Wednesday, January 23, 2008

The Palmerstonian Moment

by Richard N. Haass

THE 44th president of the United States will assume the job at a time when the country he (or she) leads will be stretched militarily, dependent on enormous daily inflows of oil and dollars, vulnerable to many of the darker manifestations of globalization and broadly unpopular. Few previous inhabitants of the Oval Office have started off with a situation of comparable difficulty.

But first, a rare piece of good news. Noticeably absent from the agenda will be great power conflict. This was the central dynamic of international relations for the past few centuries. But it no longer is and need not be for the 21st century. This will allow the next president to focus his energies on the signature challenges of this era, many of which are fostered by globalization. He can work not just with traditional friends like Europe, Japan and Australia, but also on occasion China, Russia, India, South Africa and Brazil—as partners rather than rivals.

The bad news for the United States is that support from its long-standing allies is far from assured. In the 21st century, formal alliances will increasingly count for less. Alliances require predictability: of threat, outlook, obligations. But it is precisely these characteristics that are likely to be in short supply in a world of shifting threats, differing perceptions, and societies with widely divergent readiness to maintain and use military force.

This is in no way an expression of unilateralist sentiment. But it is a recognition that many in Europe disagree with some U.S. objectives, how the United States goes about realizing them, or both. Such disagreements will prove more fundamental and enduring than the recent improvement in transatlantic relations resulting from the coming to power of more centrist and pro-American governments in Germany and France. As a result, the United States often will not be able to count on the support of its traditional allies. Also weakening Europe’s centrality to U.S. foreign policy is that its capacity for global intervention is diminishing, especially in the military field, even on those occasions it does find itself inclined to act with or in support of the United States. Much the same holds true for Japan, although there the principal dynamic stems more from a lack of domestic political consensus to act globally than it does from an unwillingness to invest.

As a result, Americans will have to become comfortable with the notion of “selective cooperation.” Not too long ago I told an audience at the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars that “we are entering an era of American foreign policy and indeed international relations that is almost Palmerstonian in certain ways, where countries are not clear adversaries or allies with the automaticity or predictability of either. . . .They may be active partners on one issue and largely inactive observers on another.” Or they may carry out alternative or even opposing policies.

The post–Cold War world, in many respects, is far more dynamic and fluid than the relatively stable and predictable bipolar arrangements of the Cold War. It thus demands a much greater degree of flexibility from policymakers. All of this is in keeping with Lord Palmerston’s dictum that a nation has neither permanent friends nor permanent enemies—just permanent interests.

But there is a silver lining. Opposition from former adversaries is also not assured. Indeed, one-time opponents may become limited partners. Take, for example, the assistance given by China in pressuring North Korea to abandon its nuclear program. Beijing, in this case—not NATO—was and is the most important partner for Washington in its efforts to denuclearize North Korea. This does not, however, mean that China is on the verge of becoming a U.S. ally. This, too, is an example of a “Palmerstonian moment”, one that served U.S. objectives.



INCREASINGLY, POLICYMAKERS will need to come to terms with the reality that the defining challenges of this era stem from globalization. Globalization has led to an increase in the flow of people, ideas and goods across borders—along with greenhouse gases, drugs, weapons and viruses, computer as well as the more familiar kind. Globalization is best understood as a reality, not a choice. In such a world, every country, no matter how powerful, is vulnerable to transnational threats. No country can shut itself off. (North Korea is something of an exception, but only at an enormous cost, and even then Pyongyang cannot fully insulate itself as much as it might try.) The United States, in particular, cannot embrace protectionism given its dependence on the inflow of dollars, oil and goods. Nor can it flirt with isolationism given its inability to insulate itself from various threats that may originate elsewhere, but have the ability to reach American soil or harm American interests.

Yet, there is a pronounced lag between the realities of globalization and the U.S. (and, in particular, congressional) response. There is a discernible spike in protectionist sentiment—against trade, investment and people. None of these biases stands scrutiny. Most of the jobs that disappear do so because of technological innovation, not cheap imports or outsourcing. The proper response is doing more to make mid-career education and training available and affordable. Portable health care not tied to employment would also help. The next president needs to push for renewed Trade Promotion Authority and to push back against agricultural subsidies and anachronistic tariff and non-tariff barriers. If the price of achieving most or all of this is building an extensive safety net, it is worth paying given all the strategic and economic benefits to this country that would accrue from a successful conclusion to the Doha round.

The growth in investment protectionism—dramatically highlighted by the opposition to proposed acquisitions by the Dubai Ports Authority and the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company in the United States—also makes little sense. Absent clear and overriding national-security concerns tied to specific investments, the United States needs to remain open to dollar inflows. Such openness is good for the U.S. economy, gives others a stake in good and stable relations with the United States, and helps spread good business practices. The case in favor of remaining open to immigration is similarly strong. Immigration is one of the factors that has made this country what it is. Immigrants perform jobs that in many cases Americans are unable or unwilling to fill. Deporting the 13 million immigrants who are here without documentation is inconceivable. Some compromise that allows for earned citizenship but that also provides for enhanced security and larger legal flows of immigrants remains the only way to move forward.

Absent amidst all this protectionism is a concerted effort to take desirable and feasible domestic measures to reduce U.S. vulnerability to another dimension of globalization, namely, energy dependence. The new administration and Congress should take meaningful steps to rein in skyrocketing demand for energy—not simply to reduce the American contribution to climate change, but also to reduce the vulnerability of the American economy to supply interruptions and price increases and to slow the flow of dollars to governments that in many instances are pursuing policies inimical to U.S. national security. Energy policy is at the core of national security. Even climate change is assuming national-security dimensions. Some within the traditional security community do not see some of these issues as major threats on par with the challenges of the Cold War. It is true that countries are unlikely to go to war over levels of greenhouse gas emissions. But they may well go to war over the results of climate change, including water shortages and large-scale human migration.

Finally, no country can contend successfully with globalization on its own. This debate is largely settled—and in many ways it was a faux debate to begin with. The United States can achieve few if any of its foreign-policy objectives via unilateral action. It is not simply that there are limits to American power and resources; it is that the challenges themselves are not amenable to being met by anything less than a collective response. The next president of the United States will be forced to adopt a more multilateral approach to foreign policy.

Multilateralism as a response to globalization should not be equated with global or universal arrangements. As we are seeing in the trade realm, it is increasingly difficult to generate consensus when the number of participants swells. The result has been the proliferation of regional and bilateral accords. Something similar is possible or even likely when it comes to climate change. It will be extraordinarily difficult to negotiate a single successor to the Kyoto Protocol, one that includes all developed as well as developing countries and that addresses all of the principal dimensions of the challenge. Instead, what is likely to emerge—or, more accurately, evolve—is an amalgam of national policies, corporate programs, and regional and global arrangements limited in scope (say, devoted to one functional aspect of the challenge, such as encouraging forestation and discouraging deforestation) and participation. As a rule of thumb, global order is best served by effective and permanent institutions with broad membership, but in many instances coalitions of the willing and other such ad hoc arrangements are the best that can be achieved in the near or medium term. Again, it is important to note the Palmerstonian dimension of this approach—a successful coalition of states coping with one specific issue should not be expected to be transformed into a permanent alignment where there is agreement on all issues.

This is why it should also be stressed that not all standing bodies promise to be all that helpful. One suggestion that is not promising is the call for various assemblages of democracies to assume a more central role in U.S. foreign policy. Aside from questions of what would qualify as a democracy and how to get anything done with so many in the room, a democracy-based foreign policy makes no sense in a world in which the cooperation of non-democracies, above all China and Russia, is often essential if we are to prevent rogue states and the dark side of globalization from gaining the upper hand. A democracy-based foreign policy also makes little sense given how difficult it can be to promote successfully and how dangerous partial democracies can be in their behavior toward their neighbors and their own citizens.

Several years ago, in these pages, I discussed how a doctrine of “integration” might replace the Cold War vision of “containment” as the main organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy.1 A policy of integration would aim to create a cooperative relationship among the world’s mid-level and major powers, built on a common commitment to promoting certain principles and outcomes. It would seek to translate this commitment into effective and lasting arrangements and actions wherever and whenever possible. Nomenclature aside, and whether one speaks of “stakeholders” or a modern-day “concert”, the idea of integration is gaining currency. Integration is the only way to tackle the challenges of a new era, especially those generated by globalization, such as protectionism, proliferation, terrorism and climate change.



BUT COMING to terms with the foreign-policy choices demanded by a strategy of integration is not just for the United States. Other major powers will also be confronted with serious choices. Again, China is a good place to start. Traditionally, foreign policy has been approached by China’s leaders through a domestic prism. The goal of foreign policy has been to create a secure environment in which domestic economic growth could occur. But Beijing is moving to an appreciation that it has a stake in the world, that what happens elsewhere affects China and that increasingly China will be held accountable for its actions. As work on a post-Kyoto framework intensifies, China will find itself on the defensive if it becomes the principal obstacle to new climate change arrangements. It is already on the defensive over the value of its currency and its failure to meet all of its trade-related obligations. Chinese officials and intellectuals are increasingly aware of China’s integration into the global system—after all, any country whose economy is so dependent on imports and exports cannot help but be concerned with how the international system is organized. Questions remain, though, about the extent to which this awareness will translate into policy, and about how China’s leaders will react if and when there is tension between the demands of domestic and foreign policy.

