Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World

Juan Cole: Engaging the Muslim World (2009, Palgrave MacMillan)

Introduction (p. 3):

The 1970s and 1980s were formative for many of the Muslim movements still with us. I lived through much of that history in the region, as a student, English teacher, translator, and researcher. I saw some of the early years of the civil war in Lebanon, met and argued with Salafis (Sunni revivalists) in 1976 in Amman while an auditor at the University of Jordan, visited South Tehran with friends and saw a burned-out apartment building alleged to have been bombed by the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK) terrorist organization. I lived in Egypt in from 1976 to 1978, when Ayman al-Zawahiri's group, the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, first became notorious. I was translating Arabic articles on the Iranian revolution into English in Beirut in 1978 and 1979, and saw the Lebanese Shiites begin to mobilize (a Shiite demonstration almost made me miss my plane when I left Beirut in the spring of 1979). In the 1980s I was in India and Pakistan off and on, and traveled up to Peshawar to talk with the Afghan mujahideen not knowing at the time about the Arab volunteers, some of whom later became al-Qaeda. I witnessed the massive food riots of 1977 in Cairo and the 1986 riots of the security police (many of whom had been assigned to guard opulent tourist hotels while being paid pennies a day by the government).

I saw with my own eyes the rise of fundamentalist and radical movements in the Muslim world, but living there, I also gained a sense of proportion, understanding the significant differences among them and which ones were important.

The Struggle for Islamic Oil: The Truth About Energy Independence: Cole starts with a chapter on oil, which seems as good an angle as any for examining the US interests in the Middle East. I tend to think such approaches are misguided: the US government followed the oil industry into the region, and often enough looked to the industry for pointers and guidance, but the US also superimposed its main foreign policy obsession -- the cold war against Soviet communism -- and its side-interest in Israel defies any sort of oil explanation. Cole actually provides a reasonably well balanced survey, including extra points on global warming. None of this is novel, but it's handled more judiciously than (e.g.) Michael Klare. (pp. 10-12):

Although the United States avoided heavy military involvement in the Middle East during the first three decades of the cold war, concern for the energy security of its allies impelled the United States to mount a series of covert operations, including the fomenting of coups that led to a destabilization of the region over time. The Truman administration overthrew the elected government of Shukri Quwatli in Syria in 1949, installing military dictator Husni Za'im, because Quwatli opposed the Trans-Arabian Pipeline, or Tapline, that would take oil from Saudi Arabia to the Lebanese Mediterranean port of Sidon. Following the regime change, the oil flowed freely across those deserts until 1983 (when the development of the supertanker and turmoil in Lebanon killed it). Syria's politics did not soon recover from the intervention. Za'im was overthrown after four and a half months, and Syria spiraled into constant instability and further military coups.

U.S. petroleum security and the interests of U.S. oil majors were also implicated in the Central Intelligence Agency-sponsored coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh of Iran in 1953. [ . . . ] After the 1953 coup, the United States installed dictator Mohammad Reza Pahlevi as shah, and U.S. corporations received a favorable position in the Iranian petroleum industry. The shah's police state enraged the Iranian public, which overthrew him in 1979, initiating decades of bad relations between that country and the United States.

In 1958 the Iraqi military staged a coup, deposing the young king Faisal II and his wily old pro-British prime minister Nuri al-Sa'id. [ . . . ] One of the first inquiries Washington cabled to its embassy in Baghdad concerned the future of the Iraq Petroleum Company under the new regime. [ . . . ]

After the 1958 revolution that brought him to power, General Qasim in Iraq became a thorn in the side of the United States and the United Kingdom because he opposed the Iraq Petroleum Company's monopoly on Iraqi development and production and was willing to deal with the Iraqi Communist Party and the Soviets. [ . . . .] A CIA unit colorfully called the "Health Alternation Committee" attempted to eliminate Qasim in 1960 by having a poisoned monogrammed handkerchief delivered to him.

