Abu Aardvark

Second Date

What, no kiss?  On the second date?  Photo:  al-Hayat

Very few media outlets in the US seem to have noticed, but Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmednejad and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah were back together again the other day on the occasion of the Hajj.  Ahmednejad's surprising appearance at the Gulf Cooperation Council summit in early December had set off something of a frenzy of media discussion about whether it meant a possible reconciliation between Iran and its Arab Gulf neighbors.   A range of commentators (both officials and pundits) had rushed to pour cold water on those hopes/fears, emphasizing lack of agreement on issues over the sheer fact of the public engagement.  Shortly after the Iranian President's visit to Doha, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates led a significant American delegation to an Arab security meeting in Bahrain to rally the Gulf Arabs against the Iranian threat and to re-energize a collective strategy of containment.  This second public meeting - reportedly at the Saudi King's initiative -  suggests that the Gulf Arab approach to Iran really is shifting despite these American efforts.  Whatever the private fears of Iran by Gulf leaders and elites (which by all accounts, including my own conversations, are quite real), this very recent Gulf Arab trend from containment towards engagement of Iran seems real.   Worth paying close attention to, particularly given how such a rapprochement could rebound in places like Iraq and Lebanon - and, of course, Washington.  It's interesting, by the way, that the Ahmednejad-Abdullah meeting was covered prominently by al-Hayat but largely ignored by al-Sharq al-Awsat (both major Arab papers owned by Saudi princes) - suggesting at least the possibility of some internal conflict between members of the royal family on the issue.

Ahmednejad on the Hajj - really, an amazing photo, courtesy of al-Quds al-Arabi

It's also worth noting that this wasn't just an (extraordinary) diplomatic get-together.  Ahmedjnejad's invitation to the religious occasion comes in the context of the deep anti-Shia sentiment which runs through much of the Saudi religious establishment (and the oft-heated Sunni-Shia political issues in Saudi Arabia itself).   That picture above, which ran in al-Quds al-Arabi, is rather eye-catching.   It has recently struck me that this year we're seeing nothing comparable to the Sunni-Shia hysteria which swept through the Arab world around this time last year (after Saddam's execution).  So the changes which seem to be taking place at the level of high politics (i.e. Ahmednejad's visits to the GCC meeting and to Saudi Arabia) are being mirrored at the public cultural level too. 

To be updated later when I have the chance to look over the Arabic press for commentary... and, in other news, I'm still frightfully busy. 

Ahmednejad and the Gulf

Saudi King Abdullah and Iranian President Ahmednejad (photo: al-Quds al-Arabi)

The Iran news dominating the US press today is the revelation of the NIE findings that Iran froze its nuclear program in 2003.  That's obviously interesting and important.  But - perhaps related, perhaps not - most Arab papers today are headlining the surprising and controversial performance of Iranian President Ahmednejad at the GCC Summit meeting in Doha - described in most as the first Iranian President to address the GCC since it was formed in 1981.  This was not uncontroversial.  Tareq Alhomayed, editor of al-Sharq al-Awsat (which often reflects official Saudi thinking), notes caustically that the GCC was formed to meet the Iranian threat, and nothing has changed with Ahmednejad - who should not have been invited at all.   The UAE's foreign minister said that Iran asked to be invited, and Qatar passed on the request - though al-Sharq al-Awsat quotes another unidentified Gulf official saying that they had not known he would be there.   

After several years of rising tension between Iran and the Gulf state and American attempts to contain Iran with a counter-alliance of "moderate Sunni Arab states",  Ahmednejad's appearance certainly does raise eyebrows.  Ahmednejad downplayed contentious issues such as Iran's role in Iraq and its nuclear program, instead offering a 12 point plan for an ambitious new regional security alliance - essentially, a GCC + 1 arrangement incorporating Iran into the existing Gulf security architecture - and for greater economic cooperation and investment with new joint economic institutions. (Buried in the reporting focused on Iran was the note that the GCC did not act on the rumored plan to sever its reliance on the American dollar). 

