The Gertrude Bell Jar

Notes On "Offensive Realism"

I posed a question in another forum last week about the Mearsheimer/Walt paper, and thought the results were interesting enough to repost here:

Drezner has a round-up of some of the more worthwhile responses to the Mearsheimer & Walt paper on the Israel lobby. I thought Jacob Levy’s thoughts were particularly interesting. Mr. Bell Jar was a student of Mearsheimer’s in the 1980s, and had already mentioned to me how odd it was for Mearsheimer to entertain the idea that a domestic political lobby might be exerting any significant influence on U.S. foreign policy, since the realist school Mearsheimer has helped to create pretty much dismisses internal national politics as a relevant factor in how states conduct international relations. Levy touches briefly on this issue, but more forcefully questions the way Mearsheimer’s opposition to the Iraq War undermines his standard view that states always act in their own security interests:

M&W are committed to the neorealist view that powerful states act in their security interest. They're also, independently, committed to opposition to the Iraq War and to what they see as U.S. overreach in the Middle East; they think that the U.S. does not effectively pursue its security interests in the region. So there's a puzzle, an anomaly-- of their own making. If you are both committed to a predictive theory and committed to an interpretation of a particular case by which it falsifies your theory, then there's a puzzle for your views, but not yet a puzzle about the world.

I know more than a few readers here have studied Mearsheimer, and possibly one or two have been actual students of his as Mr. Bell Jar has. I’m wondering: Is the forgoing a fair characterization of Mearsheimer’s theories about states other than the U.S. with reference to Israel, and conflicts other than the Iraq War? I’m wondering because, if so, then the entire argument about the Israel lobby would seem more like an attempt to explain away holes in his previous arguments than anything else. (Mearsheimer also published a widely-read article on why the U.S. should continue to pursue a containment strategy towards Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion). Or as commenter Kevin Donoghue puts it in the comment thread on Levy’s post over at Crooked Timber:

their theory (or at least the version Mearsheimer expounded in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics) is contradicted by the facts and that’s what they are wrestling with. Putting it another way, it is their anxiety to rescue their theory which is pushing them. Actually I think M/W are snookered: either states are not rational in pursuit of their interests, or it was in America’s interest to invade Iraq.

Is that fair to say? I don’t know Mearsheimer’s work well enough to judge.

P. said: I would argue that is an unfair characterization. In the introduction to Mearsheimer's The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, he outlines the limits of offensive realism, his theory. He would probably place the Iraq War situation in the anomalies that offensive realism simply does not explain.

Offensive realism does not explain these situations because it is parsimonious theory - it simplifies reality. It tries to treat states as black boxes or billiard balls, and does not really look to the internal characteristics of states. It discards factors, and the main one it discards are attention to individuals or domestic political considerations. When these factors dominate a state's decision making process, realist theories will just not predict as well. T

here are also situations where offensive realism does not tell you what the proper answer is. There are situations where several different outcomes are consistent with the theory. In these cases, offensive realism will be indeterminate as to the outcome. Other theories have to be brought in to try and figure out what is going on.

Lastly, there will be situations where great powers act contrary to what the theory predicts (the anomalous cases). Inevitably, such behavior causes negative consequences, according to Mearsheimer, and that's what he would probably say is happening with Iraq. All of this can be inferred, I believe, from pages 9-12 of Tragedy.

Mr. Bell Jar said:  Three general points -- first, Walt was always much, much squishier on Realism than Mearsheimer was. (We used to joke that you lost rigor as you dropped letters off of "Waltz". See, there was a neoliberal scholar named Alt... Okay, it wasn't much of a joke. We were grad students.)

Second, I haven't read Tragedy of International Relations, because I haven't found a cheap copy yet. All my exposure to Mearsheimer was in 1988-1990, when the 'near enemy' was still risible exponents of soft power like Keohane and Nye. However, I think the notion of a Great Power (indeed, pretty much the only Great Power left) expanding into areas of direct national-security importance like the Persian Gulf can be considered easily explicable by the Realist doctrine we all learned from Prof. Mearsheimer. The question is, are there enough other Powers who will attempt to balance against us, or aren't there? (Which is to say -- morality aside, have we fatally overstretched in Iraq and roused the other Powers, or not?) Given our continued closeness to Britain and the burgeoning new alliance with India, I think the case of fatal overstretch must remain unproven as yet.

Third, at least back in my day, we all knew that Realism wasn't necessarily predictive of state behavior, but of the consequences -- a state that departed from Realist principles (which we all knew they did; the arguments were about boundary cases like Chamberlain in 1938) would get its comeuppance sooner rather than later. (For example, biology doesn't say people will never try to breathe water. It only says that they will drown if they do.) Some of us did use Newtonian arguments -- "Left to itself, a state with opportunity to expand its power will do so," but we always knew there was a big blur over "left to itself."

