Defining the Arab State

Issandr el-Amrani has a very angry response to Aaron David Miller’s piece on the post-Arab Spring decline of the Arab state. Though el-Amrani raises a couple of important points, the piece seems as full of misperceptions that he accuses Miller of.

El-Amrani’s underlying point—that the Arab states are not simply “tribes with flags”—is a strong one, and I think Miller undermines his own argument by falling back on that assertion. But contrary to what el-Amrani seems to indicate, Miller wasn’t arguing that the state has collapsed everywhere in the Arab world, much less so in the Middle East (where he notes Israel, Turkey, and Iran have remained coherent and strong). El-Amrani uses the examples of the UAE, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt to prove his point. But apart from the fact that Miller explicitly put Saudi Arabia in the category of states “holding their own,” these examples underline Miller’s point that it’s about “basic coherence and governance.”

It’s not about feeling good about the Arab Spring, as el-Amrani dismisses Miller’s piece, but about questions of legitimacy and governance. That’s a legitimate concern to note, as different groups compete with each other, either violently or non-violently, to define the state and its basis for legitimacy, laws, and norms.

Indeed, Karl reMarks notes this in his own response to Miller, and which el-Amrani cites approvingly. He acknowledges that “the collapse of the state, in varying degrees in each of the three states [Egypt, Iraq, Syria], is an undisputable phenomenon.” reMarks’ critique is centered on the reasons for the failing nature of these states, and that’s certainly something to engage and debate.

Also contrary to what el-Amrani seems to assume, Miller wasn’t providing a normative take on the aftermath of the Arab Spring, but more like a logistical take. Will these Arab states remain functioning as central authorities, with institutions capable of asserting that authority across all of society?

I share el-Amrani’s yawn with the language Miller uses in his piece, which is—as with his other ones—filled with clichés. I suspect this is because Miller simply writes too much, and for a non-specialist audience. It seems the easiest thing to do. But that’s a different motivation than the implicit orientalism that el-Amrani hints at.

Finally, el-Amrani inserts his own cliché as much as he criticizes Miller for doing so. Referencing Miller’s take on the Hamas-Fatah split and the sectarian divisions in Iraq, el-Amrani faults Miller for ignoring the Israeli occupation and the American invasion. Obviously both are relevant, and I seriously doubt Miller isn’t aware of these as constraining factors. (In fact, he references colonial interference as a contributing factor.) But neither was relevant to his particular point, which is that Palestine and Iraq are simply unable to get their internal houses in order so as to provide good governance to their people. Explaining why certainly requires an account of the Israeli and American presence, but that wasn’t the point of Miller’s piece.  Moreover, Miller puts Palestine and Iraq in the category of “pre-Arab Spring” countries with governance problems.

The underlying problem seems to be that Miller and el-Amrani are approaching the issue from two different angles. Miller doesn’t claim that states don’t exist in the Arab world, or even that they will collapse entirely tomorrow. He admits that borders are well entrenched, and that efforts to redraw them have been few in number, and failed completely. Rather, Miller defines the state as “effective” and “possessing the capacity to protect the wellbeing of all of its citizens.” Surely, with the violence being visited upon the citizens by the governments and other citizens, this is an obvious and legitimate argument to make.

El-Amrani seems to assume that Miller is making the opposite argument. He contends that Miller confuses “the dysfunctions of Arab states with the absence of a state.” But that line of thinking doesn’t appear in Miller’s argument. Nowhere does he say there is the absence of a state; at best, only Lebanon is listed as a “non-state,” but Miller doesn’t connect this to the Arab Spring but its own long-standing internal divisions and problems.

Perhaps El-Amrani disagrees with Miller’s proposals for stabilizing the Arab states, which include strengthening national institutions and broadening their legitimacy. After all, if the Arab state is already doing fine, then it requires something else to fix the problems currently roiling them.

Miller’s assumptions of the weak foundation of the Arab states—something that’s been a perennial concern throughout the literature on the Arab state—should be engaged on their merits. Otherwise, serious policy solutions can’t be debated.

Agents and Structures in the Middle East

Michael Doran argues that Chuck Hagel’s admiration for Dwight Eisenhower’s handling of the 1956 Suez Crisis is misplaced. This is, Doran continues, because Eisenhower’s smack-down of Britain, France, and Israel had worse consequences for the Middle East and American interests than a more forceful policy against Egyptian President Nasser might have.

He then extends the logic of this lesson to imply that today Hagel stands for harsher treatment of Israel, particularly for imposing on it to resolve the Arab-Israeli and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts. This connects to Jeffrey Goldberg’s own argument that “linkage” (that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the root of all problems in the region, and that solving it will end the threats to American interests there) seems to be an Obama Administration misconception.

I agree that linkage is the wrong assumption on which to approach the Middle East. It should be obvious by now that plenty of other problems—internal fights between communities within the Arab countries, inter-Arab and inter-Muslim rivalry and contests for regional leadership—that don’t rely on Israel to continue.

