THE LONG HAUL: SOFT POWER AND PATIENCE SHOULD DOMINATE US POLICY IN THE MIDDLE EAST
by Cameron Abadi
CASMII
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Nov 3 2008
DC
Presidential elections in the United States are not decided on foreign
policy. So goes, at least, the conventional wisdom. The theory of the
provincial and parochial American voter–more interested in "pocketbook
issues" than world affairs–has a long standing history. But it
reached its pithiest and snidest formulation in 1992 when candidate
Bill Clinton’s campaign team chided George Bush Sr. with the slogan:
"It’s the economy, stupid."
Nonetheless, Barack Obama’s electoral successes this year have been
powered by loftier sentiments, and "change" is a mantra intended for
broader application than tax policy and health care reform. Time will
tell whether his strategy produces victory at the ballot box; but his
diagnosis of the problems in the Middle East has already endeared him
to many of the elites who never joined or long ago abandoned the "war
on terror." Certainly, Obama’s line of criticism is familiar. America,
he says, has squandered its hard-earned reserves of soft power in the
Middle East by promoting a democratization agenda without consistently
applying it. Meanwhile, its military has been stretched by two wars
and an ever diminishing definition of victory from which a regional
rival, Iran, has profited most.
But the long list of all that has gone wrong with the war on terror
begs the question: When, precisely, were things ever going right
for American foreign policy in the Middle East? That question, alas,
produces less comforting answers. As a number of new books attest,
America’s current failures have a long pedigree. Indeed, when the
conversation turns from tactics to strategy, from the short to the
long-term, calls for "change" seem more than a little glib. The
relationship between the United States and the Middle East may very
well be in need of wholesale revision, a change not only in degree,
but in kind.
So suggests Olivier Roy in his book The Politics of Chaos in the Middle
East. Roy–a researcher at the French National Center for Scientific
Research and a consultant to the French foreign ministry–uses the
first two pages to dispense with the requisite task of listing the
litany of recent disasters:
The failure is patent. None of America’s objectives have been
achieved…. Terrorist attacks have not ceased, and the situation
throughout the Muslim world has deteriorated…. The Taliban are back
in Afghanistan, while in Lebanon, Hezbollah makes no secret of its
determination to make or break any government in Beirut…. Those
in power in Baghdad are Shia and sympathetic to Iran. Hamas is the
dominant political force among the Palestinians.
Roy ends the catalogue of chaos with a tidy question that belies a
good deal of despair: "How did it come to this?"
In providing an answer, the book looks past the noise of immediate
causes and points, instead, to the Bush administration’s proud program
of universal democratization. Signaling where his sympathies lie,
Roy refers to Bush’s idealism as "a coherent ideological project." And
in making his case that the democratizing mindset was pernicious and
dilettantish, Roy suggests taking a close look not at the Iraq War,
but at the Bush administration’s Greater Middle East Initiative,
the development plan submitted for approval to the G-8 conference
in 2004. This, Roy suggests, is where the democratization ideology
finds its clearest expression.
"The heart of a neoconservative antiterror strategy" may seem an
unlikely place to find a project of sweeping political reform, but Roy
deftly shows how policy makers in Washington operated on two tracks
after the attacks of 9/11: organizing an immediate response on the
one, while treating terrorism as a symptom of the endemic failures
of governance in the Muslim world on the other. Roy even points out
that designers of the reform project took many of its cues from the
Arab Human Development Report, an official document prepared by the
United Nations, an institution tasked with producing international
consensus–and usually held in contempt by American conservatives.
But Roy also shows that while the neoconservatives had a sense of what
"poor governance" involves, they had a dangerously facile idea of the
nature of its opposite. The Bush administration’s efforts were guided
by a cookie-cutter liberal development theory in which "democracy is
a simple question of building institutions and electoral mechanisms,"
a cocktail comprised of equal parts open elections and free markets.
As a result, development policies–and these include efforts sponsored
by NGOs as well as governments–have ignored collective belonging
and focused exclusively on supporting individual actors capable of
identifying and expressing their own interests. Roy deftly shows how
development assistance of this sort creates a closed-circuit market in
the countries in which it operates, introducing distortions into the
greater society, but otherwise doing little to encourage significant,
organic change. As grassroots programs go, this method is peculiarly
top-down: while the programs might succeed on their own terms, they
have no clear method by which to reintroduce into society the new
actors they’ve produced. And so this path, though paved with good
intentions, has not led to any sort of Promised Land.
No, this was democratization on the cheap, and a particularly
fatal mistake in the Middle East where the history of colonialism
has left behind a set of political institutions in disrepair and a
society distrustful of neighbors and far-away powers alike. "What
is lacking in this theory of democratization," Roy writes damningly,
"is the entire political dimension of a modern society and the entire
anthropological depth of a traditional society."
Perhaps part of the problem is that many policy elites do not like what
they see when they plumb the Middle East’s anthropological depths. We
have all heard the warning that democracy in the Muslim world will
look different than the system to which Westerners are accustomed, but
Roy does the service of filling that cliché with content. By offering
analytical distinctions among types of Islamic legal doctrines, he goes
some way toward making Sharia a more palatable term for Westerners.