But yes, I do find it odd that Mearsheimer is now paying attention to questions of internally-driven motives for state behavior -- that was never his bailiwick, or even particularly interesting to him, at least not back in the Day. My theory is that as far as their paper goes, he was mostly concerned with the strategic question of supporting Israel (does it make Realpolitikal sense to ally with one state rather than eleven?) and that Walt was the guy with the rest of the baggage.

G. said: When I took his class in 2002 he seemed a contradiction. I lost count of the number of times he said, "States are basically strategic calculators." If this was supposed to be an "ideal gas" model without any perfect example in the real world, he didn't stress the point. And yet he said almost as many times that the invasion would be a mistake. I never got around to asking what it would mean if our strategic calculator chose invasion anyway. I think it's this contradiction that pushed Mearsheimer into domestic politics. So I agree with Levy.

H. said:  Oh. I thought that Realism was supposed to be prescriptive, not descriptive. Learn something new every day!

P. replied:  It is both a descriptive theory and a prescriptive theory. It is a descriptive theory inasmuch as it says this is how the world (unfortunately) works. It is a prescriptive theory inasmuch as it says, if this how the world really works, then this is how you should behave so that you can survive.

I replied:  Which pretty much guarantees that the world will go on working that way, no? This is why people who don't really know much about the details of Realist theory intuitively think it is evil anyway, I suspect.

P. replied:  That's why it's the "tragedy" of great power politics. Even if a great power wanted to be benevolent, or even just be left alone, they would be forced by circumstances (generally the aggressive behaviors of other states) to behave in a realist manner. That's the tragedy - the inescapable spiral down to behavior of the lowest common denominator.

Part of it, also, is the American liberal tradition that's reflected in our foreign policy rhetoric. Americans don't like realists - Americans want to be better than that, and there's a section in the introduction to Tragedy that talks about that as well.

And part of it, I think, is that there are some versions of realism that are evil, and some proponents of it who are evil, e.g. Henry Kissinger.

Contra Pape

I like Martin Kramer’s response to the Pape theory about suicide terrorism. Some highlights:

Professor Pape’s thesis has resonated quite widely, and before I approach it, let me say a word about why I think it has had such an appeal. Why are people eager to find his thesis plausible?

First, it is reassuring. No one likes the idea that we may have embarked on a generations-long struggle against growing tides of suicidal fanatics. Professor Pape tells us that it need not be so, that we have it in our power to stop it now ...

Second, it is empirical. The speculative and polemical interpretations and counter-interpretations of the threat confuse us. We want metrics, pie charts and graphs—something quantifiable and proven. Even when we know that databases can be flawed, samples can be too small, and statistics can be misleading, we still perk up at the first slide of the Powerpoint.

Third, it is secular. The idea of religion as an independent variable is foreign to our mode of thought. As a result, our political sciences have almost nothing to say about it. And what really scares us is Islam, which seems to combine bottomless grievance and limitless ambition. But nationalism—well, that’s a horse of a different color: we have faced it before, its aims are limited, and with nationalists you can sometimes cut a deal and split the difference. Say that Al-Qaeda is really just Arabian nationalism, and people will listen.

Kramer goes on to describe how Pape’s thesis doesn’t really fit the Israel/Palestine conflict, concluding:

The suicide bombings, pioneered by Hamas originally in open defiance of the PLO, were superficially an emulation of the Lebanese precedent. But they have never served a conventional nationalist concept of liberation. By bombing in Israel proper and against civilians, Hamas and its rivals actually achieved the opposite of nationalist goals: the attacks brought about a reoccupation of much of the West Bank, the legitimation of Israel’s security fence, and the loss of international sympathy, traditionally a core element of Palestinian national strategy. It substituted for these tangible assets a crowd-pleasing spectacle of death in Israel’s cities, which other groups were quick to copy to preserve their market share.

So the suicide attacks seem disconnected from a nationalist “strategic logic.” What the attacks have unquestionably achieved is shattering the political monopoly of the PLO. I submit that was their purpose. True, the Islamized strategy bears a superficial resemblance to a nationalist one. But look closely: the objectives have grown larger (all of Palestine, elimination of Israel), the timeline has grown longer, winning minds has become more important than regaining territory, and international sympathy has lost its strategic significance. In the Palestinian case, the occupation is the context of the suicide bombing, and it is the fuel. But ending the occupation is not the prime objective of the suicide campaign. The Palestinian bombings are spectacles intended to win over converts and build an identity over time.