This is in contrast to more recent developments in Russia. Moscow, now flush with energy wealth, enjoys a degree of autarky on many issues and can choose more often than most to opt out of the global system. China does not have that luxury. As a result, it is less difficult to see China as an “integrated country” in the near future than Russia. Of course, Japan and many of the Europeans are already committed to the strategy of integration, since multilateral arrangements are at the core of their foreign policies, although in the Japanese case in particular there is a gap between this orientation and the narrower focus of its domestic politics, a focus that tends to limit what Japan is prepared to do in the world. India, for its part, is also increasingly integrated, but mostly in the economic realm.

This gap or lag between the realities and politics of globalization is widespread and holds for democracies (including the United States) and non-democracies alike. Lobbies and special interests continue to be less than willing to give up privileges, protected positions or preferred outcomes in the name of finding compromises with other countries. The truth is that, with all of the benefits globalization has wrought, it also brings risks and constraints. Even for superpowers like the United States, the international order brought into being by globalization limits the range of choices and options available to any one individual state to pursue its own course of action. But this is a necessary and, on balance, desirable trade-off if globalization is to be successfully managed.



IN THINKING about this agenda, however, we should not assume that we must wait until January 2009 and a new presidential administration. On the contrary, talk about President George W. Bush being a “lame duck” and therefore unable to achieve much is exaggerated. It ignores the Constitution’s bias in favor of the executive when it comes to foreign policy, the potential for unexpected developments (to create opportunities or pressures to act) and the proclivities of Mr. Bush. For better or worse, he retains the ability to shape the world that will await his successor.

The Greater Middle East will continue to absorb the lion’s share of the administration’s attention and resources during its final year. (Iraq, ironically, may be the one matter that actually receives less attention.) We appear to be on the cusp of a consensus, a “reduction strategy”, one that lies in between the surge (which appears to have improved the security situation but has not altered the underlying political dynamics of the country) and complete and sudden withdrawal (which could not only lead to chaos in Iraq but also cause the entire American position in the Middle East to be undermined). This involves a recasting of the U.S. mission toward a residual force that would aim to contain the violence, secure the borders and train Iraqi forces, in the process scaling back the U.S. combat role and relocating U.S. personnel away from Baghdad and other Iraqi population centers. This consensus may calm the debate in Washington, but it is unlikely to change the fundamentals in Baghdad and across much of central and southern Iraq, which will remain messy and violent and influenced more by militias and sects than by a national government, national forces or a national identity.

There is greater uncertainty when it comes to U.S. policy toward Iran. We may end up moving toward a situation where the United States would be faced with two choices, both highly unattractive—either having to tolerate Iran with a nuclear weapon (or the means to construct one in short order) or having to use military force to prevent or, more realistically, delay this from occurring. Either policy would run enormous risks and costs for U.S. interests in the region and beyond. The Bush Administration deserves some responsibility for this state of affairs, having allowed five years and various diplomatic openings to pass while it held out for the desirable but predictably unrealistic option of regime change. Beginning in 2005, though, Washington began to pursue a diplomatic option, but then only through the UN Security Council and contingent on a demand that Iran suspend all enrichment activity, a precondition Iran rejects. New multilateral sanctions, quite possibly without Security Council support, will be necessary to help sway the Iranian government. But so, too, is a new flexibility in Washington’s stance on Tehran. The real question for the Bush Administration (or, more likely, for its successor) is whether the United States will drop its requirement that Iran first suspend its nuclear program and instead open direct talks with Tehran to negotiate verifiable limits to Iran’s enrichment program, which would leave Iran well short of a nuclear-weapons capability (and outsiders the means to verify this judgment), in return for a reduction in Western economic sanctions and the provision of security guarantees. There is no guarantee Tehran would accept such a package, but it might if it faces broad international pressure and if the terms of a fair compromise are made public and resonate with the Iranian people. Regardless, this approach is worth exploring given the two costly policy paths otherwise available and the importance of demonstrating that all other options were fully explored before choosing either of them.

The administration (and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in particular) has decided to concentrate considerably more attention on the Israeli-Palestinian question than in the past. It is a surprising amount of activity—some might consider it to be a “Hail Mary” pass on the part of an administration that has had so many other setbacks in the Middle East—but it also rests on an assessment that Israelis and Palestinians both are desperate enough to take the steps needed to get the peace process back on track. The new emphasis also reflects a judgment that many of the Sunni regimes (including Egypt and Saudi Arabia) are sufficiently anxious about the reach of Iranian influence to play a helpful role. It is not clear, however, that Israelis and Palestinians are prepared to agree to terms the other side could accept—and even if they are, it is not clear they have the means to sell the number and scale of compromises that any accord would require to their respective domestic bases. Some “sorting out” will almost certainly be necessary from both sides before the situation moves closer to being ripe for resolution. This process could be facilitated by U.S. articulation of the basics of final status, something that would help moderate Palestinian leaders justify opting for negotiations over violence. And if a Palestinian leadership emerged that was both willing and able to compromise, the Israelis would likely follow suit. In the meantime, the United States would do well to reconsider its coolness to engaging Syria, where a leadership does exist that is strong enough to negotiate and that might be prepared to enter into a peace accord with Israel.

Even outside the Middle East, this administration continues to face a daunting array of challenges. North Korea is one. The administration has made progress, albeit belatedly, in what appears to be a successful strategy of conditional engagement, linking concessions to Pyongyang to verifiable proof that its nuclear program has ended. The challenge obviously lies in the extent to which this agreement is actually implemented. What is certain, though, is that the United States and others will have to contend with a closed North Korea that possesses nuclear weapons and at least intermediate-range missiles for years to come.

Pakistan is another. Or rather “Pakistan-Afghanistan.” These are two countries increasingly joined more than divided by a long border. In both countries, the challenge is to promote economic growth and political reform amidst difficult security challenges stemming from the strength of the Taliban, Al-Qaeda and local extremists. The lack of adequate military and policing capabilities limits any progress either government can expect to realize. Growing nationalism and anti-Americanism also tend to limit what the United States can accomplish. The stakes could hardly be greater, though, given that this area is now a sanctuary for the world’s most dangerous terrorists and, in the case of Pakistan, home to dozens of nuclear weapons. Pakistan’s political crisis, by dividing and distracting the country, will only make it more difficult for the government to confront its real enemies. On these and a host of other trouble spots, like Venezuela, Cuba, Darfur, Zimbabwe, Nigeria and Kosovo, to name a few, it is clear that the Bush Administration is going to hand off unfinished business to its successor.

This puts a tremendous premium on statecraft. It means that future administrations will have to become much more comfortable and adept at meaningful consultations and building coalitions with other states. The biggest danger is that the United States and other countries will not be able to find ways to cooperate together where they can and should because of the spillover from where they disagree. It makes for a challenge that Lord Palmerston could readily appreciate. Navigating this reality will be anything but easy given the geopolitical setting we are living in. But it will be essential if integration is to come about and if globalization is to be managed on terms we desire.



Richard N. Haass is the president of the Council on Foreign Relations. His most recent book is The Opportunity: America’s Moment to Alter History’s Course (PublicAffairs, 2005).

Source: National Interest
http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=16518

Report and Retort: Kosovo's Future

by Correspondence between Dimitri K. Simes and Frank G. Wisner

Editor’s Note: Dimitri K. Simes’ article “The Consequences of Inflexibility” appeared in the December 27, 2007 edition of the International Herald Tribune and is reprinted with permission. Ambassador Wisner sent his response to our offices as a part of a mass mailing and makes clear in the text that he was seeking wider distribution, making it a public document. In view of Ambassador Wisner’s key role representing the United States in talks in the so-called Troika (the United States, the European Union, and Russia) on the future status of Kosovo, we thought our readers would be interested in the exchange.



The Consequences of Inflexibility

by Dimitri K. Simes



Even well before the Dec. 10 deadline for an agreement with Belgrade on the status of Kosovo, Pristina, Washington, and Brussels were moving blindly toward independence. Pristina's enthusiasm for this course is entirely understandable - the Albanians want independence and the United States and the European Union have promised to deliver it on a silver platter.

What motivates the U.S. and its allies is less clear - at least if one expects leaders to offer genuine moral judgments, sound strategic logic, and realistic evaluation of the consequences of their decisions.

First, some facts: Serbia is a democratic state that recently agreed to grant complete independence to Montenegro without any struggle after a referendum in the former Yugoslav republic and despite the presence of a Serb minority there. Serbia has expressed willingness to grant Kosovo far-reaching autonomy. But because Serbs see Kosovo as the cradle of Serbian civilization - and because only two years ago vicious Albanian riots killed dozens of Serbs living there, in the presence of NATO forces - Belgrade refuses to accept Kosovo as an independent nation in its current form.

Serbia's position is rooted in UN Security Council Resolution 1244, which speaks specifically about "substantial autonomy and meaningful self-administration for Kosovo" while respecting "the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia" (now Serbia).

The resolution, adopted in 1999, was a compromise between the U.S.-led NATO alliance and Yugoslavia after weeks of military bombardment triggered by Slobodan Milosevic's attacks on Kosovo Albanians, which were in turn partially provoked by Kosovo Liberation Army attacks on Serbian police and civilians.

So NATO is unilaterally backing away from a deal it made with Milosevic's authoritarian regime, putting Serbs in Kosovo clearly at risk in the process, because the democratic government of Serbia has no public support for further concessions.

There would be no similar risk to Kosovo Albanians from Serbia under Belgrade's formula. Strikingly, Kosovo's American and European supporters do not attempt to justify the partition of Serbia with international law. Rather, they say it is necessary to accommodate Kosovo Albanians who otherwise may inflame the region by attacking the Serb population there.

This is a cowardly and misleading argument. It is cowardly because the forced dismemberment of a sovereign state under the blackmail of mob violence should be beneath NATO's dignity. If avoiding violence in Kosovo is the prime concern, NATO has more than sufficient resources to have its way without surrendering to Albanian demands. It is easier to paint Serbia and Russia as the villains.

