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Al Qaeda in Its Own WordsEdited by Gilles Kepel and Jean-Pierre Milelli. Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2008. 363 pp., $27.95 ($17.95, paper). Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2500/al-qaeda-in-its-own-words
Al Qaeda in Its Own Words provides the translated writings of four jihadis—Abdullah Azzam, Osama bin Laden, Ayman Zawahiri, and Abu Musab Zarqawi. Edited by five people with Kepel, a French sociologist of Islam, as lead editor, it contains a wealth of data that, unfortunately, is presented in a rather confused manner. The actual words of Al-Qaeda are rarely analyzed or placed in context. Obvious contradictions—such as Al-Qaeda's constant protestations to Americans that its war on them is a response to and derives from U.S. foreign policy while telling Muslims that the jihad must persevere until the globe is governed according to Islamic law—are ignored. Where objective analysis is wanting, apologetics and hackneyed psychoanalyses predominate: Thus, the "neocons" are akin to Al-Qaeda since "the dual undertakings of 9/11 and the American attack on Iraq … mirrored each other"; bin Laden—that "nervous, flaccid, eternal adolescent"—opted for a life of jihad due to his "devouring" need for "recognition"; whereas Islamists such as Sayyid Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri chose jihad due to the "trauma" and "humiliation" they underwent in Egyptian prisons. The editors also fail to explain the logic of their selections. Aside from the natural inclusion of bin Laden and Zawahiri—the two men at the heart of Al-Qaeda before and after 9/11—how, exactly, do the two dead fellows (Azzam, Zarqawi) fit in? Though his writings are an important contribution to the vast corpus of jihadi literature, Azzam, dead since 1989, "can be held responsible only indirectly for the transformation of some Afghan Arab factions into terrorist organizations [i.e., Al-Qaeda]." As for Zarqawi—who had his own agenda and whose claim to fame lay in sheer barbarism and the practice of decapitation—one is at a loss to understand what value his anti-Shi'i diatribes have for understanding Al-Qaeda as an organization and not merely an amorphous body of Salafi jihadism. To justify the decapitator's inclusion, the editors magnify his legacy, telling us that Zarqawi "ignited and fuelled a civil war with religious overtones between Shi'ites and Sunnis." In fact, the 1,400-year-old Sunni/Shi'i conflict required the elimination of an iron-fisted Saddam Hussein rather than the appearance of a Zarqawi to flare up again. Much of this confusion could have been excused if the material contained in the book offered readers, as the jacket-cover promises, an "unprecedented glimpse" into the worldview of Al-Qaeda. The fact is that nearly every document contained in Al Qaeda was published earlier in other volumes or on the Internet. In order to make an original contribution, the editors could have tried offering new insights or analyses on their unoriginal material. Instead, they seem to have taken the easy road by putting together a hodgepodge of previously published material, while offering only banal "analyses" and no synthesis. Related Topics: Radical Islam, Terrorism Raymond Ibrahim Fall 2009 MEQ Architects of Delusionby Simon Serfaty Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2501/architects-of-delusion
Serfaty, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at Old Dominion University, asks why in 2003, the United States and Great Britain chose war with Iraq while France and Germany resisted it. Chapters separately examine each country as Serfaty tries to explain how distinct French, German, British, and U.S. narratives formed and shaped their leaders' decisions. While an interesting analytical exercise, Architects of Delusion is poorly researched and written. Serfaty makes little effort to survey French and German language sources or to interview French or German political figures as he seeks to explain the formation of the decisions made by those countries. Lapses are many: For example, in his chapter about French history in the run-up to Iraq, Serfaty mentions neither the multi-billion and sanctions-busting Franco-Iraqi trade, French president Jacques Chirac's long personal history with Saddam Hussein, nor France's unique history in Iraq. Nor should the reader expect to find here mention of French sponsorship of Iraq's own Osirak nuclear reactor. The German chapter is as deficient: There is little discussion of how internal German politics—for example, the rise of the Green Party and coalition formation—shaped Berlin's position. Discussion of U.S. policymaking occurs at the 30,000 foot level; there is little detail and only sporadic but tangential references to writings by Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and vanity references to Serfaty's own works, causing much of the narrative to be un-sourced and grounded in little more than Serfaty's own opinion. Serfaty's poor writing is just as handicapping. Sentences are run on, word choice is awkward, and structure confusing as the author indulges a fondness for tangents with an excessive use of parentheses. University of Pennsylvania Press appears to have conducted little editing before publishing. It is a shame that Architects flops, because serious study of the European approach to Iraq remains a vital missing piece in the narrative of the 2003 war in that country. Related Topics: Iraq, US policy Michael Rubin Fall 2009 MEQ In Search of the Moderate Muslimby Jon Gower Davies Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2502/in-search-of-the-moderate-muslim
