“No Substitute For A Saudi-Iranian Dialogue”: Blame These Two Countries, Not The United States, For The Current Crisis In Iraq
There is plenty of blame to go around for the current mess in Iraq, but reprimanding Washington, Iraqi President Nouri Al-Maliki, or the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) will solve nothing. The real fault should be assigned to those actors who, despite having tremendous influence and real leverage over the majority of the Iraqi antagonists, have so far decided not to intervene politically. That’s Iran and Saudi Arabia.
A dialogue between the Iranians and the Saudis is desperately needed not just to stop Iraq’s bleeding and prevent another full-blown civil war, but to extinguish at least the major Sunni-Shi’ite fires throughout the Middle East that are fueling this violence and chaos.
This is not a naive call for putting an end to an old and fierce rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran and to an historic feud between the two biggest branches of Islam. That’s just not going to happen. Instead, this is a realistic invitation for two regional heavyweights who, for better or worse, speak for the majority of Sunnis and Shi’ites in the Middle East, to negotiate a path out of this catastrophic situation. Call it arms control, dialogue, or cooperation. The bottom line is that they need to sit down and talk about ways to manage or stabilize their regional competition by agreeing to hard rules that would benefit both, otherwise Arab League chief Amr Moussa’s nightmare scenario of the gates of hell opening in the Middle East will turn into a reality.
In Iraq, Al-Maliki is a big part of the problem, but he is a problem that the Iranians (along with the Americans) created and can easily solve. Saudi Arabia knows that Al-Maliki is Iran’s man in Baghdad, so the first item on the hypothetical Saudi-Iranian negotiating agenda is a new power-sharing arrangement in Iraq that removes Al-Maliki and reintegrates the Sunnis into political life. Because the Shi’ites are the majority in Iraq, the balance of power will always tilt in their favor, but this doesn’t have to translate into Sunni exclusion and Shi’ite domination (as it has been the case under Al-Maliki), and the Iranians and the Saudis can negotiate that.
In Bahrain, Yemen, and Lebanon, similar realistic bargains can take place. Iran should have no business fomenting unrest in Saudi Arabia’s backyard: in Bahrain by supporting radical segments of the opposition there, and in Yemen, where Iran is suspected of sending arms to the Houthi rebels. In Lebanon, while Iran will not instruct Hezbollah to relinquish its weapons (it’s much more complicated than that), it certainly can influence the powerful Shi’ite group’s future in ways that can help it address the concerns of Lebanon’s Sunni players (and Christians and Druze), the most relevant of whom are allied with Riyadh. And even inside the Saudi Kingdom, Iran should reassure Saudi Arabia that it has no intentions of stirring trouble in the Eastern Province, which is predominantly Shi’ite.
Syria will be the toughest nut to crack. The Saudi-Iranian differences there are most acute. Saudi Arabia has spent a vast amount of material resources to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad while Iran has had to incur even heavier costs to do the exact opposite. At present, Iran seems to have the upper hand in Syria, but the conflict is anything but stable and Saudi Arabia has not said its final word yet. Progress on the other regional issues could help pave the way for some sort of deal that cuts Saudi losses, caps Iranian gains, and preserves major Saudi and Iranian security interests in the country, including the defeat of extremist elements that are associated with ISIL and Al Qaeda.
As the United States mulls its options in Iraq, the smartest thing it can do is encourage, with the help of Britain, France, and Russia, the Iranians and the Saudis to announce a summit for high-level, comprehensive political talks between their leaders.
This is the most important conversation that should be happening today in the Middle East, and we are not too far from it. Today, there is an open invitation from Saudi Arabia to a dialogue with Iran, but Iran has yet to respond. Instead, it seems to be more interested in brokering deals with Washington in Vienna by offering security cooperation in Iraq. A potential U.S.-Iran meeting in Vienna could produce tactical gains but it is absolutely no substitute for a Saudi-Iranian strategic dialogue.
By: Bilal Y. Saab, Senior Fellow for Middle East Security at the Atlantic Council’s Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security: The New Republic, June 16, 2014
“Reaganites Called Him A Terrorist And A Phony”: All The Terrible Things Republicans Used To Say About Nelson Mandela
Before Congressional Republicans in the U.S. lionized Nelson Mandela, they despised him. And they opposed not just the great freedom fighter himself but the entire anti-apartheid movement. Even worse, they took actions that damaged the cause of equality in South Africa. Not for nothing did Bishop Desmond Tutu call Ronald Reagan’s policy towards the country “immoral, evil and totally un-Christian.” Conservative Americans’ pro-apartheid actions are not just shameful history—they are similar, in some ways, to their actions to rid the world of political Islam.
