Qahwa Sada

Book Forum: America's Kingdom

While the redesign of the main Qahwa Sada site is still underway, and will probably relaunch after the holidays, I am delighted to present the first Qahwa Sada Book Forum.   These Book Forums will discuss new books in Middle East Studies, with the author and a few critical discussants and hopefully commentors joining in the discussion.   Our first Book Forum features America's Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier, by Robert Vitalis (Stanford University Press). 

 

America's Kingdom is a fascinating and highly provocative book.   Today, we kick off with initial framing remarks by Bob Vitalis, followed by commentary by two Gulf experts: F. Gregory Gause III (University of Vermont) and Toby Jones (formerly of the International Crisis Group, and currently at Swarthmore College).  I'll weigh in with my comments tomorrow. Everyone else is encouraged to comment here (general comments on this post, specific comments on the appropriate post) or over email!

UPDATE:  I have collected and edited the forum into a PDF file which can be downloaded here:   Download AmericasKingdom.pdf .  Great work everybody!

Vitalis: America's Kingdom

Qahwa Sada Book Forum:  America's Kingdom, by Robert Vitalis

Writing America’s Kingdom
Robert Vitalis

I want to thank Greg Gause, Toby Jones, and especially Marc Lynch for the chance to discuss my new book with three very sharp thinkers. What I will do to kick off the discussion is rehearse the book’s main arguments, briefly, and the objectives in writing it.  I also want to consider in a way that I wasn’t able to in the book itself some steps in the crafting of it. For a website devoted to Middle East scholarship, the latter points might prove interesting and, ideally, useful. However, I also assume some, maybe most readers on this site want to know why a book about the 1940s and 1950s matters today and not just to professors and graduate students, how it helps us in understanding America in the Persian Gulf and in the world now. I’ll tell you what I think, and then let’s see what my colleagues say.

America’s Kingdom is most basically about the organization of the labor process in the oil industry in Eastern Saudi Arabia during the time when the private U.S.-owned company known as ARAMCO was charge of exploration and production, starting in the 1930s. My book identifies the racist order built by ARAMCO in Dhahran and the other company campsites for what it is, a Jim Crow system, meaning that its white American executives pursued a purposeful, planned project of discrimination and forced segregation. I show that firms generally in the U.S. mining industry organized the labor process in this way in, among other places, what was then Indian territory, Arizona, “New” Mexico, and so on, beginning in the 1860s and 1870s in the copper industry, and, a decade or two later in the newly emerging oil industry, and when American oil firms move beyond the Caribbean Basin (Mexico, Trinidad, Colombia, Venezuela) and start to explore for oil in the Gulf and its surroundings.

At stake was what I call the “racial wage.” All firms paid miners, drillers, and other skilled and unskilled labor different wages according to race. And ending the racial wage became the issue that pitted the subordinate races against not only the white owners and managers but also the privileged caste of workers in strike after strike across the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The full panoply of Jim Crow institutions—segregated housing, differential access to services, let alone the degradation and humiliation of white supremacist thought—worked to buttress the labor control regime. The system was exported everywhere U.S. firms went, although it has not been noticed anywhere by anyone writing about oil in the past few decades, with one important exception. The historian Miguel Tinker Salas has been working on a similar project in the case of the Creole (Exxon’s subsidiary) camps in Maracaibo, Venezuela, when oil exploration began there in the 1920s.

I also explain the causes for, in this case, the halting and partial steps to dismantle the Jim Crow order inside the kingdom, which happens during the brief moment of a Saudi labor movement in the 1950s and what I call an incipient challenge to the hierarchy of the camps, the world oil market, and American hegemony launched for different reasons by a set of progressives in government and their allies in the royal family. It is a remarkable, wholly forgotten moment in modern Saudi Arabian history. In the last chapter of my book I tell the sad story of the end of this moment—a Saudi “revolution” is how more than one observer at the time referred to it—and the creation of what I call America’s Kingdom—consolidation of the power of the coalition known as the House of Fahd, which still rules today.

What most analysts, journalists, and oil, business, and diplomatic historians have done until now is reproduce the company’s propaganda unreflectively, when, for example, ARAMCO officials then and retirees now insist that the company led all others anywhere in its dedication to developing the kingdom, uplifting Arab workers, training them to take over the running of the oil industry, and the like. The reality is quite different. The firm’s own records and the testimony of its top officials reveal that its competitors in Iraq and Iran (joint moved faster and further on all the dimensions that Saudi workers began to mobilize to change and that the small Saudi state-building class pressed ARAMCO to honor. I resurrect an explanation that was known at the time but has since been forgotten. To quote from the book,

While all three countries were monarchies, only Iran and Iraq had functioning parliaments, parties, and unions. Populist politics, which emphasized inclusion and redistribution, gained ground in both places after World War II, culminating in the famous nationalization of Anglo-Persian in 1951…and revolution in Iraq in 1958.  Conditions for the nascent Saudi labor movement and the relative handful of officials who sought to move Saudi Arabia in a more inclusive and redistributive direction were, to understate the obstacle of absolute rule, inauspicious, and the firm there had a freer hand to deflect, ignore, and counter demands for fairness and human capital development.

Finally, therefore, I try to trace the origins of these myths themselves and analyze their affinity with ways in which many write, equally problematically, about the histories of firms and states more generally.

