Abu Aardvark

Friedman vs Friedman

Tom Friedman says, presumably with a straight face, "What the critics miss, though, is that the U.S. ouster of Saddam Hussein has also triggered the first real "conversation" about political reform in the Arab world in a long, long time. It's still mostly in private, but more is now erupting in public."

Breathtaking. Arabs have been openly and vigorously debating political reform in public on satellite television stations like al Jazeera for several years. September 11 gave a boost to the intensity of the arguments, but they pre-existed even that shock. Al Jazeera famously irritated almost every government in the region because it broadcast talk shows in which Arabs denounced dictatorial regimes, called for more democracy, eviscerated the status quo, and challenged taboos and red lines which had stifled political discourse for decades.

How Tom Friedman could have travelled widely in the Middle East for the last few years, writing columns regularly, and not have seen this boggles the mind. Could he really be that obtuse?

Perhaps not. Because back on February 1, 2001, Friedman had this to say: " Qatar's al-Jazeera satellite TV station, which is the freest in the Arab world, has stolen Arab TV audiences from every one of the big powers in the region with its freewheeling debates, uncensored news and, lately, online polling -- which is a total no-no in the Arab world, where people are never asked what they actually think about specific governments or policies."

And on February 27, 2001, he wrote this: "Al-Jazeera is not only the biggest media phenomenon to hit the Arab world since the advent of television, it is the biggest political phenomenon. Yes, sometimes it goes over the edge and burns people unfairly, because some of its broadcasters have their own agendas, and sometimes it hypes the fighting in the West Bank in inflammatory ways. But in a region where the evening news for decades has been endless footage of Arab leaders greeting each other at the airport, and singing each other's praises, it is no wonder that Al-Jazeera, with its real news and real opinions, has every Arab with a satellite dish trying to bring in its signal and every Arab leader gnashing his teeth."

So Friedman didn't fail to notice al Jazeera, he has just forgotten it because it doesn't fit his master narrative of the Iraq war really being about democratizing the Middle East. Missing something important is one sin... but ignoring something which you know to make a better argument, well, that's something else entirely.

Khan's Dialogues

Muqtedar Khan has an interesting take on his experience at two recent "dialogue of civilizations" conferences he attended, one in Paris and the other in Doha. In the Paris conference, he was frustrated by the absence of either American or Islamist voices, which led to a lot of America and Islam bashing. The Doha conference, organized by Brookings, brought in a high powered group of Clinton-era Americans (but, as the Weekly Standard complained last week, no Bush officials), American Muslims, and Islamist figures such as Yusuf al Qaradawi. Bill Clinton's speech gets rave reviews in this account as well - what a great idea to appoint Clinton a "dialogue czar," an ambassador at large for public diplomacy... are you listening John Kerry (or John Edwards)?

On a more analytical level, Khan observed that the public sessions tended to be unproductive, with Americans "waffling" and Muslims posturing. But in private sessions there was far more of a zone of agreement on the need for domestic reform in Muslim societies, on the counterproductive tendencies of American Middle East policies, and the like. Khan walked away with the impression that "on many issues, it appeared as if Americans and Muslims were public enemies but private allies." Such experiences call into question the value of the public dialogues which I, for one, have long advocated. But in response to Khan, I would point out that it is the public, not the private, which ultimately matters: for these opinion makers to change views, ideas, and behaviors in either America or the Islamic world they need to argue their cases in public, change the terms of public debate, and make these zones of agreement into a legitimate subject of political action. That's the only way that these kinds of conferences can actually have an impact extending beyond their own walls, or beyond a few individuals having a learning experience about the Other.

Arch-Nemesises..

You know Campus Watch, the Daniel Pipes-inspired conservative website intent on policing Middle East studies? A couple of weeks ago I wrote about their "good guys" list of recommended scholars... an embarrassingly short list so chock full of non-entities that it unintentionally demonstrated their complete insignificance to the field. Well, on the top of their web site they now proudly display a genuinely priceless quote:

"You can't mention MESA [the Middle East Studies Association] without mentioning its nemesis: Campus Watch."

Moment of clarity! So, everyone remembers the Season Six Buffy episode where the Trio of Nerds is finally revealed to Buffy and Willow? See, they had been using an invisibility ray to hide their secret identities. And then they become visible...Buffy looks at them bewildered - she had been expecting a demon or someone formidable, and instead she saw three nerdy guys. Here's the dialogue which follows:

BUFFY: So you three have, what, banded together to be pains in my ass?
WARREN: (in his most pompous supervillian voice) We're your arch-nemesises ... ses. (Buffy and Willow looking confused) You may have beaten us this time, Slayer, but next time ... um ... uh, next time...
JONATHAN: Maybe not!