The Kennedy administration had opposed the Afrikaner government, instituting an arms embargo on the country. Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, conversely, muted criticism of the regime and opened channels of communications, in order to defeat the Soviets in the Third World. As part of his human rights-focused foreign policy, Jimmy Carter reversed course, imposed restrictions and sanctions on the apartheid government, which Mandela and his party, the African National Congress, requested.
Reagan not only removed the restrictions; he embraced the South African Apartheid regime. He instituted a policy euphemized as “constructive engagement.” Reagan said that the United States lacked the power to change the internal workings of the Afrikaner government. Not only was the claim false, it contradicted his position on the far more powerful Soviet Union, which was designed precisely to change the evil empire’s internal behavior. Reagan put Mandela on the U.S. terrorist list, a placement that wasn’t removed until 2008, incredibly. This was at a time when the South African civil war was at its peak of violence, with the conflict becoming a global cause.
In 1985, after the South African government committed some of its worst atrocities against blacks, Congress voted to impose sanctions against the country. This was a time when America accounted for about one-fifth of direct foreign investment in South Africa. Reagan vetoed the Anti-Apartheid Act, calling it “immoral” and “repugnant.”
When Reagan met with Tutu, it was among the tensest meetings in his entire presidency. Reagan had the gall to tell the bishop that there had been “sizable progress in South Africa because of U.S. policy.” Tutu responded that the victims of Apartheid didn’t quite see that progress. Reagan called the ANC “notorious terrorists,” and, as late as 1988, called apartheid “a tribal policy more than … a racial policy.”
It wasn’t just Reagan. Moral Majority leader Jerry Fallwell called Tutu a “phony” who didn’t speak for South Africans blacks. He even urged Americans to support the Pretoria government. North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms filibustered the sanctions bill. Strom Thurmond and Phil Gramm likewise opposed it. And future vice-president Dick Cheney called Mandela a terrorist, saying in 2000 that he didn’t regret his position. Pat Buchanan called Mandela a “train-bomber.” The Heritage Foundation said America should stop calling for Mandela’s release from prison. Pat Robertson, Grover Norquist, future Tea Party leaders, and current Republican Senators—all were on the books supporting the Apartheid government. When 35 House Republicans broke with the Reagan administration, the National Review called them “uppity,” and Human Events called them a “lynch mob.”
Most of the opposition was justified on foreign-policy grounds. The Reaganites feared that the Soviet Union would gain from the Afrikaner regime if they alienated it. As Conservative Caucus Foundation Chair Howard Phillips put it, “It’s not just a black-white issue. It’s red versus red, white, and blue.” The man who, outside of Reagan, did more than any other to shape the administration’s pro-apartheid policy was Assistant Secretary of State Chester Crocker, who fashioned the Constructive Engagement policy. Wrote Crocker: “The real choice we will face in southern Africa in the 1980s concerns our readiness to compete with our global adversary in the politics of a changing region who future depends on those who participate in shaping it.” The State Department now says frankly that “Defenders of the Apartheid regime” in the West “had promoted it as a bulwark against communism.”
There were two flaws in this line of thinking. First was the notion that South Africa was an important theatre in the Cold War. It wasn’t. It wasn’t even of secondary importance, as Indochina was. Western Europe and Japan were what always mattered. Then there was the view that any means were justified in defeating the Soviet Union. Apartheid was as hideous a societal construct as existed, but many conservatives praised it just because it was anticommunist.
Both misjudgments are being replicated today. Instead of lasering in on anti-American terrorists, hawks maintain that Islamists anywhere are a threat to America everywhere. The result, if put into practice, would be a foreign policy that enmeshed the United States in unnecessary, damaging wars, sullied the country’s moral character, and caused great harm.
Similarly, with the entire globe being up for grabs in the conflict against radical Islam, all actions are deemed justified. Preventive wars against Iraq and perhaps Iran, torture, endless domestic and international surveillance—all are simply part of the toolkit needed to fight a limitless threat.
Some conservatives now concede they were wrong about Mandela. Perhaps after the threat to America from terrorists recedes, they will admit they were similarly mistaken—and damaging—in their inflation of threats from political Islam across the globe.
By: Jordan Michael Smith, The New Republic, December 6, 2013
“A National Embarrassment”: As A Member Of Congress, If Louie Gohmert Say’s It, There Must Be Something To It
About a year ago, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was wrapping up an important diplomatic mission in Cairo when her motorcade was confronted with angry protesters, many of whom threw shoes and tomatoes, while using Monica Lewinsky taunts. And why were these Egyptians so upset? Because they’d heard from right-wing extremists in the U.S. that the Obama administration “harbors a secret, pro-Islamist agenda” and backs the Muslim Brotherhood.
