The Gertrude Bell Jar

Watch This Space!

Mr. Bell Jar, who incidentally is currently reading a series of novels set during the Napoleonic Wars, except there are dragons, described yesterday's review of Imperial Hubris as "ripped from the headlines of the blogosphere, from 18 months ago!" Well I prefer to think of it as blogging at my own pace. Which means that you may begin looking for my incisive analysis of the current Israel/Lebanon crisis in February of 2008.

I am trying to get caught up on book reviews, though admittedly the books are mostly on the well-ripened side by now.

Imperial Hubris by "Anonymous"

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror by "Anonymous."

I've mentioned this book (which is now known to have been written by former CIA analyst Michael Scheuer) before, in a brief comment about one of its many flaws, but got hung up on writing the review, I think because I wanted to write the mother of all scathing indictments, but was honestly too infuriated and exasperated by this whole book to be able to sustain any coherent writing on it.

But time heals! I find, looking it over again, that a response I posted in another forum to a query about Scheuer a long while ago will do as a review. The questioner had seen Scheuer among the talking heads on tv commenting on the 7/7 London bombings, and was flummoxed by his "provocative yet ultimately mystifying talking points," and asked if anyone knew what was up with that.

I replied: I didn't hear what Scheuer was saying last week, but I have read his book. His basic argument is: nearly all Muslims in the Middle East are secretly Islamists, no matter what they try to tell you. Our policy options therefore are: 1. To withdraw entirely to fortress America (no more oil-buying or any other kind of trading relationship with any regime in the Middle East, and no support whatsoever for Israel or any other nation in the region and indeed no diplomatic relationship with anyone of any kind there, no more pc environmentalism preventing full exploitation of our own oil resources, no more pc civil-rights concerns preventing full defense of the homeland) or 2. Go on a total war footing, in which we understand that our purpose is to kill as many Middle Eastern Muslims as possible, or at least sufficiently to fully subjugate and terrify any survivors (hence, the book has chapter titles like "Get Good At And Used to Killing.") Pull completely out or kill 'em all, basically.

To Scheuer, in other words, the uber-fallacy is to believe that there are any Muslims in the Middle East who do not secretly want to overthrow their governments and install Osama bin Laden as their caliph in a Talibanesque Islamic state. The neocon agenda is therefore delusional, since the establishment of such a caliphate would be the inevitable outcome of allowing Muslims to vote. A right-wing militaristic response is delusional to the extent that it continues to attempt to minimize civilian casualties and be somewhat selective in regards to targets. A left-wing negotiation response is delusional because there is no negotiating with this basic antipathy to our very existence; there can be only stupid good faith on our part and lying for temporary advantage on theirs.

It's difficult to overstate the magnitude of his error here. (Although the bibliography to his book offers a partial explanation of it; Scheuer does not read Arabic nor has he made any effort to read about any of these issues from a Muslim or Arab perspective in English or English translation. His whole reading diet from the Middle Eastern perspective has apparently been propaganda missives from al Qaeda and a handful of fellow-travellers as provided by CIA translators, and from the Western perspective various iterations of conservative national defense punditry, plus the literature that has grown up around the "clash of civilizations" theory as applied in the Middle East.) But his argument for it is: Condemnation of Israel and U.S. support for Israel is nearly universal in the Middle East; al Qaeda condemns Israel and the U.S. on the same basis; therefore support for al Qaeda must be universal in the Middle East. This is a little like saying: Nearly all Americans condemn terrorism on their own soil; Bush condemns terrorism also; therefore nearly all Americans must be Bush supporters. Whereas of course we know that all significant political actors in the U.S. condemn terrorism; the competition among them is not about whether to be against terrorism, but about what to do about it. And in fact the same is true of the Middle East (though for equivalency in at least numbers read "Pat Buchanan" supporters for "Osama bin Laden" supporters); all political actors in the Middle East have condemned Israel and U.S. support for it to varying degrees since 1948; the question of which group is best able to mobilize and maintain support for itself based on its approach to the issue is the highly variable and contigent one. And all of this is trivially obvious from even a cursory glance at Middle Eastern history or at the very small amount of public polling data available.

