaking the momentum of international efforts to force Tehran to concede something — for example temporary suspension of uranium enrichment. For Obama to rebuild such momentum today seems virtually impossible, when the US itself has made it abundantly clear that it believes war is a bad idea.
Attacking Iran is indeed a bad idea, but in the poker game he has been playing with Tehran, Obama didn’t need to show all of his cards. He’s virtually folded over Iraq, is stumbling in Afghanistan, and does not occupy himself very much with Lebanon, all places where the Iranians can and are hurting the Americans. By placing most of his chips on engagement, the president has failed to develop a more multifaceted strategy while relinquishing other forms of coercion that could have been effective in Washington’s bargaining with the Islamic Republic.
On Syria, the US has been more steadfast, particularly in trying to deny Damascus the means to reimpose its will in Lebanon. However, the Assad regime has shown no signs of breaking away from Iran, a major US incentive in re-engaging with the Syrians, even as it has facilitated suicide attacks in Iraq and encouraged Hamas’ intransigence in inter-Palestinian negotiations in Cairo. The Obama administration can, of course, take the passive view that Syria is entitled to destabilize its neighbors in order to enhance its leverage; or it can behave like a superpower and make the undermining of vital US interests very costly for Bashar Assad. But it certainly cannot defend its vital interests by adopting a passive approach.
With respect to the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, Obama has taken Israel on over its settlements. It was about time, since the Bush administration’s permissiveness on settlement construction neutralized its own “road map”. However, there is more to Palestinian-Israeli peace than settlements. Obama is exerting considerable political capital to confront Israel, but it may be capital wasted at a moment when Hamas can still veto any breakthrough from the Palestinian side. In other words, Washington is working on a narrow front whereas its failure to weaken Hamas may render the whole enterprise meaningless. But how can the US weaken Hamas when improving relations with the movement’s main regional sponsors, Iran and Syria, remains a centerpiece of American efforts?
Barack Obama’s devotees may imagine that because he spent a few years abroad as a boy, he is well equipped to understand our complicated world. Perhaps he is, but his approach to the greater Middle East, shorn of the soaring rhetoric, has been artless and arrogant. The president is being tied up every which way by his foes, who can plainly see that the Obama vision is an unsystematic one. If ever the US has been close to achieving potentially terminal self-marginalization in the region, it is now.
Michael Young is the Opinion Editor and a columnist for Lebanon’s The Daily Star newspaper. He is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine.
The Daily Star (Lebanon)
August 27, 2009
There is great discomfort these days among those who backed Barack Obama’s “new” approach to the Middle East when he took office 10 months ago. That shouldn’t surprise us. Everything about the president’s shotgun approach to the region, his desire to overhaul all policies from the George W. Bush years simultaneously, without a cohesive strategy binding his actions together, was always going to let the believers down.
As the president’s accelerated pullout from Iraq begins to look increasingly ill-thought-out, as his engagement of Iran and Syria falters, as Arab-Israeli peace looks more elusive than ever, and as Americans express growing doubts about the war in Afghanistan, Obama is discovering that personal charisma is not enough to alter the realities of a Middle East that has whittled down better men than he.
For the US president, the clearest articulation of his approach to the region was his speech in Cairo last June. However, there was always more mood to that address than substance. The president put out a wish-list of American objectives, padded with reassurances and self-criticism, but there was no solid core to what he said — a discernible sense of the values and overriding political ambitions the United States was building toward. As Obama himself admitted, no single speech could answer all the complex questions the Middle East has tossed up. However, American behavior on the ground has made things no easier to understand, which is why regional uncertainties are turning to bite the administration in the leg.