Whether a harder-edged democratization agenda can be salvaged from
the Bush administration’s policies remains to be seen. As it is,
Roy suspects that the failures of democratization to match up to
expectation will lead to a return of hard-nosed, narrowly defined
realpolitik, one that is prepared to actively support authoritarian
governments in the service of efforts at eliminating militants hostile
to the West.
In his book, A Path Out of the Desert, Kenneth Pollack agrees with
Roy’s gloomy diagnosis of the status quo, but leavens his prognosis
with a good deal of American optimism. He castigates the Bush
administration for its mistakes, but encourages the next government
to look for ways that political reform can be done right.
Pollack is a well-known commodity on the Middle East policy circuit:
a former CIA officer, member of the Clinton administration’s National
Security Council and now a well-regarded policy analyst at the
Brookings Institution in Washington. He was also, as Pollack himself
points out in his new book, a prominent supporter of an invasion of
Iraq–though after the war was under way, he soon became a repudiator
and critic.
As a prelude to his new prescriptions, Pollack pleads understanding
for his earlier shortcomings–among them, a hastiness to right wrongs
through force. Now Pollack preaches patience and comes bearing a
fifty-year plan. The United States, he says, should prepare itself
to make billions of dollars of investments in the region, focused on
education and infrastructure. The Middle East requires a commitment
from America, and it needs one for the long haul. "Think of the
hundreds of billions of dollars that the United States is now sinking
into the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan," he writes. "Doesn’t it make
sense to put a fraction of that, perhaps as much as $5 billion to
$10 billion per year, into foreign aid programs for the Muslim Middle
East . . . and hopefully head off future wars?"
A long-term strategy would be a first for the United States, a point
underscored by Michael Oren’s book Power, Faith and Fantasy. Oren’s
book is sure to become a classic: He put in the hard and long-overdue
work needed to produce a comprehensive, fair-minded and fluently
written history of relations between the United States and the Middle
East, from the American Revolution to the present. Those relations,
Oren shows, were rather fitful and tenuous for much of America’s
history. For the young American republic, the Middle East was a
trading partner and an occasional adversary–in many ways a distant
concern far from the foreign policy agenda’s front-burner.
The most consistent ties between the regions were forged by
missionaries and adventurers, like the first Protestant missionaries
who "departed Boston for the Middle East in 1819 with the goal
of restoring Palestine to Jewish sovereignty and saving the souls
of Orthodox Christians, Maronites, and Druze," or the autodidact
businessman Sol Bloom who organized the popular Egyptian and Moroccan
pavilions at the World’s Fair exhibition in Chicago. So was a new
civilization linked to an older, imagined precursor by means of
religious piety ("You come to the Holy Land with something of the
feeling that you come to your home," wrote the Civil War correspondent
John Russell Young) and showmanship ("I came to realize that a tall,
skinny chap from Arabia with a talent for swallowing swords expressed
a culture which to me was on the highest plane," Bloom said on the
eve of his World’s Fair exhibition).
To be sure, as America grew in strength and confidence, it began
to assert with greater frequency its political ideals, even when it
did not have enough power to see them through. Oren shows an America
comfortable in the role of global gadfly: observing and regretting,
if not officially denouncing, genocide against the Armenians by the
Turkish military, and chiding European powers for so eagerly colonizing
the fertile crescent region after World War I. These latter protests
and later support for Arab struggles for self-determination, were the
beginnings of America’s build up of soft power reserves in the region.
But it took exogenous circumstances for the United States finally
to make strong and irreversible commitments to the region: first,
the display of Soviet aggression and ambition after World War II,
and second, the need to secure access to the area’s vast supply
of oil. Predictably perhaps, American policy in the wake of these
developments was based more on calculations of short-term gain than
anything else. Ambivalent about projecting power, and influenced
by elements of faith and fantasy, America had a difficult time
discussing and settling on a long-term strategy. And this tentative
and abstract positioning gave rise to the Bush administration’s own
ideological project, which presented itself as bold and resilient,
but was curiously abstract in its own right.
Pollack points out that a long-term commitment to the well being of
the Middle East need not be and will not be driven by humanitarian
concerns, but it will have to be reconciled with America’s outsized
interest in and influence on the rest of the world. In that way, it is
refreshing to see Pollack spell out what Oren’s book underscores, that
the United States’ strategic interest in oil is not going to change
in the near future. Of course, that message hearkens uncomfortably
to the less pleasant sides of foreign policy discourse in the United
States–from the unipolar geostrategy drawn up under the guidance of
Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz in the 1992 Defense Planning Guidance
report, to the occasional hysterics of the antiwar movements. But,
Pollack makes a solid case that the wise response is to draw up
long-term reform plans and to carry them out patiently.
It will be the task of the politician and statesman to explain the
wisdom of that approach to the American people. For the moment, the
Republican candidate for president, John McCain, seems uninterested
in that responsibility, and Obama has addressed it only by offering a
placeholder. "Hope" is fine to have, but it is a meaningless concept
when it lacks a referent. It is the achievement of these books to have
offered just that, an outline of a foreign policy that America can
feel hopeful about: realistic rather than utopian, resigned rather
than messianic, and patient rather than arrogant.
Cameron Abadi is a journalist based in Berlin. In 2006 he was a
correspondent in Tehran, Iran.
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