I found myself worrying a lot more about the quality of foreign policy analysis at the CIA than about the Iraq War after reading this book. Some of his criticism of U.S. policy is quite correct, and his knowledge of al Qaeda itself at the operational (but not ideological) level is very useful. But the underlying perspective is just warped and flat-out wrong.

Another commenter asked if I thought any of this theory could be based on ancient views of warfare, when people believed that the only way to successfully assimilate another culture was to kill all the men and take all the women for the conquerors, and also, " … what does he think the remaining portion of these civilizations would do while the other 75%+ is being wholesale slaughtered?"

I replied: I haven't read any of theory of warfare type books that were listed in his bibliography, but it wouldn't surprise me if a fair number of them went into the kind of discussion you're talking about and might have influenced his own take on things. IIRC the specific historical example he used to critique the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq was WWII, or specifically the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan, to make the point that the post-WWII occupations were much easier to handle than either of the current ones because such a large portion of the civilian population as well as the military had been killed already in the war; the Germans and Japanese were totally beaten down and hence docile at war's end in this view.

I mean, what does he think the remaining portion of these civilizations would do while the other 75%+ is being wholesale slaughtered?

Cowering and awaiting instructions, presumably. So would the occupations of Germany and Japan lead one to believe. Of course there was little else they could have done at the time, the idea of international terrorism by nonstate actors not having been thought of yet, and not as easily done anyway with the available technology. But this is where his notion of fortress America comes in, I suppose.

The original questioner commented that Scheuer had indeed given off a bit of a "crackpot" vibe, and that perhaps he was intentionally a little cagey about what he was actually saying, since being too clear might well put him on the "do not call back" list.

I replied: I think he manages to sound reasonable enough even in most of his book. It's common enough, after all, to point out the differences between the German and Iraqi occupations as I mentioned below. But to most people this is just a difference in the outcome of two very different approaches to warfare in which the latter version is vastly preferable on its own hook; the point of bringing it up is just to recognize the difficulties that seem to follow comparatively low casuality warfare and propose ways to address them, or to critique Dubya for failing to plan for them in advance, etc. I think Scheuer is probably the only commentater I've encountered who thinks the correct answer would have been to have gone all Dresden on Iraq in the first place. I'm guessing he just doesn't include the crazy part when he's talking on tv.

Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism/Haideh Moghissi

Feminism and Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis by Haideh Moghissi.

I’ve mentioned this book before, with a long quote from the introduction. Moghissi is an Iranian ex-pat dismayed by what she sees as Western academic apologism for the misogynist aspects of the wave of Islamization that swept Muslim countries generally in the 80s and 90s, as well as for the low status of women in revolutionary Islamist states themselves (particularly Iran). She challenges the notion that secularist democracy and equalitarian feminism should be seen as culturally inappropriate or for Middle Eastern peoples, and attempts to map out a method for critiqueing the status of women in Muslim nations without playing into Orientalist imagery or anti-Muslim bigotry. Moghissi is especially skeptical of the enthusiasm for Islamic feminism when it is treated not as a necessary resistance strategy for women living in Islamist states, but as the only appropriate mode of feminist consciousness for women in Muslim nations in general. Moghissi herself sees strict limits on how much the status of women can be improved from within Islamic tradition, and so favors secularization as the best method of accomplishing feminist goals. It’s an interesting read and serves as a good introduction to the range of thought among Muslim and ex-Muslim women on feminism and Islam.

New Political Religions/Barry Cooper

New Political Religions, or An Analysis of Modern Terrorism by Barry Cooper.