The path to overturning the foundational myth about ARAMCO began with reading the vast U.S. state department archive for the 1940s and 1950s (and later the 1960s), where we find detailed records of the strikes that rocked the Saudi oil frontier in those decades. Let me simply note that few other scholars have used these records, and those that have, notably Nate Citino and Sarah Yizraeli, all challenge conventional claims about Saudi state formation and U.S-Saudi relations. It is hard not to. I wrote the first paper on these matters while on leave at Princeton’s Davis Center for Historical Studies in 1995-1996 (published in 1999 and reprinted in the 2004 book I co-edited with Madawi al-Rasheed), which drew mainly on these records and the Mulligan Papers at Georgetown University, which comprise a partial set of company records taken from the kingdom by a retired employee. Like any archive, the Mulligan papers have to be used with great caution, and let’s just say that all the new, rushed-to-press books in the past few years, designed to instruct us anew on the U.S.-Saudi special relationship, treat the materials a bit too reverentially. I eventually worked in seventeen different archival collections during the course of my research.

Just as important as the records themselves, I began a kind of tutorial that year with two historians at Princeton, Steve Aaron and Karen Merrill, who were new assistant professors specializing in the nineteenth and twentieth century American West. The connection with them began with Wallace Stegner, who I knew only as a guy who wrote a terrible history of ARAMCO’s pioneer era, and they knew as one of America’s greatest writers (he indeed is) and influential environmentalist who, they insisted, never wrote a book about oil (he indeed did). Those conversations led me to study the history of mining enterprise and the discovery of what I call the unbroken past of hierarchy across the nineteenth and twentieth century mining frontiers (and some readers will recognize my homage to the recently re-released, path-breaking book by Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West.)

I returned to Princeton University and commuted from there to the New School on a second leave in 1997-1998 to retrain in Afro-American studies with Kevin Gaines, Adolph Reed, and Vicky Hattam, hoping to develop a better understanding of the history of race and racism in the international order during the rise of American dominance or hegemony. I published two pieces on the history of race and international relations that I worked on during the fellowship year, before resuming work once more on America’s Kingdom during a third and final leave at NYU’s International Center for Advanced Study in 2002-2003. ICA was then running a three-year project on the Cold War as Global History. All these strands are woven together in a book that takes seriously the transnational turn pioneered by black theorists and what Dan Rodgers calls post-exceptionalist history writing.

As I came to understand more about why so many before me have gotten the story so wrong, I made it an objective of my book to explain how bound up our views of the world are with two constructs of the cold war. One is the belief that America is “exceptional,” which a lot of people think translates into “better” or “different” but I think Dan Rodgers gets it right when he says it is more as if we think America is insulated from processes that shape the world at large. The relevant example for my book is the idea that unlike all other great powers or would be great powers of the nineteenth and twentieth (and now twenty first) century, America has resisted the imperial temptation or the ancestors learned to get along without an empire or that the so-called neo-conservative cabal is just getting around to building an empire now in Iraq.  The second construct that works basically like a powerful set of blinders on our ability to understand the world is what Toni Morrison calls the tradition of not noticing race. She calls it the “graceful and generous liberal gesture.” The norm against noticing is another construct of the Cold War.

The way I think this all works—to simplify things a little bit here—is that we have an exaggerated sense of time--the distance between the past and present—and space—the distance between something called home and all other places abroad. We might tell one story about the nineteenth century, and even acknowledge some troubled aspects of that “national” history, but as we do so we also distance ourselves from it. The past is always being transcended or obliterated or overcome.  Then we believe there is some coherent nationally bounded story to be told about the United States that has intermittent and sporadic connections with some places and more continuous connection with some other places, all of which have coherent national stories of their own. There is even a kind of logic of comparison across all these different places with their distinct national trajectories (otherwise my colleagues who specialize in comparative politics would be in real trouble). So when I started working on the American West as part of my study of ARAMCO in Saudi Arabia, the historian of the Middle East I know best asked if it didn’t make more sense to look at the British empire in Africa? Others asked even more frequently why I wasn’t studying the British East India Company? Of course, these latter histories are also ones that specialists on the Middle East, including American-born and employed ones, are ones they are more likely to know than ones about American empire in the nineteenth-century West.

The goal I set for myself, therefore, was to write a book that tried to undo these conventions. As I put it in the Foreword,

America’s Kingdom shows why it is imperative that we tear down the wall between the 1940s and all that came before, and that we topple that other, more formidable wall, once understood as dividing races and now as dividing nations or cultures, which protects the myth of an isolated and autonomous history of the United States of America.

Before I do what many or maybe most who are reading the page are anxious for me to do—to stop writing like a professor to other professors and say something about how the book matters for understanding US-Saudi relations today—I want to note for the record that I reject that distinction—it is invidious in fact—that is often made between the campus and the so-called real world.  I think the most important thing my book can do—to the extent that readers come away after finishing it with a new view of the past than the one they started with—is to motivate them to do some work on their own in exposing the struts and bolts of hierarchy, as Toni Morrison puts it, in the present. The basic question to ask is what blinders continue to constrict our understanding about the world generally? The same question is relevant whether you are a student, professor, working person, retiree, history buff, bartender or political activist.