But this doesn’t mean there aren’t connections between some problems in the region, and the Arab-Israeli conflict. In their arguments, Doran and Goldberg represent one side of a perennial debate in Political Science—the agent-structure problem. They assume that the Arab states and Palestinians are independent agents, who choose to drag Israel into their problems, but who also have the choice to leave it out. By virtue of doing the former, then, the United States must—it follows—adopt the position that Israel doesn’t matter because it’s being utilized as a matter of choice for strategic or tactical reasons.

That Israel is used as such is certainly true: During the heyday of Arab authoritarianism, the conflict was used by the regimes to justify shifting the focus from domestic reform to fend off the Zionist threat, to clamp down on domestic dissent, to rationalize a bloated bureaucracy, including domestic security agencies, and as a stick with which to beat other Arab states.

But at the same time, larger structural forces have long been at play in the region that bring Israel into the equation even apart from conscious Arab decisions. One such structure is the network of inter-actor relationships in the region, including outside powers like the US, which conditions how actors act, sometimes pushing them into decisions.

The Middle East as a regional system means that Israel, the Palestinians, the Arab states, Turkey, and Iran are all inter-connected through their regional politics. What happens in one area has ripple effects in the other. The lines that connect one actor to another criss-cross each other until it looks like a spider web of links.

This applies to American policy in the region, as well. Doran suggests that Eisenhower’s implicit protection of Nasser had dire consequences: it led to a deeper Soviet penetration of the region, and it enhanced Nasser’s regional and international standing.

But there’s no evidence that this wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Nasser’s own regional ambitions would have led to a direct clash with Washington anyway, given the American preoccupation with the Cold War and the desire to see locals as allies or enemies. Egypt’s rivalry with Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan would likely have pushed some states into the Soviet camp and some into the American camp for their own purposes anyway.

Moreover, when Ike pressed the British, French, and Israelis at Suez, he wasn’t just concerned with Egypt: he was driven by larger processes as well. He had other—which is not to say more important, but just competing—interests at the time of the Suez crisis. This included the expansion of the Cold War, and the Hungarian uprising and crisis that overlapped with the Suez war. Eisenhower was angry at his allies because he wasn’t consulted, but primarily because he was trying to manage American interests at the global level. His concern was that the attack on Egypt undermined his effort to castigate and push back against the Soviets for their invasion of Hungary at the same time.

And what was the alternative? To let the British, French, and Israelis undermine Nasser so that he was eventually replaced? Who would have replaced him? The evidence of foreign countries intervening to shape the politics of a state has, over the years, demonstrated time and again that it hardly works. Rather, it leads to breakdowns of traditional networks upon which the polity is built, suffering for the citizens, and regional instability, threatening other countries. If the Israeli experience in Lebanon isn’t the clearest example of this, I don’t know what else is.

Doran’s argument contains other misperceptions that can be attributed to emphasizing agents over structures. He contends that Eisenhower’s action put the final nail in the coffin of the British Empire. Maybe, but the end of empire was already there—at best, the empire would have dragged on a little longer. The structural conditions for its demise were already playing out. Opinion in Britain and in its possessions was turning against it, while resistance and national liberation movements were already mobilizing against British authority. The financial crisis London faced after World War Two and the loss of India had made the end inevitable. Nothing Ike would have done would have saved it, and it’s even arguable that prolonging the empire would have led to more suffering as Britain fought longer to keep its possessions.

Doran’s take on Ike provides an early representation of the American conundrum in how to deal with the Arab Awakening today. I buy the argument that Washington can contribute to the stabilization of Egypt without resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But at the same time, it is clear that removing this festering conflict would undermine many of the arguments anti-Israel groups use to support their militant positions; would free up American attention and resources to help stabilize other countries; and more. It won’t end all the other conflicts—Saudi Arabia and Iran will still remain rivals, for example—but that’s not a reason not to push for a settlement.

(For the record, I’m not trying to resolve the agent-structure debate here. Just noting the difficulty in separating them under certain conditions.)

Too Soon to Predict American Defeat in or Retreat from the Middle East

In the New York Times, Pankaj Mishra considers the “inevitable retreat” of the US from the Middle East. Certainly the argument is important to debate, but the article itself contains too many assumptions and problematic comparisons.

Mishra is correct that there are similarities in current conditions to the beginning of the Iranian Revolution: there, too, the uprisings against the regime were composed of different groups—some Islamist, some not—alongside intra-group struggles for domination and a share in power.

It’s also true that the US has a long history of clumsy and ill-advised interventions in the Middle East. But that history has been there for a while, as has the dissatisfaction with it. The frustration, anger, and resentment that has been expressed lately has been expressed many, many times before; the only difference is that this time in some places the authoritarian governments that contained them are no longer around to do so.

Mishra also begins by assuming the Middle East and the Muslim world are interchangeable; they are not. Afghanistan, which Mishra compares to Egypt, is not part of the political, security, economic, and cultural structures of the Middle East, which have a totally different dynamic.

