An early case of a Gulf regime entering a conflict was Saddam Hussein’s decision to attack Iran in 1980. While acknowledging that the Iraqi government saw an opportunity to advance territorial claims at the head of the Gulf, Gause argues based on the timing of events that the actual decision to go to war was motivated by a fear of revolutionary Shi’ism spreading to Iraq, a fear which also motivated support for Iraq by Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf states. Gause adduces a similar motivation behind Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, producing a great deal of evidence that Saddam Hussein, with a certain amount of paranoia, believed Israel, the United States, and the smaller Gulf monarchies were conspiring with internal dissidents to undermine his regime in the wake of the unsuccessful Iran-Iraq War. A belief that danger was imminent led him to attack Kuwait in August 1990, instead of trying to wait until he had nuclear weapons. In this context, Saddam saw Kuwait’s over-pumping of oil as in part an attempt to undermine his own economy and patronage capacity by driving down prices.

Gause devotes an entire chapter to the American decision to attack Iraq in 2003, which he argues undid the tripolar system leading to a current situation in which it is unclear how power and influence will ultimately be distributed. His argument here is that while some within the Bush administration were in favor of an attack on Iraq from the get-go, Bush himself only came to support the idea after September 11, and this support was based primarily on the belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons programs and could provide such weapons to terrorists. Once this decision was made, confirmation bias and internal administration politics led to exaggerations of the intelligence in areas such as nuclear weapons and al-Qaeda links that served to make the case for war to the American public.

As someone who follows these issues closely, I felt like I’d heard almost everything in this book before at some point or another, but it was still invaluable to have it all in one place as part of a common narrative and analysis. Looking at the region today, one can see the continued foreign policy salience of regimes’ concerns for their international security in Saudi Arabia’s decision to help suppress demonstrations in Bahrain. At the same time, I’m not as convinced as Gause is that Iraq is now primarily a playing field for outsiders as opposed to a power in its own right. While there are definite internal tensions to be resolved, Iraq currently has a stable government with a steadily increasing capacity, and I’m dubious that any of its neighbors want to see it collapse back into civil war. The key issue to watch there is what kind of path it charts amidst the Saudi-Iranian rivalry.

In summary, Gause’s book is a highly effective introduction to key regional issues, as well as a useful resource for those with some background in the area, which will continue as a flashpoint in world affairs for the foreseeable future.

(Crossposted to my blog)

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“The vanity of the governing elite may require public acclamation but not legitimacy, which for the ideologues of the right comes from God rather than from the people. In their view, if the people do not have the wisdom to vote for the correct candidate, their misfortune should not obstruct the regime’s consolidation of power…The further one looks from the date of the election – in either direction – the clearer this becomes”

Amidst a brief political history of Iran since the 1989 death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Ansari explains the ideological underpinnings of the different political movements and their claims to embody the ideals of the 1979 Islamic revolution. As in his other work, the reformists come across as highly complacent about the lengths to which their opponents would go to retain power. The principlists, however, fare little better, as he says:

“Their failure to see the changes taking place beneath their own gaze has regularly been their ondoing. The eruption of popular anger that followed the stolen election of 2009 stands testament to the persistence of this extraordinary hubris among Iran’s governing elite; while the failure to move swiftly to capitalize on this anger reflects the persistent romanticism of the reformist leadership.”

Ansari also highlights a key point about the election’s aftermath:

“The strategy of the authorities has been to raise the stakes, to turn an electoral dispute into a confrontation about the nature of the velayat-i faqih (guardianship of the jurist). This had the desired effect of clarifying the nature of the dispute and reinforcing the core of their support. But it also raised fundamental questions about the nature of governance and accountability that many Iranians preferred not to confront. It was as if the ambiguity that had been essential to the character and political sustainability of the entire edifice of the velayat-i faqih had been discarded. Iranians could no longer remain ambivalent about their position towards the system; it had to be absolute, one way or the other. Put simply, did Iranians really believe that obedience to Ahmadinejad was equivalent to obedience to God.”