I’m a tad behind on book reviews and so had to dip back into this a little to jog my memory, and was reminded again of what a really interesting book this is, even though it ended up being a tad disappointing on the subject of Islamism. I posted about Cooper’s basic theory about pneumopathology, first & second reality, etc. with reference to Aum Shinrikyo and Stalin in some detail back in October when I was actually reading this the first time. And indeed, as I expected then, his treatment of the Islamic sense of history turned out to be as good as any I’ve come across so far:

… following the hijra, the Prophet defeated his own tribe in battle and therefore created the umma, humanity in statu nascendi obedient to God …

The most obvious characteristic of the early history of the Islamic community was its political success. Unlike Christianity, which penetrated an already existing political order, imperial Rome, Islam combined temporal and spiritual activity in a single act of imperial-religious founding. As Smith observed: "the success was comprehensive as well as striking. As we have said, the enterprise gained not only power but greatness. In addition to quickly attaining political and economic mastery, Muslim society carried forward into new accomplishments both art and science. Its armies won battles, its decrees were obeyed, its letters of credit were honored, its architecture was magnificent, its poetry charming, its scholarship imposing, its mathematics bold, its technology effective." Moreover, it proved difficult and perhaps impossible for one participating in Islamic history, that is, the pious Muslim, to distinguish the political from the religious dimensions. As Fazlur Rahman puts it, Muhammad was "duty-bound to succeed." His success, for the community, was understood to be an intrinsic part of Islam, an element of Islamic history, proof, as it were, of God’s favor. The victories of the Prophet were understood to be the victories of God.

… The success in actually spreading God’s message to humanity seemed to confirm the meaning of Islamic history in the course of events, namely, the history of Islamic society and of the Muslim religion. That is, the gap between paradigmatic and pragmatic history or between Augustine’s two cities seemed to be closing and perhaps even to be closed. For Muslims, God had spoken and told human beings how to live; those who submitted to God’s will and lived the way God said were visibly blessed. The pragmatic triumphs of the Muslim armies were understood as the confirmation and triumph of paradigmatic Islamic history. Pragmatic events thus confirmed a symbolic meaning and then came to be understood as having themselves acquired a symbolic meaning.

(Though Cooper does not head in this direction in his analysis, it seems to me partly to explain why the complaints of Muslims against the West seem to spring not just from jealousy as some have argued, or even solely resentment of specific real injustices, but from an underlying sense of existential wrongness with the current position of Muslims in the world. Indeed, even among the relatively secularized in Muslim lands there’s a sort of bafflement about this. This also perhaps is why it did finally become possible for Muslims in the 20th Century to embrace the European notion of an International Jewish Conspiracy, which would have seemed utterly nonsensical to their forebears. Yes, the Jews were sometimes enemies of the Prophet, but the Prophet always won. The Jews had not even succeeded in killing Jesus, though the Christians mistakenly thought they had. In Islamic history until the advent of the state of Israel, the Jews were considered too incompetent to seriously trouble anyone. How could it be otherwise if they were not Muslims?)

Anyhoo, having described the Aum Shinrinkyo cult and its progression from predicting a coming apocalypse from which those who accepted its purifying message could be saved to seeking to bring about the apocalypse in order to punish those who ignored it, Cooper promises:

As we shall argue below, modern Islamist thinkers such as Qutb or bin Laden easily combine jihadist and apocalyptic traditions in the expectation that a final and ecumenic conquest requires a pure society, which in turn is a bridge to the end time, an essential element in a grandiose redemptive event prior to the end of the world.

And there follows a valuable discussion of the theological evolution and general headspace (to use the technical term) of the Islamist jihadist movement and its suicide-bombing foot soldiers. But the evidence of apocalypticism is a bit thin:

The Jews are not, for Islamists, merely the citizens of Israel and unwelcome neighbors of the Muslim states of the region. Nor are they merely the repository of a long-standing hostility. Later in the interview bin Laden explained why he was so confident of victory: "We are certain that we shall--with the grace of God--prevail over the Americans and over the Jews, as the Messenger of Allah promised us in an authentic prophetic tradition when He said the Hour of Resurrection shall not come before Muslims fight Jews and before Jews hid behind trees and rocks."