Some analysts divide the Muslim population into two camps, extremists and moderates. That moderates make up the vast majority has become a linchpin of media reporting and government policy. Davies, a sociologist, self-described practicing Christian, and a critic of multiculturalism, sets out to define the moderate Muslim in this finely argued book. He explains that his search takes place in the context of an existential threat to Western civilization, by which he means Great Britain and its values of decency, fairness, democracy, and freedom. "This book is not about Islam," he writes, "it is about Muslims. Islam is what Muslims do." With these five words, Davies distances his argument from theological claims and academic theory disconnected from historical or social reality. He argues that hard facts alone define Islamic moderation. How plausible, he asks, is "the claim that most Muslims are moderate? How plausible is our claim to moderateness? Can I rely on these Moderate Muslims to understand the nature of my moderateness? Can I rely on them to both understand and to defend my moderateness and my moderate world?" Rather than indulge in fantasies about a Golden Age in Islamic Spain or accept the British government view that Muslim extremists rate as moderates so long as they do not engage in violence, Davies uses wide-ranging statistical analyses of those Muslim countries (chiefly Pakistan and Bangladesh) from which come the majority of Muslim immigrants to the United Kingdom. He finds failings of moderation in all areas of life and demonstrates that these are not countries or cultures in which moderation is a virtue. He concludes: "It is not surprising that moderate people like me see but limited potency in the Moderate Muslim." By way of proof, Davies cites many indications of immoderation: a notorious statement by the secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, Muhammad Abdul Bari, that unless the British police and some sections of the media stop "demonizing" Muslims, "Britain will have to deal with two million Muslim terrorists—700,000 of them in London";[1] the Sudanese president's claim that British and Americans plan to restart the slave trade by kidnapping Muslim children; that 13 percent of Muslims polled regarded the 7/7 bombers in London as martyrs; that just under 33 percent of British Muslim students think that killing in the name of God is justified; and so on. By dispensing with trite references to "moderate Muslims," Davies performs an important service. "While 'moderate Muslims' may well exist in large numbers," he writes, "they have not been tried and tested, not been shown to be effective." [1] The Daily Mail (London), Sept. 11, 2006. Related Topics: Moderate Muslims Denis MacEoin Fall 2009 MEQ The Much Too Promised Landby Aaron David Miller Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2503/the-much-too-promised-land
A key player on the U.S. "peace team" during three administrations, Miller is well-placed to compare and evaluate the different approaches, personalities, and outcomes of the efforts of these three U.S. administrations. The author adds to the flood of memoirs, often covering the same ground—the embrace of Palestinian victimization; surprise at Arafat's treachery; Jimmy Carter's doctored accounts. Ultimately, the main contribution of this book lies in its illumination of the perceptions and misperceptions emanating from Washington. The most substantive sections cover the 1989 to 1992 period, which started and ended with U.S. pressure on Israel, though interrupted by the 1991 Kuwait war. In this phase, Secretary of State James Baker and his colleagues used the threat of blame for failure ("the dead cat on the doorstep" model) to press Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir for concessions. The attempt did little other than increase tensions between Washington and Jerusalem. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the U.S. invasion of Iraq amplified Washington's power of persuasion—saying "no" to Washington became more costly. After months of pressure, Shamir, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, and a thinly disguised Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) delegation agreed to the 1991 Madrid conference. But the investment produced little more than a photo-op. The bilateral talks that followed simply regurgitated old slogans while multilateral efforts designed to promote visible cooperation between Israel and the major Arab countries were ignored—as they are in Miller's history. However, the pressure eventually produced the Oslo experiment, which ended seven years later in a mass terror campaign and the Israeli response to it. One of the main causes of this failure was (as Miller shows indirectly) the top-down process that relied too heavily on PLO chairman Yasser Arafat. On the Palestinian street, no effort was made to challenge the core mythologies centered on refugee claims, Jerusalem, and (crucially) on the rejection of Israel's right to exist. In contrast, as terrorism grew, Israel's hyperactive democracy lost any initial enthusiasm for risk-taking—another aspect of the so-called peace process that is missing in Miller's version of events. Eight years later, as the Obama team tries again, it might consider Miller's contribution to the literature of failure—concentrating, perhaps, not so much on what he has included in his book but on what he has left out. Related Topics: Arab-Israel conflict & diplomacy, US policy Gerald M. Steinberg Fall 2009 MEQ The Palestinian Militaryby Hillel Frisch Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2504/the-palestinian-military
Frisch, a senior research fellow at Israel's BESA Center for Strategic Studies and senior lecturer at the department of political studies at Bar-Ilan University, argues that it is easier to develop a terrorist infrastructure than to unite one's forces under an organized military. In the heyday of the Oslo peace process, Yasser Arafat created approximately seventeen different security forces, all of which were doing much the same thing. The Palestinians also established the General Security Services, an umbrella organization set up to coordinate the work of several disparate units. Today, the Palestinian security establishment consists of border police, military intelligence, military police, and a presidential security unit. These forces, including intelligence units, grew out of the military wing of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the militias that had served as Arafat's bodyguards during his Jordanian, Lebanese, and Tunisian years. The Palestine Liberation Army was founded in 1965, and its forces, including a small air force and navy, trained with sympathetic Arab militaries. Frisch shows that having so many security apparatuses was Arafat's way of ensuring he remained in power. The security forces protected his regime from possible coups and reduced the threat of mutiny and insubordination. This labyrinthine system pitted security units against each other and ensured that the military would never grow strong enough to depose him. The system worked only as long as Arafat himself was on the scene. Since his death, cracks have emerged. Today, the Palestinian security forces continue to be a haphazard collection of units with varying levels of armament. Moreover, as internal fragmentation within Palestinian society has continued to grow since Arafat's death and as clashes between Fatah and Hamas have escalated, the likelihood of a unified military front is becoming more and more a pipe dream. Hamas's military offensive in June 2007 crushed Fatah's political and military positions throughout the Gaza Strip. West Bank security is maintained by Israel although some now argue for cooperation with Fatah units, which have lately received yet more training and arms from the U.S. military. Hamas's 2006 electoral victory in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority's control of the West Bank demonstrate how anti-Israeli terrorism is the preferred ideology used to "govern" Palestinian society. This also explains Gaza's transformation into a united, terrorist front that has brought together many groups otherwise at odds with one another, including Al-Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, an "Iranian embassy," and many more. Related Topics: Palestinians Asaf Romirowsky Fall 2009 MEQ Persian Dreamsby John W. Parker Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2505/persian-dreams
Each of us looks at the world through our own glasses. The same developments can appear quite differently when examined through a different set of eyes. Parker, a division chief at the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Intelligence and Research, situates Iranian-Russian relations within the context of Russian politics, in which U.S. concerns are often peripheral or irrelevant. He shows how Moscow's concerns were, on the whole, entirely different from those of Washington. Russia was preoccupied by developments that are usually given only glancing reference in U.S. eyes—in particular, the 1992-97 civil war in Tajikistan—while it relegated to second-order importance the U.S.