(pp. 26-27):

A powerful new competitor with the United States for Islamic oil and influence in the Muslim world has emerged in recent years: India. With a population of over a billion, some 13 percent of them Muslims, India has the potential to be a regional player of great importance in coming years. The Indian economy grew only a little over 3 percent a year for four decades after its indpendence in 1947. Sine its population grew at about the same rate, the per capita increase was close to nothing, and the subcontinent remained predominantly rural. Economists grimly joked that it was the "Hindu rate of growth." I lived in India's largely rural Hindi belt in the early 1980s and saw its dire poverty with my own eyes. Population growth was clearly putting pressure on the infrastructure, which was deteriorating rapidly. [ . . . ]

After about 1980, India began shaking off those decades of economic lethargy and flexing its muscles. A forest of unhelpful regulations regarding imports was felled and a more business-friendly atmosphere created. In 2006 India grew at a phenomenal rate of 9.6 percent, decelerating to a still-impressive 8.7 percent in 2007. India possesses limitd proven oil and gas reserves, and therefore imports more than 70 percent of the petroleum products is needs, a percentage that is likely to grow. It is now the sixth-largest importer of petroleum, bringing in 2.4 million barrels a day in 2007. Its energy needs had been forecast to grow roughloy 5 percent a year for the next twenty years, but in 2007-2008 alone its energy use jumped 8 percent.

Muslim Activism, Muslim Radicalism: Telling the Two Apart (pp. 53-55):

The Muslim Brotherhood of the 1940s in Egypt was an extremely hierarchical organization. The rank and file could not criticize al-Banna, the "supreme leader," without risking being shunned, and they were forbidden to belong to other political parties. The Brotherhood quite self-consciously divided itself into an outer layer of sympathizers, an inner layer of the committed and knowledgeable, a core of completely devoted cadres, and a still more secret inner sanctum of operatives willing to use violence. The local groups were organized as federated branches in Egypt's provinces, a mechanism that allowed them to survive attacks on the central leadership. The Brotherhood fought foreign influence and sought to impose strict puritanism on society, attacking drinking, gambling, and prostitution. Although most members and perhaps even branch leaders concerned themselves mainly with freeing Egypt of British dominance and working for the provision of social services, the top leadership aimed at abolishing secular law in favor of Islamic canon law and imposing an Islamic leadership that would consult with the ruled but not be constrained by them. [ . . . ]

In part because of the poor performance of the Egyptian government and military in the 1948 war [over Israel/Palestine], the Brotherhood became even more intent on destabilizing the Egyptian monarchy. Their terrorist activities were discovered by the government of Prime Minister Mahmud al-Nuqrashi in the fall of 1948, and he banned the organization. On December 28, 1948, a budding veterinarian named Abdul Majid Ahmad Hasan, a member of the Broterhood, assassinated al-Nuqrashi. Although al-Banna denounced the assassination, it is hard to believe that a major section of his organization was acting without hisknowledge or blessing. In February 1949, al-Banna was himself killed, probably by Egyptian secret police seeking revenge for the killing of al-Nuqrashi. The police arrested 4,000 members of the organization.

(p. 65):

The Arabic word for struggle is jihad. It is not used in the Qur'an with the precise meaning of "holy war," a doctrine that developed later in Muslim history. Medieval Muslim jurists considered warring for the faith, whether defensively or offensively, to be a collective duty of the community, not an individual duty. They believed that only the duly constituted authorities could declare war, and only a portion of the community had a responsibility to fight it. [Egyptian Islamic Jihad theorist Abd al-Salam] Farag, in contrast, wanted to make the waging of holy war an everyday obligation of individuals, who apparently could in his view act in vigilante fashion, without needing the authorization of a Muslim government.For this reason, I will refer to followers of this tendency as fundamentalist vigilantes. Some scholars call them Salafi Jihadis. But "Salafi" refers to reformists who want to go back to an early Islamic practice, and jihad is a formal legal doctrine, whereas the followers of Qutb and Farag violate both of these normative traditions.

