I am not sure I agree with Caroline Glick

Caroline Glick, a columnist for the Jerusalem Post, believes one problem with the war or terror is that the US has been insufficiently aggressive in fighting it. In particular, she would like the US to expand its efforts to countries such as Iran, Lebanon, and Syria. Although she doesn’t directly call for US-led regime change in these countries, it seems to me that at a minimum she would like the US to do something to make these countries more unstable than they already are. After carefully considering her point of view, I have come to the conclusion that she is totally nuts. Let’s leave the merits of the policy aside (of which I think there are few) and look at the US record on regime change in the broader Middle East over the past decade. We have tried it in two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the record is, to put it charitably, mixed at best.

Don’t get me wrong – I very pleased that Glick has such confidence in the US’s capacity to get other countries to govern as we wish they would through a policy of military aggression. The problem is that I find it really hard to believe that the world would be a safer place if the US provoked more instability in the Middle East. Perhaps in a future column Glick will outline why she thinks the US military would be more successful in Iran, Lebanon, and Syria than it has been in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan. Until that day comes, I hope that our joint chiefs of staff don’t read her work and think, “hmm…she’s got a point. Lemme run it by Obama.”

D&S is right on time!

We like to be timely here at D&S, but we’re not usually this timely. Our most recent issue of Democracy and Society (which just came out this week!), as it turns out, focuses on US foreign policy in the Middle East and has lots of good articles addressing the crises unfolding in the region:

• Dina Guirguis provides some good analysis about what’s unfolding in Egypt at the moment…and predicted the explosive protests we’re seeing there right now (I’m not certain if she was predicting them so soon…).
• Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf (of the Park 51 Mosque controversy) and Eric Patterson provide some good advice for how the Obama administration can engage in the region in a constructive way.
• Nicholas Noe discusses (predicted?) the crisis in Lebanon.
• Uriel Abulof and David Kenner talk about the challenges of democratic reform in the region.
• István Balogh weighs in on the shifting balance of external power in the region.

As they say, RTWT (read the whole thing).

Why I don’t work on the Middle East

I am not persuaded that outsiders can force negotiations between people who go to war over ground chickpea paste.

Wrong diagnosis of terrorism; wrong cure

Rami Khouri, columnist for Lebanon’s Daily Star, is not impressed with the the US  addresses terrorism:

If media are a mirror of the political system in the United States – and I believe they are – then it is no wonder that the past two decades have seen a steady expansion of two related and symbiotic problems: the spread of terrorism in and from the Arab-Asian region; and the spread of the American armed forces and covert operations in the same region.

Yemen media coverage captures this very neatly. The mainstream American media, especially network and cable television, mainly report that the problems that spur terrorism from Yemen are poverty, religious extremism, and ineffective government. Charismatic Muslim preachers, often using the internet, are also widely mentioned these days as a real problem that exacerbates the terror threat. In every report I have seen, without fail, the thrust of the report is that terrorism is a consequence of Muslim religious extremism that is somehow connected with a visceral hatred of the United States or Western ways in general.

The flaw in this approach – and it was evident in President Barack Obama’s remarks Thursday on how the US would improve its intelligence defenses against terrorism – is that it refuses to acknowledge that terrorism in our age is largely a reactionary movement that responds to perceived threats against those societies from where terrorists emerge. It is striking that in most cases of successful or failed terror attacks, the perpetrators or the organizations that send them to kill explain that they carry out their deed in response to the deeds of others – such as Israel’s assault on Palestinians, US and British armies in Iraq or Afghanistan, American drone attacks against Yemeni militants, or some other such issue…

Mainstream American media coverage of terrorism, Yemen and related issues is, with very few exceptions in terms of quality analysis and reporting, a horror show of superficiality, selectivity and racist sensationalism. The latest culprits for the US media are “Muslim televangelists,” as they are called. A few years ago, the culprits were the madrasas, or Muslim religious schools. Before that the culprits were the folks at Al-Jazeera television. Before that they were Saudi-financed Salafists. Before that the problem was poverty and hopelessness. Before that it was that Muslims had trouble with “modernity.” Next month, the culprits will be someone else. When will this evasive nonsense ever stop, and when will mainstream American journalism executives grow up and act like adults, rather than adolescents, on this score?

For what it’s worth, I know Rami. We were both fellows at Stanford’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the same time. Rami’s a reasonable and level-headed analyst, the type of moderate, modern democrat that the US State Department loves to support. If he’s got steam coming out of his ears about Obama’s policies towards terrorism, its a really bad sign about how little he has improved the image of the US in the Middle East.

Growth without government

I have been in Beirut, Lebanon the past few days, attending a conference put on by the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) that we partially sponsored.  Although I saw very little of Beirut, I did see what rapid private sector growth without government looks like.  The result is private sector development without public goods.  I am writing this post from an upscale mall next to an even more upscale hotel, and both have excellent wireless internet connections.  Yet due to the lack of investment in public goods commensurate to the scale of private sector development, walking down the street is treacherous.  Traffic is chaotic (because no one enforces traffic laws) and there has been no appreciable investment in public infrastructure (for example, traffic lights, sidewalks, and pedestrian crosswalks) to help connect the rapidly-expanding private sector developments.  What I take away from my short time in Beirut is that private sector growth without a government to supply public goods can lead to islands of development with chaos in between.  It’s a pretty good example of the indispensable role the government plays in economic development.