-centric 1990-91 confrontation with Saddam Hussein over Kuwait. The Russian reading makes sense when viewing the world from Moscow. In its first (and bloodiest) year, the Tajik civil war resulted in 25,000 deaths and threatened to spill over into several other Central Asian states, making it much more important to Russia than the events in far-off Kuwait. Parker has done extraordinarily meticulous research including many interviews with key Russian actors, and he makes careful comparisons between what various Russian politicians wrote or said. He structures his account around Russia's changing political scene and its shifting interests. For an American used to thinking of the United States as the indispensable superpower of the post-Cold-War era, it can be humbling to realize that Russia was pursuing an agenda with Iran without much reference to Washington's concerns. Moscow's motives in its relations with Tehran were not intended to block Washington but arose simply from insufficient concern about the U.S. agenda—Russia's attention was focused on other issues. To be sure, the United States has often played an important role in Russia-Islamic Republic relations, but the reasons seem usually to have been Iran's interests rather than Russia's. In particular, it was to check Washington that Iran reached out to the USSR for a strategic relationship in 1989, a relationship about which Moscow was never particularly excited. In any event, the relationship did not last long; the collapse of the Soviet Union and Iran's economic difficulties overtook the plans for rebuilding the Iranian military with Soviet arms. Another interesting U.S. role was that played in Iran's 1983 vicious repression of the pro-Soviet Tudeh Party in 1983 and the related expulsion of top Soviet diplomats, which were based on information passed to Tehran by the CIA after the defection to the U.K. of a Soviet KGB agent in Iran. Parker's concluding chapter presents convincing evidence that Russia is and will remain vastly more important to Iran than Iran is to Russia. The Islamic Republic needs a counterweight to the United States while Russia sees Iran as a sometimes problematic country, which can be of use on some occasions and on some issues. Related Topics: Iran, Russia/Soviet Union Patrick Clawson Fall 2009 MEQ The Quest for Democracy in Iranby Fakhreddin Azimi Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2506/the-quest-for-democracy-in-iran
The Western picture of Iran is of authoritarianism with clerical rule following centuries of shahs—punctuated by Mohammed Mossadegh, an eccentric, 1950s prime minister supported by pro-Soviet forces. Azimi, a history professor at the University of Connecticut, provides a useful corrective, illustrating how the desire for modernity runs deep among Iran's intellectuals, businessmen, and ordinary people. Few in the West realize how much Iran's political culture continues to be shaped by the 1905-11 Constitutional Revolution, a violent struggle to impose constitutional democracy on Mozzafar al-Din Shah and to maintain it under his successor Mohammad 'Ali Shah. The constitution, which relegated the shah to a largely ceremonial role, was ignored by successive shahs who reestablished absolutist rule: first, Mohammad 'Ali (r. 1907-09), his son Ahmad Shah (r. 1909-21), Reza Khan from the 1920s, and then his son Mohammed Reza, especially through the 1960s and 1970s. What Azimi brings to life is how broadly the absolutism was resented and seen as illegitimate by both elites and the population at large, which saw democratic consultation as an inseparable part of the modernization those shahs claimed to be advancing. Further, Azimi brings out the striking similarities between the shahs and the Islamic Republic's clerical leaders: Both groups bend to popular democratic demands when weak but, when strong, promptly install authoritarian rule, which is broadly resented as illegitimate and a force that stifles modernity. The strength of Azimi's account lies in how he captures the burning desire that some Iranians have for democracy. He is frank in attributing the failures to the democrats as much as to the autocrats. His evaluation of Mossadegh could apply to Iranian liberals across the last century: "In the specific circumstances of Iran, liberal democratic constitutionalism was more congruent with political opposition than with governance. It was far easier to oppose violations of the Constitution and denounce election rigging than to govern constitutionally or conduct free elections." The weakness of The Quest for Democracy is that Azimi presupposes considerable knowledge about Iranian history over the last century. He presents broad interpretations that make sense only if one is already well versed about the twists and turns, of which there were many, in Iran's complicated political evolution. Azimi does little to guide the reader interested in democracy but with only a passing acquaintance with Iran. As a result, his account is more useful to the specialist or to informed Iranians than to Westerners in general, even to those with considerable interest in foreign affairs. Related Topics: Patrick Clawson Fall 2009 MEQ Reform in the Middle East Oil MonarchiesEdited by Anoushiravan Ehteshami and Steven Wright. Reading, U.K.: Ithaca Press, 2008. 309 pp. $54.50 Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2507/reform-in-the-middle-east-oil-monarchies