That said, the book demands that the activists work harder on understanding the international politics of oil, starting with the myth that nothing has changed in the decades since the 1950s and that oil companies still dominate Saudi Arabia or other Gulf producing states in the ways I write about (and if you didn’t make this argument yourself or heard it at an antiwar rally, then spend a little time on line and you will find plenty of variants of this idea). Those days are long gone and the challenge is to work out how hierarchy is reinscribed today in the world economy, by whom, and to what end.
Lesson two, needless to say, is to trust nothing written about the U.S. – Saudi relationship by the pundits who play geostrategists on television, the second rate scholars, ex-diplomats, adjunct fellows, and the like that are writing from the Upper East Side and DuPont Circle. Do you recall the early days after 9/11, the handwringing by the kingdom’s “friends” in response to the "Saudis are our enemies" line of the Christians, Israel-first types, Rand consultants, and spies-turned-authors? Check the archival records yourselves. See who was arguing that the so-called special relationship was suddenly in crisis, allegedly, for the first time since Franklin Delano Roosevelt met Ibn Saud on board the U.S.S. Quincy in the Great Bitter Lake (the location of which the Council on Foreign Relation’s Gulf expert is still not quite sure of). My book tells you why 1. I never believed any of this talk and why you should not have either, and 2. Why those same prophets have no good explanation now for why it is business as usual between the United States and the Kingdom. Hint: it doesn't have anything to do with the Carlyle Group.

Finally, there are plenty of so-called experts out there who think that the only thing that stands between the United States and a trouble free relationship with Saudi Arabia and other Middle East states is Israel and the influence of the so-called Jewish lobby. There are people who have argued the same thing every decade since the 1940s. My book shows why it wasn’t true then and, by extension, why it isn’t true now, no matter how many times the Arabists, lobbyists, and energy consultants repeat the myth.

Jones: America's Kingdom

Qahwa Sada Book Forum:  America's Kingdom, by Robert Vitalis

Reading America’s Kingdom
Toby Jones

Bob, your new book America’s Kingdom is a remarkable achievement. In fewer than 300 pages of elegantly and smartly argued prose, you turn the standard approach to writing the history of U.S.-Saudi relations – as well as the history of the formation of the modern Saudi Arabian state – on its head. America’s Kingdom is a brilliant intervention in Saudi studies and will hopefully facilitate equally critical and insightful work in the future.

In spite of my enthusiasm that this may happen, we’ll have to wait and see. As you would no doubt acknowledge, although the investigative work needed to write America’s Kingdom required work in seventeen archives (!), the story was there to be told if earlier scholars had only done the necessary mining of the sources. I’m not sure if their inability to do so reflected choice, laziness or more likely, as you suggest, the Cold War era failure to notice things such as race and racism.

Even for those scholars who will no longer be taken in by the claims of exceptionalism, other challenges remain for critical examinations of Saudi Arabia and/or the American role there. Sources remain hard to come by, particularly with regard to the Saudi side of things. I was fortunate enough to get into the kingdom for ten months in 2003 to carry out research. Even so, it took luck and the assistance of Saudi citizens sympathetic to my project – and critical of the Saudi state – to find the most interesting and important resources for my own work.

One of the things I learned in Saudi Arabia is that a remarkable parallel to the story you tell of ARAMCO is the presence of a powerful sense of Saudi exceptionalism. Here, your application of Dan Rodgers’ formula, which in this instance might be restated as Saudi Arabia seeing itself as “insulated from processes that shape the world at large”, would be appropriate. The volume you edited with Madawi al-Rasheed, Counter-Narratives, touches on this to some extent. But I might go a step further and make that claim that the history of race, state-building, and imperial power in Saudi Arabia in the period after America’s Kingdom ends – say after 1960 – appears to parallel the American story in Saudi Arabia in very interesting ways. I would even argue that to some extent the Saudi approach to the challenges of governing a population that does not see the state as legitimate is to some degree derivative of ARAMCO practices and policies. Hopefully, we can return to this later in the week.

For now, I am compelled by your most basic premise that America’s Kingdom shatters several myths, the most important of which is the long-unchallenged claim advanced by the giant American oil conglomerate ARAMCO and its chroniclers that Americans were a force for good in Saudi Arabia. In a rousing bit of myth-busting, you succeed in showing how ARAMCO fits neatly into a long tradition of American corporate racism, in which the oil giant constructed an elaborate discriminatory residential and professional system that institutionalized the worst abuses of the Jim Crow order.

Like me, however, you probably would not be surprised if few readers were shocked to learn that American oil companies were hardly good citizens abroad. After all, we live in an era of hyper-cynicism about big-business. Even so, it is impossible not to be outraged (if this is still possible) to learn in grim detail the wrenching degree to which ARAMCO not only relied on race to order its operations in Saudi Arabia, but also the ways in which company managers ignored and sought to circumvent those (the Saudi victims of racism) who challenged its discriminatory practices.

For me, one of the most revealing aspects of this sordid history is that ARAMCO managers understood well the racist order they constructed – it was a deliberate act – and were even embarrassed enough about it to excise references to their discriminatory practices from the company’s promotional materials, including company histories and even a feature-length film. Not once, did their embarrassment and clear understanding of wrong-doing lead to a reversal in company policy. Not once.

Worse, by the mid-1950s when the company began to face sustained periods of labor unrest and challenges to its racism, ARAMCO stood firm and sought ways to avoid solving the specific problems their discriminatory policies were generating. As you note, ARAMCO managers deployed Cold War rhetoric to mask the substance of the grievances levied against them, deflecting criticism by charging their critics with being communists and agitators for the overthrow of the Saudi and American political order. Given that this was the same tactic used to smear Civil Rights advocates in the United States, this does not come as much of a surprise. It is interesting to note that the Saudi state also came to mimic the same line, charging dissenters with sympathy for communism as a method for undermining their potential appeal, not to mention as a pretext for cracking down on them. In this respect, American Cold War logic and discourse proved highly malleable and portable.

