Thursday’s Middle East Memo, 12.15.2005

For those readers familiar with my Middle East Week in Review, this new feature, Middle East Memo, is meant to replace it. The reason for the change is that I wanted to stop attempting to act as a general news source and free up time to deal with my mo…

Resisting the serious pressure on the US administration for early withdrawal from Iraq to save lives and taxes, Robert Kaplan thinks the troops should remain indefinitely. It begs the question of how long the policy on the Middle East of a representative government can ignore public opinion.

Good interview – I’ve read eight of his books, and so it is interesting to see his thinking evolve over time, as he has influenced my thinking, and mine evolves. A few points:

1) Iran: I agree on the initial point he makes about how he used to be optimistic about peaceful change there, and isn’t now. The regime is quite firmly entrenched; its the thoughtful and careful Islamists like Rafsanjani who want to kill Americans, destroy Israel and dominate the region against crazy insane people like Ahmadinejad who want to acheive the same goals.

I disagree with his point at the end about Iran determining the future of the Middle East. Over the past three decades they have been influential in pioneering the suicide bomber tactic and they have been an inspiration to Sunni Islamists who want to replicate their success, but their influence in the Arab world is mainly negative; they make Persian Gulf countries want to be close to the U.S. Even in Iraq, where their influence is the greatest, the new government there is very different from their own, perhaps even a threat in the long-term if it inspires democratic revolution. They are losing in Lebanon. And their cultural influence is marginal. Iran is really important in terms of support for terrorism and nuclear proliferation, but that is it.

2) Afghanistan & Iraq: I agree that we have acheived more in the former than we should have expected. In Iraq, we haven’t acheived as much as we expected, but we were over-optimistic. We shouldn’t have expected to have all this work out in a year or two.

To respond to IJ’s comment, we shouldn’t “ignore public opinion” in perservering in Iraq, but recognize that public opinion is the way it is because of (a) ignorance and (b) moral weakness. We need to work on those. We don’t need to stay in Iraq indefinitely, Kaplan only says we shouldn’t set a timetable, and I agree because then our opponents would start counting the days.

Kaplan is right that we have acheived more in Iraq than Haiti or Kosovo.

3) Asia: He doesn’t lose sight of China. The point about the need for military cooperation with Indonesia is interesting. I’m not sure what he means when he says “we need to develop a more realistic outlook on India.” I have great hopes for that burgeoning alliance, but I’m not sure how far that can go and perhaps he means we shouldn’t expect too much.

On the subject of education, Robert Kaplan was interviewed by ‘American Enterprise Online’. In 1998, American Enterprise formed an alliance with the Brookings Institute to help public enlightenment. Specifically the purpose of the US alliance is to hold lawmakers and regulators accountable for their decisions.

In September AEI-Brookings released a report on the cost of intervening in Iraq:

“Government policies are routinely subjected to rigorous cost analyses. Yet one of today’s most controversial and expensive policies””?the ongoing war in Iraq””?has not been. . . . [O]ur best estimates suggests that the direct economic costs to the U.S. through August 2005 are about $255 billion, about $40 billion to coalition partners, and $134 billion to Iraq. These estimates suggest a global cost to date of about $428 billion. The avoided costs, meanwhile, are about $116 billion. We estimate that the expected total net present value of the direct costs through 2015 could be $604 billion to the U.S., $95 billion to coalition partners, and $306 billion to Iraq, suggesting a global total expected net present value of about *$1 trillion*. The net present value of total avoided costs, meanwhile, could be about $429 billion.”
The comment on the paper (linked at bottom of page) makes interesting reading too.

Younghusband: When Kaplan says that “the future of the Middle East will be determined by Iran,” I interpret that to mean that if democracy rises and the regime falls this will spur reform in other countries nearby, but if the Islamist regime stands, that will reinforce Islamism; i.e. Iran has some cultural force beyond sponsoring suicide bombers. You seem to interpet it the same way.

I think that the statement is wrong: Outside of Iraq, Iran has no more cultural impact on the Arab world than Turkey, whose democracy has had no impact. It is non-Arab and Shia, and so no one outside the Shia minority is influenced by them at all. And the Shia of Iraq have different thinking anyway about political theory, so even there Iranian influence is limited.

Compare with Iraq: the democratic flowering in Iraq is spurring reform forces everywhere in the Arab world, because they have the same language and culture. Iraq has been central to the Arab world since the 8th century. It will continue to be so in the future. Iraq will much more likely be an influence on Iran than vice versa, because Iranian reformers will set up shop in democratic Shia Iraq and export the revolution eastward.

I do agree with Kaplan’s statement about Sistani deserving a Nobel Peace Prize.

IJ: The estimated amount of our unfunded liabilities in Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security is roughly $45 trillion over the next half century, and those programs are of dubious constitutionality, whereas foreign policy is the clear mandate of the federal government. Iraq will be central to U.S. foreign policy for decades to come. Whatever the final number is in Iraq, it is a good investment.

I agree with your point as expressed in the third paragraph: anti-Americanism has a much stronger native base in the Arab world than Iran, a country which, free of the current regime, would naturally want to have close relations with the United States. I just thought that if Kaplan was pushing the idea that Iran might have some broad influence in the Arab world, the way Iraq could, then I don’t agree with that.

In re to Iraq, I think that the Sunni areas could take years to fully integrate into a democratic system, but the real action will be in the south. Look and watch at what happens in Karbala and Najaf. If these cities, which are the historic centers of Shi’ism, become bases for Iranian reformers, Tehren will need to watch out. And even without stability in Iraq, I think it is already having an impact elsewhere in the Arab world.