"Fundamentalist vigilantes" neatly factors Islam out of the equation. The phrase could just as well describe the murderers and terrorizers of abortion doctors in the US.

(pp. 67-68):

In the 1980s, the burgeoning religious right in the United States adopted the Afghan holy warriors as their cause célèbre, seeing them as dear allies against the godless, atheist communists. Christian Voice, for instance, issued a "biblical scorecard," a checklist that voters on the religious right were instructed to use to decide whether to support their senators and representatives in Congress. A key criterion was whether the politician voted money to support the Muslim freedom fighters in Afghanistan. Evangelist Pat Robertson, who ran for the Republican presidential nomination in 1987, campaigned in support of the Muslim guerrillas, pledging: "I would send arms and supplies to the brave, indigenous freedom fighters that are found in Angola, Mozambique, Afghanistan and Nicaragua."

(pp. 70-71):

The big unnoticed story of the 1990s was the decisive defeat of the radical vigilantes in Egypt. Extremists in Egypt were responsible for an estimated 1,357 killing sbetwen 1992 and 1998. An Egyptian Islamic Jihad assassination attempt against Hosni Mubarak failed in 1995, and the Egyptian government imprisoned 20,000 or more members of and even sympathizers with the fringe cults. Worse, the public was turning against the radicals, denying them funding and moral support. A straw in the wind was the popular 1992 film Terrorism and Barbecue, starring prominent Egyptian comic Adel al-Imam, about radical Muslims who take hostages in a government building but are persuaded to let them go by the arguments of the protagonist, who underlined that what they were doing was incompatible with the humane principles of true Islam.

A horrific attack in 1997 on Western tourists at the Temple of Hatshepshut in Luxor left seventy-one dead and provoked widespread disgust in the Egyptian public. Although the radicals coded such acts as "jihad," or holy war, they violated the canons of holy war as an Islamic ritual. These canons forbid holy warriors to kill civilian noncombatants. They stipulate that fair warning be given of an attack, that those attacked be given the opportunity to convert first, and that the warriors need authorization from duly constituted Islamic leaders. Terrorism is not jihad, and Egyptians knew very well what had really happened to the innocent tourists. In Luxor, many local Egyptians, stricken with grief by the attack on their guests, ran to the hospital to give blood.

An interesting section on US "fundamentalist vigilantes" like Timothy McVeigh and Randy Weaver. (p. 76):

If anger on the far right at the American government for being too left wing subsided in the first years of the twenty-first century [i.e., when George W. Bush was president], other ultraconservative themes retained their salience. In a 2006 Gallup poll, 9 percent of Americans said they believe that the Bible should be the only source of U.S. law, and 46 percent said that it should be a source of law. Secular journalists and politicians are often taken aback by similar polling results about Islamic law in Muslim countries but are so out of touch with the American grassroots that they are largely unaware of the desire for biblical law shared by nearly half the U.S. population (and, obviously, by more than half of the Christian population).

Nor has homegrown extremism gone away in the United States. The FBI in recent years has reported over 7,000 hate crimes annually, but some experts point out that frightened victims probably take few such crimes to the authorities. These experts estimate, based on household surveys, that there are nearly 200,000 hate crimes in the United States annually. Even in the small FBI sample of attacks that get reported to police, approximately 2,000 Americans are assaulted in this country because of their race and others are attacked because of their religion every year. The number of hate groups in the United States has grown 48 percent since the year 2000, reaching nearly 900 in 2007, according to the Southern Christian Law Center.