While Ahmednejad's appearance has to be seen as something of a diplomatic coup in the face of US-led efforts at containment, it's unlikely that the initiative will go anywhere right now.  The most contentious issues (Iraq, the nuclear program) were largely ignored.   Al-Hayat quoted an anonymous Gulf official as seeing nothing new in the call for greater cooperation and no answers on the contentious and worrisome security issues.  Other officials dismissed the ideas as "utopian" and unrealistic.   Al-Jazeera reports that Kuwait welcomed the Iranian initiative, but wants to see concrete actions and responses to outstanding controversial issues.  The UAE delegation was unhappy with Iran's participation because of their outstanding dispute over three islands in the Gulf, and Al-Arabiya reports that the final declaration says that unfortunately the contacts with Iran had no positive results with regard to that point.  Ahmednejad's reference to the "Persian" rather than "Arabian" Gulf reportedly ruffled some feathers.  Still, the more conciliatory line taken by al-Sharq al-Awsat's former editor and current directory of al-Arabiya Abd al-Rahman al-Rashed is worth noting - he suggests that the GCC states could help protect their current $100 a barrel oil windfall by bridging the conflict between the US and Iran.   

Overall, it seems to  me that the main significance of Ahmednejad's appearance is the appearance itself, and what it might signify about the future of the containment/confrontation strategy, not any concrete or immediate results from his proposals.  I'd be interested to hear from Gulf or Iran analysts about how this is playing and developing - comment away!

Pew: Arabs and Iran

The 2006 Pew Global Attitudes report is out - I had seen some of these numbers a little bit ago, but they were embargoed until now.   Lots of interesting stuff in there, as usual - I'll focus here on the two Arab countries were surveyed this time, Jordan and Egypt.   

All in all, the Pew surveys aren't showing much evidence of greater success in public diplomacy - if you think that these surveys should be such a metric (I don't think they should be but inevitably will be... kind of like the US News college rankings.  I'll elaborate on that in a forthcoming paper, not now.)  Favorable opinions of the US in Jordan have dropped back to 15% (from 21% last year), while 30% of Egyptians expressed favorably opinions of the US - which seems a bit high to me, but who am I to argue with the gold standard of international survey research?   Well, it seems a bit high to me.  16% of Jordanians "support the US war on terror" - up from 12% in 2005, suggesting a 4% "Zarqawi bump" after the Amman hotel bombings.  Only 10% of Egyptians support the US war on terror - which again makes that 30% favorable rating look odd.   Only 10% of Egyptians and 16% of Jordanians (familiar numbers, no?) think that the war in Iraq made the world safer.   

There's a lengthy section of the report about the Iran question which is quite relevant to my research into Arab attitudes towards Iran.  42% of Jordanians and Egyptians alike support Iran's acquisition of nuclear weapons. 39% of Egyptians and 51% of Jordanians have favorable views of Iran in general.  And only 26% of Egyptians and 22% of Jordanians express some or a lot of confidence in Ahmednejad personally - better than Bush, but rather lower than their confidence in Chirac or Haifa Wehbi.  Those numbers suggest real limits to the allegedly great enthusiasm for Ahmednejad among the Arab public.  On the other hand, only 14% of Egyptians and 19% of Jordanians see Iran as a threat to world peace (the US in Iraq and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict rate far higher).  57% of Egyptians and 67% of Jordanians think that Iran would only use nuclear weapons defensively... but at the same time 65% of Jordanians and 61% of Egyptians think that Iran would use them to attack Israel. 

Gulf TV and Iran

The other day I started writing about the Arab politics of the Iran issue.  Al-Hayat had an interesting piece today comparing the coverage of the Iran issue by the major Gulf TV stations.   