None of the claims were true, but there was a problem — the protesters in the streets of Cairo were relying on comments made by U.S. clowns like Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.). You know she’s ridiculous and not to be taken seriously, and I know she’s ridiculous and not to be taken seriously, but all Egyptians heard was that an elected member of Congress’ majority party had made provocative claims about U.S. policy in Egypt that many found credible.
A year later, as Sahil Kapur reports this morning, the problem persists as Rep. Louie Gohmert’s (R-Texas) nonsense about the White House and the Muslim Brotherhood, which Americans know to ignore, is “complicating U.S. foreign policy in the region.”
Anti-American conspiracy theories are rampant [in Egypt], for a variety of reasons related and unrelated to U.S. foreign policy, and hearing it from a United States congressman lends credibility to the theory that the U.S. is teaming up with the Muslim Brotherhood — and even Al-Qaeda — to destroy Egypt.
“I guarantee you nobody in Egypt really knows who Louie Gohmert is or what he’s about. So they could very well point to this and say ‘Look! He’s a member of Congress. This must be serious. There must be something to it,'” said Steven A. Cook, senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It doesn’t help in a political environment where everyone is already angry at us to be fueling conspiracy theories against us. In that way it enables an overall level of hostility toward the U.S.”
Shadi Hamid, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, told TPM, “[L]ook, this does provide real ammunition to the conspiracy theorists when you have American sources seemingly verifying what they are saying…. It lends these bizarre theories a new code of legitimacy and amplifies them. When Egyptians see this, they don’t realize that just because a U.S. congressman is saying this that it can be wrong or that he can be lying publicly.”
Congratulations, far-right activists, your nonsense now has a global reach and is actually influencing international events among those who can’t tell the difference between serious policymakers and circus clowns from thousands of miles away.
The TPM report added:
The New York Times reported Monday that the U.S.-Brotherhood conspiracy theory has become “widespread” in Egypt, even to the point of being seen by some as common knowledge. Billboards and posters in Egypt tie President Obama to the Brotherhood and accuse him of supporting terrorism against Egypt. And segments of the pro-military Egyptian media have been playing a YouTube clip of Gohmert speaking on the House floor, spliced with ominous background music, likening the Obama administration’s aid to Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi’s government with assisting terrorists.
Gohmert defended his remarks in a statement to TPM, saying he was merely opposing President Obama’s policies and that Egyptians “are able to” make that distinction.
But they’re not able to. Most fair-minded political observers recognize Gohmert as a national embarrassment more in need of counseling than political power, but it’s not realistic to think Egyptians will have a sophisticated understanding of American politics. When they see YouTube clips of elected officials on the floor of our legislative body in Washington, and they hear outrageous conspiracy theories involving Egypt, they haven’t the foggiest idea that Gohmert is a few fries short of a happy meal.
Yes, in fairness, it’s important to note that many who are inclined to believe absurd conspiracy theories don’t really need proof — that, of course, applies to any country — and many Egyptians who want to believe in imaginary U.S. support for the Muslim Brotherhood are going to embrace the non-existent ties whether Gohmert talks them up or not.
But the point is, the right-wing Texas congressman, by recklessly spouting garbage, is making it easier for Egyptian conspiracy theorists to persuade others. Gohmert is obviously free to be as foolish as he wants to be, but one can only hope real-world events in Egypt will push him and his cohorts to be a little more responsible.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 27, 2013
“The Default Religious Setting”: Christian Identity Politics On Fox
I try, with only partial success, to avoid spending too much time on the “A conservative said something offensive!” patrol. First, there are plenty of other people doing it, so it isn’t as if the world won’t hear about it if I don’t remark on the outrage du jour. But second—and more important—most of the time there isn’t much interesting to say about Rush Limbaugh’s latest bit of race-baiting or Bill O’Reilly’s latest spittle-flecked rant or Louie Gohmert’s latest expectoration of numskullery.
But let’s make an exception for this interview Reza Aslan did on Friday with Fox News to promote his new book Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth. You’ve no doubt seen Aslan on television multiple times in the last decade, and maybe even read something he’s written. In the post-9/11 period, he became a go-to guest on shows from Meet the Press to The Daily Show as someone who could explain Islam to American audiences. Young, good-looking, and smart, Aslan could be counted on to put events like the sectarian civil war in Iraq into historical and religious context in ways viewers could understand.