(p. 79):

Ironically, the U.S. government has had no difficulty dealing directly with, and even promoting, the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP), which is the direct descendant of the Muslim Brotherhood and which retains many of al-Banna's goals and emphases. Because Sunni fundamentalists were for the most part repressed by Saddam Hussein, the IIP welcomed the Bush administration's overthrow of his regime and was willing to accept a seat on the U.S.-appointed Interim Governing Council of 2003-2004. Even more remarkable, American proconsul in Iraq Paul Bremer was perfectly willing to appoint members of this Muslim Brotherhood branch to high office in an American-ruled colonial state. Yet the IIP wants Islamic law to be the law of the land in Iraq, just as its Egyptian counterpart does. The main difference between the two lies in their differing attitudes to the United States. If that distinction is the basis for Washington to treat them so differently, then one is not speaking of principled U.S. policy but of ad hoc diplomatic maneuvering, which surely is and should be subject to change with altered circumstances.

The Wahhabi Myth: From Riyadh to Doha: (pp. 85-86):

Willingness to cavalierly stigmatize other Muslims as pagans marked a sectarian mind-set, a departure from the relatively tolerant, big-tent attitude of Sunni Islam. Although nowadays Wahhabism is thought of as a Sunni school, in the eighteenth century it condemned most Sunnis as infidels, and Sunnis returned the favor.

(p. 87):

Ironically, the United States is responsible for significant past efforts to make Wahhabi Saudi Arabia the spiritual leader of the Muslim world. As the 1950s wore on, some in the U.S. foreign policy establishment became increasingly worried that Arab nationalism of the Abdel Nasser sort was in effect a handmaiden of international communism. Arab nationalism tended to be anti-Western, and fostered more or less socialist economies that limited the potential for Western investment. Arab nationalist states were hungry for weaponry and technical assistance, which they were willing to get from the USSR and the Eastern bloc if it was not forthcoming from Western Europe or the United States.

As a result, during the cold war, American politicians and diplomatic and intellgience officials often saw Islam and Muslims as natural allies against the Soviet Union and international communism.

(pp. 87-90):

The romance of Islam for the American right wing during the cold war is exemplified by Republican senator William F. Knowland, Senate majority leader, caustic critic of the Truman administration, and champion of Taiwan's nationalists against Red China. In 1953, Knowland returned from a tour of South and Southeast Asia to state, "Pakistan has the potential of really being like Turkey ultimately in firmly standing against Communism," adding of its relationship to the United States, "Pakistan could become an ally very definitely." In 1954, Pakistan proved Knowland right. Pakistani prime minister Mohammad Ali Bogra took his country into the U.S.-backed, anticommunist Southeast Asian Treaty Organization, which aimed at containing Mao Zedong. Then, in February of 195, Bogra signed on to the British-led Baghdad Pact, which involved Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan in an attempt to limit Soviet influence in the Middle East and the oil-rich Persian Gulf. On February 29, 1956, Pakistan's parliament declared it an Islamic Republic, which did not appear to bother Knowland or the Eisenhower administration at all.

Faced in the Middle East with the rise of secular Arab nationalism and of leftist politics in countries such as Syria, Washington cast about for a counterweight. President Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his diary in the spring of 1956 that "Arabia is a country that contains the holy places of the Moslem world, and the Saudi Arabians are considered to be the most deeply religious of all the Arab groups. Consequently, the King could be built up, possibly, as a spiritual leader. Once this were accomplished, we might begin to urge his right to political leadership." Later that year, after the potentially destabilizing Suez War, Eisenhower cabled his secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, in Paris, "I continue to believe, as I think you do, that one of the measures that we must take is to build up an Arab rival of Nasser, and the natural choice would seem to be the man you and I have often talked about." Dulles agreed that King Saud (bin Abdul Aziz, who had succeeded his father in 1953) could in time be "the best counter to Nasser." [ . . . ]

Eisenhower's plan to make Wahhabi Saudi Arabia the spiritual leader of the Middle East, as a way of shifting the region to the right and blocking Soviet influence, failed during his own administration, in part because King Saud bin Abdul Aziz lacked spiritual stature or widespread Arab popularity. King Saud, enormously wealthy from his kingdom's petroleum exports and busy with his harem, was no match for Abdel Nasser, who knew how to appeal through powerful oratory to the aspirations of the Arab masses. Furthermore, Eisenhower did not realize that many Sunni Muslims viewed the Saudi's Wahhabism as intolerant and sectarian, an attitude that limited Saudi influence. Finally, King Saud could not in the end shake suspicions in the Arab world and in his own kingdom that he was a creature of Washington.