I read this book a couple of weeks ago, then got distracted by the last week of classes and final exams before posting about it. I remember thinking Ansari was optimistic about the hardline regime’s eventual collapse, but can now no longer find an explicit section that gives that impression. As the quotes above suggest, however, he believes it has become difficult if not impossible to sustain the government ideologically, while on the level of personalities, divisions among the elite remain a critical asset for the Green Movement. Regardless of those conclusions, however, this book has a clear narrative that reviews all the major elements of the 2009 crisis and their possible implications for the future.

(Crossposted to my blog)

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The book includes a quote from Moroccan heavy metal artist Reda Zine: “We play heavy metal because our lives are heavy metal.” The genre’s often harsh lyrics blend well with the cynicism and anger toward society, politics, and the world generally that characterizes much of the Middle East. Whereas in the United States and Britain, heavy metal has been long unmoored from its roots in the economic woes of the 1970′s, in the Middle East it still retains them, and represents not just a form of entertainment frequently criticized by the more conservative establishment, but also a critique of that establishment and the world it governs.

Potential connections between heavy metal and political dissent came through most strongly in the chapter on Egypt, where I learned that Shady and Noor Noor, sons of Egyptian opposition leader Ayman Noor, were both known parts of their country’s heavy metal scene. The “potential” in that sentence is important, however, as in much of the book the artists seemed most interested in protecting their music and expression rather than moving into action beyond the expression. LeVine also frequently sought connections between metalheads and Islamists, with what seemed like little success.

In his conclusion, LeVine illustrates the potential he sees with an account of Istanbul’s Barisha Rock for Peace Festival, a sort of Turkish Woodstock which in 2007 drew around 150,000 fans. His conclusion:

“Luckily, the metal-heads, hip-hoppers, rockers, and punks of the Middle East are no longer alone. They not only have each other; helped by the Internet and an increasing number of international festivals of various sizes, the world is starting to listen to their music and their stories. A real dialogue between cultures and countries is emerging, one that will not be cowed by authoritarian governments, silences by war-crazed administrations, overshadowed by jihadi propagandists, or co-opted by multinational conglomerates. It is being conducted by young people around the world, on their terms, and if they’re lucky, it will be free of the stereotypes, prejudices, and conflicting interests that have doomed their elders’ conversations for generations…

“The fear, the violence, the hatred in the Middle East can seem deafening, but it’s still not loud enough to silence the voices of resistance. A generation after Twisted Sister’s 1984 smash hit, kids across the MENA are screaming, in English, Arabic, Urdu, Farsi, Hebrew, Turkish, and French – online, onstage, and, however tentatively, on the streets – “We’re not gonna take it anymore.” It’s a message that used to resonate with Americans and Europeans. The sooner we rejoin the chorus, the sooner real peace, democracy, and reconciliation will be achieved – not just in the heartlands of the Muslim world, but in the heartlands of the West as well.

You can hear LeVine discussing the book’s topic here.

(Crossposted to my blog)

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It is after this that Cole delves into the colonial background, defusing the most emotional charges about the present before explaining the past. Iran never became a formal territory of a European empire, but its development was stunted by Great Power rivalries, and its resources plundered by Western business interests. There’s a quote Cole could have used from Winston Churchill in the 1920′s in which he declares to Parliament that Britain has made far more money from Iran’s wealth than had Iran, to the tune of some jaw-dropping figures. He also mentions the role of the United States in deposing Muhammad Mosaddeq, remembered in Iran as the great betrayal and demonstration of American hypocrisy.

Cole then returns to current issues, with a specific focus on Israel, and in particular Iranian support for Lebanon’s Hizbullah. Cole properly situates this movement in a Lebanese context as well as one related to Israel, noting in the process the largely economic and political reasons both it and Iran are viewed favorably by Lebanese Shi’ites.

Cole does note key differences between Iran and NATO nations, differences related to both the values which determine its internal security policies and civil liberties, as well as geopolitical differences. I am, however, a little less convinced than usual of one of his proposed solutions. His focus on Iran’s nuclear program derives from a view that it’s all about energy independence, but might there also be status issues in play? Still, his overall points are irrefutable, and need to be shouted from every rooftop whenever someone starts beating the war drums or raising fantasies of mad mullahs with their fingers on the button.

