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Energy Victoryby Robert Zubrin Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2425/energy-victory
With oil prices dropping dramatically over the past few months, many Americans no longer feel a sense of urgency in dealing with the challenge of our growing oil dependence. Zubrin's book is a reminder of why it could be a costly mistake to put the issue on the back burner. Zubrin, an aerospace engineer, argues correctly that the root of our energy problem lies in a lack of liquid fuel choice: The global transportation sector is 96 percent dominated by petroleum. At the same time, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), despite its control of 78 percent of global reserves and its inclusion of two new members, Angola and Ecuador in 2007, produces today almost as much oil as it did thirty-five years ago just before the 1973 Arab oil embargo. The oil cartel's growing control over the world's oil and its ability to manipulate supply and prices are a real and dangerous threat to the West. Zubrin's solution: an open fuel standard requiring that every car sold in America be a flex-fuel vehicle capable of running on any combination of gasoline and alcohol (ethanol and methanol.) Such cars can be made by all automakers at a low cost of an extra $100 per new vehicle. With tens of millions of flex-fuel vehicles on the road, free market forces would quickly give rise to an industry of alternative fuels as well as a refueling infrastructure. Fuel choice at the pump would break oil's monopoly in the transportation sector and allow new players to compete against OPEC in a free market environment. Another benefit: Poor developing countries with agricultural bases would be empowered economically as they become producers of biomass-based alcohol fuels. Energy Victory is one of the best books written on our oil dependence problem. The solutions it offers are economically, technologically, and politically feasible. They should be heeded as an insurance policy against the next energy crisis that is already looming on the horizon. Related Topics: Oil Gal Luft Summer 2009 MEQ Freedom's Unsteady Marchby Tamara Cofman Wittes Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2426/freedoms-unsteady-march
Wittes's central thesis—that the Bush administration was right to try to advance freedom in the Middle East but went about it in the wrong way—will probably find wide acceptance. No U.S. president can eschew democracy promotion as a mission. It is in our national DNA; it is our light unto the nations; it is what we see in our flag. Equally, few will argue with her assertion that "we failed" in Gaza and Lebanon (though there is vigorous debate about Iraq) because elections there are empowering Islamist extremists who have no interest in peace and no enduring interest in democracy. Wittes, a Middle East expert at the Brookings Institution, provides extensive and compelling evidence that the absence of freedom impairs economic, social, and political development in Arab countries. Ergo, since what Bush was trying to achieve was indubitably the right thing although he got a bad result, he must have done it incorrectly. The challenge is to find the right way, and here Wittes contributes many informed and detailed recommendations. Binyamin Netanyahu and Natan Sharansky will find Wittes's core argument as convincing as will Barack Obama. Netanyahu praised Bush's focus on democracy promotion and told Congress that there should be enhanced U.S.-Israel cooperation to democratize the region. Not a few Israelis believe in this irresistible and hopeful idea, that Arab democracies would be natural partners for the United States and Israel and peaceful neighbors for the Jewish state. Is it true? The United States has many "allies" in the Arab world—almost entirely in the thin strata of the ruling elites. Challenging them are, by and large, movements that represent distance from if not outright antagonism toward the United States in addition to hostility and militancy toward Israel. The mass movements in Egypt and Jordan are not at all happy with the peace treaties their governments signed with Israel, and they view strategic and diplomatic cooperation with the United States as the opposite of patriotism. What we have here is a compelling idea colliding with an inconvenient truth. Wittes's book is a serious and thoughtful contribution to the literature of the freedom agenda. But is she right that doing it differently, we will get a different result? Related Topics: Democracy and Islam, Middle East politics, US policy Steven J. Rosen Summer 2009 MEQ A History of Modern Iranby Ervand Abrahamian Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2427/a-history-of-modern-iran