Moscow, however, has made clear that it could accept Kosovo independence with Serbia's consent. There is no evidence that the Kremlin has fueled Serbian intransigence beyond simply stating that a UN member state cannot be involuntarily partitioned. In fact, Russia earlier signaled that it might abstain in a Security Council vote if Kosovo's independence became a precedent for other unrecognized states, including the Georgian enclaves Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which border Russia.

The more the Kremlin hears from the Bush administration that Kosovo is not a precedent, the more it wants to demonstrate that Russia is a serious power which cannot be ignored like it was in 1999. Most in Moscow see the situation today as a replay of major European powers' historical attempts to expel Russia from the Balkans and to demonstrate its irrelevance.

This course led to war the last time - and it could again. Serbia and Russia could do little, at least not right away, after Western recognition of Kosovo. But Abkhazia and South Ossetia will likely reiterate their claims to independence and, if they go unrecognized, it won't matter. Their goal is not statehood but integration into Russia - and most residents already have Russian citizenship.

Moscow has so far promised to respect Georgia's territorial integrity, but there is a growing danger that Russia will move slowly and quietly but steadily toward integrating Abkhazia and South Ossetia. If Georgia accepts this new reality on the ground, Kosovo will become exactly the kind of precedent for the Caucasus that the Bush Administration denied it could be. If Georgia chooses to use force, Russia is likely to respond militarily. If there is shooting between Russia and Georgia, would NATO come to Georgia's defense, risking a confrontation with Russia? Or would it just make a lot of angry noise, giving President Vladimir Putin a major strategic victory with consequences throughout the former Soviet region? In either case, America's ability to cooperate with Russia on such essential matters as nonproliferation, counter-terrorism and energy interdependence would be in tatters.

Meanwhile, back to the Balkans. If estrangement between Russia and the U.S. progresses further, Moscow may decide to use its UN veto to block an extension of the EU force's mandate in Bosnia. Measures intended to avoid violence in the Balkans would boomerang, bringing broader Balkan instability.

Washington and Brussels are right that Kosovo's status quo is unsustainable in the long run and that independence is a logical destination point. But that does not mean that Kosovo needs independence now.

Moreover, while further negotiations are indeed hopeless so long as the U.S. and EU continue to tell the Albanians that they can count on quick independence without concessions to Belgrade, a more balanced position could lead to compromise. A deal could include territorial exchanges between Serbia and Kosovo; a temporary arrangement that would give Belgrade largely symbolic sovereignty over the rest of Kosovo; and a fast track to EU membership for Serbia. This in turn could lead to a tacit understanding with Russia that the status of the Georgian enclaves should not be changed unilaterally.

This approach is distasteful to some, who will settle for nothing short of another "victory" for the West. But victories like these often have devastating unintended consequences. Some discovered this in Iraq, but others never learn.



Dimitri K. Simes is president of The Nixon Center and publisher of The National Interest.



Letter to the Honorable Charles Freeman from Ambassador Frank G. Wisner:



January 17, 2008



Dear Chas,

I understand that the Salon has recently circulated to its members a copy of Dimitri Simes' article of December 27, 2007, in the International Herald Tribune. Having served as the Special Representative of the Secretary of State to the Kosovo Status Talks for the past two years and having just completed an intensive series of European, United States and Russian led Troika negotiations with Serbia's and Kosovo's representatives, I believe I am in a strong position to comment on Mr. Simes’ conclusions, with which I disagree. I would appreciate your sharing my views with the members of the Salon.

The negotiations over Kosovo's final status are over. During the past several years every possible effort has been made to find common ground between the Serbian and Kosovar positions. There is none; every avenue to a compromise based solution was explored. Kosovo has been a UN responsibility for the past eight years; the status quo is no longer sustainable. The UN administration has exhausted its ability to exercise its responsibilities and the overwhelming majority of Kosovars insist on independence for which, after years of tutelage, they are amply prepared. The vast majority of Kosovars are not to be denied independence, having experienced many years of Serbian rule and having been victims of harsh repression in 1999. That experience is indelibly etched in Kosovar memories; it has a consequence which not even those in Serbia who profess democratic ideals can eliminate. Kosovar independence is exactly the conclusion former Finnish President, Martti Ahtissari, reached after two years of negotiations on behalf of the Secretary General.

Mr. Simes does not fully describe the autonomy measure which the Serbian government advanced during the latest Troika led negotiations. That offer fell short of providing a basis for a settlement. In fact, it was less substantial than the arrangements in place under the Yugoslav Federation, arrangements which Milosevic revoked. Under its recent proposal, Serbia asserted its right to retain sovereignty; it would not cede responsibility for Serbs living in Kosovo. Kosovo would have neither responsibility for its defense nor its foreign officers. Nor would Serbia's offer allow for Kosovar representation in Belgrade's central institutions—its parliament and government. In a word what Serbia offered to Kosovo's leaders was less than the authorities they presently enjoy under the UN's mandate.

Mr. Simes is also wrong in asserting that UNSCR 1244 does not provide for the international community to decide Kosovo's future. Moreover, nothing in 1244 precludes Kosovo's independence. To repeat, no new negotiation can produce a consensus position between Serbia and Kosovo. The international community must make a decision on final status and the United States, among others, believes the time is right to implement Ahtisaari's plan. Kosovo is not being handed independence on a "silver platter" as Dimitri Simes claims. The Kosovar leadership is ready to accept the Ahtisaari proposal with its substantial protections for the minorities, including the Serbian community. Kosovar leaders are also prepared to accept tight international supervision during the early years which follow final status to ensure they comply with the Ahtisaari obligations, develop sound judicial and law and order systems, and pursue appropriate defense policies.

Resolving Kosovo's future ought to be the final step in settling the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. Clarity over Kosovo gives the region, Europe and the United States an opportunity to move beyond the brutal legacy of the Milosevic years; it will define state boundaries, establish sovereignty and set the stage for the region's nations to enter the European Union and NATO. Without a clear definition of state boundaries, the contest over Kosovo will go on, with the United States and the international community caught m the middle. NATO will be faced with a continuing threat to European security. An unresolved Kosovo leaves Serbia with an "albatross" around its neck. No power on earth can force Kosovo's majority population to live again under the Serbian flag.

There remains, as Mr. Simes points out, the question of Russia. Regrettably, Russia objects to Kosovar independence. Contrary to the Russian view, Kosovo is a unique case. Its tragic circumstances in the 1990’s, UNSCR 1244; the imposition of UN responsibility and eight years of UN rule sets Kosovo apart from any other territorial quarrel in today's world, including in the former Soviet Union. I remain to be persuaded that Russia has anything like the responsibilities in the Balkans, including Kosovo, which we and the Europeans bear. This said, I am equally certain Russia bears a responsibility ensuring Kosovo's orderly evolution to final status, and should work to moderate Serbian objections to it.

I hope the members of the Salon will keep the foregoing thoughts in mind as they make judgments about the wisdom of the United States policy. I firmly believe we did the right thing in the 1990s in standing by those—including the majority populations in Bosnia and Kosovo—who suffered from Milosevic's repression. The time is right to make good on our commitment to settle Kosovo's future justly.

Finally, no American can look at the future of south eastern Europe without recognizing the centrality of Serbia to the region's peace and prosperity. We have long standing ties with Serbia. We have fought on the same side in the last century's two world wars. Many Serbs have found homes in the United States and the Serbian community here is vibrant and prosperous; it has contributed much to America. We may disagree with Belgrade's government over Kosovo and will continue to do so in the face of Serbian opposition to Kosovo's final status. But we want Serbia to know we are ready to rebuild the relationship and get the past, nearly twenty years of difficulty, behind us, so that peace results and commerce and economic progress in the Balkans occur. A good starting point would be getting it right with Kosovo and putting the issue behind us. Serbia, like the United States, has a stake in stability.



Sincerely,

Frank G. Wisner



Ambassador Frank G. Wisner is the U.S. Special Envoy to the talks on Kosovo’s future status.



Dimitri K. Simes’ response to Ambassador Wisner:



Dear Ambassador Freeman:

Ambassador Frank Wisner was kind enough to share with me his letter to you in response to my December 27, 2007 International Herald Tribune piece, “The consequences of inflexibility”. I know Frank Wisner well, respect him a great deal and consider him a friend. Still, I have a serious disagreement with both his analysis and with some of the facts as he presents them. While unlike him I was not involved in Kosovo’s status negotiations, I have discussed them over a period of time with a variety of U.S., European, Russian, and Serbian officials, including both the policy makers and the people directly involved in the talks. I stand by every statement I made in my piece.

Ambassador Wisner argues that “during the past several years every possible effort has been made to find common ground between the Serbian and Kosovar positions”. That is not quite the case. From the very beginning, both the United States government and the United Nations envoy, Martti Ahtissari, have argued that the only acceptable outcome would be Kosovo independence. With this in mind, Ahtissari has hardly been an impartial intermediary. Moreover, under these circumstances, why would the Kosovars even entertain the possibility of settling for anything less than what they have been encouraged to think they can get? And how would this position by Ahtissari and Washington—which is totally unacceptable to the democratically elected government in Belgrade and, as every opinion poll indicates, the vast majority of Serbs—get the Serbian government to display flexibility at the bargaining table? The talks were bound to be deadlocked from the start.