As important as the details of the practice of racism on the ground are in your recounting, America’s Kingdom is perhaps more important for what it suggests about the role of ARAMCO and racism in the shaping of American political power abroad and what we might come to think of as American empire. It is clear from your account that American “hegemony” in Saudi Arabia did not conform to our typical perception of how empire works. In the kingdom, American political interests followed ARAMCO and, in fact, those interests were subordinate to ARAMCO for several decades. It is beyond dispute that ARAMCO and its racist ways played the paramount role in shaping not only American policy but also the Saudi political order.

You point out the fascinating ways that this took shape as well as the important ways in which Saudi state-builders and leaders pushed back against American power. Saudi Arabia proved no mere puppet and the United States proved no Great Britain. And yet, at the end of the day, American hegemony in Saudi Arabia was no less nefarious than those formal empires that dominated the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. As you show the Americans played no small role in undermining the kingdom’s potential transition to a more liberal political order at the end of the 1950s, even if the U.S. did not actually orchestrate the ascension of the highly bureaucratized and institutionalized authoritarian political system that followed.

In later years, in the 1960s and well into the 1970s, other American organizations and firms actually helped strengthen the authoritarian character of the Saudi state (not to mention Saudi sovereignty itself) by bolstering the operation of various police forces and governing ministries. And, given that the ruling al-Sa¬ud came to rule over communities and territories that despised them, it may be true that even if the story of ARAMCO and the United States in Saudi Arabia is not one of formal empire, it may well be a story in which they trained the kingdom’s leaders how to maintain one themselves.

Gause: America's Kingdom

Qahwa Sada Book Forum:  America's Kingdom, by Robert Vitalis

Reading America’s Kingdom
F. Gregory Gause III, University of Vermont

   I am tempted to say that the only criticism I can aim at Robert Vitalis’ excellent book is that his publishers chose not to use the blurb they solicited from me on the dust jacket.  I’ve lost the e-mail in which I composed it, so I will just summarize here.  I think there are four reasons why people interested in America and the myth of its exceptionalism, the history of American foreign policy, race relations, Saudi Arabia, ARAMCO, the oil industry, the Persian Gulf and all sorts of other stuff should read this book.  First, Bob takes on really big and important questions about American exceptionalism, American foreign policy and the oil industry.  Second, he does so while staying very close to his sources, many of which have never before been utilized in scholarly work.  Third, he contributes invaluably to our understanding of Saudi Arabia and Saudi-American relations.  Fourth, this is one of the best-written academic books I have ever read.  Bob says he wants his readers to take it to the shore (as they say in Philadelphia; the rest of us would say the beach).  This is one academic book that actually makes good beach reading. 

    The big target of the book is the myth that somehow the United States and American companies were different from the bad old colonial countries like Great Britain and France in their dealings in the “Third World.”  Bob devastates that contention through his careful examination of ARAMCO, which had always put itself forward as an example of how American business dealings with Third World governments and societies were of a higher standard than those of the colonialists.  Suffice it to say that ARAMCO World magazine will not be publishing excerpts of this book.  Bob shows that ARAMCO basically and unapologetically recreated the racial hierarchies of American mining towns in the eastern Arabian desert.  It did next to nothing to advance Saudis in the company.  Its labor practices were antediluvian, making Anglo-Iranian’s treatment of its Iranian workers (you know, the ones who supported Mossadegh’s nationalization in 1951) look good.  I am a more credulous person than Bob, but even I wondered as a graduate student studying Saudi Arabia if the stories about ARAMCO as good corporate citizen in Saudi Arabia were all that believable.  Nobody can think that any more after this book.

    The other big contribution, to my mind, of the book is its treatment of Saudi politics and the Saudi-American relationship in the 1950’s and early 1960’s.  Bob says that this is a book about America, it just takes place somewhere else.  But he helps us to understand this fascinating period in Saudi history much better than anyone else who has written about it (with the possible exception of Sarah Yizraeli).  His target here is the dominant story of “Faisal the reformer,” and he very successfully calls that story into question.  He also makes it clear that the belief that Saudi-American relations were smooth and uncontentious from the arrival of the first Standard Oil of California workers in the 1930’s to the oil embargo of 1973 is groundless.  Bob is not the first to take on this bit of the conventional wisdom (Safran’s book on Saudi foreign policy treated it most directly), but he does an excellent job is showing the ups and downs of Washington’s relationship with Riyadh during the period.   

    So, being an academic, I now have to raise some critical points about the book.  Here is one:

I take Bob’s general point that the whole “Faisal as reformer; Saud as dissolute idiot” story is bunk.  Faisal was not a political reformer.  Saud did appoint the most progressive cabinet in Saudi history in 1960.  But I am not sure that Bob has provided us with a sufficient understanding of how that internal Saudi political fight worked out the way it did.  First, the reformers who are the heroes of Bob’s story here (Abdullah Tariki and Abd al-Aziz Ibn Muammar) really did not have much of a political base.  I think that they were promoted by Saud in an effort to find allies against Faisal.  Once he no longer needed them, they were gone.  So I am not sure that they could have accomplished the kinds of changes the Bob implies they could, including building institutions for popular representation in Saudi politics.  Also, one could make the case that Faisal’s opposition to these guys was not simply the result of his fears of reform (though that would be a part of it).  Faisal probably suspected the reformers of being pro-Nasser, and I think he was probably right to do so.  (Bob knows the record here better than I; I just raise the points and am open to evidence that I am wrong.)  Given that the Saudi ruling elite had plenty to fear from Nasser and Nasserism, Faisal’s stance was understandable, even if you do not like the normative implications.