The Saudi leadership idea did not go away, however, and was resurrected by later American presidents. Washington appeared to think that, just as mainstream Protestants such as theologian Reinhold Niebuhr were bulwarks against communism in the United States, so Wahhabism could underpin a conservative moral order compatible with the sanctity of private property in the Middle East.

(pp. 100-101):

[After the 1979 fundamentalist revolt in Mecca, the revolution in Iran, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Saudi King] Fahd made the fateful decision to seek the security umbrella of the United States. In exchange for sophisticated U.S. weaponry, such as F-15 fighter jets and AWACS spy planes, he signed on to help create Reagan's anticommunist militias, givign them Saudi money in Nicaragua, Angola, and Ethiopia, and vastly increasing aid to the mujahideen in Afghanistan. Saudi officials deny ever having a formal relationship with Usamah Bin Laden (who was then raising funds from Saudi clerics and entrepreneurs on behalf of the Muslims fighting the Soviets). Saudi intelligence, urged on by the Americans to find resources for the mujahideen, nevertheless probably recruited him for that purpose.

Although the Saudi royal family had long despised the Arab nationalist ideology of Baathism, Fahd joined the Reagan administration after 1983 in supporting Saddam Hussein, whom the Arabian monarch called "my brother" and "my sword," against Kohmeinist Iran.

Iraq and Islam Anxiety: How Fearmongering Got Up a War and Kept It Going: (p. 115):

The American right wing invokes Islam Anxiety to ensure that the Unitd States does not depart Iraq, and have discovered that nothing inspires greater Islamophobia than mentioning al-Qaeda. In the 2008 presidential campaign, John McCain warned, "My friends, if we left, [al-Qaeda] wouldn't be establishing a base. They'd be taking a country, and I'm not going to allow that to happen, my friends. I will not surrender. I will not surrender to al-Qaeda." McCain thus went beyond the argument against withdrawal made by then vice president Dick Cheney in 2008 at Balad Air Force Base in Iraq:" We have no intention of abandoning our friends or allowing this country of 170,000 square kilometers to become a staging ground for further attacks against Americans."

(pp. 122-123):

The U.S. invasion and military occupation of Iraq undeniably unleashed a tsunami of violence and disorder that has blighted the lives of millions. The displaced Iraqis swelled to a river of humnanity, a startling 4 million persons by any conservative estimate. Ironically, during the years of the American troop escalation, 2007-2008, the number of those Iraqis who had fled their homes for another part of Iraq grew markedly. In the summer of 2008, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) estimated the number of internally displaced Iraqis at 2.7 million; before the surge, in January 2007, that number was estimated at 1.8 million. It is large tragedies like this one, unfolding in the midst of the supposedly good news of lower monthly death tolls, that make Muslim publics suspicious of the triumphal U.S. narrative of progress.

In 2006 and 2007, Baghdad, a city of 6 million, witnessed substantial ethnic cleansing of Sunni Arabs, with the city ending up 75 percent Shiite, according to the U.S. military. Many Sunnis were forced abroad, to Syria. Baghdad is estimated to have been half Sunni Arab in 2003, when the United States invaded. This cleansing thus occurred under the nose of the U.S. troops. Of those displaced from Baghdad to other provines in Iraq, 71 percent said that their property had been seized and claimed by private citizens. The internal refugees "remain particularly vulnerable to the harsh living conditions of squatter settlements, which offer no or little access to medical care, education, drinking water and other basic facilities," according to the intergovernmental International Organization for Migration, which added, "In Anbar Al-Ka'im district, IOM monitors reported that many children were forced into betgging and their mothers into collecting garbage for resale in order to survive.