Ambassador Wisner states that “the overwhelming majority of Kosovars insist on independence for which, after years of tutelage, they are amply prepared”. First, why is Kosovar insistence on independence any different than similar desires of the Palestinians, the Abkhaz, or the Armenians in Karabakh? Yet, quite reasonably, the United States would not suggest that Israel, Georgia, or Azerbaijan be dismembered without the agreement of the states in question. And by what strange criteria can one claim that the Kosovars are “amply prepared” for independence just two years after dozens were killed and major damage was done to holy sites and property during anti-Serb riots, which international forces were not able to stop?

According to Ambassador Wisner, “what Serbia offered to Kosovo’s leaders was less than the authorities they presently enjoy under the UN’s mandate”. That is not quite the case. What Serbia was proposing would lead to a removal of foreign forces from Kosovo. They would not be replaced with any Serbian forces, allowing the Kosovars to essentially be in charge of their own affairs. True, the Serbian proposal was not perfect and as I made clear in my International Herald Tribune piece, eventual independence for Kosovo was the right course. But there was more than enough in the Serbian offer to be exploited in search of a compromise with Belgrade – a compromise which was never attempted by the Bush administration or Kosovo independence enthusiasts among Hillary Clinton advisors like Ambassador Richard Holbrooke.

In Ambassador Wisner’s words, “Mr. Simes is also wrong in asserting that UNSCR 1244 does not provide for the international community to decide Kosovo’s future”. I said nothing of the sort, provided that by the international community one means the United Nations Security Council. But a decision by the United States and the European Union is not a substitute for a U.N. Security Council mandate. Surely, the United States would not allow other nations and regional organizations to claim the authority of the international community in acting against American interests and American allies. Ambassador Wisner’s next sentence, “Moreover, nothing in 1244 precludes Kosovo’s independence”, is absolutely correct – if 1244 is replaced with another U.N. security resolution. But as long as this does not happen, 1244 itself is abundantly clear and does not allow any other interpretation that Kosovo should have “substantial autonomy and meaningful self-administration” while the U.N. remains committed to "the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia", of which Serbia is the legal heir.

Most important in terms of policy implications, Ambassador Wisner states that “contrary to the Russian view, Kosovo is a unique case” because Russia does not have “anything like the responsibilities in the Balkans, including Kosovo, which we and the Europeans bear”. Of course every case is unique, but the Russians, the Abkhaz, the South Ossetians, and the Karabakh Armenians believe that there is more than enough similarity to view Kosovo as a precedent, and they are bound to act on their views rather than on policy statements from Washington. With peacekeeping forces in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, territories contiguous to Russia where the majority of residents are Russian citizens, Moscow feels that its interests there are not inferior to U.S. interests in Kosovo. And like the U.S. in Kosovo, Russia has resources in these areas to have its way. In the case of Serbia, which Ambassador Wisner says he would like to see integrated into Europe, recent election results there show how unlikely it is that independence for Kosovo will produce an outcome inside democratic Serbia that would advance that goal.

None of the arguments I made in my International Herald Tribune piece are new or unique, and as Ambassador Wisner knows there are a number of people in the Bush administration itself who share my concerns. Some of them actually privately wrote me after the publication of my piece to indicate their broad agreement. The issue is that the Bush administration’s senior officials have ignored the objections of those worried about the unintended consequences of Kosovo independence in the same way they ignored words of caution before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. I expect that the costs of Kosovo will not be so high as those of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, but I would not count on it, particularly if we continue to act as if the combination of our righteousness and our power always entitles us to have our way without a serious price to pay.

Source: National Interest
http://www.nationalinterest.org/PrinterFriendly.aspx?id=16670

Monday, January 21, 2008

Pre-emptive nuclear strike a key option, Nato told

Ian Traynor in Brussels
Tuesday January 22, 2008

The west must be ready to resort to a pre-emptive nuclear attack to try to halt the "imminent" spread of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction, according to a radical manifesto for a new Nato by five of the west's most senior military officers and strategists.
Calling for root-and-branch reform of Nato and a new pact drawing the US, Nato and the European Union together in a "grand strategy" to tackle the challenges of an increasingly brutal world, the former armed forces chiefs from the US, Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands insist that a "first strike" nuclear option remains an "indispensable instrument" since there is "simply no realistic prospect of a nuclear-free world".

The manifesto has been written following discussions with active commanders and policymakers, many of whom are unable or unwilling to publicly air their views. It has been presented to the Pentagon in Washington and to Nato's secretary general, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, over the past 10 days. The proposals are likely to be discussed at a Nato summit in Bucharest in April.

"The risk of further [nuclear] proliferation is imminent and, with it, the danger that nuclear war fighting, albeit limited in scope, might become possible," the authors argued in the 150-page blueprint for urgent reform of western military strategy and structures. "The first use of nuclear weapons must remain in the quiver of escalation as the ultimate instrument to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction."

The authors - General John Shalikashvili, the former chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff and Nato's ex-supreme commander in Europe, General Klaus Naumann, Germany's former top soldier and ex-chairman of Nato's military committee, General Henk van den Breemen, a former Dutch chief of staff, Admiral Jacques Lanxade, a former French chief of staff, and Lord Inge, field marshal and ex-chief of the general staff and the defence staff in the UK - paint an alarming picture of the threats and challenges confronting the west in the post-9/11 world and deliver a withering verdict on the ability to cope.

The five commanders argue that the west's values and way of life are under threat, but the west is struggling to summon the will to defend them. The key threats are:

· Political fanaticism and religious fundamentalism.

· The "dark side" of globalisation, meaning international terrorism, organised crime and the spread of weapons of mass destruction.

· Climate change and energy security, entailing a contest for resources and potential "environmental" migration on a mass scale.

· The weakening of the nation state as well as of organisations such as the UN, Nato and the EU.

To prevail, the generals call for an overhaul of Nato decision-taking methods, a new "directorate" of US, European and Nato leaders to respond rapidly to crises, and an end to EU "obstruction" of and rivalry with Nato. Among the most radical changes demanded are:

· A shift from consensus decision-taking in Nato bodies to majority voting, meaning faster action through an end to national vetoes.

· The abolition of national caveats in Nato operations of the kind that plague the Afghan campaign.

· No role in decision-taking on Nato operations for alliance members who are not taking part in the operations.

· The use of force without UN security council authorisation when "immediate action is needed to protect large numbers of human beings".

In the wake of the latest row over military performance in Afghanistan, touched off when the US defence secretary, Robert Gates, said some allies could not conduct counter-insurgency, the five senior figures at the heart of the western military establishment also declare that Nato's future is on the line in Helmand province.

"Nato's credibility is at stake in Afghanistan," said Van den Breemen.

"Nato is at a juncture and runs the risk of failure," according to the blueprint.

Naumann delivered a blistering attack on his own country's performance in Afghanistan. "The time has come for Germany to decide if it wants to be a reliable partner." By insisting on "special rules" for its forces in Afghanistan, the Merkel government in Berlin was contributing to "the dissolution of Nato".

Ron Asmus, head of the German Marshall Fund thinktank in Brussels and a former senior US state department official, described the manifesto as "a wake-up call". "This report means that the core of the Nato establishment is saying we're in trouble, that the west is adrift and not facing up to the challenges."

Naumann conceded that the plan's retention of the nuclear first strike option was "controversial" even among the five authors. Inge argued that "to tie our hands on first use or no first use removes a huge plank of deterrence".

Reserving the right to initiate nuclear attack was a central element of the west's cold war strategy in defeating the Soviet Union. Critics argue that what was a productive instrument to face down a nuclear superpower is no longer appropriate.

Robert Cooper, an influential shaper of European foreign and security policy in Brussels, said he was "puzzled".

"Maybe we are going to use nuclear weapons before anyone else, but I'd be wary of saying it out loud."

Another senior EU official said Nato needed to "rethink its nuclear posture because the nuclear non-proliferation regime is under enormous pressure".

Naumann suggested the threat of nuclear attack was a counsel of desperation. "Proliferation is spreading and we have not too many options to stop it. We don't know how to deal with this."

Nato needed to show "there is a big stick that we might have to use if there is no other option", he said.

The Authors:

John Shalikashvili

The US's top soldier under Bill Clinton and former Nato commander in Europe, Shalikashvili was born in Warsaw of Georgian parents and emigrated to the US at the height of Stalinism in 1952. He became the first immigrant to the US to rise to become a four-star general. He commanded Operation Provide Comfort in northern Iraq at the end of the first Gulf war, then became Saceur, Nato's supreme allied commander in Europe, before Clinton appointed him chairman of the joint chiefs in 1993, a position he held until his retirement in 1997.

Klaus Naumann

Viewed as one of Germany's and Nato's top military strategists in the 90s, Naumann served as his country's armed forces commander from 1991 to 1996 when he became chairman of Nato's military committee. On his watch, Germany overcame its post-WWII taboo about combat operations, with the Luftwaffe taking to the skies for the first time since 1945 in the Nato air campaign against Serbia.

Lord Inge

Field Marshal Peter Inge is one of Britain's top officers, serving as chief of the general staff in 1992-94, then chief of the defence staff in 1994-97. He also served on the Butler inquiry into Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and British intelligence.

Henk van den Breemen

An accomplished organist who has played at Westminster Abbey, Van den Breemen is the former Dutch chief of staff.

Jacques Lanxade

A French admiral and former navy chief who was also chief of the French defence staff.