Afghanistan also has a long and separate history of dealing with foreign interventions, the experience of which is very different from the Middle East. At the time of the 2001 American attack on Afghanistan, observers were already noting the British and Russian/Soviet history in the region, predicting similar responses to a US presence. The specific attack referenced in Mishra’s piece is not something new or in any way unexpected, and occurred under very different conditions, expectations, and historical experiences than the embassy and consulate attacks in Egypt and Libya.

The article then claims that a “more meaningful analogy” to the US struggle against radical Islam in the Middle East is Vietnam in 1975, and the American withdrawal from Indochina more broadly. But this example, too, falls short of historical experience and contemporary conditions.

Mishra rightly points out that the US perceived the area to be on the frontline of the defense against Communism, and therefore worth involvement in. But the difference with the Middle East is that in the latter there is hard and tangible physical and other evidence that its presence is based on more than perception.

The US has close and longstanding security, economic, and strategic ties with several states in the Middle East that it didn’t have in Indochina. It also has publicly committed itself many times to the defense of some of these states (particularly Israel and Saudi Arabia)—and has demonstrated this commitment with force of arms.

One might argue that the US has faced similar moments of “withdrawal” from the region before. But close examination reveals that these were really only in response to short-term and contained violence (Lebanon in 1983) or about tactical redeployment to elsewhere in the region (Saudi Arabia some years after the 1991 Gulf War). When it did have hundreds of thousands of troops in the region (1990-1991), it was deeply committed to maintaining them there for a very short period of time with a limited war aim; after that, most of the thousands of troops that remained were moved elsewhere in the region not as a retreat but a tactical and strategic redeployment in some cases, and due to a lack of need in others.

The one example of a large-scale American military commitment to the Middle East that might rival Vietnam was the occupation of Iraq. At the time, many did argue that Washington’s ill-advised invasion was opening the door to Iranian influence, at the expense of American influence. The American withdrawal of forces from there is comparable, but it was also on Washington’s policy agenda before the outbreak of the Arab Awakening, and it was not conditioned upon a larger removal of American presence from the region—as the Vietnam example was.

More broadly, Mishra’s argument that retreat is inevitable is not supported by the contemporary relationships the US has with regional actors. It remains very close to Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Jordan, and Israel.

In fact, according to Mishra’s implication, the US has only really “lost” Egypt at the moment, and even that deserves qualification since we are still at the beginning of a transition. There is no way to know whether America’s military aid to the Egyptian military and Cairo’s need for aid and money from international organizations and creditors won’t act as a vehicle for a continued American role, however different, in the future of the country.

As has been pointed out several times already, the “mob assaults” against the US have been just that: small groups of people who haven’t been able to sustain any real momentum, rallied by individuals engaged in their own intra-communal struggles or the work of violent groups committed to attacking the US regardless of how the population as a whole feels. These are disconnected from the larger structural conclusions Mishra is pointing to.

Certainly, the moment has arrived at which the US has lost its ability to control events there. And there is no reason to think the demonstrations and what they represent will end any time soon. This is a period of adjustment for the Middle East and for outside powers involved in it.

Mishra’s argument rests, in the end, on a historical comparative case for a “compelling” American “strategic retreat” from the Middle East. But because these comparisons are incomplete or too different, this recommendation, too, falls short of careful consideration. One could argue that the exact opposite of Mishra’s recommendation is necessary—that the US can help transitions in the region to some form of democracy, peaceful coexistence and shared tolerance, healthier economies, and so on.

This doesn’t require the kind of intervention and sinister influence the author implies is the only option for the US, but it does require some careful consideration of available options and ideas, not to rushed judgment about the inevitable future. The conclusion might be the same as Mishra’s, but there should be some time devoted to such a discussion first.

Kissinger, Arab-Israeli Peace, and US National Interests

I was intrigued by something Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said to King Faisal (Saudi Arabia) just after the 1973 war:

Your Majesty, it doesn’t work that way in the United States. Our best argument is not to say that we’re anti-Israeli or pro-Arab, but that we want peace in the Middle East and that we’re pursuing the interests of the United States. If we try to put it on the basis of the merits of the Arab-Israeli dispute, there will always be more people defending Israel than the Arab side. So we have to put it in terms of American national interests.**

Now whether Kissinger meant this or whether it was just a line he thought the king would like, I don’t know. But in either case, I had not thought of this before, the idea that framing the peace process in terms of US interests might give the United States a way of meeting some/many Arab demands without upsetting the pro-Israel majority in the United States. Thus, US support for  Israeli withdrawal is not pro-Arab; it is framed as in the US own interest.

The question is was that a prudent effort to square competing demands or a fundamental US mistake that prevented the United States from more directly challenging Israeli positions that hurt the drive for peace. I lean toward the former (as I demonstrate with President Carter and Palestine policy in a forthcoming article), but it is a good debate in which to engage.

**  Edward R. F. Sheehan, “How Kissinger Did It: Step by Step in the Middle East,” Foreign Policy, no. 22 (Spring 1976), pp. 3-70 at p. 21.