According to al-Hayat, al-Jazeera has treated the Iran issue as the topic of a lot of wide open talk , asking whether Iran threatens the region rather than assuming that it does.  Al-Hayat sees al-Jazeera's position as reflecting the official Qatari position, which wants to find a middle ground between the Iranian and the American positions. Dubai TV and Abu Dhabi TV are also trying to find a middle ground, choosing language which doesn't favor either the American or the Iranian side. 

Al-Hayat sees al-Arabiya's coverage as unabashedly, enthusiastically pro-American on this issue, hyping the Iranian threat, criticizing Iranian behavior, and giving full voice to Gulf fears of Iran.   MBC, according to al-Hayat, is dealing with the issue with a cold, calm professionalism in contrast to its sister station al-Arabiya.   

This sounds about right based on the research I've been doing into exactly the same question (comparing coverage of Iran on the various stations) - though I would phrase some things a bit differently.  I think al-Jazeera's position goes beyond just reflecting Qatar's official position, important as that might be, and has as much to do with trends in Arab arguments about power and identity.  But that argument will have to wait until another day. 

Is Iran Turning Arab?

I haven't written much about Iran lately because I don't read Persian (which doesn't stop most other people, I realize) and haven't been really focused on the issue.  But I think I'm going to start writing more about it.  Partly because of Rice's diplomatic initiative, which I'm delighted to see, though I have some issues.  Partly because Iran is likely to become a major issue for international relations and for US domestic politics over the summer and fall whether or not I want it to. And partly because Iran is becoming more and more of an Arab issue, in all kinds of ways.  So take the long, rambling post to follow as a first toe in the water - with more to come as I dig into the materials I'm collecting. 

How is Iran becoming an Arab issue?  Most obviously, Arab states will be directly affected by any military confrontation with Iran, and would have to be active participants in any kind of serious sanctions regime.  Gulf fears of Iran are nothing new, and we've been hearing more and more such fears from pro-American Arab regimes outside the GCC.  Abd al-Hadi al-Majali, the conservative Transjordanian-origin speaker of Jordan's Parliament, caused a bit of a stir by declaring Iran to be a threat to Jordan's security.  This follows King Abdullah's remarks last year about his fears of a "Shia Crescent" from Lebanon to Iran, and Hosni Mubarak's "incautious" remarks on al-Arabiya last month that most Shia were more loyal to Iran than to their own countries.   

Official Arab suspicion of Iran isn't new, but extending it to the Shia more generally should be very concerning.  For one thing, a focus on the Shia rather than just on Iran aligns America and pro-American regimes with key elements of the Iraqi insurgency.  Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's intense, fanatical hatred of the Shia and hopes of stirring up Sunni-Shia war are well-known. Abd al-Salam al-Kabisi, on behalf of the Association of Muslim Scholars (one of the key Sunni players in Iraq), just accused Iran of meddliing in Iraqi affairs.  During a recent al-Jazeera interview, the prominent Gulf analyst Abdullah al-Nafisi called on Saudi Arabia to intervene in Iraq to tip the balance there against Iran.  Kind of wild that the Sunni insurgency and the most wild-eyed jihadi fanatics would become America's supporterrs if it became serious about curbing Iranian power.   

On the other side, much has been made of Ahmednejad's play for popular Arab support.   Playing pan-Arab cards like offering financial support for the Palestinians and challenging  American hegemony is business as usual for an Arab would-be player, but Iran is not, lest we forget, Arab.  Iran is not part of the Arab identity community or Arab narrative, and can not simply pick the "Nasserist cloak" off the rack.   It's not a member of the Arab League (or of the GCC -- which has always been something of an anti-Iranian club).  Its leaders aren't given fiery speeches in Arabic.  It has real ideological and identity issues with Sunni Islamists, not just with extremists like Zarqawi. I've heard from people in Egypt and Jordan that pictures of the Iranian President are appearing everywhere - I'd love to hear more from people on the ground as to how true and/or widespread it is.

