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| Volume XII, Spring 2005, Number 1 |
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| Editor's Note |
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Iraq has held elections for the committee that will write its constitution, and the winner is . . . Iran! As expected, the vote has empowered Iraq’s Shiites, the majority (60 percent) religious group, who have never before held the political reins in an Arab country. Their highest religious authority, Ayatollah Ali Sistani – born in Iran, like many of Iraq’s senior clergy – had long insisted on an election, initially against the wishes of the Bush administration which could also do the arithmetic. The U.S.-appointed interim government featured secular rule. It is as if the United States has now revised its decision of 1985-88 during the Reagan administration, to help Saddam Hussein’s Iraq win the war against the Islamic Republic. An apparent post-Cold War lack of U.S. attention led to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, and all that followed in its wake. Washington also lost interest in the Afghans after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, leaving their country to devolve into civil war (see Riphenburg on the difficulty of writing a constitution for Afghanistan, p. 31).
In Tehran’s view, the United States had created monsters to both the west and the east of Iran – Saddam and Osama bin Laden – and the least Washington could do was drive them out of power (see the article by the foreign minister of Iran, Kamal Kharrazi, p. 25). That has happened, with the cooperation of Iran. But Tehran has received no thanks from Washington. Indeed, sabers are still being rattled, carrots are not being proffered, and President Bush has said the United States would not leave Iraq until it was a functioning democracy that could defend itself – an indication that the American armed forces would be parked on Iran’s border for the foreseeable future. Even worse, investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claims (in the The New Yorker, January 23) the United States has special forces working inside the Kurdish area in Iran and that military actions are being contemplated to disrupt its nuclear-energy research.
U.S. policy on Iran and how to deal with the civil war in Islam, to use Zbigniew Brzezinski’s term, is apparently not set in concrete. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has put a new face on her department, but clarity is missing. So many grievances are stored in the collective American memory under the rubric “Iran.” The itch for revenge is always lurking beneath the surface, the Islamic Republic having scored points on Carter, Reagan and Bush. We helped Saddam Hussein in the 1981 war because we feared the religious ideology of the regime next door. Now we have revised our choice. We have deposed the secular dictator, and his antithesis has just won the election held under our auspices. Having gleaned a majority of the vote, the Shiite parties will control the drafting of the rules of government, no doubt following the divinely ordained sharia, Islamic law. Leaders will be popularly elected, but the religious authorities will provide a backstop of some kind, though the highest Iraqi religious authorities have said they do not want clerics to actually run the country (for wise analysis on Iraq, see the contributions from the American Political Science Association panel, edited by Norton and Cantori, p. 97). The potential tyranny of the majority will have its heaviest impact on the Kurds (see Gunter and Yavuz article, p. 122).
The question of how to integrate Islam and democracy finds a model in Turkey, a country both European and Muslim. But the path to full acceptance by the European Union is still rocky (see Bonner article, p. 44). Europeans are ambivalent even now about the rising number of Muslims among them. The Netherlands, for example, finds itself facing a crisis of confidence regarding its tradition of tolerance, now that a well-known filmmaker has been murdered for his negative depiction of the Muslim treatment of women. The killer was a pious though apparently assimilated Muslim youth whose parents had emigrated from Morocco. Just one such high-profile case can reverberate around the world and poison the atmosphere these days.
Terrorism, the most alarming manifestation of the civil war in Islam, was the subject of the recent Capitol Hill symposium convened by the Middle East Policy Council (see edited text, p. 1). Dan Byman reminds us that “historically, al-Qaeda’s emphasis has not been on terrorism but on supporting insurgent movements throughout the Muslim world. As a result, by creating a strong insurgency in Iraq, we are playing to the organization’s strength.” Pat Lang, one of the participants, sees Muslim violence as a recurring historical phenomenon. He prefers to focus on the question of why we Americans insist on trying to remake other societies in our own image. “Instead of invading the Iraq of the Iraqis, we invaded the Iraq of our dreams, in which every Iraqi wanted to be a participant in the world as we believed it ought to be.”
Anatol Lieven assesses the problem of terrorism from the angle of social dislocation. Young Muslim men find themselves squeezed out of the mainstream in their own countries and migrate to metropoles in Europe or the United States looking for work. There are no “new” worlds anymore, so they find themselves having to eke out a marginal existence in the alien West. Unable to speak the language well and cut off from family and traditions, they find identity and comfort in religion. A small number of them (and no one knows how many; estimates vary widely) engage in “heroic” actions involving violence against the enemies of God as they define them. No one has tight control over these peripheral people; whether Osama bin Laden is dead or alive matters little. He had always wanted to strike the United States in order to drive a wedge between Saudi Arabia and its protector. Other salafi jihadis are mounting what might be called protests against tyranny as they define it.
The no-longer-anonymous Michael Scheuer was also part of our terrorism panel. On the recent election in Afghanistan, he offered this assessment: “What we’ve just seen was the drawing of a line for the next civil war. People didn’t vote for Karzai because he was a democratic leader or a competent individual. They voted for him because he was a Pashtun.” As for al-Qaeda, “Their biggest fear, besides fighting a superpower, is that the superpower will change some of the policies that have been in place for the last 20 years.” Chas. Freeman, moderator of the Council symposium, asserted, “There is an ominous trend: the unity of the Islamic world around the view that it is under assault from the United States and American allies, whether from the Israeli occupation and rampages through Gaza and the West Bank or from the American occupation and rampages through Iraq.”
The United States has alienated its friends and united its enemies, a dangerous situation, even for a superpower. However, the Bush rhetoric for the Middle East, according to the inaugural and state-of-the-union speeches, continues to feature threats to “reorganize” Syria, for example. Iran is likely too difficult a case – huge landmass, high mountains, large population, located next to a major disaster area. But the lull in the Israel-Palestine conflict may offer a window of opportunity for harassing Iran’s Shiite friends in Lebanon, particularly Hezbollah. And it is just a lull (for background on why, see Mahle’s analysis of the failed Oslo process, and dueling reviews of books by Dennis Ross and Clayton Swisher, p. 150ff).
Anne Joyce, February 2005
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