Source: Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/print/0,,332160591-111202,00.html

Sunday, January 20, 2008

After Iraq

A report from the new Middle East—and a glimpse of its possible future

by Jeffrey Goldberg

Not long ago, in a decrepit prison in Iraqi Kurdistan, a senior interrogator with the Kurdish intelligence service decided, for my entertainment and edification, to introduce me to an al-Qaeda terrorist named Omar. “This one is crazy,” the interrogator said. “Don’t get close, or he’ll bite you.”
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Omar was a Sunni Arab from a village outside Mosul; he was a short and weedy man, roughly 30 years old, who radiated a pure animal anger. He was also a relentless jabberer; he did not shut up from the moment we were introduced. I met him in an unventilated interrogation room that smelled of bleach and paint. He was handcuffed, and he cursed steadily, making appalling accusations about the sexual practices of the interrogator’s mother. He cursed the Kurds, in general, as pig-eaters, blasphemers, and American lackeys. As Omar ranted, the interrogator smiled. “I told you the Arabs don’t like the Kurds,” he said. I’ve known the interrogator for a while, and this is his perpetual theme: close proximity to Arabs has sabotaged Kurdish happiness.


Omar, the Kurds claim, was once an inconsequential deputy to the now-deceased terrorist chieftain Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Omar disputed this characterization. By his own telling, he accomplished prodigies of terror against the pro-American Kurdish forces in the northern provinces of Iraq. “You are worse than the Americans,” he told his Kurdish interrogator. “You are the enemy of the Muslim nation. You are enemies of God.” The interrogator—I will not name him here, for reasons that will become apparent in a moment—sat sturdily opposite Omar, absorbing his invective for several minutes, absentmindedly paging through a copy of the Koran.
During a break in the tirade, the interrogator asked Omar, for my benefit, to rehearse his biography. Omar’s life was undistinguished. His father was a one-donkey farmer; Omar was educated in Saddam’s school system, which is to say he was hardly educated; he joined the army, and then Ansar al-Islam, the al-Qaeda–affiliated terrorist group that operates along the Iranian frontier. And then, on the blackest of days, as he described it, he fell prisoner to the Kurds.

The interrogator asked me if I had any questions for Omar. Yes, I said: Have you been tortured in this prison?
“No,” he said.

“What would you do if you were to be released from prison right now?”

“I would get a knife and cut your head off,” he said.

At this, the interrogator smacked Omar across the face with the Koran.

Omar yelped in shock. The interrogator said: “Don’t talk that way to a guest!”
Now, Omar rounded the bend. A bolus of spit flew from his mouth as he screamed. The interrogator taunted Omar further. “This book of yours,” he said, waving the Koran. “‘Cut off their heads! Cut off their heads!’ That’s the answer for everything!” Omar cursed the interrogator’s mother once again; the interrogator trumped him by cursing the Prophet Muhammad’s mother.

The meeting was then adjourned.

In the hallway, I asked the interrogator, “Aren’t you Muslim?”

“Of course,” he said.

“But you’re not a big believer in the Koran?”

“The Koran’s OK,” he said. “I don’t have any criticism of Muhammad’s mother. I just say that to get him mad.”

He went on, “The Koran wasn’t written by God, you know. It was written by Arabs. The Arabs were imperialists, and they forced it on us.” This is a common belief among negligibly religious Kurds, of whom there are many millions.

“That’s your problem, then,” I said. “Arabs.”

“Of course,” he replied. “The Arabs are responsible for all our misfortunes.”

“What about the Turks?” I asked. It is the Turks, after all, who are incessantly threatening to invade Iraqi Kurdistan, which they decline to call “Iraqi Kurdistan,” in more or less the same obstreperous manner that they refuse to call the Armenian genocide a genocide.
“The Turks, too,” he said. “Everyone who denies us our right to be free is responsible for our misfortunes.”

We stepped out into the sun. “The Kurds never had friends. Now we have the most important friend, America. We’re closer to freeing ourselves from the Arabs than ever,” he said.




To the Kurds, the Arabs are bearers of great misfortune. The decades-long oppression of Iraq’s Kurds culminated during the rule of Saddam Hussein, whose Sunni Arab–dominated army committed genocide against them in the late 1980s. Yet their unfaltering faith that they will one day be free may soon be rewarded: the Kurds are finally edging close to independence. Much blood may be spilled as Kurdistan unhitches itself from Iraq—Turkey is famously sour on the idea of Kurdish independence, fearing a riptide of nationalist feeling among its own unhappy Kurds—but independence for Iraq’s Kurds seems, if not immediate, then in due course inevitable.

In many ways, the Kurds are functionally independent already. The Kurdish regional government has its own army, collects its own taxes, and negotiates its own oil deals. For the moment, Kurdish officials say they would be satisfied with membership in a loose-jointed federation with the Shiite and Sunni Arabs to their south. But in Erbil and Sulaymani, the two main cities of the Kurdish region, the Iraqi flag is banned from flying; Arabic is scarcely heard on the streets (and is never spoken by young people, who are happily ignorant of it), and Baghdad is referred to as a foreign capital. In October, when I was last in the region, I called the office of a high official of the peshmerga, the Kurdish guerrilla army, but was told that he had “gone to Iraq” for the week.

The Bush administration gave many reasons for the invasion of Iraq, but the satisfaction of Kurdish national desire was not one of them. Quite the opposite: the goal was, and remains, a unified, democratic Iraq. In fact, key officials of the administration have a history of indifference to, and ignorance of, the subject of Kurdish nationalism. At a conference in 2004, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice stated, “What has been impressive to me so far is that Iraqis—whether Kurds or Shia or Sunni or the many other ethnic groups in Iraq—have demonstrated that they really want to live as one in a unified Iraq.” As Peter Galbraith, a former American diplomat and an advocate for Kurdish independence, has observed, Rice’s statement was disconnected from observable reality—shortly before she spoke, 80 percent of all Iraqi Kurdish adults had signed a petition calling for a vote on independence.

Nor were neoconservative ideologues—who had the most-elaborate visions of a liberal, democratic Iraq—interested in the Kurdish cause, or even particularly knowledgeable about its history. Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurd­istan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me.

As America approaches the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, the list of the war’s unintended consequences is without end (as opposed to the list of intended consequences, which is, so far, vanishingly brief). The list includes, notably, the likelihood that the Kurds will achieve their independence and that Iraq will go the way of Gaul and be divided into three parts—but it also includes much more than that. Across the Middle East, and into south-central Asia, the intrinsically artificial qualities of several states have been brought into focus by the omnivorous American response to the attacks of 9/11; it is not just Iraq and Afghanistan that appear to be incoherent amalgamations of disparate tribes and territories. The precariousness of such states as Lebanon and Pakistan, of course, predates the invasion of Iraq. But the wars against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and especially Saddam Hussein have made the durability of the modern Middle East state system an open question in ways that it wasn’t a mere seven years ago.

It used to be that the most far-reaching and inventive question one could ask about the Middle East was this: How many states, one or two—Israel or a Palestinian state, or both—will one day exist on the slip of land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River?

Today, that question seems trivial when compared with this one: How many states will there one day be between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates River? Three? Four? Five? Six? And why stop at the western bank of the Euphrates? Why not go all the way to the Indus River? Between the Mediterranean and the Indus today lie Israel and the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Long-term instability could lead to the breakup of many of these states.

All states are man-made. But some are more man-made than others. It was Winston Churchill (a bust of whom Bush keeps in the Oval Office) who, in the aftermath of World War I, roped together three provinces of the defeated and dissolved Ottoman Empire, adopted the name Iraq, and bequeathed it to a luckless branch of the Hashemite tribe of west Arabia. Churchill would eventually call the forced inclusion of the Kurds in Iraq one of his worst mistakes—but by then, there was nothing he could do about it.

The British, together with the French, gave the world the modern Middle East. In addition to manufacturing the country now called Iraq, the grand Middle East settlement shrank Turkey by the middle of the 1920s to the size of the Anatolian peninsula; granted what are now Syria and Lebanon to the French; and kept Egypt under British control. The British also broke Palestine in two, calling its eastern portion Trans-Jordan and installing a Hashemite prince, Abdullah, as its ruler, and at the same time promising Western Palestine to the Jews, while implying to the Arabs there that it was their land, too. As the historian David Fromkin puts it in A Peace to End All Peace, his definitive account of the machinations among the Great Powers that resulted in the modern map of the Middle East, the region became what it is today both because the European powers undertook to re-shape it and because Britain and France failed to ensure that the dynasties, the states, and the political system that they established would permanently endure.

Of course, the current turbulence in the Middle East is attributable also to factors beyond the miscalculations of both the hubristic, seat-of-the-pants Bush administration and the hubristic, seat-of-the-pants French and British empires. Among other things, there is the crisis within Islam, a religion whose doctrinal triumphalism—Muslims believe the Koran to be the final, authoritative word of God—is undermined daily by the global balance of power, with predictable and terrible consequences (see: the life of Mohammed Atta et al.); and there is the related and continuing crisis of globalization, which drives people who have not yet received the message that the world is now flat to find solace and meaning in their fundamental ethnic and religious identities.

But since 9/11, America’s interventions in the region—and especially in Iraq—have exacerbated the tensions there, and have laid bare how artificial, and how tenuously constructed, the current map of the Middle East really is. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration sought not only to deprive the country of its putative weapons of mass destruction, but also to shake things up in Iraq’s chaotic neighborhood; toppling Saddam and planting the seeds of democracy in Iraq would, it was hoped, make possible the transformation of the region. The region is being transformed; that transformation is just turning out to be a different, and possibly far broader, one than imagined. As Dennis Ross, who was a Middle East envoy for both Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush, and is now with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, puts it, the Iraq War has begun to produce “wholesale change”—but “it won’t be the one envisioned by the administration.” An independent Kurdistan would be just the start.