It is likely that thee are about 200,000 Iraqis in Jordan (larger figures sometimes appear in the press, but my research indicates that they are exaggerated), and over a million in Syria. There are also 30,000 each in Egypt and Lebanon and about 40,000 in Sweden. About 1 million Iraqis had been displaced before the American invasion, but at least 400,000 of those had gone to Iran, and they returned with the fall of Saddam. We may conclude that approximately 1.5 million Iraqis have been forced abroad by the U.S. invasion and its chaotic aftermath. They are disproportionately well educated (half those in Jordan have had some college) and middle or upper class -- by 2008, at least a third of the Iraqi middle class had fled abroad. The total displaced since 2003, internally and externally, equals nearly a sixth of the entire Iraqi population.

(pp. 124-125):

Despite the lowered civilian death tolls in Iraq from September 2007, the problems of militia intimidation, ethnically cleansed neighborhoods, and lack of basic services remained. Fear, unwillingness to suffer further, and hope of being resettled abroad led some 50,000 destitute Iraqis to live furtively in Amman, even when denied work permits or temporary residency visas and constantly looking over their shoulders. Some Iraqi women in exile who were heading their households had run out of money and were baking bread for neighbors, sewing, or running informal beauty salons in their living rooms to eke out a living. Others could not afford a sewing machine or oven, and were seeking aid to get one, but found that nongovernmental organizations were unwilling to risk helping them work illegally. UNHCR could provide them only about $75 a month in refugee aid, which went less and less far as gasoline and food prices rose throughout 2008.

(pp. 139-140):

By spring of 2001, [Treasury Secretary Paul] O'Neil[l] told journalist Ron Suskind, Cheney and his more hawkish allies on the cabinet, such as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his neoconservative deputy Paul Wolfowitz, were planning an Iraq war, over the objections of Secretary of State Colin Powell. What likely changed between 1991 and 2001 was that Cheney had spent half a decade leading a major energy corporation and had come to see the absolute necessity for American companies to become involved in developing Iraqi and Iranian fields of gas and petroleum, among the biggest unexplored such reserves in the world, given that there had been few new big finds in the 1990s and projections ten and twenty yeras out suggested vastly increased demand. Cheney had been in a position to foresee that the petroleum and gas markets were becoming like a game of musical chairs and that the United States might, because of AIPAC's boycott policies, end up the player without a chair. Such a fate would equal the demotion of the United States to a second-rate power.

My conjecture is that Cheney and other petroleum company executives had despaired of ever besting AIPAC on the sanctions issue. Therefore, they believed that they would be locked out of Iraq and Iran and their enormous oil and gas reserves while France, Russia, and China positioned themselves to benefit from developing those fields. Cheney had spent most of the 1990s fighting the Israel lobbies and consorting with Saudi princes and Muslim presidents and prime ministers. Yet when he set up as vice president in 2001, he created a rump national security council of his own that he staffed with figures such as Irv Lewis Libby, John Hannah, and later on David Wurmser -- all prominent neoconservatives who were ideologically close to Israel's right-wing Likud Party. This about-face is so stark that it should make our necks snap. Big Oil, with its strong ties to the Arab hydrocarbon monarchies, was cohabiting in the vice presidential mansion with AIPAC and the Project for the New American Century.