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Juan Cole, however, is a Pakistan expert, and the first part of his chapter provides an educated overview of Pakistani politics and it social basis, as well as the causes of Pakistani grievances with the United States. A key point is that Islamic Revivalism does not have a large constituency in the country, nor are most grievances rooted in pan-Islamic sentiments. Most of the country is radically different from the tribal areas from which the Taliban Movement of Pakistan emanates, and where one finds the madrasas who took in poor and orphaned refugees from the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and provided them with a rudimentary education, which did happen to be based in theologically conservative Deobandi teachings.

While Islamist parties won 2002 elections in the North West Frontier Province, Cole interprets this as a reaction to the American invasion of Afghanistan and the support it received from President Pervez Musharraf. The population was swiftly disenchanted when these parties focused on implementing Islamic law in the area rather than advancing their agenda on other issues.

After surveying Pakistan’s recent political history up to the rise of current President Asif Ali Zardari, Cole turns his attention to Pakistan, which is a very different place. A basic sense of nationalism, which underlies the modern state system, isn’t strong among any of the country’s inhabitants, with the possible exception of the Uzbeks, and where it does exist it is often directed toward linguistic groups rather than “Afghan-ness.” Cole also questions how much of the violence in Afghanistan’s south is really caused by the Taliban, and indeed much is not.

The one point in this chapter where I question Cole has to do with the old issue of the extent to which ethnicity influences Afghanistan’s conflict. Here’s the crucial paragraph:

“The conflict also has a strong, if not determinative, ethnic coloration, with some Pushtun tribesmen resentful of what they see as the Tajik-dominated government in Kabul even though Afghan bureaucrats representing that government in the southern provinces are themselves Pushtun. The ethnic lines are not drawn in an absolute way, since Karzai and many of his officials are Pushtun and they have many Pushtun tribal supporters. In some ways, the fighting in the south is the civil war between pro- and anti-Karzai tribes. Still, ethnicity is one element in the struggle – there are no Hazara Shi’ite Taliban, and the spread of neo-Taliban violence to northern provinces such as Kunduz, where German troops have come under repeated attack, has tended to occur through Pushtun clan networks.”

My question here is that can’t the given examples better support the idea that ethnicity is a minor factor? Is the lack of Hazara Taliban because they are Hazara, or because they are Shi’ites? Is the Pushtun-ness of the clan networks of neo-Taliban violence in the north really important?

That aside, this is an excellent chapter, and I strongly support Cole’s recommendations, which boil down to forming an alliance with the Pakistani people rather than particular governments.

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The middle portion of this chapter shifts into an exploration of how the U.S. got involved in the war in the first place. Here Cole delves into the geopolitics of world oil supplies. I suspect one reason people have difficulty believing this is that the war-for-oil slogan is often used to call up simple war for corporate profit. Cole notes effectively that for many, economic strength is a vital component of national strength, which is perfectly in tune with aspects of the PNAC writings from the 1990′s.

As a regular Informed Comment reader, I was most interested in Cole’s speculations as to why Cheney and Bush, who as oil men had warm relations with the Arab world, would launch an Iraq invasion. It was before blogs, but I remember in 2000 thinking that the Bush administration was oversee a warming of our relations with Iran because of Exxon-Mobil’s oil interests, which that was also the calculation of the Iranian government during the late Clinton years. Cole tracks Cheney’s views of Middle Eastern policy through the 1990′s, when, contra AIPAC, he was a chronic opponent of sanctions on oil-rich countries in the Middle East, though he may have been content with Halliburton’s involvement with the oil-for-food program in Iraq’s case. Here’s the nut of it:

“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 1990′s 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 Hannahm, and later on David Wurmser – all prominent neoconservatives who were ideologically close to Israel’s 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 United States as a superpower into the twenty-first century.”

From there the chapter moves into an account of Iraq’s post-invasion problems, which need no elaboration here. Cole finally makes the case for U.S. withdrawal from the country, noting at the end that it, “would reduce America Anxiety in the Muslim world and would eliminate a prime cause of Islam Anxiety for the American public, perhaps making possible movement toward real understanding.” Again, there’s not much new in this chapter for regular Cole readers, but there’s a lot to be said for having an overview of the situation concisely in one highly readable place.