This "authentic prophetic tradition" is one of many apocalyptic themes surrounding relations between the two religions, Islam and Judaism. Article Seven of the (Sunni) Hamas Covenant, for example, states: "The time [of Resurrection] will not come until Muslims fight the Jews and kill them, and until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees whence the call is raised: ‘Oh Muslim, here is a Jew hiding! Come and kill him.’" During the apocalyptic Hour of Resurrection, therefore, the common world is transfigured, and even the rocks and trees cry out to assist in the process of extermination of the enemies of God.

The purpose of this large-scale killing is akin to Asahara’s purpose of ordering large-scale pao-ing: to bring about a peaceful world of triumphant justice. As with the example of Aum Shinrikyo, common sense has difficulty grasping how an apocalyptic war of extermination can achieve an endless peace of righteousness. Thus, as Juergensmeyer said, with some perplexity, there are no "simple answers" that terrorists alive with apocalyptic expectations can give when they are asked "simple questions," such as: "What kind of state do you want? How do you plan to get it? How do you think you will get along with the rest of the world?" Juergensmeyer’s commonsense questions are easily dismissed by terrorist pneumopaths because such people are concerned, not with getting along with the rest of the world, but with changing the structure of reality, with "changing the world" as Marx put it, so that an apocalyptic conflict will give rise to a metastatic peace.

The hadith repeated in the forgoing is the only concrete Islamic or even Islamist reference cited as an example of Muslim apocalyptics; all other references Cooper makes are to a vague commonality with the apocalyptics of the Abrahamic tradition in general. It doesn’t seem like a firm basis for arguing that Islamism is actually animated by (as opposed to merely consonant with) apocalyptic expectations in the same way Aum Shinrikyo was. The hadith could be cited merely to bolster predictions of eventual victory, a claim common to most if not all leaders seeking to incite others to war. It might also serve the purpose of bolstering the notion, otherwise not terribly present in traditional Islamic sources or beliefs, that ultimately God wants all those Jews dead anyway, in the minds of those suiting up to slaughter unarmed busloads of them, today. If this is really all there is, isn’t it just as likely that Islamism is more like any other utopian political movement than an apocalyptic religious cult like Aum Shinrikyo? Could Lenin have answered any of Juergensmeyer’s "simple questions" in any detail either, before the fact of actually administering a state? After I had read Cooper’s book, references to "the Last Day" in Islamist texts did start jumping out at me, but I find it hard to tell how important they are. Christians refer to "Judgement Day" all the time, too. Among non-fundamentalist types it’s just supposed to remind you about prioritizing God’s expectations over material desires, not to imply that it’s just around the corner and you should be really expecting it or anything. I had probably recited the Lord’s Prayer a thousand times in my lifetime before learning that it contains references to the end time, in an Atlantic article about Millenarianism published on the eve of 2000. There’s not enough information here to even tell how present the End of Days is in the minds of ordinary Muslims, let alone Islamists.

I’m not convinced that the notion of "wrecking the present to create a peaceful future" as Cooper puts it presupposes an apocalyptic mindset, either. I have written before about the role the notion of going to war in order to make peace played in Muhammad’s use of warfare in spreading Islam, and a certain similarity that bears to the Bush doctrine (it’s a long entry, so to quote just the relevant bit):

At [the time of the hejira], only a small portion of the population of the Arabian peninsula was urbanized. Most Arabs were still organized into Bedouin tribes, and relations between tribes were mostly defined by warfare. Each tribe had its own god, and would routinely raid other tribes for treasure and slaves. The god of the loser would be smashed and repudiated by his or her previous adherents who had escaped the raid intact, and who would then sometimes adopt the god of the victors as evidently the stronger deity.