The simplest explanation would be that Cheney made a conceptual breakthrough. He may have seen that if he pushed for regime change in Iraq and Iran, he could turn AIPAC and the Israel lobbies into allies of the oil majors' plans for investment in Iraq and Iran. If he committed to removing the governments that threatened Israel and replacing them with pro-Western regimes, then Congress would lift those implacable boycotts and allow Houston and Dallas finally to play in Mesopotamia and Khuzistan. Such a development could well be crucial to maintaining the position of the Unitd States as a superpower into the twenty-first century. Cheney and such cabinet allies as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz needed to convince Bush to commit major resources to verthrowing the Baath regime in Baghdad. Bush, even as governor of Texas before becoming president, had repeatedly expressed a desire to "take out" Saddam, but was skeptical of foreign interventions and nation-building projects,and so would have had to be convined that the project could be achieved relatively painlessly.

(p. 142):

In June 2008 it was announced that BP, ExxonMobil, Total, and Shell were considering returning to Iraq to carry out repairs and give technical support to Iraqi oil fields, though it is likely that these negotiations will be protracted. These were the Western oil majors that had dominated the Iraq Petroleum Company from the 1920s through the oil nationalization of 1972. However badly things had turned out in other ways in Iraq, Cheney had succeeded in reopening Iraq's fields to U.S. investment.

Pakistan and Afghanistan: Beyond the Taliban: (p. 175):

Most Pakistanis appear to have had no sympathy for the hard-line ideology of the Red Mosque vigilantes, and few joined demonstrations on their behalf in provines such as Sindh and Punjab. In a summer 2008 poll, some 60 percent of Pakistanis said hey would oppose further Talibanization of their society, and only 15 percent wanted a substantial increase in such puritanism. The Pakistani public is worried about the influence of the rigid and authoritarian seminaries, or madrasahs, and 64 percent favor requiring them to register with the government and modernize their curriculum so as to include contemporary sciences. Still, the mosque invasion and continued unrest and militarization did not sit well with people.

(p. 176):

Washington began asking if Musharraf was another Mohammad Reza Pahlevi, who tried to hold on to dictatorial power too long and found himself overthrown by a popular revolution. Then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was reported to have come up with the idea of convincing Musharraf to allow exiled former prime minister Benazir Butto to return to the country and run in the approaching parliamentary elections. Rice appears to have unrealistically hoped for cooperation between Musharraf as president and Bhutto as prime minister.

(p. 181):

The political crisis in Pakistan is deeply intertwined with that of its neighbor to the northwest, Afghanistan. In both countries, rural tribal groups resist the penetration of the countryside by the bureaucratic state just as they stand up to foreign influence. The presidents of both countries have in recent years suffered from being seen by many in their publics as puppets of the American superpower. The political and security challenges in the two differ enormously, however.

Pakistan has the advantage of a cohesive national elite, a large, disciplined army, a long if troubled tradition of party politics, and a significant, cosmopolitan urban population. For Pakistan, the FATA Taliban are a small provincial revolt and are rather unlikely to take over the government in Islamabad. In Afghanistan, in contrast, the TAliban ruled the country in the late 1990s, and their potential political base is much larger. However despised they are now, they have shown an ability to take, hold, and rule large swaths of territory. The Taliban remnants benefit from substantial resentment in the Pushtun countryside roused by efforts to eradicate the lucrative poppy crop and by the actions of U.S. and NATO troops in their regions. The foe they face in the form of the Afghan government is weak, and its newly built army is largely ineffective.

(p. 190):

Although forcible poppy eradication may on the surface appear to be a reasonable response to the threat of narcoterrorism, it is in fact counterproductive. It raises the price of poppies and so does nothing to impede the drug economy. The farmers involved in it are mostly engaged in subsistence agriculture and are otherwise dirt-poor. If their poppy crops are put under flame-throwers, they are cast into profound debt. One in seven Pushtun farmers in Helmand who saw their poppy crops eradicated reported that they had had to sell one of their children as a result (likely it was a girl child who was trafficked). Some 38 percent said that they had become more sympathetic to the Taliban after the crops were forcibly destroyed.