The basic left-wing view about Iran is that Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi was truly evil while the Islamic Republic is a mixed bag—and the United States bears heavy responsibility for all Iran's problems, including the failure of the recent democratic movement. Abrahamian, a history professor at City University of New York, has produced a history firmly situated in this paradigm, almost to the point of parody. Consider two issues about the Islamic Republic and Mohammad Reza's rule, issues that are deeply related to the important impact each had on the lives of ordinary Iranians. First is the Iran-Iraq war. Abrahamian devotes less than two pages to the war. He spends more space analyzing the shah's military buildup than on the war itself, in which hundreds of thousands of Iranians died. Long paragraphs deplore the social dislocation caused by the rapid growth of the shah's era, but Abrahamian does not find it worthwhile mentioning the millions of Iranians forced from their homes by the war. He tells the reader nothing about events seared on the souls of Iranians, such as the use of chemical weapons or the "war of the cities" in which millions fled Tehran each night in fear of missiles. The second issue is the extraordinary economic growth under Mohammad Reza and the economic decline that took place under the Islamic Republic. Even a careful reading of Abrahamian's text fails to show that, from 1960 to 1976, the rate of growth of Iran's national income was among the fastest of any country in the world—faster than the Chinese economy has grown in the last fifteen years, for example. Nor would the reader learn that in the Islamic Republic's first decade, per capita income was cut in half. Instead, Abrahamian treats us to long discussions about the inequality of income distribution under Mohammad Reza. Evidently sharing poverty is, to Abrahamian, more worthy than creating wealth. And he goes on to praise the Islamic Republic for accomplishments that were well short of what Iran achieved under the shah, such as the increase in rural life expectancy, which has risen under the Islamic Republic but at a slower rate than during the shah's reign. These two examples are hardly exhaustive. Whether about human rights issues, repression, cultural accomplishments, or foreign policy, Abrahamian's account is exhaustive on the shortcomings of Mohammad Reza's period and cursory on problems of the Islamic Republic while he is similarly brief about the shah's accomplishments and detailed about those of the Islamic Republic. In a similar vein, the 1926-41 rule of Reza Shah is painted in dark tones while what Abrahamian calls "the nationalist interregnum" of 1941-53 is described with starry eyes. And Abrahamian rarely misses an opportunity to cast U.S. policy in the most negative light possible, often ascribing to it an influence well in excess of what it actually exerted. Abrahamian has an extraordinary command of the details of Iranian history, and he is a good writer. All of which serves to throw into sharper relief the anti-shah agenda and the soft-peddling of the problems of the Islamic Republic. Related Topics: History, Iran Patrick Clawson Summer 2009 MEQ Leaderless Jihadby Marc Sageman Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2428/leaderless-jihad
Understanding Terror Networks (2004) by Sageman, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, is justifiably regarded as a must-read within the field.[1] In contrast, Leaderless Jihad ultimately disappoints: Many of its conclusions tread old ground while its new conclusions are controvertible and frequently depart from the "scientific approach" that he advocates. Sageman's idea of bringing the scientific method to the study of terrorism is a good place to begin understanding his work. The first chapter of Leaderless Jihad defends the scientific approach at length. He criticizes other authors for too much reliance on case studies since "basing conclusions on a single event or individual often leads them astray." In contrast, Sageman writes, a "scientific approach should encompass all the available data." While Sageman's Understanding Terror Networks studied 172 terrorists, that sample grew to over 500 by 2008. Sageman shows that the majority of terrorists are not poor but middle class; that most terrorists are self-instructed in religion rather than trained in madrasas (Islamic schools); that the majority of his sample "held professional or semi-professional" employment positions; and that the terrorists he studied were well-educated. Rejecting mental illness and inherent criminality as explanations for terrorism, Sageman writes that terrorists are, generally, "neither bad nor mad." While his research on these points is solid, his conclusions are no different than they were in Understanding Terror Networks. What is original in the 2008 volume is Sageman's analysis of what he dubs "leaderless jihad." He believes that the terrorist threat has "evolved from a structured group of al Qaeda masterminds … issuing commands" into "a multitude of informal local groups." In this new analysis, Sageman offers some decidedly non-empirical conclusions. For example, little empirical evidence supports his argument that "leaderless jihad" is a viable combat model. He concedes that moving to leaderless terrorism used to be "an admission of failure of traditional terrorism" but thinks that the Internet changes this. In fact, many plots that fit the leaderless jihad model—such as those in Fort Dix or Miami—have been characterized by operational incompetence compared to those where Al-Qaeda's central leadership has had a hand organizing the plot or providing training. Similarly, Sageman's policy prescriptions contain questionable claims. He discounts the need for a coherent response to Al-Qaeda's religious ideology on the basis that he has "traveled to several trials of terrorists in Western Europe, spoken to people who knew them as children and as young men, and read the open-source literature about them." These observations prompt him to conclude that "the terrorists in Western Europe and North America were not intellectuals or ideologues, much less religious scholars." Sageman thus warns against "over-intellectualizing" the fight against jihadist ideology. This conclusion falls short of Sageman's plea for an approach that examines "all the available data": He presents no concrete data and offers no reason to believe that the trials he studied are representative. Sageman calls for rapid U.S. withdrawal from Iraq, stating that the "presence of even one American soldier in uniform in Iraq will trump any goodwill policy the United States attempts to carry out in the Middle East." Though the Iraq war has been a boon to jihadist recruiting, his claim is not supportable. Aside from the hyperbolic assertion that a single American soldier in Iraq would undermine any U.S. goodwill policies, his prescription ignores the fact that Iraq has been costly for jihadists since early 2007. Doesn't Washington gain something by leaving behind a relatively stable country, as opposed to the propaganda victory that jihadists would gain if the United States withdrew in defeat? This volume lacks the rigor of Understanding Terror Networks, too often departing from scientific methodology or reaching questionable conclusions. [1] Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Related Topics: Radical Islam, Terrorism Daveed Gartenstein-Ross Summer 2009 MEQ Muhammad's Graveby Leor Halevi Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2429/muhammads-grave
Western policymakers and academics often concern themselves with death in Islam only in the context of suicide terrorism. But the Islamic treatment of death is far more complicated. Halevi, professor of history at Vanderbilt University, has written a masterful, well-written work filled with original research that shows how Islamic notions of death coalesced in the first centuries of the new religion. Well-organized by theme, the separate chapters in Muhammad's Grave (on such topics as cover tomb stones, the washing of corpses, shrouds, wailing, processions, and tomb construction) will primarily interest medievalists and theologians. At the same time, Halevi's work makes for interesting reading to all Middle Eastern experts. Halevi is an expert linguist and, with training at Princeton, Yale, and Harvard, equally at ease with Muhammad bin Isma'il al-Bukhari's compilations of the sayings and traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, with the Babylonian Talmud, or with the essays of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century French and German scholars. Because Halevi has mastered such a breadth of sources, he is able—as is Qur'anic scholar Khaleel Mohammed at the University of California—to provide the context to Islam's early years.[1] Islam did not arise in a vacuum. Classical Muslim scholarship—lost to a generation of modern scholars who have mastered neither language nor historiography—acknowledges how both Judaism and Christianity influenced Islam's development and the evolution of its rites more than some contemporary studies suggest. Hence, when discussing the washing of corpses, Halevi is able to provide the Jewish, Christian, and Zoroastrian contexts with a bit of humor. Why, he asks, did "Basrans and Kufans stray from the Medinese model? Did they fall under the influence of Jews or Zoroastrians, some of whose notions concerning purity and pollution they ingested as readily as Magian cheese?" Halevi also describes early debates about whether and how "should Muslims participate in everyday civic events that failed to meet their standards," such as Jewish and Christian funerals. After all, Saudi authorities might today seek to keep their kingdom Judenrein, but in classical periods of Islam to which, ironically, many fundamentalists seek to return, Arabia was a far more diverse and tolerant place. Halevi's final chapter, "The Torture of Spirit and Corpse in the Grave," may immerse itself fully in classical scholarship, but it provides important background for modern debates—as Halevi explains elsewhere.[2] If Muslims believe they suffer great pain once in the grave but can avoid such torture if they die as martyrs, then terror masters have an effective line of argument when they recruit "martyrdom" bombers. [1] Khaleel Mohammed, "Assessing English Translations of the Qur'an," Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2005, p. 59-71. Related Topics: History, Islam Michael Rubin Summer 2009 MEQ Nazis, Communisten En Islamistenby Emerson Vermaat Summer 2009 http://www.meforum.org/2430/nazis-communisten-en-islamisten