This interview is something to behold, because the Fox anchor, one Lauren Green, obviously not only didn’t read Aslan’s book (not a great sin, given that she probably has to interview a few people a day) but instead of asking him about it, decided to spend nearly ten minutes challenging whether Aslan has any right to write a book about Jesus, since he’s a Muslim. Seriously.
The first question she asks him is “You’re a Muslim, so why did you write a book about the founder of Christianity?” Aslan answers defensively by citing his ample qualifications as a scholar of religion; he could have said he wrote the book because Jesus is one of history’s most important and interesting figures, but before he can get to that, Green interrupts with, “It still begs the question, why would you be interested in the founder of Christianity?” He manages to squeeze in a little bit about his book, talking about the political context in which Jesus emerged, but Green quickly returns to question his right to write about Jesus. “But Reza, you’re not just writing about a religion from a point of view of an observer,” she says. “I believe you’ve been on several programs and never disclosed that you’re a Muslim.” That’s just false, not to mention idiotic, and Aslan immediately corrects her by noting that he not only mentions his faith on the second page of the book they’re discussing, but it’s mentioned in practically every interview he’s ever done.
Now maybe we shouldn’t be too hard on Lauren Green—for all I know, her producer could have handed her these questions and told her how to conduct the interview. She obviously knew nothing about Aslan or his book. But I wonder about what kinds of conversation at Fox preceded the interview. “This guy calls Jesus a zealot!” somebody says. “And he’s a Muslim! Let’s nail him.”
I haven’t read Aslan’s book, so I have no idea what if anything it adds to the hundreds of books that have already been written about Jesus. But Green came pretty close to saying that as a Muslim, Aslan must by definition be hostile to Christianity in general and Jesus in particular and therefore incapable of writing a measured piece of history. This gets back to something I wrote about last week on the privilege associated with being the default racial setting, although here it’s the default religious setting. If you’re in the majority, it’s your privilege to be whatever you want and speak to whatever you want, and you can be treated as an authority on anything. But those in the minority are much more likely, when they come into this kind of realm, to be allowed only to speak to the experience and history of their particular demographic group. So Fox has no trouble treating Reza Aslan as an authority on Islam, but if he claims to also be an authority on Christianity, those Christians react with incredulity.
I’m not saying that similar assumptions never travel in the other direction. People in minority groups have sometimes told those in the majority that their identity as part of the majority renders them unable to speak to certain experiences; you can call that the “It’s a [insert my group] thing; you wouldn’t understand” effect. But what we’re talking about here isn’t testimony, where someone says, “Let me tell you how life is for us,” demanding to be the reporter and interpreter of their own experience. It’s history, and ancient history at that. If someone came on Fox to promote a biography of Aristotle (I know, I know), it wouldn’t be too likely the interviewer would demand to know who they thought they were writing such a book since they aren’t even Greek.
But at Fox and in many other places, Christianity and Islam aren’t just different tribes, they’re different tribes that are in a state of virtual war. The war flares brighter at some times than others—for instance, if you didn’t watch Fox during the “Ground Zero Mosque” brouhaha, you were spared an unbelievable orgy of anti-Muslim hate-mongering, as they gave shocking amounts of time to despicable bigots like Pamela Geller—but it’s always there. For all the talk from more establishment figures that America isn’t at war against Islam (and by the way, that was something George W. Bush was very good about repeating), down where conservatives get their news, it’s a very different world.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 29, 2013
“Nativist Vigilantism”: The Media And The “Dark-Skinned” Men From Chechnya
Jake Tapper had been up all night covering the manhunt in Boston for CNN, so maybe that explains why he seemed to rush to judgment when he said of the bombing suspects: “It certainly seems these two are Islamic terrorists.”
“Yes, but those are two separate words,” Juliette Kayyem, a CNN contributor and former homeland security official, reminded Tapper. Technically, literally, he’s not inaccurate: The two brothers, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who died in a shootout with police last night, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who is apparently cornered by police as I post this, are Muslim and allegedly are terrorists. But all morning long, Kayyem had been cautioning viewers and fellow journalists not to jump to conclusions (as CNN’s John King so infamously did two days ago when he wrongly reported that a “dark-skinned male” had been arrested in connection with the bombing.) “The fact that they’re from Chechnya,” Kayyem said, “is not a motivation.”
The big question, of course, is what was the motivation. But even before the FBI made the Tsarnaevs’ photos public yesterday, and well before we knew their names or background (they’re from a region in Russia next to Chechnya, actually, and have lived in Boston about 10 years), we all have been trying to answer why by placing the two men somewhere on a racial, ethnic, religious, and ideological spectrum.