From Tehran to Beirut: The Iranian Challenge: (pp. 206-207):

But let us just imagine for a second that the image of the Islamic Republic as a praetorian regime with aggressive ambitions were true. It is not, but let us do a thought experiment. If Iran wanted to attack Israel, how could that even be accomplished? [ . . . ] Iranian jets do not have the range to reach Israel, and Iran's fleet of fighters is small and old, with many planes dating from the days of the shah. Despite persistent rumors that it will purchase state-of-the-art fighters from Russia, there is no good evidence that it has done so. Iran does appear to have some missiles that might be able to reach Israel, though their range and accuracy are in question. The Iranian regime knows that it cannot attack Israel with missiles without killing Palestinian Arabs. Since Israel, according to former president Jimmy Carter, has 150 nuclear bombs, it would in any case be suicide for Iran to attack Israel militarily; Israel has the capability of incinerating Tehran, with 12 million residents in its metropolitan area, in retaliation. The scenario has no plausibility whatsoever if one does not accept the Islamophobic premise that Iranians by virtue of being Muslims are insane and undeterrable by mutually assured destruction.

(pp. 208-209):

In a major policy speech in June 2006, Supreme Jurisprudent Ali Khamenei called the American assertion that Iran seeks a nuclear bomb "a sheer lie." He affirmed, "We consider using nuclear weapons against Islamic rules. We have announced this openly," Khamenei was instancing the chivalric law of Islamic warfare, wherein jurists had forbidden the killing of innocent noncombatants such as women, children, and unarmed men. Since a nuclear bomb dropped on a contemporary city would inevitably annihilate hundreds of thousands or millions of innocents, he was saying, it acnnot be used by an Islamic state that has any regard for Islamic law. Further, he said, a nuclear weapons program is extremely expensive, and he could not justify imposing that expense on the Iranian people, since there were no policy purposes for which Iran would find such a weapon useful. He concluded, "We do not need those weapons." Khamenei pledged no first strike with conventional weapons against Iran's enemies, saying "We will never start a war. We have no intention of going to war with any government."

(p. 210):

In the 1970s, General Electric and Westinghouse won contracts to build eight nuclear reactors in Iran. The shah intimated that Iran would seek nuclear weapons, without facing any adverse consequences beyond some reprimands from the United States or Western Europe. In contrast, Khomeini was horrified by the idea of using weapons of mass destruction, and he declined to deploy chemical weapons at the front in the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, even though Saddam had no such compunctions and extensively used mustard gas and sarin on Iranian troops.

(p. 211):

The Ford administration memo from the 1970s on Iran's need for nuclear energy as a backup for its petroleum reserves explains why Iran is pursuing a civilian nuclear research program that alarms the rest of the world. Ayatollah Khamenei explained in his 2006 address, "To say that no country has the right to have access to nuclear technology means that in twenty years' time, all of the countries of the world will have to beg certain Western or European countries to meet their energy demands." That is, Khamanei views the sophisticated nuclear power plant infrastructure in France, Russia, and the United States as the future of energy, and fears that if his country does not develop its own plants and close the fuel cycle so as to be able to produce its own fuel, Iran will be drawn into dependence on Western technology for its future energy needs. In an ironic turn of phrase with which people in the Americas and Europe surely can empathize, he complained that once Iran's oil is gone, it and countries in a similar position "will have to beg for energy in order to run their lives. Which country, nation, or honest official is ready to take that?"

Conclusion: (p. 237):

In a 2007 poll, an average of 79 percent of respondents in Egypt, Morocco, Pakistan, and Indonesia agreed that America seeks to "weaken and divide the Islamic world." The same average percentage in these countries believed that the United States wants "control over the oil resources of the Middle East." An average of 64 percent asserted that Washington wants to spread Christianity among them. Three-fourths of respondents in the four countries supported the goal of getting all American troops and bases out of their region. Obviously, hundreds of millions of Muslims suffer from America Anxiety; they believe that a superpower is seeking to udnermine and destroy their religious identity and control their resources.

posted 2009-10-16