Vermaat, a Netherlands-based investigative journalist, analyzes the connections between three seemingly unrelated groups—Nazis, communists, and Islamists—providing key insights into the logic behind their alliances. Despite its scholarly nature, the book offers a fast-paced read. The author shows how proponents of generally incompatible ideologies look past their specific differences to establish mutually beneficial relationships. He provides examples of each alliance: the Islamist grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husseini, who embraced the anti-Semitism of Nazism to wage a Nazi-tinged jihad in the Balkans; the Hitler-Stalin 1939 nonaggression pact, which mutually benefited both countries (until Hitler violated the agreement); and the alliance between Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who awarded Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a medal, which the latter reciprocated when Chavez visited Tehran. Indeed, Vermaat devotes several chapters to the alliance between Chavez and Ahmadinejad, showing how they reconciled their left-wing and Islamist world-views and explaining how aspects of their ideologies complement the other's. Vermaat expertly demonstrates that such alliances are not just a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" but rather a merging of ideological purpose. He documents the "points of convergence" of leftist and Islamist ideologies such as demagoguery and dogmatism and shows how a totalitarian mindset connects them. Vermaat meticulously documents the historical events leading up to the alliances of these seeming ideological opposites. The author concludes with an examination of conspiracy theories, especially those surrounding the 9/11 attacks and the individuals and groups who promote them. This shows that Realpolitik often trumps lesser theoretical concerns, permitting a flexibility and accommodation in areas deemed strategically most important. Related Topics: Radical Islam, Russia/Soviet Union Beila Rabinowitz Summer 2009 MEQ Three Cups of Teaby Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2431/three-cups-of-tea
One of the key characters in this marvelous book on schools told Mortenson, cofounder and executive director of the nonprofit Central Asia Institute, "The first time you share tea with a Balti, you are a stranger. The second time you take tea, you are an honored guest. The third time you share a cup of tea, you become family." Three Cups of Tea enlightens us simultaneously on three levels of analysis: The foundational level is a remarkable and entertaining tale of a transition from climbing junkie to humanitarian hero; the subsequent level is an enlightening study of a region few have visited or read about; and, the most important level provides a lucid primer for those struggling to aid the Muslim world in countering ideological support for terrorism. For the reader interested in a book about altruism, Mortenson's efforts, not unlike those of Jody Williams's in her personal campaign to ban land mines, are at once heroic, frustrating and bungling. Still, he constructed over seventy-eight schools in one of the most remote and dangerous areas of the world. For lovers of anthropology, the tale begins in the tiny village of Korphe high in Pakistan's beautiful and impoverished Karakoram Himalaya region, an area rich in openhanded people. For those of us who have labored in this area as well as for the reader, the descriptions vividly evoke its vastness, splendor, and penetrating, unforgettable cold. For the professional needing context and inspiration in dealing with our long war against terrorism and extremism, Three Cups of Tea provides profound lessons. Foremost, we must "give time to time" and follow local rhythms while not forcing things at a Western pace. We are also reminded by a devout imam to "look into our hearts and see that the great majority of us are not terrorists, but good and simple people." Arguably, Mortenson and Relin identify the region's seminal problem: the lack of education and the noxious influence of Wahhabi and Deobandi madrasas. Some critics will hedge over style or a minor gaff (such as the "red tracers" of Kalashnikovs in a firefight) but this is quickly forgotten and the impact of Three Cups of Tea remains. Related Topics: Central Asia Summer 2009 MEQ To receive the full, printed version of the Middle East Quarterly, please see details about an affordable subscription. | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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