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Also in reading this chapter, I found I like “fundamentalist vigilante” more one its own terms than as something produced as a deliberate alternative to “Salafi Jihadi.” (I actually think Salafi, given the contemporary capture of that term by the theological conservatives, works well for the purposes for which “Wahhabi” is often employed.) In any case, Cole’s decoupling of the Wahhabism and militancy is similar to that argued for by David Commins in The Wahhabi Mission and Saudi Arabia, though he seems not to have read Commins’s work, which would have buttressed his mention that the forms of extremism causing international concern owe more to the Sahwa tradition of the Muslim Brotherhood than they do to Wahhabism per se. To all this, Cole adds another point that Saudi Arabia has actually been a close ally of the United States, and has even taken the lead in trying to lead the Arab world to peace with Israel. This is a necessary corrective to the view that the kingdom is somehow our mortal enemy, though an informed reader might wonder about the differences within both the Saudi royal family and the country’s religious establishment.

Cole also describes Qatar in this chapter, and spends several pages on al-Jazeera that serve to make their own points about that station which are similar to those Abu Aardvarkian readers of this blog are probably already familiar with. (Marc Lynch’s work is actually cited in the endnotes here.) If memory serves, Sharjah, one of the components of the UAE, is also Wahhabi. It’s not relevant to the point of this chapter, but as a scholar, it might be interesting to explore the relationship of those dynasties with the Wahhabi ulama, as well as that of the Rashidis of Ha’il during the 1800′s, in attempting to understand the differences among Wahhabi states.

The takeaways from this chapter are that Saudi Arabia is not a geopolitical enemy of the United States, and conservatism does not equal militancy. Both points are well argued.

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Much of the first half of the chapter is taken up with a history of the Muslim Brotherhood, which places its origins in the context of the Egyptian and Arab nationalist movements of the early 20th century, and traces it through the Nasser era and into the present as its relations with the government, organizational structure and activities, and attitude toward violence fluctuates over time. He also addresses the thinking of Sayyid Qutb, whose thinking was never accepted by most Islamists, let alone most Muslims, but has become important in terrorist circles.

Many of the innovations in this chapter concern terminology, and a common thread is that, by positing a normative Islam, Cole then denies the use of Islamic terminology to al-Qaeda and similar organizations. With the base term of “Islamic,” Cole asserts early that because it refers to the ideals of the religion, it cannot modify “terrorism,” and much of the chapter can be read as a defense of how terrorist activities are contrary to Islam as understood by most Muslims. He also replaces “Salafi Jihadis” with “fundamentalist vigilantes” by reference to standard theological definitions of “salafi” and “jihad.” This feels chancier, as Thomas Hegghammer, in trying to cull labels for these phenomena from Arabic sources, found that “jihadi salafi” today refers in practice to transnational fundamentalist militants. Cole also makes a strong case for seeing the militant Islamist movements as cults, of which his core definition is, “a religious group characterized by values that put it in severe tension with the outside society, and organized so as to demand very high levels of obedience and conformity to the cult leader.”

In laying out his view of al-Qaeda as a desperate force, Cole places emphasis on the defeat of Egypt’s internal terrorists in the 1990′s, which led Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden to shift their focus to the United States as the “far enemy.” A few pages later he mentions Egyptian dominance of al-Qaeda leadership. He also defines al-Qaeda narrowly as only those fighters who have pledged loyalty to Bin Laden. I happen to agree that al-Qaeda is falling apart, but I can’t draw these connections so neatly given the multiple theaters of “fundamentalist vigilante” activity, and I’m also interested in the possible “banner definition” of al-Qaeda which the index suggests may be addressed in future chapters.