Another way that Iran is "turning Arab" is that it is receiving more and more coverage on Arab satellite TV.  The volume of programmes and news about Iran on al-Jazeera has increased dramatically, and not only about the nuclear issue.  Since al-Jazeera has always been rather inwardly-focused, with its talk shows overwhelmingly concentrating on Arab issues, this expansion of its brief to include Iran is noteworthy (especially since critics of al-Jazeera - especially Iraqis - have often labeled it "Sunni TV" for its alleged bias in favor of the old regime and/or the insurgency).  In addition to its coverage of Iran, al-Jazeera has also been heavily covering Hezbollah - it seems like there's a live speech by Hassan Nasrallah or an interview with Mohammed Fadlallah every week.  Some key Islamist figures like Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Fahmy Howeydi have condemened Zarqawi's attacks on the Shia and have urged open relations with Iran.   Al-Arabiya has been paying attention to Iran too, in a more hostile way - most recently, with this interview with the Iranian opposition figure Hossein Khoemeini calling for democracy in Iran and an end to the wilayat al-faqih.

So is Iran "turning Arab" in the sense of becoming an integral part of Arab public arguments and political identity issues?   If so, how does it matter?  We're already hearing a lot of arguments about Arab attitudes towards Iran that seem to have been lifted unaltered from the Iraq debates - Arab leaders secretly want Iran's regime changed but won't say so in public, the "Arab street" will or won't rise up in support, and so forth, the Iranian people will or won't greet Americans as liberators.  My sense is that Iran's role in Arab public opinion and in Arab regime calculations is fundamentally, deeply different from Iraq's in the 1990s-2003 period, and that transposing the Iraq frame onto Iran doesn't really work.  Is that right?  These are some questions to work on, at least!

UPDATE - and right on cue, here's another Zarqawi broadside against the Shia and Iran, just today - and even against Hezbollah, which like usual puts him strongly outside the al-Jazeera Arabist and mainstream Islamist orbits]. 

Arab media and Iranian protest

This is interesting:  John Bradley has filed a report from Ahfaz Ahvaz (silly keyboard!) Iran, about unrest among ethnic Arabs in that city.  While his claim that this unrest "presents Iran with its most serious domestic security threat since the 1979 Islamic revolution" may be a bit exaggerated, I was intrigued by this point about the role of the Arab media:

The scale of the riots probably would have escaped attention outside Iran if Arabic Al Jazeera television had not managed to get a video crew into Khuzestan. It subsequently was barred from reporting from the province.

In my last few talks about the Arab media -  at Harvard and in Ann Arbor - questions have come up about how al-Jazeera had dealt with Iran. What's interesting is that this seems to be changing.  One thing I noticed in the research for my book was how completely "Arab-centric" al-Jazeera's talk shows have generally been - out of nearly 1000 talk shows I examined, only a handful dealt with anything not directly related to the Arab world.  And Iran was not part of that "Arab" world.

But over the last year or so, there seems to have been a notable increase in the number of programs devoted to Iran.  Ghassan bin Jidu's show, Open Dialogue, seems to deal with Iran almost once a month now, for instance.   Iran is still clearly treated as non-Arab, not part of the Arab "narrative", but it is also clearly entering more heavily into the Arab political argument.  At the Michigan event, Juan Cole speculated that this was largely to do with anti-imperialism, with Iran's standoff with the US and UN over the nuclear weapons issue capturing Arab attention, rather than anything to do with Iranian domestic politics.  My sense was that the nuclear issue certainly played a role, but I have seen quite a few programs about Iranian domestic politics too.   

Bradley's report suggests that the news coverage might be following the same track.  If he's right about the impact of al-Jazeera's coverage on the Iranian political scene, it would also be one more instance of that station helping rather than hurting American interests in the region - not through any conscious decision to "help" the US, but simply by reporting and discussing the kinds of protests and reform movements which are so central to its approach to politics.   Whether that kind of coverage would continue in the event of an American escalation against Iran is an interesting question.  2003, when al-Jazeera was more or less completely consumed by the Iraqi question, was the only period where discussion of reform largely dropped out of al-Jazeera's discourse - which suggests that something similar might happen in the event of a confrontation with Iran (though at a lower level, since Iran is still outside the Arab identity narrative).