Maybe you had to be there. But it was really funny... The three nerds had this self-image as supervillains, Buffy's nemesisises.... and really they were just a bunch of hopeless nerds and losers, she had hardly been aware of their existence, and when they were revealed they became even less impressive. I never would have thought of such an obvious analogy for Campus Watch if they hadn't drawn my attention to it themselves! "Banding together to be a pain in our ass," indeed! God, Campus Watch is brilliant.. how can you mock an organization so good at unintentional self-parody?

Of course, Warren and the nerds did end up doing serious damage, completely by accident, when Warren killed Tara with a random bullet fired through the window. Sobering... all the above doesn't mean that they can't hurt people.

The Good Guys List

Campus Watch, the web site for the Pipes side of the Middle East studies culture wars, has posted a list of "recommended" - i.e. "thoughtful and balanced" - scholars of Middle East studies. They come up with 32 names. About a dozen are so obscure that I've never even heard of them - and I follow Middle East studies pretty carefully - teaching at schools so obscure that you've got to wonder how Campus Watch dug them up (Immaculata College? Georgia Perimeter College?).

I suspect that several of those thirty two are going to be less than happy to see their names on the list. And a whole bunch more of us will breathe sighs of relief that we didn't make the cut! Not because people on the list are going to punished by some imaginary junta of Middle East Studies political correctness commissars... just because it's kind of icky.

There are maybe 7 on the list in that I would put on an Aardvark's publicity stunt, um, I mean list of thoughtful and smart Middle East scholars worth studying with (and no, I'm not going to name them).

Globalization and Terrorism

Herb Kitschelt, a Duke political scientist who specializes in European political economy, has a forthcoming essay on the "Origins of Contemporary International Terrorism in the Middle East." (via Political Theory Info)
[Warning: what follows might be a little to political science-y for some of y'all. Sorry. Goes with the territory.]

Kitschelt's basic thesis is that "Islamist international terrorism is associated with polities and regions of the world where economic globalization has not taken place because public institutions do not support the development of viable capitalist markets." He then runs the problems created by this failure to globalize through a "political opportunity structure" mobilization model to explain why resentment became internationalized.

His findings aren't very surprising, and for all the sophistication of the theoretical presentation end up looking a lot like the conventional wisdom: failure to globalize causes economic deprivation and resentment; repressive regimes in the Middle East force challengers to the more permissive Western countries; Saudi Arabia buys off challengers by spending lots of money spreading Wahhabism; Islamism has largely failed as a political movement leaving it with few options other than violence. A fairly typical narrative.

But wrong, I think, in one key way: Kitschelt's conception of globalization is primarily economic, which leads him to the entirely correct assessment that the Middle East has failed to globalize.

But in a number of other ways, using broader conceptions of globalization, the problem in the Middle East may be too much rather than too little globalization. In particular, communications and media have played an enormous role in the transformation of regional politics. Al Jazeera and its competitors have revolutionized the media environment, and hence the political arena within which Islamists operate. The ease of communications and movement has tied diaspora networks back to the region in new ways, and of course facilitated the operation of networks such as that of al Qaeda. And international economic institutions like the IMF have dictated economic policies which have often fallen heavily on the vast majority of citizens of Middle Eastern states.

Failure to globalize, then, or a distorted, lopsided kind of globalization? What do people think?

Microsoft Contra Orientalism

I was contemplating the following sentence:

"The legacies of Orientalism, with its distorting lens shaping Western views of the Islamic world, as well as a mirror image Occidentalism shaping Islamic views of the West, complicated such dialogue."

Not a particularly good sentence, perhaps. But that's not the point here.

When I ran the spellcheck, Word challenged my use of the word "Orientalism." But it did not challenge the word "Occidentalism."

Now, since Martin Kramer has been warning us for years of the pervasive influence of Said's critique of Orientalism, wouldn't you think that "Orientalism" would be a more common word than the seemingly more esoteric "Occidentalism"?

I'm sure that this is profound evidence of something. I'm not really sure of what, though. Probably just that Microsoft Word sucks.

By the way, go Packers! The stars are aligned: Westbrook is out, it's really cold in Philadelphia, the unbeatable Rams with the horrifying dome have lost. So go Packers, beat the Eagles!