The six Persian Gulf monarchies—Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates (UAE), Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman—have for decades been undergoing sustained economic development that was matched by little if any political reform. Reform in the Middle East Oil Monarchies argues that this situation has changed. By far the most interesting essay is the introduction by Gerd Nonneman, which argues that the growing wealth of the local business communities is leading to emerging "post-rentier" dynamics in which state-controlled oil revenues are no longer the sole source of wealth. He goes on to describe the "liberalization without democratization" that each ruling family hopes to accomplish. Successive essays look at reform by country. The essays by locals, on Oman and Kuwait, are short and thin. Those on Dubai and Saudi Arabia analyze economic reform in depth. They are interesting—full of information and sound analysis—but largely avoid the more difficult issue of what impact economic development will have on political life. Ahmed Abdelkareem Saif's essay on Qatar and even more so Neil Quilliam's essay on Bahrain explore in depth political changes in those countries. They show that there has been real liberalization—including freer expression and more public discussion—but only very limited democratization in the sense of popular control over the making of major decisions. Three chapters deal with factors affecting political reform. Bahgat Korany denies the thesis that Islam impedes democracy. Steven Wright argues that the United States has done little to promote it. More plausible than either of those is Emma Murphy's argument that information and communication technologies are forces for modest change, rather than agents of revolutionary, political transformation. In sum, a thin book on a thin subject—but that is still more than would have been true a decade or two ago when there would have been precious little to put in such a volume. Related Topics: Oil, Persian Gulf Patrick Clawson Fall 2009 MEQ Still Brokenby A.J. Rossmiller Middle East Quarterly http://www.meforum.org/2508/still-broken
Rossmiller dedicates the first half of Still Broken to his Iraq experience. Analysts worked 14-hour days, processing data and maintaining a database of questionable accuracy. Rossmiller describes catching obvious errors—Sunni insurgents with names like Ali more often used by Shi'a, for example—but having his concerns brushed off because of a lack of seniority. He adds color to the broader narrative of Iraq with descriptions of insurgent in-processing and debriefings and arbitrary and ineffective interrogation and detention. A tendency to recount cartoonish dialogue among U.S. soldiers distracts and raises questions about where and how Rossmiller took notes in the course of processing insurgents and about whether the many conversations Rossmiller recounts are simply fiction with unnamed soldier archetypes from his own imagination. The second half of Still Broken changes settings to the Pentagon, but the narrative is much the same. Rossmiller conveys the suffocating weight of bureaucracy and dysfunction. He exudes bitterness that no one would heed his warnings that Islamists would win the January 2005 elections although he exaggerates when implying this was either only his or even a minority opinion. He amplifies complaints of his boss's disagreement with his analysis into a broader pattern of political abuse but provides no evidence other than his office director—a career analyst—refusing to sign-off, saying his analysis was too pessimistic. Indeed, at times it is Rossmiller who appears doctrinaire, refusing out-of-hand to consider that Sunnis and Shi'a can cooperate even though Iranian intelligence has often reached out to secularists, Baathists, and Sunnis. Sunni secularist Yasser Arafat was, for example, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's first foreign guest after the Islamic Revolution; Baathist Syria is perhaps Tehran's closest ally; and Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps founded Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a Sunni, Islamist group. While well-written and a quick read, Still Broken offers only limited insight into the lackluster analysis that underlies the intelligence community. Readers who wish more breadth and insight should instead turn to Ishmael Jones's The Human Factor,[1]which tackles much the same problem but with a depth that comes from years rather than months inside the intelligence community. [1] New York: Encounter Books, 2008. Related Topics: Michael Rubin Fall 2009 MEQ To receive the full, printed version of the Middle East Quarterly, please see details about an affordable subscription. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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