Envisioning what the Middle East might look like five or 10 or 50 years from now is by definition a speculative exercise. But precisely because of the scope of the transformation that’s under way, imagining the future of the region, and figuring out a smart approach to it, should be at the top of America’s post-Iraq priorities. At the moment, however, neither the Bush administration nor the candidates for the presidency seem to be thinking about the future of the Middle East (beyond the immediate situation in Iraq and the specific question of what to do about Iran’s nuclear intentions) in any particularly creative way. At the State Department and on the National Security Council, there is a poverty of imagination (to borrow a phrase from the debate about the causes of chronic intelligence failure) about the shifting map of the region.
It’s not just the fragility of the post-1922 borders that has been exposed by recent history; it’s also the limitations of the leading foreign-policy philosophies—realism and neoconservatism. Formulating a foreign policy after Iraq will require coming to terms with a reshaped Middle East, and thinking about it in new ways.





Unintended Consequences


In an effort to understand the shape of things to come in the Middle East, I spent several weeks speaking with more than 25 experts and traveling to Iraq, Jordan, the West Bank, and Israel. Many of the conversations were colored, naturally, by the ideological predispositions of those I talked with. The realists quake at instability, which threatens (as they see it) the only real American interest in the Middle East, the uninterrupted flow of Arab oil. Iranophobes see that country’s empowerment, and the threat of regional Shiite-Sunni warfare, as the greatest cause for worry. Pro-Palestinian academics blame Israel, and its friends in Washington, for trying to force the collapse of the Arab state system. The liberal interventionists lament the poor execution of the Iraq War, and wish that the Bush administration had gone about exporting democracy to the Middle East with more subtlety and less hypocrisy. The neoconservatives, who cite the American Revolution as an example of what might be called “constructive volatility,” see no reason to regret instability (even as they concede that it’s hard to imagine a happy end to the Iraq War anytime soon).


Some experts didn’t want to play at all. When I called David Fromkin and asked him to speculate about the future of the Middle East, he said morosely, “The Middle East has no future.” And when I spoke to Edward Luttwak, the iconoclastic military historian at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, he said there was no reason to engage the subject: the West is unable to shape the future of the Middle East, so why bother? “The United States could abandon Israel altogether, or embrace the general Arab cause 100 percent,” he said, but “the Arabs will find a new reason to be anti-American.”



Many experts I spoke to ventured that it would be foolish to predict what will happen in the Middle East next Tuesday, let alone in 2018, or in 2028—but that it would also be foolish not to be actively thinking about, and preparing for, what might come next.



So what might, in fact, come next? The most important first-order consequence of the Iraq invasion, envisioned by many of those I spoke to, is the possibility of a regional conflict between Sunnis and Shiites for theological and political supremacy in the Middle East. This is a war that could be fought by proxies of Saudi Arabia, the Sunni flag-bearer, against Iran—or perhaps by Iran and Saudi Arabia themselves—on battlefields across Iraq, in Lebanon and Syria, and in Saudi Arabia’s largely Shiite Eastern Province, under which most of the kingdom’s oil lies. In 2004, King Abdullah II of Jordan, a Sunni, spoke of the creation of a Shiite “crescent,” running from Iran, through Iraq, and into Syria and Lebanon, that would destabilize the Arab world. Jordan, which is an indispensably important American ally, is a Sunni country, but its population is also majority-Palestinian, and many of those Palestinians support the Islamist Hamas movement, one of whose main sponsors is Shiite Iran.



There are likely second-order consequences, as well. Rampant Kurdish nationalism, unleashed by the invasion, may spill over into the Kurdish areas of Turkey and Iran. America’s reliance on anti-democratic regimes, such as Egypt’s, for help in its campaign against Islamist terrorism could strengthen the Islamist opposition in those countries. An American decision to confront Iran could have an enduring impact on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process—a tenuous undertaking to begin with—because the chief enemies of compromise are the Iranian-backed terror groups Hamas and Hezbollah.


Then there are third-order consequences: in the next 20 years, new states could emerge as old ones shrink, fracture, or disappear. Khuzestan, a mostly Arab province of majority-Persian Iran, could become independent. Lebanon, whose existence is perpetually inexplicable, could become partly absorbed by Syria, whose future is also uncertain. The Alawites who rule Syria are members of a Shiite splinter sect, and they are a tiny minority in their own, mostly Sunni country (the Ala­wites briefly ruled an independent state in the mountains above the Mediterranean). Syria, out of a population of 20 million, has roughly 2 million Kurds, who are mostly indifferent, and sometimes hostile, to the government in Damascus.


Kuwait is another state whose future looks unstable; after all, it has already been subsumed once, and could be again—though, under another scenario, it could gain territory and population, if Iraq’s Sunnis seek an alliance with it as a way of protecting themselves from their country’s newly powerful Shiites. Bahrain, a majority-Shiite country ruled by Sunnis, could well be annexed by Iran (which already claims it), and Yemen could expand its territory at Saudi Arabia’s expense. And the next decades might see the birth of one or two Palestinian states—and, perhaps, the end of Israel as a Jewish state, a fervent dream of much of the Muslim world.


And let’s not forget Pakistan, whose artificiality I was reminded of by Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani dictator, during an interview in the garrison city of Rawalpindi some years ago. At one point, he took exception to the idea that the Baluch, the quasi-nomadic people who inhabit the large deserts of Pakistan’s west (and Iran’s southeast), might feel unattached to the government in Islamabad. In so doing, he undermined the idea of Pakistan as a naturally unitary state. “I know many residents of Baluchistan who are appreciative of Pakistan and the many programs and the like that Pakistan has for Baluchistan,” he said, referring to one of his states as if it were another country. He continued: “Why [is Pakistan] thought of as artificial and not others? Didn’t your country almost come to an end in a civil war? You faced larger problems than we ever have.”


Musharraf also made passing reference to the Afghan-Pakistan border, the so-called Durand Line. It was named after the English official who in 1893 forced the Afghans to accept it as their border with British India, even though it sliced through the territory of a large ethnic group, the truculent Pashtuns, who dominate Afghan politics and warmaking and who have always disliked and, accordingly, disrespected the line. Musharraf warned about the hazards of even thinking about the line. “Why would there be such a desire to change existing situations?” he said. “There would be instability to come out of this situation, should this question be put on the table. It is best to leave borders alone. If you start asking about this and that border or this and that arrangement …” He didn’t finish the sentence.
All of this is very confusing, of course. Many Americans (including, until not so long ago, President Bush) do not know the difference between a Shiite and a Sunni, let alone between a Sindhi and a Punjabi. Just try to imagine, say, Secretary of State Podhoretz briefing President Giuliani on his first meeting with the leaders of the Baluchi­stan Liberation Army, and it becomes obvious that we may be entering a new and hazardous era.




Mapping the New Middle East


“Nobody is thinking about whether or not the map is still viable,” Ralph Peters told me. Peters is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and intelligence expert who writes frequent critiques of U.S. strategy in the Middle East. “It’s not a question about how America wants the map to look; it’s a question of how the map is going to look, whether we like it or not.”

In the June 2006 issue of Armed Forces Journal, Peters published a map of what he thought a more logical Middle East might look like. Rather than following the European-drawn borders, he made his map by tracing the region’s “blood borders,” invisible lines that would separate battling ethnic and sectarian groups. He wrote of his map,


While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone—from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism—the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.


Peters drew onto his map an independent Kurdistan and an abridged Turkey; he shrank Iran (handing over Khuzestan to an as-yet-imaginary Arab-Shiite state he carved out of what is now southern Iraq); he placed Jordan and Yemen on a steroid regimen; and he dismembered Saudi Arabia because he sees it as a primary enemy of Muslim modernization.


It was an act of knowing whimsy, he said. But it was seen by the Middle East’s more fevered minds as a window onto the American imperial planning process. “The reaction was pure paranoia, just hysterics,” Peters told me. “The Turks in particular got very upset.” Peters explained how he made the map. “The art department gave me a blank map, and I took a crayon and drew on it. After it came out, people started arguing on the Internet that this border should, in fact, be 50 miles this way, and that border 50 miles that way, but the width of the crayon itself was 200 miles.”


Given the preexisting sensitivities in the Middle East to white men wielding crayons, it’s not surprising that his map would be met with such anxiety. There is a belief, prevalent in the Middle East and among pro-Palestinian American academics, that the Bush administration’s actual goal—or the goal, at least, of its favored theoreticians—is to rip up the existing map of the Arab Middle East in order to help Israel.


“One of the most evil things that is happening is that a bunch of people who are fundamentally opposed to the existence of these nation-states have gotten into the control room,” Rashid Khalidi, who is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, told me. “They are irresponsible and highly ideological neoconservatives, generally, and they have been trying to smash the Arab state system. Their basic philosophy is, the smaller the Arab state, the better.”


Neoconservatives inside the administration deny this. “We never had the creation of new states as a goal,” Douglas Feith, the former undersecretary of defense for policy, told me, and indeed, there is no proof that the administration sought the breakup of Iraq. On the contrary: shortly after the invasion, I saw Paul Wolfo­witz, then the deputy secretary of defense, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, and I told him I had just returned from Kurdistan. Maybe he was just feeling snappish (a few minutes earlier he had had a confrontation with Al Franken that ended with Wolfo­witz saying “Fuck you” to the comedian), but Wolfo­witz looked at me and, as though he were channeling the Turkish foreign minister, said, “We call it northern Iraq. Northern Iraq.”


Peters said he noticed early on as well that the administration was committed to a unified Iraq, and to the preexisting, European-drawn map of the Middle East. “This is how strange things are—the greatest force for democracy in the world has signed up for the maintenance of the European model of the world,” he said. “Even the neocons, who look like revolutionaries, just want to substitute Bourbons for Hapsburgs,” he continued, and added, “Not just in Iraq.” (Peters acknowledged that neoconservatives outside the administration were more radical than those on the inside, like Feith and Wolfowitz.)