Yet another reason why Pape’s thesis is so comfy is the seamless way it appeals to our ethnocentrism. It is apparently counter-intuitive to think that Arabs or Muslims could be doing all these earth-shattering things primarily to influence each other rather than us. Yet the stated aim of Islamist political groups is to replace all existing governments of Muslim countries with a Caliphate, and to do that Islamists need to beat their political rivals on their home territories. Ambulance chasing and seeking to exploit and and capture the initiative on any conflict involving Muslims anywhere in the world is their most persistent strategy, regardless of which tactics are in vogue at any given time. Conflicts which they think benefit political rivals more than themselves will be ignored, foreign occupation or no. Gilles Kepel argues persuasively in Jihad: the Trail of Political Islam that the purpose of switching to Western targets was to reinvigorate a political movement which had seemingly exhausted every means within the Middle East to effect the desired revolution.

(And yes, I’m way overdue on posting a review of Kepel’s book along with many others ...)

Apocalypse Then And Now

Well, the David Cook books, Understanding Jihad and Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature, have come in the mail, and dipping into the latter, I find that its relevance to parsing the public statements of our Shia Persian of interest will be uncertain, since Cook notes that he is focussing exclusively on Arab Sunni sources. (In his introduction to another book I found at the library, Holiest Wars: Islamic Mahdis, Their Jihads, and Osama bin Laden, author Timothy R. Furnish states that he will deal exclusively with Sunni Mahdist movements, and further that he began working on correcting the misperception that Madhism is primarily a Shia phenomenon in his own doctoral dissertation, so perhaps that will be the best place for me to look for references to works that deal with Shia variants of Mahdism).

Contemporary Muslim Apocalyptic Literature looks like it will be a profitable read nonetheless. See this, for example:

[One level] of the anti-Semitic conspiracy stems from the frustrations Muslims feel about their inability to deal with Israel and their inability to convince the larger world of the justice of their concerns.

He continues the thought in a footnote:

There is also the inability to understand the freedom of choice and the marketplace of ability created by a free society, which promotes the view that since the Jews are prominent in Western society (and are regarded as even more so by the exagerrations created by discovery of "hidden Jews"), there must be some conspiracy to explain this fact. Coming from a hierarchical society where ability is not necessarily rewarded and where it is more important to have a protective group supporting an individual than to get a good education and to work hard, the conspiracy accusation at this level is understandable.

Ah. The footnotes concludes, "See H. 'Abd-al Hamid (1996, 5-6)," but probably you don't want to, since the reference is to his work Yajuj and Majuj, or, Gog and Magog, so the book most likely presents an example of this phenomenon rather than a critique of it. On the other hand, it's an English translation, so go nuts if you want to, I guess.

Beyond this, it looks like Cook will be fleshing out one of the central claims in Bernard Lewis' Semites and Anti-Semites, that modern Arab anti-Semitism is almost entirely dependent on European and Christian sources and influences for its theory, and pretty much dates from the latter half of the 20th Century. As Lewis explains, though Jews and Christians were indeed thought inferior and assigned secondary dhimmi status and subject to many special restictions in Islamic civilizations, the notion that Jews are any kind of threat to Muslims is a modern one. After all, in Islamic history the Muslims triumphed over Jews on the battlefield, and though the Jews did plot to kill Jesus, they were too incompetent to succeed (Muslims believe that Jesus did not really die on the cross and was simply taken bodily into heaven by God rather than resurrected). Persecution of Jews in Islamic civilization did occasionally occur, but was exceptionally rare as compared to Europe, which is why Muslim lands were a haven for European Jews during the European Middle Ages.

Cook states that the so-called "rocks and trees" hadith,

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.’

which is cited repeatedly by Islamists and apocalypticists alike (and even appears verbatim in the Hamas Charter) is actually the only hadith or reference of any kind in classic Muslim apocalyptic literature which assigns the Jews a particular role in the end times, and that in some versions of the hadith, the Jews are not mentioned at all. This is too slender a reed for contemporary apocalyptic writers who want to connect theories about the end times to the International Jewish Conspiracy, so they tend to lean heavily instead on sources from outside the Islamic tradition, chiefly Biblical passages, European anti-Semitic writing (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a core text), and all manner of Western crackpot books on topics like the Masons and UFOs.

Questions For Hamas

Marc Lynch had some interesting comments about the Palestinian election yesterday:

The Bush administration has talked a lot about democracy, about past mistakes in American policy towards democracy in the region, and so forth, but I think it's fair to say that most Arabs remain deeply suspicious. Recent Arab elections haven't really tested whether this has changed. Iraq under American military occupation is sui generis. In Egypt there was never any chance that the Muslim Brotherhood would be allowed to actually win, and even if it somehow had Mubarak would have remained in control over a relatively impotent Parliament. Jordan's Parliamentary elections have been sufficiently gerrymandered (via electoral law) to ensure a strict ceiling on Islamist seats. Sudanese Islamists arrived on the back of a military coup.