Second, I think Bob misses what might be the essential dynamic in the internal Saudi maneuvering of this period.  Saud had lost most of his family allies by 1960, a fact which Bob more than adequately documents.  He was left with Talal and the other Free Princes.  As a result, or maybe this was part of a previous plan, Saud relied more and more on his own sons in government.  There were fears among the other brothers that he intended to institutionalize primogeniture, passing rule on to one of his sons and cutting out the brothers.  You do not need to be a tech’ed up rat choicer to figure out that this fear would drive the rest of the family to oppose Saud.

Third, Faisal was no political reformer.  But he did seem to have a better grasp on fiscal realities than did Saud.  Given how much trouble other governments have gotten into when they had to go to the “international community” for help to pay their bills, Faisal’s parsimonious ways with the state budget might have been what Saudi Arabia needed at the time.  Bob provides evidence from contemporary observers that Faisal did not rein in the princes; he just cut the government budget.  That seems like good self-interested politics for a Saudi leader at that time.

    I also want to challenge mildly a point in Bob’s posting about the Saudi-American relationship now.  He said that he never thought that there was a real crisis in the relationship after 9-11, because there had been problems before (the biggest, the oil embargo of 1973-74, was outside the book’s chronological focus) and the fundamental Saudi security dependence on the U.S. and the U.S. interest in Saudi oil always overcame those problems.  I do not disagree with that analysis, but I think that in the post-9-11 period it was touch and go as to whether that dynamic could be sustained.  Not because of the Saudi side, which quickly fell in line with American policy in the “global war on terror.”  Bob frequently cites Toni Morrison’s insight about the power of “not noticing.”  On the American side, the entire relationship has been built around the principle of “not noticing,” or at least the fact that most Americans either do not notice or choose not to notice what happens in Saudi Arabia.  For a brief time (I think it is over) after 9-11, lots of Americans were noticing Saudi Arabia, and did not like what they saw.  There was a risk that there might have been a reassessment in Washington of the Saudi-American relationship – if other things had happened:  Iraq had gone better, Kerry had won in 2004.  None of that happened, and the relationship muddles on.  But I do not think it was nearly as much as a sure thing as Bob does. 

    So much for mild disputation.  This is a great book.  It certainly has changed the way I think about Saudi Arabia and the Saudi-American relationship.  It has changed the way I will present those subjects in my classes.  It is my nominee for the Albert Hourani book award at MESA next year, given to the best book written in the previous year in the field.  (Too bad I am not on the committee.)  I know it was a hard slog writing it.  Thanks for the effort, Bob.

Alterman: Arab Decision 2007

Arab Decision 2007
by Jon Alterman

While it was U.S. voters who cast their ballots in last week’s elections, Arabs may feel the election’s most profound effects. For five years, the Bush Administration has dedicated itself to healing the Middle East so as to provide security at home. While U.S. voters did not directly repudiate the vision, they showed little support for the zeal with which the administration pursued it. With the U.S. push toward Arab reform stalled, Arabs—governments and publics—will find themselves facing harder choices, not easier ones. They took it for granted that the Bush Administration could not solve their problems, but they grew comfortable lining up in opposition to the long arm of U.S. intervention. In the aftermath of U.S. elections, the problems they face are as acute as ever, their awareness of those problems is higher, and they have lost their ability to tar reformists as American stooges. Their choices have become harder, not easier.

There is little question that President Bush and many in the White House continue to believe that the only truly strategic answer to the terrorist threat is attacking the conditions they see as giving rise to terrorism in the first place. In his speech on the fifth anniversary of September 11, President Bush concentrated on the cause of Middle Eastern democracy, saying that when hope and freedom prevailed in the region, “the clouds of war will part, the appeal of radicalism will decline, and we will leave our children with a better and safer world.” He centered his address to the United Nations General Assembly later in September on his “freedom agenda” as well, arguing, “We know that when people have a voice in their future, they are less likely to blow themselves up in suicide attacks.” The President’s vision is clear.

Still, what should one make of the ways in which widely heralded elections in Iraq and Palestine yielded armed conflict verging on civil war and put militias at the heart of political power? How should one analyze the dashed hopes of last year’s elections in Egypt, widely heralded as a test case for U.S. policy? The transatlantic initiatives of the G8’s 2004 Sea Island Summit have all but been forgotten, and the bold new programming of the State Department’s Middle East Partnership Initiative has morphed into a set of comfortable projects that are often indistinguishable from traditional USAID assistance. However attractive the President’s rhetoric, it has been mugged by reality.

Even so, something is afoot in the Middle East. Too many young people still clamor for too few jobs, and government services groan under burgeoning populations. Public educational systems are mostly broken, and in many countries, wages lag behind rising expenses. Regional governments make solemn international proclamations, but they rarely seem to be able to shape world events in a constructive way. Increasingly, publics complain their governments have been successful at self-preservation, but too little else.

And complain they do, and not only to friends in private. On satellite television, on the Internet, on cassettes, videotapes, and DVD’s, the complaints are piling up. Censorship is dying in the Middle East, and even surveillance is getting harder. Unprecedented criticism is in the air.

With that criticism comes a renewed sense of seriousness. The Middle East is in the midst of a remarkable economic boom, driven by high oil prices. It is almost like the halcyon days of the 1970s, but with a couple of twists. First, everyone expects that, one day, this oil boom will end. Second, most look back on the flush days of the 1970s and regret that they were not able to use that window to build stronger economies and better workforces. While few would call the opportunity completely squandered, there is a keen desire to invest in a serious way and do better this time.