So just what did the neoconservatives, the most influential foreign-policy school of the Bush years, have in mind? Feith, whose (inevitable) book on the invasion and its aftermath will be published in March, told me that the neoconservatives—at least those inside the administration—did not hope to create new borders, but did see a value in “instability,” especially since, in his view, the Middle East was already destabilized by the presence of Saddam Hussein. “There is something I once heard attributed to Goethe,” he said, “that ‘Disorder is worse than injustice.’ We have an interest in stability, of course, but we should not overemphasize the value of stability when there is an opportunity to make the world a better or safer place for us. For example, during the Nixon presidency, and the George H. W. Bush presidency, the emphasis was on stabilizing relations with the Soviet Union. During the Reagan administration, the goal was to put the Communists on the ash heap of history. Those Americans who argued for stability tried to preserve the Soviet Union. But it was Reagan who was right.” Feith had hoped that the demise of Iraq’s Baath regime would allow a new sort of governance to take hold in an Arab country. “We understood that if you did something as big as replacing Saddam, then there are going to be all kinds of consequences, many of which you can’t possibly anticipate. Something good may come, something negative might come out.”


So far, it’s been mainly negative. The neoconservatives’ big idea was that American-style democracy would quickly take hold in Iraq, spread through the Arab Middle East, and then be followed by the collapse of al-Qaeda, who would no longer have American-backed authoritarian Arab regimes to rally against. But democracy has turned out to be a habit not easily cultivated, and the idea that Arab political culture is capable of absorbing democratic notions of governance has fallen into disfavor.


In December of 2006, I went to the Israeli Embassy in Washington for a ceremony honoring Natan Sharansky, who had just received the Medal of Freedom from President Bush. Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident, had become the president’s tutor on the importance of democratic reform in the Arab world, and during the ceremony, he praised the president for pursuing unpopular policies. As he talked, the man next to me, a senior Israeli security official, whispered, “What a child.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s not smart … He wants Jordan to be more democratic. Do you know what that would mean for Israel and America? If you were me, would you rather have a stable monarch who is secular and who has a good intelligence service on your eastern border, or would you rather have a state run by Hamas? That’s what he would get if there were no more monarchy in Jordan.”


After the ceremony, I spoke with Sharansky about this critique. He acknowledged that he is virtually the lone neoconservative thinker in Israel, and one of the few who still believes that democracy is exportable to the Arab world, by force or otherwise.


“After I came back from Washington once,” he said, “I saw [Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon in the Knesset, and he said, ‘Mazel tov, Natan. You’ve convinced President Bush of something that doesn’t exist.’”

A War about Nothing?


It is true that the neoconservatives’ dream of Middle East democracy has proved to be a mirage. But it’s not as though the neocons’ principal foils, the foreign-policy realists, who view stability as a paramount virtue, have covered themselves in glory in the post-9/11 era. Brent Scowcroft, President George H. W. Bush’s national security adviser and Washington’s senior advocate of foreign-policy realism, told me not long ago of a conversation he had had with his onetime protégée Condoleezza Rice. “She says, ‘We’re going to democratize Iraq,’ and I said, ‘Condi, you’re not going to democratize Iraq,’ and she said, ‘You know, you’re just stuck in the old days,’ and she comes back to this thing, that we’ve tolerated an autocratic Middle East for 50 years, and so on and so forth. But we’ve had 50 years of peace.” Of course, what Scowcroft fails to note here is that al-Qaeda attacked us in part because America is the prime backer of its enemies, the autocratic rulers of Egypt and Saudi Arabia.


It is conceivable, if paradoxical, that the actual outcome of the recent turmoil in the Middle East could be a new era of stability, fostered by realists in this country and in the region itself. This might be the most unlikely potential outcome of the Iraq invasion—that it turns out to be the Seinfeld War, a war about nothing (except, of course, the loss of a great many lives and vast sums of money). Everything changes if America attacks Iranian nuclear sites, of course—but the latest National Intelligence Estimate, which came out in early December and reported that Iran had shut down its covert nuclear- weapons program in 2003, makes it unlikely that the Bush administration will pursue this option. And the next one or two U.S. presidents, who will be inheriting both the Iraq and Afghanistan portfolios, will probably be hesitant to attack any more Muslim countries. It’s not impossible to imagine that, in 20 years, the map of the Middle East will look exactly like it does today.


“We tend to underestimate the power of states,” Robert Satloff, the director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. “The PC way of looking at the 21st century is that non-state actors—al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, general chaos—have replaced states as the key players in the Middle East. But states are more resilient than that.” He added that a newfound fear of instability might even buttress existing states.


Jordan is an interesting example of this phenomenon. While it would seem eminently vulnerable to the chaos—Iraq is to its east, the Palestinians and Israel to its west, and Syria to the north—Jordan is, in fact, almost tranquil, in part because it is led by a savvy king (scion of a family, the Hashemites, who are quite used to living on the balls of their feet) and in part because most of its people, having viewed from orchestra seats the bedlam in Iraq, want quiet, even if that means forgoing all the features of Western democracy.


Jordan might be an exception, however. Even a passing look at a country like Saudi Arabia suggests that internally driven regime changes are real possibilities. In Egypt the aging Hosni Mubarak is trying to engineer his unproven younger son, Gamal, into the presidency. It does not seem likely, at the moment, that Gamal would succeed in the job. Egypt was once a country that could project its power into Syria; now its leaders are having trouble controlling the Sinai Peninsula, home to a couple hundred thousand Bedouin, who are Pashtun-like in their stiff-neckedness and who seem more and more unwilling to accept Cairo’s rule. America, of course, continues to embrace Mubarak, seeing no alternative except the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood. This pattern is familiar in American diplomacy; President Bush’s long embrace of Musharraf comes to mind, and there are various, bipartisan antecedents—such as, most notably, Jimmy Carter’s support for the Shah of Iran.


Beyond Realism and Neoconservatism


In the years since his Iraq project fell into disrepair, President Bush has acted like a realist while speaking like a utopian neoconservative. He has touted the virtues of democracy to the very people subjugated by pro-American dictators. This is probably not a good long-term policy for managing chaos in the Middle East.

The problem is that Iraq has already poven—and Iran continues to prove—that Americans cannot make Middle Easterners do what is in America’s best interest. “Whether the Middle East is unimportant or terrifically important, when it comes to doing anything about it, the actions undertaken are all ineffectual or counterproductive,” Edward Luttwak told me. “In the Middle East, it doesn’t help to be nice to them, or to bomb them.”

A first step in restoring America’s influence in the Middle East is to accept with humility the notion that America—like Britain before it—cannot organize the re­gion according to its own interests. (Ideologues of varying positions tend to quote for their own benefit the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr on the proper use of American power—but perhaps what the debate needs is a version of Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the courage to change the regimes I can, the grace to accept the regimes I can’t …”) What’s called for is a foreign policy in which the neoconservative’s belief in the liberating power of democ­racy is yoked to the realist’s understanding of unintended consequences.

Of course, winning in Iraq—or at least not losing— would help fortify America’s deterrent power, and check Iran’s involvement in Lebanon, Gaza, and elsewhere. America’s situation in Iraq is not quite so dire as it was a year ago; the troop surge has worked to suppress much violence, and there have been tentative steps by both Shiite and Sunni leaders to prevent all-out sectarian war. To be sure, very few experts predict with any assurance an optimistic future for Iraq. “Ten years is a reasonable time period to think that the sectarian conflict will need to play out,” Martin Indyk, the director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution, told me. “The parties will eventually exhaust themselves. Perhaps they have already, although I fear that the surge has just provided a break for Sunnis and Shias to better position themselves for further conflict when American forces are drawn down. There’s no indication yet that the Shias are prepared to share power or that the Sunnis are prepared to live as a minority under Shia majoritarian rule.”

Erstwhile optimists about the prospects for democracy in the Middle East, myself included, have been chastened by recent events. But the U.S. would do well not to abandon the long-term hope that democracy, exported carefully, and slowly, can change reality. This would be not a five-year project, but a 50-year one. It would focus on aiding Middle Eastern journalists and democracy activists, on building strong universities and independent judiciaries—and on being discerning enough not to aid Muslim democracy activists when American help would undermine their credibility. If Arab moderates and democrats “begin this work now, in 10 or 15 years we will have a horse in this race,” said Omran Salman, the head of an Arab reform organization called Aafaq. “We’ve sacrificed democracy for stability, but it’s a fabricated stability. When someone’s sitting on your head, it’s not stable.” Salman, a Shiite from Bahrain, said he opposes Western military intervention in certain cases, preferring American “moral intervention.” The Americans “have to keep pressure on regimes to force them to make reforms and open their societies. Now what the regimes do is oppress liberals.”
One problem is that American moral capital has been depleted, which only underscores the practical importance to national security of, among other things, banning torture, and considering carefully the impact an American strike on Iran would have on the typical Iranian. After 30 years of oppressive fundamentalist Muslim rule, many of Iran’s people are pro-American; that could change, however, if American bombs begin to fall on their country.

The Next Phase


There is a way to go beyond merely managing the current instability, and to capitalize on it. I’m aware that this is not the most opportune moment in American history to disinter Wilsonian idealism, but America does now have the chance to help right some historic wrongs—for one thing, wrongs committed against the Kurds. (There are other peoples, of course, in the Middle East that the U.S. could stand up for, if it weren’t quite so committed to the preservation of the existing map; the blacks in the south of Sudan—one of the most disastrous countries created by Europe—would surely like to be free from the Arab government that rules them from Khartoum.)