Braude Internet and Iran

Joseph Braude has an interesting piece in TNR arguing that the rise of the internet and blogging may be harming rather than helping the cause of reform in Iran, in part by moving political and cultural debate out of the public sphere and into a relatively private sphere:

The Internet may actually impede political change in Iran as much as it facilitates it. While 100,000 or so Iranians post their passions to the blogosphere, 4,900,000 other users are evidently doing something else. It is well known, for example, that Iranians massively consume Western entertainment--sports media, pop music, and other elements of global culture that the regime in Tehran bans from the public sphere. This injection of hours of hi-speed fun into Iranian homes makes daily life under a theocracy less different from daily life anywhere else--and probably less difficult to tolerate. The advent of Web use in Iran might be less of a net gain for dissidents than many Iran watchers expect because the revolutionary change Iranians want has already arrived. And the truce between the reigning mullahs and their subjects may well have been fortified, rather than undermined, as a result.
....
The trouble with the rise of the Internet in Iran is that rather than unite the two groups against the regime, the new medium may instead isolate them from each other. The ranks of Jeffersonian idealists are less likely to be swelled by fans of Jefferson Airplane and "The Jeffersons" if the latter crowd can at last enjoy its new media risk-free--without sticking their necks out in a political movement inspired by the former. As far as the shallow side of youth culture is concerned, the cause of reclaiming Iran's public space from its self-appointed guardians of public virtue--who ban hand-holding in parks and foreign films from movie houses--is less urgent in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth: Internet dating, movie downloads, and other gifts of the global village have effectively stocked private space with countless Western trimmings.
....

But if the Internet played a role in counteracting the Islamist agenda in Israel, it has probably been a blessing to Islamists in Iran: that is, a boon to the status quo. The Iranian government seems to have figured out how to use the medium to its advantage: Over the past four years, the regime's strategy of social control over the Internet has switched from sweeping security crackdowns to the more subtle practice of technological filtration, accompanied by the periodic jailing of some bloggers. No other Muslim country, to my knowledge, has gone through a similar evolution. Back in May 2001, Tehran police shut down more than 400 cyber cafés in advance of the country's June elections. Four years later, the government has replaced such clumsy measures with more targeted efforts against specific kinds of Internet use. According to OpenNet Initiative, a collaborative partnership among Harvard Law School, the University of Toronto, and the University of Cambridge, the regime has adopted "one of the world's most substantial Internet censorship regimes." And it's what the government is--and isn't--censoring that's particularly noteworthy: "Currently, Iran's filtering focuses on Iran-related, and particularly Farsi-language, content. Non-Iran specific sites, such as news, human rights, and foreign government pages, are subject to less filtering, though pornography, sex, gay, and some proxy and circumvention Web sites are subject to censorship with varying degrees of effort." In other words, the sites that could really hurt the government--those maintained by Iranian political dissidents--are heavily censored. By contrast, foreign sites that allow Iranians to participate at a distance in Western culture are less likely to be blocked.

Meanwhile, Iran's public sphere is becoming less, rather than more, permissive. In the summer of 1998, I observed a relaxing of restrictions on public displays of affection, Western music, and other hot button issues of domestic concern--a shift that was widely discussed and commonly credited to the reformist president. Today, those concessions are being rolled back; for instance, Iran's new president has banned Western music from all radio broadcasts. Hardliners are freer than they were several years ago to mold public behavior according to their ideals--perhaps because liberals are freer than they were several years ago to experience global culture at home according to their whims.

I doubt that optimism about Iranian blogs is cooling enthusiasm for action against Iran, which is how he frames the piece - more likely it will be taken as evidence that the Iranian people are stockpiling their hugs and puppies to welcome us as liberators.   But aside from that, I think that the basic point is an intriguing and important one.   I don't know nearly enough about the Iranian blogosphere to say whether or not he's right, but as a think piece it's provocative and worth a read.