Muhammad sought to convert the Arabs to Islam by warfare in a similar fashion. For one thing, victory in warfare was the major sign of the efficacy of any god in the minds of the Arabs; for another, monotheism offered the promise, ultimately, of peace. Muhammad's innovation was to offer prisoners of war the option of conversion to Islam and membership in the Muslim community rather than execution or enslavement; his theory was that once all the Arabs were united under the god of Abraham, war itself would cease. In this theory and in this context, warfare for the sake of Islam was understood to be basically defensive, it being only a matter of time before any prosperous community, including any community of Muslims if it gained any traction or success, would be attacked and raided by another under a different banner. (The notion of preemptive "defensive" warfare, with the additional purpose of creating the conditions for a more permanent peace, will perhaps be familiar to those following current events). In essence, the goal was to replace warring tribal affiliations with shared Muslim confessional identity as the basis of community.

And indeed there are many other examples. "Making the world safe for democracy," anyone? Intriguingly, the "reality-based" remark from an unnamed person in the White House was leaked shortly after my first post about Cooper’s discussion of first and second reality; I half-suspected that someone in the administration was reading his book, or some part of its bibliography.

I don’t regard Cooper’s theory about the role of Muslim apocalyptics as wrong so much as unproven. I imagine I’ll have to read some of the books he footnotes to get a better handle on what Muslim apocalyptics actually are and what role they might play in Islamist theology. For my own future reference, assuming I ever get around to this, the most relevant texts seem to be:
David Cook, Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature. (Forthcoming. Well, maybe published by now.).
David Cook, Studies in Classic Muslim Apocalyptic.
David Benjamin & Steven Simon, The Age of Sacred Terror.
Mark Juergensmeyer, Terror in the Mind of God: The Global Rise of Religious Violence.

Radical Islam/Emmanuel Sivan

Radical Islam: Medieval Theology and Modern Politics by Emmanuel Sivan.
I've mentioned this book a few times before; it's basically the single most useful source on the topic I've encountered so far. Sivan has compiled a history of Islamism from published books, pamphlets, newsletters, letters from prison, police interrogations, issued statements, etc., of leading theorists as well as of foot soldiers. Almost none of this stuff is available in English, so this book is invaluable.

Martyrs' Day/Michael Kelly

Martyrs' Day: Chronicle of a Small War by Michael Kelly.
A collection of essays and reports by the American journalist (he was an editor of The Atlantic at the time of his death while covering the more recent war in Iraq) about the Gulf War. He ignored the pool reporter thing and went pretty much everywhere during the war; Baghdad before the outbreak of the war, Israel during the SCUD attacks, at the front with the Egyptian Army during the ground war, Kuwait City after liberation, Kurdish areas of northern Iraq after non-liberation there, etc. Some of it is very compelling stuff; the chapter on the occupation of Kuwait City is particularly troubling in the wake of Abu Ghraib and stirring up of old reports about the Stanford Prison experiment and whatnot. A both enjoyable and depressing read.

The Islamist Impasse/Ibrahim A. Karawan

The Islamist Impasse by Ibrahim A. Karawan.
A very concise account of the rise of Islamism, the nature and extent of its appeal as an opposition movement, and strategies adopted by both Islamists and the regimes they aim to overthrow in countering each others' challenges. The discussion here of the political goals of Islamist terrorism is particularly useful. Karawan's overall conclusion is that Islamism appeared to have reached the climax of its power (this paper dates from 1997) and been consistently stymied by its own limitations and by countermeasures by state regimes that have turned out to be quite stable. This may sound unprescient, but I don't think it is, exactly. His portrait of political deadlock seems to match that offered by Gilles Kepel in his pre-9/11 book Jihad (which I'm currently reading in bursts) and was I believe pretty much the consensus among experts in the late 90's. Kepel has added a preface to the paperback edition of Jihad in which he argues that 9/11 and the shift in focus to attacking Westerners abroad rather than "apostate" Muslims at home was probably a fairly desperate measure to jumpstart support in the Muslim world for the radical agenda, by outstripping other regimes' perceived ability to defeat or challenge the West. I'd be very interested to see what Karawan has had to say about this; I wonder if he's written anything more recent …

History of the Arab Peoples/Albert Hourani

A History of the Arab Peoples by Albert Hourani.