Hamas winning and presumably moving to form a government is the first real instance of an Islamist movement on the brink of winning power democratically since 1992.* If they take power, we are going to see some major political science propositions put to the test: does power moderate or radicalize Islamist groups? Will they be willing and able to work with non-Islamist parties in a coalition? Will they use their democratic victory to abolish democracy? Will Islamist groups concentrate on the pragmatics of rule or resort to foreign policy grandstanding? Will they use their position of power to pursue terrorism? Will they be willing to set aside doctrine and work pragmatically with Israelis and Americans? Will they use government power to impose unpopular sharia rule over their people? Will they oppress Christian and non-Islamist Muslims? Most academic and policy analysis of these questions has remained counterfactual and hypothetical, since there have been no actual examples of an elected Islamist group in power. That could now change ....

For America, I think it's extremely important right now to handle this right: honor the will of the people, demonstrate a commitment to democratic process, and see what happens. Give Hamas the chance to prove its intentions. Don't get too upset about the inevitable bursts of objectionable rhetoric by excited victors - test deeds, not early words. Above alll, don't give the Islamist hardliners the winning argument they crave about American hypocrisy. Refusing to deal with Hamas right now could effectively kill American attempts to promote democracy in the Middle East for a generation.

That sounds about right to me. Dubya seemed to follow roughly this line in his press conference yesterday when questioned about the election. He made no outright refusal to deal with Hamas and many feel-good statements about the democratic process represented by the election.

But he also made it clear that U.S. willingness to deal with Hamas will be conditioned on Hamas abandoning its call for and commitment to the destruction of Israel. I’m not sure whether refusal to recognize the outcome of the election based on who won vs. refusal to deal with that government based on total opposition to its major policy will be viewed as much more than a distinction without a difference in the Arab world. It is surely an improvement on the outcome in Algeria; there will be no coup, U.S.-backed or otherwise. However, U.S. vs. Arab nation beliefs about what is fair and reasonable when it comes to Israel differ so radically that it may be a mug’s game for the U.S. to try and court Arab public opinion on the issue without substantially altering our policy, and well beyond anything that would be considered acceptable in the U.S.

Lynch is keeping an eye on the Arab media to see how the Palestinian election is being viewed in other Arab countries, so his blog will be well worth checking for the next few days (even more so than usual, I mean).

*Some commenters at Lynch's blog pointed out that an Islamist party had already won a majority, in Turkey. True, but not really comparable since that party is so much more moderate than Hamas, and the tradition of democracy is so much more firmly entrenched (and independently supported by the army) in Turkey than in Palestine. When AK won in Turkey, people were mostly worried about the impact on women’s rights and on Turkey’s ability to join the EU and that sort of thing, not whether there would ever be another election in Turkey. But with Hamas in power, a transition to theocratic fascism is indeed one possible outcome for Palestine.

End Of Days 101

I’ve been trying to learn a bit more about Muslim apocalyptic since Iranian President Ahmadinejad starting coming over all Mahdist in his rhetoric. You might recall my earlier synopsis (here and here) of Barry Cooper’s book about religious political movements, in which I learned two things that seem relevant here: 1) Prophecy-oriented political movements have shown a tendency to try and make the events they predict happen rather than wait around from them to come of their own accord; and 2) Muslim apocalyptic involves a final annihilatory conflict with the Jews which Muslims will win with the help of God. (There’s a Wikipedia entry on the role of the Mahdi in the end times here; however neither it nor the related entry on Islamic eschatology discuss the battles that will accompany all of these events. The devil is in the details as usual!) Put this together with Ahmadinejad's various remarks about Jews and his World Without Zionism speech, in which he argued that the destruction of Israel and the United States is both possible and desireable, along with his resumption of Iran’s nuclear program, and it seems we may have what you could call a very bracing couple of months or years ahead of us.

David Cook’s books on Muslim apocalyptic and jihad dominated Cooper’s list of references (see the 2nd entry on Cooper), and it seems that Cook is currently the world’s foremost expert on the subject. Making a library run, I discovered that others have had the same thought about what goes at the top of the reading list just now, and and I’ve had to order my own copies. While I’m waiting for them to come in, I’ve found an interesting interview with Cook about the history of Muslim apocalypticism and its relationship to current events. He also has an article titled “Islam and Apocalyptic” online containing an interesting summary of what is found lately in apocalyptic literature, plus the following cautionary note about the difficulty of interpreting the relationship between Muslim apocalyptic and Islamist terrorism:

One would obviously wish to know what exactly is the relationship between apocalyptic literature and apocalyptic-messianic groups. In other words, when there is a plethora of literature in the market on the end times or on the Antichrist or the Mahdi, can we expect for a figure or group to appear and put the material to use? Does a Hamas terrorist really read an apocalyptic pamphlet before picking up a bomb to commit suicide? Is he thinking that the end of the world is so close that there is no point in living, or that perhaps he is bringing the apocalypse closer to reality as he pulls the trigger? Unfortunately, there has been no real research in this area, and we really do not know what the answer to this question is. In my judgment, the closest analogy of the relationship of apocalyptic material to terrorist activities is that of pornographic material to sexual assault. While one cannot say that all obscene material leads directly to violent sexual practices, one can say that the vast majority of those who commit these actions have more than a passing acquaintance with pornography. Likewise, people of good will can come to opposite conclusions as far as the significance of the inciting material to the action.