Cole also assigns Israel a crucial role for both the Muslim Brotherood and al-Qaeda. I don’t know much about the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930′s, but Cole’s assigning it a role in the MB’s activities during that period fits the general picture I have of Arab politics during that decade. As far as al-Qaeda is concerned, he refers to Muhammad Atta’s radicalization by the Israeli attack on Lebanon in 1996 called Operation Grapes of Wrath, and particularly the Qana debacle, and also cites Flagg Miller’s work on al-Qaeda documents retrieved from Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban government. I’ve been someone inclined to downplay the Israeli role for al-Qaeda, but found all this convincing.

Cole’s most controversial conclusion is likely to be his comparison between the Islamic militants and the far right in the United States represented by Timothy McVeigh and other fringe figures from the 1990′s. I find that, frankly, a perfectly good analogy. I hope, however, that with such groups starting to resurface now that an African-American Democrat is in the White House, Cole doesn’t get any more material for future commentary along those lines.

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The chapter’s subtitle comes from Cole’s argument that U.S. energy independence simply isn’t in the cards in the near term, as it can only be sustainably guaranteed by solar power, which cannot reach its potential until problems of cost and storage are resolved. One might quibble here that Cole does not do justice to possible combinations of different energy sources and degrees of independence, but his main point is undeniable: For the foreseeable future, the United States and the rest of the world will depend on fossil fuels for most of their energy, and those fossil fuels will come predominantly from countries with Muslim majorities.

Cole’s book is directed primarily at an American audience, and an audience of the interested general public, at that, so he doesn’t spend much time taking apart the phrase “Islamic oil” which titles the chapter, preferring instead to make his major points simply and effectively before moving on. Cole therefore bypasses the issue of what sense, if any, energy supplied by Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan deserve to be called “Islamic oil” and focuses almost exclusively on the Middle East and Muslim South Asia. One might, however, shake loose the point that by joining OPEC, the Arab Gulf states went against the hopes of Arab nationalists such as Nasser, placing their own national economic interests above the pan-Arab concerns that animated the original “Arab street” whose specter analysts continue to invoke. Oil his not been a barrier to relations between the U.S. and these states, but rather the major bond, with the U.S. guaranteeing the regimes’ stability and independence to safeguard the free flow of oil, and frequently adopting what Americans consider the “moderate” line on foreign affairs to help maintain that alliance and the goodwill of their customer base. In Cole’s brief discussion of sanctions, one might go even further in discussing U.S. aid to Egypt and the economic benefits Egypt and Jordan get under the Qualifying Industrial Zone protocol to highlight the ways in which the U.S. has used economic carrots and sticks to create relations of dependence which are similar to those it has with the oil-producing Gulf states.

Cole’s historical background for the oil industry in the Middle East is important reading, and contextualizes the current tensions over oil prices and profits, as well as highlighting the ways in which the geopolitics of oil has shaped American policy in the Persian Gulf since the British withdrawal in 1971. It does, however, contain an error when he states that, “Kuwait had been part of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and was administered indirectly through the governor of Basra Province, in what is now Iraq.” When Baghdad governor Midhat Pasha asserted Ottoman claims to northern Arabia in the 1870′s, he did include Kuwait, but the Kuwaiti agreement to call themselves part of the Ottoman Empire depended on the Ottomans never actually doing anything. According to Frederick Anscombe’s The Ottoman Gulf Midhat Pasha’s agreement with Kuwait implied only “patronage and protection.” The Ottomans stationed no officers there, collected no taxes or fees, and did not intervene in local affairs, although Kuwait’s rulers occasionally supported them militarily. The deeper connections were economic, with Kuwaitis owning agricultural land in southern Iraq, which they continued to do deep into the 20th century. Jill Crystal has written of the role this played in the 1938 Majlis Movement, when both Iraq’s King Ghazi and some Kuwaiti merchants were interested in union between Kuwait and Iraq. Altogether, the relationship between Kuwait and the Ottoman Empire, even in the late 1800′s, does not fit that of a modern nation-state, but of a premodern agrarian empire with a tribally organized periphery.

That aside, Cole is right in pointing to the common threats faced by the United States and Muslim oil producers, such as global warming and the potential for resource wars as the demand for fossil fuels may surpass the available supply. These are challenges that can only be addressed by accepting interdependence and working toward commonly beneficial solutions.

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