Geez, that took me long enough; I started this book many many months ago and have been reading it in tiny increments. It's just so hard to read while asleep, isn't it? Hourani is not at all boring as historians go, but I am so not History Girl. Anyhoo, this is a survey of Arab history from the time of Muhammad to the present day, in about 450 pages and with tons of helpful maps and dynastic lists and references and whatnot in the back, and cover endorsements by both Daniel Pipes and Edward Said, due to the almost inhumanly careful balance maintained on controversial issues like Israel. Hourani has a very elegant writing style and is a pleasure to read. But still, the book contains a prodigious amount of facts about dead people, so what are you gonna do?

Guests of the Sheik/Elizabeth Warnock Fernea

Guests of the Sheik: an Ethnography of an Iraqi Village by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea.

Fernea accompanied her anthropologist husband to a small village in Southern Iraq (just a year or two before the Ba'athist Revolution/Coup/whatever), and at his urging undertook to document that part of women's lives (i.e., nearly all) that he as a man was not permitted to witness. It's a really fascinating account of how traditional Islamic and customary Arab sex roles and restrictions are actually supposed to work in practice and in their more or less original setting, and how modernity was impinging on them even then and in that remote spot. While reading this I spent a lot of time thinking about the difference between merely enacting customs that you've inherited and trying to reimpose them self-consciously and selectively as an aspect of a political ideology. In the former case so much wiggle room is left for contradictions and special cases and slipped feet, while in the latter beating square pegs into round holes seems to be almost the entire point of the exercise.

Engagement or Coercion/Katerina Dalacoura

Engagement or Coercion: Weighing Western Human Rights Policies Towards Turkey, Iran and Egypt by Katerina Dalacoura.

(I've reviewed her previous book Islam, Liberalism and Human Rights here). This is a review of various policies adopted by the U.S., the European Union, various nations of Western Europe and Canada and an assortment of NGO's in an effort to promote human rights in the Middle East throughout the 1990's. Dalacoura meticulously documents every peaceful approach tried with respect to the nations mentioned in the title, the full suite of diplomatic tools ranging from verbal pressure to economic punishments, and the failure of each one (unless one counts cosmetic and short-lived changes as success, which she doesn't). So what does Dalacoura think of the Iraq War, you are dying to ask?

If the conclusion of this study, that Western human rights policies have had a limited and ambiguous impact in the Middle East, is correct, the implication, ironically, is that Iraq will democratize only if it is fully taken over and reconstructed by the occupying powers. But if the Iraqi people eventually come to assume responsibility for their affairs, as Japan and Germany did after the Second World War, then the flourishing of democracy and liberal institutions in Iraq is a possibility.

A similar argument was made by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in October 2002: "One of the lessons of more than a decade of democracy promotion around the world is that outsiders are usually marginal players. They become the central determinant of political change only if they are willing to intervene massively, impose a de facto protectorate, and stay for an indefinite, long term. No matter what happens in Iraq, such forceful intervention is unthinkable in most Middle East countries." It is indeed doubtful that the United States and the United Kingdom will be willing to commit the manpower and resources entailed by such an occupation of Iraq. A job left half-done and a quick exit, in the manner of Afghanistan after the US intervention of 2001-2, which left the Kabul government in partial control of the country, is a more likely scenario. This cannot but further discredit the West's commitment to human rights and democracy in the eyes of the people of the Middle East.

Of course that is a false characterization of the situation in Afghanistan. The US and its allies have not yet left Afghanistan; indeed that war isn't actually over yet, and there may be a bit more endgame to be played with respect to the warlords there once it is over. She may be right, she may be wrong; we'll all learn together soon enough I suppose.