Further Googling on the subject turned up this interesting discussion with Richard Landes about the role of antisemitism in Muslim eschatology, including what may be an example of the kind of phenomenon Cooper identified in New Political Religions:

”Lately, disturbing evidence suggests that the hadith that claims that at the end of time, every Muslim will have 'a Jew or Christian to substitute for him in hell,' has been interpreted to mean that every Muslim has a Jew - or a Christian - to kill in order to be saved. The Arab Muslim French youngster who slaughtered and mutilated a neighbor since childhood, a successful Jewish disc jockey, last winter, came up to his parents' apartment with bloodied hands and said, 'I've killed my Jew, I can go to Paradise.’

And at the library, I was able to find a journal article of Cook’s, “Muslim Apocalyptic and Jihad”, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam v.20 1996 pp. 66-104. This article is mostly about what we may discern about the apocalypic beliefs of early Muslims from hadith literature, including many overtly eschatological hadith about the purpose of jihad as a spiritual exercise in warfare, many of which have been excluded from the canon due to their deep incompatibility with the general agenda of establishing and building a social order that was the basic purpose of hadith collection in the first place. I have no idea at the moment how relevant the specific issues Cook discusses in this piece are to contemporary Muslim apocalyptic literature, but this passage seems apposite:

The feeling is strong among these groups that society is basically wrong, and so it becomes the enemy by whom (through their struggle) and from whom they are purified. Both apocalyptic groups and jihad oriented groups require a strong external enemy upon which they can focus their fervor. This enemy must be, on the face of things, unbeatable, since these groups wish to display their total reliance on God to bring about the apparently impossible. Through this struggle, they are liberated from the confines of the world, sometimes by death in battle, but frequently by the simple fact of their otherworldly attitudes.

On The Grift, Lebanon-Style

I guess they don’t have grifters in Portland. Maybe a city has to be certain size before you get many of them around, I certainly hadn’t encountered any before I moved to Chicago, and I did not come from a small town. Nonetheless I was surprised to see Michael Totten describe the very typical grifting behavior he’s encountered in Beirut as a Lebanon-specific thing. For example:

I argued with one guy downtown for an hour about whether or not I was going to give him 10,000 Lebanese lira. (That’s six dollars plus change.) I told him I didn’t have any cash on me, that all I had was a credit card, which was true. “No problem,” he said. “I will go with you to the bank.” No doubt if I said yes he would have bumped it up to 20,000 by the time we got there.

It’s always fatal to try to fob them off with the excuse that you don’t have cash right this minute. You have some usual way of rectifying that problem, don’t you? So why not right now? A friend of mine made the mistake of mentioning that he so happened to be on his way to an ATM machine that very minute to bolster his claim of empty pockets, to a man who had stopped him and showed him ID (to prove what, that he really existed or something?) and given him a long sob story about how he needed $50 dollars, one night when a group of us were making our way home from some excursion or other to downtown Chicago. So naturally the man said, I’ll go with you, there’s an ATM just down the block, and meekly off we went together, and the man waited and my friend took his money out and gave him the $50 from it. Every single one of us knew that the man was lying and our friend had just been conned, and so did our friend if I was reading his body language correctly, but not a word was said about it among us afterwards, not to this very day.

Why? It’s all just too embarrassing. Grifting above all is about gaming implicit social contracts. Ordinarily we have considerable social distance from criminals and feel comfortable excluding them on some level from the common run of humanity. But this turns out to be very hard to do to someone who is actually standing in front of you and speaking to you. “Excuse me miss” or “Can I ask you a question” is always a gateway to hearing someone’s sob story and then not being quite able to bring yourself to indicate that you suspect this person you’ve engaged in eye contact for whole seconds and possibly minutes at a time already is totally lying, via refusing to help them with their very compelling dilemma, whatever it may be. The implicit social contract that makes it very hard to treat a person you’re engaging with on some level as dishonest or criminal is much more powerful than empathy per se, one finds if one examines one’s own feelings after such an encounter. The best con artists, the kind that can still catch me and other long-time big-city dwellers out, can make maximum use of this fact under the right circumstances by implying that there may be some kind of actual social relationship between the two of you beyond just this conversation. Just a few years ago a really good grifter got 10 bucks off me—for an emergency cab ride, IIRC—by standing on my doorstep and posing as one of the new neighbors I hadn’t met yet. I didn’t really 100% believe him, but the risk of mistakenly treating one of my actual neighbors like a con man was too horrible to contemplate. My friend M. when told this story said he’d been caught in a very similar one once, in which the grifter posed as someone who worked in another part of the institution where my friend was employed. What if M. ended up running into him again at the office holiday party? M. didn’t really believe it either, but who wants to risk it if it’s only a few dollars at stake?