There is a rising tide in the Middle East. It is not demanding more liberal, or more personal autonomy; it is demanding better results. This tide unites liberals and conservatives, secular and religious forces. In many cases, it includes younger government officials as well, who contrast the burgeoning Asian economies with the rigid structures of the Middle East. Regional governments know their public sectors are far too big (in several cases employing upwards of 90 percent of the native workforce), and that they must use the opportunity the current boom provides to create a more vibrant private sector. Political reform is a potential but not inevitable consequence of the changes they demand. Asia has several examples of effective governments that are not very open—Singapore springs to mind—but it has even more examples such as Taiwan and South Korea where economic growth helped nurture a more open government.

The United States is a minor player in this unfolding drama, and perhaps that is best. The United States is often like a force field in the Middle East now, distorting everything that it comes near. Having helped open the topic of change in the Middle East, the topic now has a life of its own. While the Bush Administration is likely to be a less zealous advocate for the next two years, and its successor less zealous still, the hard choices remain where they should be, with the peoples and governments of the region itself. The United States will step away, but the hard choices for the Middle East have only begun.

Jon Alterman is director of the Middle East Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.  This essay is reprinted by permission from the November 2006 Newsletter.

around the web, nov 15

Relaunch of a new Qahwa Sada now set for immediately post-Thanksgiving.   Good stuff coming!  In the meantime, some Middle East stuff around the web:

Mohammed Samhouri, "Gaza Economic Predicament One Year After Disengagement: What Went Wrong?" November 2006. (PDF).   Crown Center, Brandeis University.

Max Rodenbeck, How Terrible Is It?, New York Review of Books, looks at the war on terror through the lens of a bunch of recent books.

Omran Salman, "Dissent and Reform in Bahrain" and Emad Omar, "Dissent and Reform in Jordan."  Links to PDFs of both papers can be found at the American Enterprise Institute Event page. (Thanks to Chanad for the link)

Nawaf Obeid has two new presentations available from the Saudi National Security Assessment Project at the US-Saudi Relations site:  "Remnants of al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia: Current Assessment" and "Saudi Arabia's Emerging Role: New Strategic Initiatives"

Kenneth Pollack and Daniel Byman, "Explosive Affinities:  Cross-Border Consequences of Civil Strife in Iraq." Berlin Journal, Fall 2006, via Brookings Institute.

       

Paul Salem, "The Future of Lebanon", Foreign Affairs, full text via Carnegie.
....
and the November issue of the Arab Reform Bulletin.  Featured articles include:
Arab World: Regional Conflicts as Moments of Truth Amr Hamzawy
Lebanon: Hizbollah's Enduring Myth Emile El-Hokayem
U.S. Policy and Palestine: Reform and Peace are Interdependent Philip C. Wilcox, Jr.
Jordan: A Balancing Act that Keeps Political Change at Bay  Rana Sabbagh-Gargour

around the web, nov 10

Apologies for the long posting pause.  We'll be relaunching after Thanksgiving with a slightly different roster and approach, and there's already a lot of quality content lined up.   I knew this would take some tinkering to get it right, and it has, but we'll get it right. 

In the meantime, here is this week's roundup of recent Middle East studies content from around the web  (a feature which Qahwa Sada will retain in its relaunch next month as a weekly thing):

Jordan and its Islamist Movement: The Limits of Inclusion, by Nathan Brown (Carnegie).   From the abstract: "Over the past 50 years, Jordan’s rulers have encouraged Islamists to run for office, but within strict limits to discourage religious extremism. Historically, Islamist leaders have chosen to participate in the system rather than work to overthrow the regime.  As a result, the Jordanian Muslim Brotherhood and the government have come to regard each other as political rivals, rather than implacable adversaries. Yet the recent pressure of regional events threatens to unravel the peace, as both sides consider whether to escalate, or contain, growing tensions.  Understanding this dynamic in Jordan helps answer some of the most critical questions about regional democratic reform: Can Islamist political parties operate within the boundaries of a democratic system? Does participation breed moderation?"

Countering Islamists at the Ballot Box, edited by David Schenker (Washington Institute for Near Eastern Policy).   The text of three fascinating presentations from a September 2006 panel:  Soner Cagaptay calls for a massive American effort to build  liberal, pro-Western parties in the Arab world;  Greg Gause calls for giving up democracy promotion;  and Mona Makram-Ebeid calls for Arab liberals to cooperate tactically with Islamists in order to pry open authoritarian regimes. 

"Anatomy of a Civil War."  Nir Rosen has written a fascinating account of Iraq's troubles for the forthcoming issue of Boston Review.  You can download an advance PDF copy at the main Boston Review site.

A new issue of the Muslim World Journal of Human Rights has been released.   The most interesting article to me was " Yemeni Reflections on Guantanamo and American Efforts for Political Reform in the Arab World" , by Charles Schmitz.

"Aims and Methods of Europe's Muslim Brotherhood," Lorenzo Vidino (Center on Islam, Democracy, and the Future of the Muslim World.)  Offers a close look at Yusuf al-Qaradawi's 1990 manifesto for the Muslim Brotherhood.   I disagree with some of the author's conclusions, but that's what makes these debates interesting!

around the web, oct 31

While I grow frustrated with the output of my colleagues for Qahwa Sada (and do drop me a line if you think that you might be a potential contributor), here's another roundup of interesting ME stuff around the web:

Simon Henderson discusses the implications of the new Saudi succession rules for the Washington Institute. 

Olivier Roy has a piece at Open Democracy based on a lecture he gave on shifts within Islamism.

