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Anyone interested in transnational Islamist political movements or the politics of the Gulf countries, especially the Arab ones, should read Laurence Louer’s Transnational Shia Politics: Religious and Political Networks in the Gulf. I won’t be able to finish it right away as I return it to the library tomorrow in advance of moving, but it has lots of information on major Shi’ite political movements and how they manifest themselves within different national states.
This isn’t a major point within the book, but it may explain some of the references to Hizbullah in the current Iranian crisis:
"’Hezbollah’ is initially a Quranic term meaning the ‘party of God’. After the revolution, it became a recurring concept of Ruhollah Khomeini’s speeches to designate those truly committed to the defence of Islam and the Islamic revolution. The term was then appropriated by vigilante groups constituting a loose network of volunteers supported by some individual figures of the regime and claiming to act in order to safeguard the revolution against its enemies. While, in Iranian parlance, the word ‘Hezbollah’ designates the hardliners in general, it can also refer to structured pressure groups, often used by the regime to intimidate or even assassinate this or that recalcitrant person. While many self-describe as ‘Hezbollah’, many others often prefer to speak about them as partisans of the ‘Imam’s Line’, that is those who keep faithful to the heritage of so-called ‘Imam Khomeini’. This is the case, for example, of those who perpetrated the attack on the American embassy in Tehran in November 1979. Over the years, the label ‘Imam’s Line’ has been preferred by the vigilantes because ‘Hezbollah’ came to have a pejorative connotation in an Iranian society weary of revolutionary language and favourable to a more relaxed implementation of the Islamic ethic."
I don’t know if the term’s appropriation by vigilante groups refers specifically to the Ansar-i Hizbullah, or is a more general phenomenon.
As Juan Cole explains, Rafsanjani’s Friday prayer sermon was a paean to popular sovereignty in the Islamic Republic, in which he noted that even the Supreme Leader is indirectly elected by the people. It places him squarely in the reformist camp in a way he simply wasn’t before, endorsing not only their candidate as an opponent of the principlists, but their core tenets, as well. Coming from a pillar of the establishment in such a high-profile setting, it also contributes to a weakening of the aura surrounding the office of the Supreme Leader, and sends a strong signal that the Green Wave is not over, even if it’s path to victory is not yet apparent.
Peter Bergen penned a piece in the Washington Monthly in which he argues that, with a substantial dedication of time and resources by the United States and the international community, Afghanistan could, eventually, become a "relatively stable and prosperous Central Asian state." In short, Afghanistan is a "winnable" war.
The entire first half of Bergen’s piece is dedicated to shooting down "facile" historical comparisons between Afghanistan and Vietnam and between the Soviet experience in Afghanistan and ours (Bergen contrasts the tactics and professionalism of the respective armies), as well as correcting the history of other imperial efforts in the region. But Bergen’s is an unnecessary and, ultimately, irrelevant exercise.
Clearly, Afghanistan is not the same as Vietnam, and the argument that they are parallel episodes is as misguided as any prior argument that the Iraq war was a replication of our Vietnam campaign. But so what? The Iraq war wasn’t the Vietnam war, and it didn’t have to be Vietnam in order for it to be a grievous foreign policy debacle whose costs (in terms of human suffering and US interests) are almost immeasurable. Proving Iraq and Vietnam were different did little to inform us of the wisdom of invading or perpetuating the occupation of Iraq.
In fact, the same metrics that Bergen uses to show why our Afghan effort has a better chance of succeeding than our prolonged Vietnam mission (less costly as a percentage of GDP, fewer casualties, no support for insurgents from a powerful foreign benefactor, insurgent force relatively small and lightly armed) could have just as easily been used by those arguing that Iraq wasn’t Vietnam, going on to suggest our prospects in Iraq were thus brighter. They wouldn’t have been correct, of course.
I don’t envy President Obama’s predicament in Afghanistan. It’s hard to think of a region that has been less hospitable to foreign interlopers throughout ancient and modern history (earning itself the moniker "Graveyard of Empires"). And yet despite this foreboding track record, it is unclear that President Obama is willing to deviate from that familiar, if tragic, path traveled most recently by Britain and the USSR. Not that Obama’s options are all that attractive. Bush left him with a mismanaged and directionless occupation to unwind (or not). The exact nature of the hoped-for success via a continued military occupation is hard enough to define, let alone achieve, yet withdrawal has its downsides as well – including the potential for an intense civil war and the return of repressive elements such as the Taliban.
While entirely too much has been made of the importance of Afghan safe havens in terms of conducting successful terrorist attacks (just as too little has been made of the ability to replicate similar safe havens elsewhere and our ability to disrupt any such haven from afar now that we are making such interdiction a priority), there is little doubt that Obama would pay a steep political price if he were to withdraw and an attack occurred that had some traceable connection to Afghanistan. While an attack emanating from hubs in, say, Europe or Yemen may be just as (or more) likely, those connections would not prove as damaging despite the underlying reality of the terrorist threat.
So it is that Obama seems to be trading Bush’s muddled vision of Afghanistan for his own, with a vague yet grandiose (if often contradictory) recitation of implausible goals and exaggerated fears, all buttressed by a refusal to acknowledge the costs of continuing our occupation. As if they were trivial (think trillions of dollars – less than the costs of health care that has Washington in a tizzy, but then wars never seem to count as spending). As Rory Stewart suggests, it’s almost impossible to decipher an actual policy direction from the pomp and flourish:
One of the best in the biz (I’d say the best in the biz), hilzoy, is retiring. There is no voice out there quite like hers – reasonable, measured, honest, uniquely (and penetratingly) insightful, widly intelligent, humorous (with a mischievous bent), open-minded, humble, etc. God I’ll miss her.
Sometimes you come across a piece that succinctly, and neatly, expresses otherwise amorphous ideas that have been circulating in your muddled consciousness. It’s like reading what the resolution of your inner debate would look like if you had been able to achieve such clarity yourself. Or how you would have liked to have formulated a hodgepodge of thoughts if you could have only organized them in such an eloquent, plainspoken manner.
But when it all comes together, reading such a work can be like reading yourself – only better. Even if it’s nothing ambitious or grandiose, it resonates.
Many times, those pieces are written by someone named hilzoy. Here’s one example.
But really, the examples are too numerous to list. It was my honor and extreme pleasure to share Obsidian Wings with her for a small part of her blogging career.
"Beijing’s main interest in Latin America has been guaranteeing access to the region’s raw materials – principally oil, iron ore, soybeans, and copper – to fuel its continued rapid growth. For many countries, there’s a downside in the China trade, through which cheap imports have displaced local textiles.
"China’s growing role has alarmed policymakers in Washington. However, China has been careful not to establish a military presence in the region, since doing so would antagonize Washington. The US has considered Latin America to be in its sphere of influence since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823.
"China ‘treats [Hugo] Chávez as they do [Álvaro] Uribe and Lula,’ said Alexandre Barbosa, a consultant to the São Paulo-based consulting firm Prospectiva, referring to the presidents of Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil, respectively. ‘They’re interested in business’
"And what a voracious interest in business they’ve shown. Trade between Latin America and China rocketed from $10 billion in 2000 to $140 billion in 2008. China is buying zinc from Peru, copper from Chile, and iron ore from Brazil. It’s shipping electronic equipment to Brazil, buses to Cuba, clothes to Mexico and cars to Peru."
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