But most grifters aren’t able to work an angle like that most of the time; instead, they present a problem so compelling that you would never consider refusing assistance to a person really in that circumstance, like needing money for baby food and diapers when all the public assistance offices are closed, or having just gotten released from the hospital with no way to get home (impossible, btw, hospitals require someone to be there to take you home before they will discharge you, but not everyone knows that, so it goes in the script), or being stranded and just needing a few dollars to put some gas in the tank, or something of that nature. I can’t remember what ATM man had told us his problem was, but his very act of showing us his ID was designed to embarrass us. Oh no, of course you don’t have to prove anything, you’re a worthwhile human being and I’m decent enough to recognize that without proof. Heh heh heh.

The only way to win is never to hear the story, which is why everybody learns not to stop for “Excuse me miss/sir” or “Can I ask you a question?” As Totten notes, “if someone doesn’t instantly tell you exactly, precisely, what they want, get away from them immediately.”

What’s interesting about Totten’s encounter with the woman who wanted to marry one of his single American friends and get a green card that way is that there almost certainly must have been a Part 2 involved, I think. It’s not the sort of thing that can be transacted from beginning to end in a single sitting in a cafe, is it? She perhaps expected to catch him off guard admitting to be single, in which case she would expect him to eventually try to fob her off with probably a false name or address, either supposedly his, or perhaps that of his fictional single friends if he were married already or at least quick enough to pretend to be so. She’s counting on the fact that he can’t possibly tell her to her face that she’s too unappealing to tempt him or any of his friends.

So what’s the next step, once a fictional social relationship in which Totten would be participating as a liar himself were established? Maybe she has a confederate who will follow him home, so that accidentally on purpose she can run into him again, or maybe she’s already scoped this out herself, or has seen him in this cafe before and expects she will find him here again, etc. She could maybe say, forget about your friend, I met somebody else who has a friend who wants to marry me. Then maybe he’s supposed to feel guilty for having doubted either her truthfulness or mentally insulted her attractiveness. Or maybe since she’s letting him off the hook, he would believe that she really has found someone, or at least find it socially impossibly to visibly doubt it in any way. But wait! She has no money for passport fees or photos! What about airfare? She doesn’t want to look greedy, he won’t marry her then, so she can’t ask her fiance, etc. What’s the excuse for not helping now, with her one chance in life slipping away? Would he be relieved enough at the prospect of finally getting her off his back to go ahead and just give her something, whether he really believed her or not? Is it even relevant whether he really believes it, if he feels too embarrassed to openly doubt her by not giving her the money he obviously must have as an American tourist?

Well, that’s how I’d play it anyway, if I were her. I guess we’ll never know what she was really up to.

It strikes me that grifters must make out like gangbusters with the unwary in Arab countries, the implicit social compact with strangers is so much more elaborate and obligatory in that culture than it is in the U.S. Maybe that’s why there are apparently so many more grifters in Beirut than in Chicago. Totten reports encountering one every other week or so; here on the South Side of Chicago it’s more like once a month or so, or even less often than that sometimes. (On the other hand, a presumably wealthy American might just be a particularly attractive target, who knows.) I’m not surprised that Totten’s friend is actually aggressively rude about brushing them off (whereas in Chicago a murmured “sorry, no” while keeping moving is good enough); it must be very important to completely deny all human connection with such people at the very outset. How difficult to be even that impolite!

The level of politeness and hospitality ordinarily shown to strangers in Arab countries seems always to astonish travellers. In journalist John Hockenberry’s memoir Moving Violations, he describes learning very quickly never to pause his wheelchair anywhere near a staircase in Palestinian areas, or passersby would suddenly haul him bodily up or down them on the assumption that he must need to go up or down, but was simply too proud to ask. His protestations would always be ignored, because of course it is also polite to refuse any offer of help multiple times. From what I’ve gathered in reading about Arab cultures, personal dignity is assigned a very high value, and the wounding of it is an unpardonable social sin. Thus, leaving someone in the humiliating position of both needing that kind of help and also having to ask for it is unthinkable and unbearable, the situation must be rectified, unasked, immediately.