Facing the music

Iran's erratic President Ahmedinajad has taken decisive action against the real threats facing his country.  Yep, you guessed it:

Hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has banned Western music from Iran's radio and TV stations, reviving one of the harshest cultural decrees from the early days of 1979 Islamic Revolution....

"Blocking indecent and Western music from the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting is required," according to a statement on the council's official Web site.

No word yet on whether he would also object to the musical stylings of a good Shia lady such as Haifa Wehbi...

The Iranian problem

There's a lot of talk these days about a possible confrontation between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States.  Leaving aside the admittedly big question of nuclear weapons for a moment, it's pretty easy to see the reasons for concern.

The country is ever more dominated by conservatives and advocates of political religion.  There was a time in the 1990s when the country seemed to be moving in a more liberal direction, but those days are long past.  Conservatives and religious movements have spent the last few years consolidating their control over the major political institutions - the executive branch, the legislative branch, the judiciary, even the media.   Indeed, in the most recent elections, the conservatives routed their liberal counterparts.  These conservatives and their religious base express open contempt for liberals and their values.   Pretty much the only remaining opposition seems to be among university students and among some liberal newspapers, but their limited power doesn't really threaten the ruling coalition.   What's more, the country has recently been very active inside of Iraq, which threatens important national security interests.  Leading conservative figures, including some known for very close ties to senior government leaders, have openly declared their hostility and have even spoken about the need for military action.  Even relatively moderate foreign policy officials have been sounding pretty hawkish lately.

You can see why the Iranians might be worried about a country like the United States these days.

Not to mention Americans.   

(Note to the irony-impaired:  I am not in fact claiming that the United States is identical to the Islamic Republic of Iran;  nor am I claiming that the Christianist movement in the United States is identical to the Islamist rulers of Iran.  Just pointing out some amusing similarities, is all, and wondering how supporters of the Bush administration can, with a straight face, make certain kinds of criticisms of the Iranian system.   This preventive strike footnote provided as a public service to save bandwidth in the comments section).

Ledeenapalooza!

The National Review showers us with riches today.. not one, but two essays by Michael Ledeen! What an embarrassment of riches... or, well, an embarrassment at least.

So what does Mr Ledeen have to say? In his first offering, Ledeen explains why he does not believe David Kay's report about Iraqi's WMD. Why does he doubt Kay's conclusions, after Kay's time on the ground in Iraq searching and interviewing and so forth? Because, get this, Ledeen once talked to this guy who told him that Iran had smuggled some uranium from Iraq, and he told Kay he should check it out, but nothing ever came of it! Yup - some unreliable defector tried to sell the US a bill of goods via a reliable conduit for such bogus intel, and nothing panned out. And that is why Ledeen doesn't believe Kay. Ouch. I'll bet Kay feels pretty dumb now.

Okay, so that was underwhelming. What about the second part of this Ledeenapalooza? Three congressmen are appeasing Iran, in collusion with the State Department, by treacherously trying to improve relations and build on that whole "accepting inspections of its nuclear program" thing. Only Ledeen doesn't really mention the nuclear thing - he professes himself perplexed at why anyone would think this a good time to explore an opening with Iran. I wouldn't have thought that there was much too this initiative - sending some Congressional staffers doesn't really seem like much - except for how hysterical it seems to have made Ledeen. At one point he wonders whether the "appeasers" are actually mentally unbalanced; and then he says this: "Appeasers are sent deep into the Inferno, because their acts are truly wicked, shoring up our would-be killers and discouraging our would-be allies inside the country." At the end of the essay he frets, referring to "the appeasers," that "justice will be delayed until their final judgment. Faster, please." Which sounds an awful lot like Ledeen is hoping that they die, which sounds an awful lot like what someone like Khomeini would have said.

Just another day in Ledeen Land.