Crooked Timber hosts a great symposium on a new book by Shari Berman.  It isn't about the Middle East, but it is a nice model for the kind of book symposium which we have in the works here.   

Jordanian journalist and blogger Batir Wardum is working on a list of the 100 most influential Arab intellectuals in the past 25 years.   You can see an English version of his work in progress here.

Brookings has a  sobering analysis of internal displacement due to ethnic violence in Iraq, prepared by   Ashraf al-Khalidi and Victor Tanner. 

around the web, oct 25

Some Middle East studies on the web:   

The new issue of ISIM (International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World) is full of short, interesting pieces.   Among the highlights (all links go directly to PDF files):

• 10 Islamist-Leftist Cooperation in the Arab World / Jillian Schwedler & Janine A. Clark
• 16 Re-reading al-Qaeda: Writings of Yusuf al-Ayiri / Roel Meijer
• 18 Liberal Islam: Between Texts and its Modern Condition / Abdulkader Tayob
• 30 Global War on Terror as De-Militarization / Faisal Devji
• 32 Lebanese Shia Women: Temporality and Piety / Lara Deeb

Also, the Wilson Center recently produced A View From the Region:  Different Perspectives on Israel's War With Lebanon's Hizballah (PDF file).  Contributors include Rami Khouri, Aaron Miller, Martin Kramer, Hadi Semati, Murhaf Jouejati, and Soli Ozel.

Over at Jamestown, an interesting paper entitled Shifting Alliances in the Salafi Movement After the Lebanon War, by Abdul Hameed Bakier.

Kenneth Katzman prepared a CRS report for Congress on Iran's Influence in Iraq.  (PDF file; via Steve Aftergood).

Original Qahwa Sada content coming soon, just as soon as contributors get their stuff in!

Hayden: Blogging the Lebanon Crisis

Blogging the Lebanon Crisis
Craig Hayden
(note:  this is an abridged version of a report posted on the Intermap blog.  A longer version, with many more quotes and examples, can be found there.)

The month of August was rife with commentary across more widespread news outlets about the Lebanon war and its aftermath, and the English-language Arab blogs witnessed a similar focus. Yet the notion of Arab blogs, let alone English-language Arab blogs, raises a very important concern about their impact on the public sphere. Simply put – how influential are blogs (especially English blogs) on the ongoing pan-Arab conversation about the United States and its policies in the Middle East? Do they reveal more fundamental shifts in argument strategies? Or, are they only representative of the dissidents and minorities within Arab countries?

These questions are crucial to understanding the role of blogs within the communication infrastructure of the Middle East – how the inform and are in turn influenced by the hierarchy of media forms that connect the interpersonal to the mass level of communication. This notion of “infrastructure” is drawn from communication scholar Sandra Ball-Rokeach’s theoretical formulation of a media system. This system links more macro-level media outlets with the more immediate forms of local communication that in turn instructs basic beliefs about political culture and other social norms. Blogs, under this view, can be seen as part of the meso-linkages between what is reported at the “mass” level and the opinions expressed at the local or “micro” level. In the United States, blogs have grown into a full-fledged sphere of public deliberation and political commentary. Political blogs have blossomed into parallel feeds of ideologically aligned news and information. They are obvious sites for examining nascent media “frames” about issues, that can feed back into the mainstream media to steer public debate. Does this hold true for Middle East media markets?

The first big question mark attached to blogs in the Arab public sphere deals with basic infrastructure and the role internet technology in everyday life. Compared to the oft- discussed domination of satellite communication, how important are blogs? How many individuals have access to blogs, and actually read and participate in such forums? Various recent studies have concluded that the number of active internet users in the Middle East is relatively small. Small numbers alone, however, does not diminish the importance of blogs and bloggers. The main issue may be one of audience. Who is reading blogs, and what are they taking from blog-driven arguments about the United States? A small segment of Arab populations actively use the internet. An even smaller segment blogs, and a still smaller population reads and blogs in English. (of course, according to this site the Egyptian blogosphere seems split!). Is there a significance to the sliver of English bloggers within the Arab internet world?

Arab media scholar Marc Lynch has rightly identified that there is not so much an Arab blogosphere as there is a collection of localized, regional blog communities. These communities, such as the bloggers associated with the independent political parties in Egypt, reflect less of a nationalist or pan-Arab tone, but more immediate political concerns. The recent imprisonment of Egyptian blogger Alaa highlights their efforts at political debate. But this also raises another question: are they the political movement themselves? Are bloggers just dissidents, or do they reflect a growing plurarlity to the public sphere? The question is important, especially if the goal of this project is to identify how media framing of the United States is developing across various media outlets in the pan-Arab world.

And here I come to my final caveat. The majority of my blog research has focused on English language Arab blogs, with a few selections of translated Arab-language blogs thrown in. I remain somewhat skeptical about the conclusions that can be drawn about pan-Arab argument trends by studying these blogs. English language blogs represent either small communities, or are written in anticipation of English language audience. For The latter point suggests that many English language blogs do not reflect the internal Arab conversation, but a roundabout means of impromptu cultural diplomacy – an emergent forum of international dialogue. One need only look to the “comments” fields of many English-language blogs to realize that Americans comprise a good portion of their readership. For another example, see this post on Beirut Spring illustrating just who is reading his blog.

The explosion of Lebanese blogs during the war, in particular, illustrates this trend. Many of these blogs were attempts at argument aimed not at Lebonese, but at the larger English-language world. Many bloggers believed that the mainstream media in the West did deliver an accurate picture of the war as it was happening on the ground in Lebanon. The blogs were a way to express frustration about the violence and destruction involved in the war.