Iraq has been unstable since its creation because its Kurds and Shiites did not want to be ruled from Baghdad by a Sunni minority. So why not remove one source of instability—the perennially oppressed Kurds—from the formula? Kurdish independence was—literally—one of Wilson’s famous Fourteen Points (No. 12, to be precise), and it is quite obviously a moral cause (and no less moral than the cause that preoccupies the West—that of Palestinian independence). There is danger here, of course: Kurdish freedom might spark secessionist impulses among other Middle Eastern ethnic groups. But these impulses already exist, and one lesson from the British and French management of the Middle East is that people cannot be suppressed forever.

For the moment, the Kurds of Iraq are playing the American game, officially supporting the U.S. and its flawed vision of Iraqi federalism, in part because the Turks fear Kurdish independence. Turkey has been an important American ally except for the one time when Turkey’s friendship would have truly mattered—at the outset of the Iraq War, when Turkey refused to let the American 4th Infantry Division invade northern Iraq from its territory. The U.S. does not owe Turkey quite as much as its advocates think. The Kurds, on the other hand, are the most stalwart U.S. allies in Iraq, and their leaders are certainly the most responsible, working for the country’s unity even while hoping for something better for their own people. “If Iraq fails, no one will be able to blame the Kurds,” said Barham Salih, a Kurd who is Iraq’s deputy prime minister.

The next phase of Middle East history could start 160 miles north of Baghdad, in Kirkuk, which the Kurds consider their Jerusalem. One day, in the home of Abdul Rahman Mustafa, the Kurdish-Iraqi governor there, I learned about the mature position the Kurds are adopting. Over the course of its 20 years, Saddam’s regime expelled Kurds from Kirkuk and gave their homes to Arabs from the south. The government now is slowly—too slowly for many Kurds—reversing the expulsions. A group of dignitaries had come to see the governor on Eid al-Fitr, the holiday that marks the end of the holy month of Ramadan. To reach the governor’s office, you must navigate an endless series of barricades manned by tense-seeming Kurdish soldiers. The house itself is surrounded by blast walls. Kirkuk has a vigorous Sunni terrorist underground, and an enormous car bomb had killed seven people the day before.

I asked the governor, who is an unexcitable lawyer of about 60, if “his people”—I phrased it this way—were seeking independence from Iraq. “My people,” he said, “are all the people of Kirkuk.” The men seated about his living room nodded in agreement. “My job is to help all the people of Kirkuk have better lives.” More nodding. “My friends here all know that we will have justice for those who were hurt in the regime of Saddam, but we will not hurt others in order to get justice.” Even more nodding, and mumblings of approval.

Four men eventually got up to leave. They kissed the governor and then left the house. The governor turned to me and said, “One of those men is Arab. Everyone is welcome here.”

I told him I would like to ask my question again. “Do your people want independence from Iraq?”

“Yes, of course my people, most of them, want a new, different situation,” he said. “I think—I will be careful now—I think that we will have what we need soon. Please don’t ask me any more specific questions about what we need and want.”

I asked, instead, for his analysis of the situation—did he think the Sunni-Shiite struggle would become worse, or would it burn out? He laughed. “I cannot predict anything about this country. I would never have predicted that I would be governor of Kirkuk. This is a city that expelled Kurds like me until the Americans came. So I couldn’t predict my own future. I only know that we won’t go back to the way it was before.”

He went on, “I listen to television about the future, but I don’t believe anything I hear.”

Later that evening, as I was looking over my notes of the conversation, I recalled another comment, made by a man who thought he understood the Middle East. A little over a year ago, I ran into Paul Bremer, the ex–grand vizier of the Coalition Provisional Authority, the man who disbanded the Iraqi army, among other achievements. We were at Reagan National Airport; it was the day after the Iraq Study Group report was released, and I asked Bremer what he thought of it. He said he had not yet read it. I told him that from what I could tell, the experts were already divided on its recommendations. Bremer laughed, and said, with what I’m fairly sure was a complete lack of self-awareness, “Who really is an Iraq expert, anyway?”

Source: Atlantic Monthly

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200801/goldberg-mideast

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

The Clash

Fouad Ajami

It would have been unlike Samuel P. Huntington to say “I told you so” after 9/11. He is too austere and serious a man, with a legendary career as arguably the most influential and original political scientist of the last half century — always swimming against the current of prevailing opinion.

In the 1990s, first in an article in the magazine Foreign Affairs, then in a book published in 1996 under the title “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” he had come forth with a thesis that ran counter to the zeitgeist of the era and its euphoria about globalization and a “borderless” world. After the cold war, he wrote, there would be a “clash of civilizations.” Soil and blood and cultural loyalties would claim, and define, the world of states.

Huntington’s cartography was drawn with a sharp pencil. It was “The West and the Rest”: the West standing alone, and eight civilizations dividing the rest — Latin American, African, Islamic, Sinic, Hindu, Orthodox, Buddhist and Japanese. And in this post-cold-war world, Islamic civilization would re-emerge as a nemesis to the West. Huntington put the matter in stark terms: “The relations between Islam and Christianity, both Orthodox and Western, have often been stormy. Each has been the other’s Other. The 20th-century conflict between liberal democracy and Marxist-Leninism is only a fleeting and superficial historical phenomenon compared to the continuing and deeply conflictual relation between Islam and Christianity.”

Those 19 young Arabs who struck America on 9/11 were to give Huntington more of history’s compliance than he could ever have imagined. He had written of a “youth bulge” unsettling Muslim societies, and young Arabs and Muslims were now the shock-troops of a new radicalism. Their rise had overwhelmed the order in their homelands and had spilled into non-Muslim societies along the borders between Muslims and other peoples. Islam had grown assertive and belligerent; the ideologies of Westernization that had dominated the histories of Turkey, Iran and the Arab world, as well as South Asia, had faded; “indigenization” had become the order of the day in societies whose nationalisms once sought to emulate the ways of the West.

Rather than Westernizing their societies, Islamic lands had developed a powerful consensus in favor of Islamizing modernity. There was no “universal civilization,” Huntington had observed; this was only the pretense of what he called “Davos culture,” consisting of a thin layer of technocrats and academics and businessmen who gather annually at that watering hole of the global elite in Switzerland.

In Huntington’s unsparing view, culture is underpinned and defined by power. The West had once been pre-eminent and militarily dominant, and the first generation of third-world nationalists had sought to fashion their world in the image of the West. But Western dominion had cracked, Huntington said. Demography best told the story: where more than 40 percent of the world population was “under the political control” of Western civilization in the year 1900, that share had declined to about 15 percent in 1990, and is set to come down to 10 percent by the year 2025. Conversely, Islam’s share had risen from 4 percent in 1900 to 13 percent in 1990, and could be as high as 19 percent by 2025.

It is not pretty at the frontiers between societies with dwindling populations — Western Europe being one example, Russia another — and those with young people making claims on the world. Huntington saw this gathering storm. Those young people of the densely populated North African states who have been risking all for a journey across the Strait of Gibraltar walk right out of his pages.

Shortly after the appearance of the article that seeded the book, Foreign Affairs magazine called upon a group of writers to respond to Huntington’s thesis. I was assigned the lead critique. I wrote my response with appreciation, but I wagered on modernization, on the system the West had put in place. “The things and ways that the West took to ‘the rest,’” I wrote, “have become the ways of the world. The secular idea, the state system and the balance of power, pop culture jumping tariff walls and barriers, the state as an instrument of welfare, all these have been internalized in the remotest places. We have stirred up the very storms into which we now ride.” I had questioned Huntington’s suggestion that civilizations could be found “whole and intact, watertight under an eternal sky.” Furrows, I observed, run across civilizations, and the modernist consensus would hold in places like India, Egypt and Turkey.

Huntington had written that the Turks — rejecting Mecca, and rejected by Brussels — would head toward Tashkent, choosing a pan-Turkic world. My faith was invested in the official Westernizing creed of Kemalism that Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had bequeathed his country. “What, however, if Turkey redefined itself?” Huntington asked. “At some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar pleading for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West.”

Nearly 15 years on, Huntington’s thesis about a civilizational clash seems more compelling to me than the critique I provided at that time. In recent years, for example, the edifice of Kemalism has come under assault, and Turkey has now elected an Islamist to the presidency in open defiance of the military-bureaucratic elite. There has come that “redefinition” that Huntington prophesied. To be sure, the verdict may not be quite as straightforward as he foresaw. The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military.

“I’ll teach you differences,” Kent says to Lear’s servant. And Huntington had the integrity and the foresight to see the falseness of a borderless world, a world without differences. (He is one of two great intellectual figures who peered into the heart of things and were not taken in by globalism’s conceit, Bernard Lewis being the other.)

I still harbor doubts about whether the radical Islamists knocking at the gates of Europe, or assaulting it from within, are the bearers of a whole civilization. They flee the burning grounds of Islam, but carry the fire with them. They are “nowhere men,” children of the frontier between Islam and the West, belonging to neither. If anything, they are a testament to the failure of modern Islam to provide for its own and to hold the fidelities of the young.

More ominously perhaps, there ran through Huntington’s pages an anxiety about the will and the coherence of the West — openly stated at times, made by allusions throughout. The ramparts of the West are not carefully monitored and defended, Huntington feared. Islam will remain Islam, he worried, but it is “dubious” whether the West will remain true to itself and its mission. Clearly, commerce has not delivered us out of history’s passions, the World Wide Web has not cast aside blood and kin and faith. It is no fault of Samuel Huntington’s that we have not heeded his darker, and possibly truer, vision.

Fouad Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at the School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, and the author, most recently, of “The Foreigner’s Gift.”

Source: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/books/review/Ajami-t.html?sq=the%20clash&scp=2&pagewanted=print