Informed Comment

Kuwaiti authorities are confirming that al-Qaeda was behind the attack there Tuesday on two Americans, which killed one and gravely injured the other. They have been interrogating Sami Muhammad Marzuq al-Mutayri (Mutairi), who was captured by the Saudis and turned back over to Kuwait. An employee of Kuwait’s department of social affairs, he had tried to go to Afghanistan after the September 11 attacks on the US, to fight for al-Qaeda. The 24-year-old has confessed to the shooting, and says that he had accomplices who are still at large.

Al-Qaeda has switched from theatrical terrorism to such smallish operations that can be carried out by a single individual against US civilians and government/military personnel.

Yemen and Bahrain both pleaded yesterday with Washington to employ non-military means to deal with the Iraq crisis. Since both governments are cooperating closely with the US military, it is hard to see such statements as more than fig leaves for public consumption. That is not to say the sentiments are insincere, only that these small, weak governments have no ability to resist the US if it goes to war, and would not try. Indeed, they will actively cooperate in key ways, especially Bahrain.

French President Jacques Chirac has also admitted that he has no power to stop the US from going to war if it really wants to, despite his own feeling that a war now would be at least premature. Nato ministers met yesterday to discuss whether to support the US in the coming war. It was from all accounts a heated discussion. Apparently the ministers do not dispute with the Bush administration about the grounds for a war, but feel the inspections should run their course and diplomatic avenues should be exhausted first.

Russian intelligence sources reported that the Russian military has been informed that the US will launch the war in the middle of February. That seems quite plausible to me.

Gen. Myers said yesterday that the US has evidence that the Iraqi high command is rattled at the prospect of a war. This is news? That they are Baathists doesn’t mean they are brain dead.

It seems to me that the war has all but begun, and the Russians are right that we are about three weeks away from it. It amazes me that my friends on the left think that mere public opinion can still avert it. The only real bar to the war could have been raised last fall in Congress, and wasn’t. Bush has all the domestic authorization he needs. And the UNSC resolution can be interpreted as a warrant for action if the Iraqis are found to be flaunting it (and they are at least being uncooperative with the inspections).

I think there are grounds for such a war, but think it highly unwise to launch it without an explicit, second UN Security Council Resolution. The Bush administration hawks are essentially tearing up the UN Charter and the post- WW II attempts to avert further aggressive, unilateral wars. The US is the most powerful country in the world, and sets precedents about things like legitimate grounds for military action. If we do this thing in the teeth of UNSC, we will all eventually suffer for it. But, that maniac mass-murderer Bin Laden gave the Bushies a public warrant for their perpetual war, and there is nothing anyone can do about it for now. When Wolfowitz goes on to China, then maybe the American public will be war-weary enough to put a stop to this crusade.

If the left is wise, it will begin holding the administration’s feet to the fire about the need for democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq. The former is being re-talibanized by our allies, and the Rumsfeld-Cheney axis would be happy with a less repressive dictatorship in Baghdad. If there is going to be a war, the US should do its best to get a genuinely democratic Iraq out of it. The worst case scenario is we risk all this world opprobrium and kill 30,000 Iraqis, just to end up with another iron fist, only garbed in a velvet glove.

History News Network

1-20-03: Culture Watch

Why Are Arch Conservatives Ganging Up on the Middle East Studies Association?

By Juan Cole

I had never even heard of Stanley Kurtz before he began attacking the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). He is woefully misinformed about my professional association. As far as I can tell, he speaks no Arabic or Persian and has never studied the Middle East. He does not show up in any author indexes I looked at online. Now he has set himself up to judge the scholarly work of persons like myself, though he has read almost none of it. He is a columnist for the National Review, and he was a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and is now is a fellow at the Hudson Institute, which has links to the Israeli Right as well as to Jewish neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz. Since his only trade appears to be in garish opinion, it is rather sad that some of what he says is so obviously incorrect that it makes him look like a clown.

Contrary to what Kurtz attempts to imply, the Middle East Studies Association is not a research institute. It is not a political action committee. Its members differ wildly among themselves about political issues. Arab-Americans, e.g., tend to vote Republican, and they are a small but significant proportion of members. Such matters do not arise in the panels, however, because it is just a professional association. Anyone can join it who can demonstrate possession of two of three criteria: a degree in, publications in, and service to the academic study of the Middle East. It was founded in 1966.