For example, what is the policy in Iraq? In recent weeks, following the American military withdrawal from Iraqi cities, the upsurge in devastating suicide attacks has threatened to reverse years of efforts by Washington to stabilize the country. Ultimately, Obama’s priority can be summed up in one word, reflecting his psychological hesitation to commit to an enterprise that he associates, in a dangerously personalized way, with his predecessor. That word is “withdrawal,” and Obama described his Iraqi policy this way in Cairo: “Today, America has a dual responsibility: to help Iraq forge a better future — and to leave Iraq to Iraqis. I have made it clear to the Iraqi people that we pursue no bases, and no claim on their territory or resources. Iraq’s sovereignty is its own.”
Those were noble thoughts, but how do they square with other American concerns, such as the containment of Iran, the avoidance of sectarian conflict that might engulf the region, the stability of oil supplies, and much else? Obama feels that an America forever signaling its desire to go home will make things better by making America more likable. That’s not how the Middle East works. Politics abhor a vacuum, and as everyone sees how eager the US is to leave, the more they will try to fill the ensuing vacuum to their advantage, and the more intransigent they will be when Washington seeks political solutions to prepare its getaway. That explains the upsurge of bombings in Iraq lately, and it explains why the Taliban feel no need to surrender anything in Afghanistan.
Engagement of Iran and Syria has also come up short, though a breakthrough remains possible. However, there was always something counterintuitive in lowering the pressure on Iran in the hope that this would generate progress in finding a solution to its nuclear program.
Engagement is not an end in itself, it is a means to an end among countless others. Where the Obama administration erred was in not seeing how dialogue would buy Iran more time to advance its nuclear projects, precisely what the Iranians wanted, while breaking the momentum of international efforts to force Tehran to concede something — for example temporary suspension of uranium enrichment. For Obama to rebuild such momentum today seems virtually impossible, when the US itself has made it abundantly clear that it believes war is a bad idea.
Attacking Iran is indeed a bad idea, but in the poker game he has been playing with Tehran, Obama didn’t need to show all of his cards. He’s virtually folded over Iraq, is stumbling in Afghanistan, and does not occupy himself very much with Lebanon, all places where the Iranians can and are hurting the Americans. By placing most of his chips on engagement, the president has failed to develop a more multifaceted strategy while relinquishing other forms of coercion that could have been effective in Washington’s bargaining with the Islamic Republic.
On Syria, the US has been more steadfast, particularly in trying to deny Damascus the means to reimpose its will in Lebanon. However, the Assad regime has shown no signs of breaking away from Iran, a major US incentive in re-engaging with the Syrians, even as it has facilitated suicide attacks in Iraq and encouraged Hamas’ intransigence in inter-Palestinian negotiations in Cairo. The Obama administration can, of course, take the passive view that Syria is entitled to destabilize its neighbors in order to enhance its leverage; or it can behave like a superpower and make the undermining of vital US interests very costly for Bashar Assad. But it certainly cannot defend its vital interests by adopting a passive approach.
With respect to the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, Obama has taken Israel on over its settlements. It was about time, since the Bush administration’s permissiveness on settlement construction neutralized its own “road map”. However, there is more to Palestinian-Israeli peace than settlements. Obama is exerting considerable political capital to confront Israel, but it may be capital wasted at a moment when Hamas can still veto any breakthrough from the Palestinian side. In other words, Washington is working on a narrow front whereas its failure to weaken Hamas may render the whole enterprise meaningless. But how can the US weaken Hamas when improving relations with the movement’s main regional sponsors, Iran and Syria, remains a centerpiece of American efforts?
Barack Obama’s devotees may imagine that because he spent a few years abroad as a boy, he is well equipped to understand our complicated world. Perhaps he is, but his approach to the greater Middle East, shorn of the soaring rhetoric, has been artless and arrogant. The president is being tied up every which way by his foes, who can plainly see that the Obama vision is an unsystematic one. If ever the US has been close to achieving potentially terminal self-marginalization in the region, it is now.
Michael Young is the Opinion Editor and a columnist for Lebanon’s The Daily Star newspaper. He is also a contributing editor at Reason magazine.
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