Media coverage is fraught with that tension: Were they “self-radicalized” and acting on their own or were they part of a larger network? Were they praying to Allah or praising Jesus? Was their nefariousness domestic- or international-based? (The word international keeps popping up superfluously: Fox & Friends’ Gretchen Carlson remarked that “they saw their photos on international television.” Well, unless they were watching CNN International, they saw themselves on good ol’ American TV, like Fox News.)
In other words, were they the kind of white Christian Americans that society has a hard time calling terrorists, or were they the kind of foreign-looking, “dark-skinned” suspects that we have a hard time not calling terrorists?
Much of the media today have been careful not to assign motivations, at least not yet. As Savannah Guthrie said, “There are facts that cut both ways.”
She, Kayyem, and other reporters, including a few on Fox, have laid out reasons that the two suspects might not be big-time Islamic terrorists: No one claimed responsibility for the carnage, as jihadist groups tend to; if they were part of a politically radical network, they probably wouldn’t have been so stupid as to rob a 7/11; high-school friends describe the younger brother as a normal teenager who partied, drank, and smoked.
The estimable Richard Engle of NBC allowed that while they could have been acting alone, there’s a good chance they’re connected to a militant group, specifically, he said, the Islamic Jihadist Union, which is “an Al Qaeda faction for all the non-Arabic speakers.”
An uncle of the two, Raslan Tsarni, surrounded by a mob of reporters outside his Maryland home, fervently denied any political motivations. “What I think was behind it: Being losers, hatred to those who were able to settle themselves,” Tsarni said. “These are the only reasons I can imagine of. Anything else, anything else to do with religion, with Islam, is a fake.”
If he’d suspected anything, he’d be first to turn them in, he added. They brought shame on the family and “shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity.”
One reporter asked a question that, I thought, brought embarrassment to his profession. Reminiscent of how the political establishment demands that Obama say the magic word “terrorist” or else lose patriotism points, the reporter asked Tsarni point blank: What do you think of America?
“I respect this country. I love this country,” he said. “This country, which gives chance to everybody else to be treated as a human being. That’s what I feel about this country.”
Right after the marathon, the right tried to make it seem as if Muslims, preferably the Arab kind, had practically planned the attack on “Obamaphones.” When a Saudi man was mistakenly identified as a person of interest, Glenn Beck and some rightwing blogs spun a conspiracy story in which the U.S. swiftly deported the man because Obama wanted “to cover up Saudi Arabian and Al Qaeda ties to the attack.”
Then, the New York Post stooped to phone-hacking levels by publishing a cover photo of two young men, one of them a Moroccan-American high-school athlete, who were simply watching the marathon, under the headline “BAG MEN.”
It was in hopes of avoiding just this sort of nativist vigilantism that Salon’s David Sirota wrote a piece titled Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American.” It was still before we had any idea of who they were, when he added:
I hoped (though certainly never assumed) the Boston bomber ends up being a white non-Muslim American because in a country where white people are never collectively profiled, surveilled or targeted by law enforcement, that would best guarantee a measured — rather than a hysterical, civil-liberties-trampling — reaction to the atrocity. For this, I was lambasted by everyone from Rush Limbaugh to Bill O’Reilly to their thousands of followers for being “race obsessed” (O’Reilly, in fact, took a step into straight-up slander by subsequently claiming that I am hoping Americans kill other Americans in terrorist attacks).
I, too, hoped the bomber was a non-Muslim white American. Last night, after the shootout, a taped loop showed a young blond man lying on the street, with his arms splayed out, surrounded by police with drawn weapons. We don’t know who he was, and he may have been an innocent bystander. But for a moment, I actually hoped that the “white cap” guy in the FBI photos was wearing a dark wig and that underneath he was a blond “domestic terrorist” trying to frame Muslims.
Yesterday, after the FBI put out their photos but before we knew the suspects’ names or background, a lot of people didn’t know what to make of them: Were they white, Muslim, Italian, what? Erin Burnett sounded authentically perplexed, saying, “These two kids look like they’re very, very from here.” Most people figured them for college students, which in fact they were.
Now that they’ve been ID’ed, that relatively innocent moment is gone. We know they’re Chechen, and Chechen is not something we’ve processed racially. Or as The Onion put it: “Majority Of Americans Not Informed Enough To Stereotype Chechens.”
Unfortunately, in the end, what will matter most to our national political narrative is that they’re both Muslim and terrorists. “Islamic terrorists.”
By: Leslie Savan, The Nation, April 19, 2013
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