To be fair, some English-language blogs were aimed at Lebanese during the war, and also at diasporic communities. As one Lebanese blogger, Mazen Kerbaj put it [in English], “we are writing our future’s collective memory.". Blogging was vital to narrating the war; a record for both internal and international audiences.

The Blogs of August

So what did August blogs reveal? The previous reports showed a steady drift towards support of Hezbollah, and a decline in discussion of the Shia-Sunni divide. The Lebanon war had become a truly pan-Arab cause. The United States was, not surprisingly, the most obvious target of condemnation outside of Israel. Yet it was the universal negative view of the United States that seemed most striking. There were few sympathetic views for the U.S. policy – even among outlets that often carried more moderate criticism of the U.S.

The Bahraini blogger Sabbah’s focus was telling. He chose to reprint Nasrallah’s speeches verbatim on his blog, bequeathing yet more legitimacy on the rhetoric of the Hezbollah leader. There seems to be no obvious contestation of Nasrallah’s arguments:

“I assure (you that) whatever the results of the war, Lebanon won’t be American and Lebanon won’t be Israeli and Lebanon won’t be one of the bases for the ‘new Middle East’ which George Bush wants and which Condoleezza Rice wants,”

These quote epitomized the gathering sense of a referendum on the broader U.S. Middle East policies. The Lebanon war was labeled an American war, and characteristic of the motivations and intentions behind the U.S. administration.

Beirut Spring, who typically voices a “moderate” perspective on Middle East affairs, commented on the decision by President Bush to send aid after the end of hostilities in August. This decision was presented by Beirut Spring as a reaction to the announcement by Hezbollah that it would actively engage in repairing the damages caused by the war in southern Lebanon. Beirut Spring’s careful equanimity falls away in his critique:

“You see Mr. Bush, I don’t know how it works in the US, but here in the Middle East, you can’t drop bombs and aid at the same time. We all know that you were shipping high-precision bombs to the Israelis, bombs that could have been used to kill Lebanese children. We all know that America was behind postponing the ceasefire until the “objectives” of the Israelis are met. Honestly Mr. President, no matter how much money you throw at us, you can’t undo the bad press that gave you.”

Moderates, though, don’t face quite the same level of social stigma within the blogosphere. A quick note of Beirut Spring’s logs reveals that his readership is predominately American. It is hard to figure whether he is downplaying or muting his own arguments about the U.S. administration’s role in the war cleanup. At the very least, his post reveals the obvious – the war was not good publicity for the United States.

Salam Alil’s (Asterism) report from the Iraqi blogosphere highlighted some of the reactions of Iraqi bloggers to the Lebanon war. This excerpt, from “Hala,” captures the degree of frustration that emanated throughout man blogs. Alil reprints Hala’s commentary after she returned from Beirut:

“I’ve never ever felt so humiliated in my life as I did seeing Israeli jets flying freely in the skies of Beirut… I loathed our weakness, I loathed being born as an Arab, I loathed living in London I hated myself so much I couldn’t even look in the mirror or watch my shadow as I walk. I felt so small and envied a tiny ant struggling to find its way through the sand.

The US has only one goal, that is to turn the area to a desert and drain it freely; armless, helpless, pacified and who dares to say a word. It is very hard for me to say that our only salvation is to ally with Iran, the only strong country left, enough is enough we are living in an era where you have to be feared not respected.

And a small message to all the hypocrates; you may kill and slaughter trying to establish a so called “The New Middle East”; rememmber you are fighting an ideology not a group of people.

Nasrallah is not a terrorist; he is probably the last dignified man in the area. Right now he is the only man I can take my hat off for.

It should be noted that Hala is an Iraqi expatriate living in London. Nevertheless, if the diasporic community is any reflection of pan-Arab opinion leadership, this post would confirm something of a sea change in media characterization of the United States. In particular, I am referring to the muting of voices that once mainly criticized policy efficacy, and the increase of narratives that encapsulate the United States motives and ambitions as wholly negative. What we see here is a merging of arguments that once were somewhat separated: the conspiratorial, anti-American voices and the more moderate policy critics. The critics, it would seem, have gone towards the route of wholesale rejection of the United States.

This is not altogether surprising. As the war progressed, support for Hezbollah and condemnation of the United States slowly spread from more typically anti-American outlets into more mainstream and government-sponsored venues. This follows an emergent pattern in the course of controversies within the Arab media. The most prominent case of this would be the Danish cartoon controversy, which had its origins in Islamist media, then grew to capture more mainstream outlets.

Conclusion

There are, of course, many more exemplars of blogging across the Arab media sphere for the month of August. A siginificant portion of these blogs dealt directly with the Lebanon war and its aftermath. Many echoed the sentiments already documented in the previous reports - that the destruction of the war was the result of U.S. planning as much as the Israeli Defense Forces. These themes continued to reverberate as the war dragged on, appearing increasingly as a consensus media frame of the war itself. The U.S. has of course weathered a considerable amount of criticism in the Middle East since the days after 9/11 - yet the increasing trend towards wholesale rejection of U.S. policies signals something different than previous criticism. First, the characterization of the U.S. as wholly repugnant is common across all media outlets. Second, the value rhetoric so central to U.S. public diplomacy rhetoric and to the publicly voiced justifications for U.S. policy in the region are increasingly assailed. The ideographs of democracy, freedom, and liberty have themselves become circumspect in the blogospheres, which in turn have echoed many of the vitriolic news editorials.

Craig Hayden is a researcher affiliated with the Center on Public Diplomacy and the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California.