Hockenberry found this so extraordinary that he took one Palestinian’s question about whether his disability had been caused by an Israeli bomb as an explanation for the deference shown him, but I think he’s probably wrong about that. First because there are plenty of maimed-by-the-Enemy Israelis to go around too, yet no parallel culture of extreme kindness to disabled people has arisen in that country so far as Hockenberry was able to find. Secondly because another incident confirms the compelling-respect-for-the-dignity-of-others theory. When Hockenberry goes to rent a car in Israel, he needs to get an attachment that will allow him to operate the gas and brake pedals with his hands, and there is a bureaucratic kerfuffle about permits and paperwork and whatnot involving this piece of equipment that delays his rental for days. When he goes over to Palestinian territory, the dealer simply rents him a normal, unconverted car, no questions asked. Hockenberry is so surprised by this that he asks the dealer if he’s not concerned about whether he can drive the car as is. The dealer slightly misinterprets the question, and is so appalled at the thought the he or anybody who works for him might have implied in any way that the gentleman can’t drive an ordinary car that he insists on Hockenberry accepting a very lovely dinner with him in his own home by way of apology. I think the truth of the matter is, on an ordinary day Arabs are about that polite to everybody, it just turns out to be a somewhat arduous task to satisfy the Arab notion of politeness and respect towards a disabled person.

To get caught in a conversation with a good grifter while operating with a cultural background like that must be like being in the grips of some kind of unholy, merciless machine that you can’t possibly stop or control, I would imagine. Aggressive avoidance is probably not only advisable, but required.

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.

Arab Opinion On Reform

Abu Aardvark has an interesting post about the results of a (non-scientific) public opinion poll by Al-Arabiya:

More than 80% of participants said that the delayed development of the Arab world is the fault of the reluctance of their governments about changes and reforms. Since the other options on this question included "the Arab Israeli conflict" and "terrorism", this result seems significant. As for the reasons why people don't participate in political life in the Arab world, 61% said that lack of confidence in political parties was the main reason they abstained, while some 94% mentioned "fear" as a reason not to participate. I found it somewhat disheartening that only 23% saw freedom of expression as the fastest way to develop, although I wonder if the framing of the question mattered there. In a different part of the survey, 59% saw "the absence of democracy and freedom of opinion" was the most important challenge confronting political development.

The (also non-scientific) Al Jazeera poll he posted about earlier was also pretty interesting. Abu comments:

Second, the 37%-35% net in favor of reform and democracy over Palestine/Israel as the highest priority issue should actually be the headline finding here. In past surveys of this kind, you were far more likely to find 60-70% choosing Palestine first, which crowded out all other issues. That Palestine is not now crowding out reform is encouraging and interesting.

And later, in his comments section, he adds,

Reform and democracy and human rights are not alternatives to caring about Palestine. Posing them as such has been standard practice for Arab rulers for many years, and it's been all too effective as an excuse for refusing change. My sense of this is not that pushing for domestic reform comes at the expense of caring about the Palestinians, but that the two issues go together for a lot of Arabs today. Certainly that's the way it's been framed on al Jazeera for years now...

Happy Happy, Joy Joy Joy

Wow, that was fast! M. and I were just talking last night about how we’ll know that the suddenly invigorated democratization trend in the Middle East is real and irreversible when the intelligentsia begin to argue that it was inevitable (as opposed to impossible, the conventional wisdom up to this point in time). And here, this very morning, is a NYT Times editorial laying the ground work already, by concluding: "The wonder is less that a new political restlessness is finally visible, but that it took so long to break through the ice."* The news article in the Chicago Tribune this morning deployed the alternate strategy of attributing all apparent progress primarily to the death of Arafat, with the Bush Doctrine trailing distantly as a secondary influence.

OH YEAH BABY! It’s all good.

It may all yet come to nothing, but this could turn out to be the point at which it was all over but the shouting, too. M. and I were also talking about how truly mysterious this sort of thing can be. We are both Cold War babies and grew up with the assumption that the Soviet Union would always exist, and that there would always be a Cold War, unless somebody screwed up and destroyed the planet and everything on it. And then you’re watching on tv about crowds gathering outside public buildings in Moscow, and Yeltsin addressing one of them over a bullhorn, and waiting for the tanks to roll in as they had in Prague. But they don’t come, and don’t come, and, at some undefinable moment, POOF, no more Soviet Union. I still don’t understand how that happened, exactly, how consensual reality just suddenly changed like that, in a way that utterly deprived the existing government of any power; how only consensual reality could have been holding all of that up in the first place, and why it had failed now and not in 1968. But a genuine anti-government protest in a country occupied by Syria that not only 1) occurs at all, 2) has thousands of participants, and 3) results in an actual change rather than a massacre should have been completely impossible, but somehow wasn’t. That may very well be the paradigm shift, right there.

Belgravia Dispatch has an email from a guy who was circulating and talking to the protesters in Beirut last Friday, btw. (And what looks like a nice round-up of responses to these developments in subsequent entries, but I haven’t read through it yet.)

*I kid, but the NYT editorial is actually pretty good, and summarizes all of the significant events thus far. I noticed that the Michael Jackson trial was the lead story on CNN.com all day yesterday, and a spectacular local murder trumped the story in the Trib this morning, so there’s a possibility that not everyone is really getting how astonishing the last few days have really been.

Update: Woot! M. found another one, employing a slightly different approach. All hail the paradigm shift!

Update 2: M. adds: Today's "Worldview" on NPR is must-listening for a cavalcade of people falling over themselves not to give more credit to the Bush administration or the Iraq election than absolutely necessary. (As the interviewer asked each subject whether American foreign policy was responsible for what was happening, I was reminded of Reverend Lovejoy's "...ooooh short answer yes with an if, long answer no with a but...") They very much wanted to make sure that everyone understood that this didn't mean that people in Lebanon/Egypt/the occupied territories liked Americans or George Bush. (Because otherwise, you know, the average NPR listener would naturally assume that we're beloved by all.) Highlights include the Lebanese newspaper editor whose comments amounted to "all right, maybe-- maybe-- things were sped up a little by events in Iraq and the presence of an American army across the border from Syria, but is it really important who might or might not be able to take credit?" and the Egyptian analyst (IIRC, an Egyptian professor at an American university) who was saying "well, elections will be good if people wind up voting on the issues, but if it all becomes a marketing campaign like elections here in the US then that's not really much of an improvement." Because, after all, there's no difference between an autocratic tyranny and a liberal democracy, right? And could you help me move these goalposts a little further that way? I smiled all the way to work-- if this is the level of quibbling from NPR's experts, then maybe we really are winning.

But perhaps I'm not being fair in my paraphrases-- memory and interpretation are tricky things. The show should be up on "Worldview's" site shortly. (It'll be the March 1 show) Judge for yourself.

Epitaph

Benny Morris, reviewing The Missing Peace: the Inside Story of the Fight for Middle East Peace by Dennis Ross, in The New Republic, November 8, 2004:

Without doubt, the Palestinian rejection of peace at Camp David [in 2000] and after—coupled with their unleashing in the West Bank and Gaza a war, known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, against the Jewish state—was a milestone in the history of the Middle East, and will be regarded by future generations as one of the most catastrophic mistakes in this long history of catastrophic mistakes, right up there with the Palestinian rejection of the Peel Commission in 1937 (the first internationally proposed partition of Palestine into two states, with the Jews receiving about 20 percent of the country), the Palestinian (and pan-Arab) rejection of the partition resolution of the United Nations General Assembly in November 1947 (it awarded the Jews some 55 percent of the country), and the PLO rejection of the Israeli-Egyptian Camp David Accords in September 1978 (they provided for Palestinian self-rule, which would most likely have evolved into full-fledged sovereignty, in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, constituting some 22 percent of the country). In 2000, the negotiations focused on the awarding of around 20 percent of the country to the Palestinians, so the conclusion is obvious: the successive Palestinian rejections each resulted in a reduction of the amount of land that the international community and the Jewish state have been willing to consign to Arab rule.

It is noteworthy that no Palestinian participant at Camp David in July 2000, or in the negotiations that followed, has published a detailed account of what transpired. Arafat himself has never gone on record about Camp David; like his colleagues, he has simply parried all questions in the matter with obtuse one-sentence generalities and mendacities about "cantonization" and "Bantustans," as if Israel had offered nothing and the Americans and the Israelis had conspired to cheat the Palestinians ... To this day, the Palestinian people have never been told what they were offered and what they turned down, and why. Indeed, Arafat and his colleagues were greeted as returning heroes who had steadfastly rejected humiliating Israeli-American diktats, and they have lied about Camp David and the Clinton proposals ever since.

Drezner has some halfway optimistic speculation about what happens now. (I don't have a clue about it myself.

M. is encouraged by a recent quote from the CIA: "Challenged to consolidate control and unable to match Arafat's ability to unite Palestinians in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Diaspora, a new leadership would be more beholden to the sentiment of the Palestinian "street" and less likely to show moderation toward a Palestinian-Israeli peace process," the CIA warned. Given the CIA's record in projecting Soviet capabilities and policy, Islamist terrorism, etc., before the fact, I'm more optimistic now wrt a post-Arafat breakthrough.

I replied: Yeah, I've learned to be very suspicious of claims about this or that "street." From what I've been able to gather, most Palestinians are both more pro-democracy and more flexible on issues like the "right of return" than their leadership ever is, and spent the 2nd Intifada trying to get their children married off fast enough to keep them out of it (the average age at first marriage has dropped about 3 years, if I recall correctly).