MESA’s hundred or so founding members were highly diverse, including European immigrant scholars, WASP offspring of diplomats or missionaries who had encountered the Middle East as children, former State Department personnel who had gone into academics, Zionists who had learned their Arabic in Israel, Arab-Americans, and others whose lives had lead them into university teaching about the Middle East.

MESA has grown to have about 2600 members from colleges and universities in the United States, but by my count only about a thousand of them are tenured or tenure-track professors. The rest are adjuncts, graduate students, and associate members (e.g. architects and computer systems analysts who have at least an MA in Middle East studies). Still, there is no doubt that the field–though small–has grown enormously since 1966. MESA does not receive U.S. government money, and has a small income, mainly from private dues and its annual conference (in good years).

Now we come to Stanley Kurtz. After MESA’s mid-November annual meeting in Washington, D.C., Kurtz commented in the National Review Online, that “they meet in DC regularly, to remind the federal government just how much MESA scholars contribute to our national security in exchange for all the money they get from the federal government.” MESA does not meet in Washington, D.C., because of the U.S. government, and certainly not because the organization conceives itself as having anything to do with “national security.” It is just an association of college teachers, for heaven’s sake. I’m not aware that anyone from the government even bothers to come to most of the meetings. Washington is centrally located on the East Coast, and MESA conferences tend to be big when held there, generating a little extra pocket change for a cash-strapped organization every third year.

Moreover, MESA does not get any money at all from the Federal government. Some of its member institutions do get small sums, but they are not mediated by MESA. The 15 federally funded National Resource Centers concerned with the Middle East at major universities get an average of $200,000 a year each from the government through Title VI, much of which goes to funding graduate students to study Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Hebrew. Since a typical fellowship costs $20,000, and since the Centers do other things, they can only really support a handful of students each with this money. This is a paltry sum of money, and the scandal is that it is so little, given the need of a democratic society to keep informed of foreign policy challenges. Kurtz wants to make it seem that MESA and its members are raking mountains of funds from the taxpayer. The NRC’s have for decades turned out many of the few Arabic, Persian and Turkish linguists of high caliber that we have in this country, and the main complaint I have at this moment is that the government did not spend more on turning out greater numbers of them.

Kurtz then goes on to say, “Trouble is, there are no panels scheduled on suicide bombing or Wahhabism, no mention of al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. Even the few mentions of ‘terrorism’ are put in quotes.” Kurtz now attempts to make it seem as though the annual convention of the Middle East Studies Association had no panels of any relevance to current events, and that this is a sin of some sort. But this complaint has two flaws. First, it is rather like flogging the Modern Language Association for having no panels on the resignation of Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neil. MESA is not a contemporary affairs research institute. A good third of its members are historians, who will likely not present papers on the present. Others work on literature, economics, and religion. Second, there were several important panels on contemporary affairs, including Islamic radicalism. I organized a well-attended panel on Afghanistan and the War on Terror in which Bin Laden and the Taliban were prominently mentioned and where there were no quotation marks in evidence. An evening session on the Israel-Palestinian peace process was [scheduled to be] addressed by the Bush Administration undersecretary of state for Near East, William Burns.

Kurtz continues, “These scholars, who are getting subsidized by the federal government for contributing to our national security, are busy planning panels on Middle Eastern ‘sex and gender’ in the early twentieth century.” Most MESA scholars receive no subsidies from the government for contributing to our national security. And if Kurtz does not think sexuality and gender are wrought up with the region’s current crises, he has not been paying much attention! In actual fact, there has been a lack of academic writing about sexuality in the Middle East, even though it clearly underlies many of the culture wars in the area. The panel he trashed was innovative and illuminating, but of course he did not bother to attend it, so how could he have known? Being informed is apparently not part of his job.

He ends this whine by saying, “where is the attention to the crisis of the moment? Is this what we’re paying for? After all the embarrassing revelations about their refusal to deal with the reality of terrorism and Muslim fundamentalism, these scholars have learned nothing.” But Kurtz has not paid for the MESA conference. Its members paid for it. Most panelists had never received a dime from the U.S. government. Many who did, received it because the Department of Education wanted historians of the region to be trained, and they are now doing history as requested. In actual fact, moreover, there have been papers on Muslim fundamentalism at MESA conferences ad nauseum since the late 1970s. There were such panels in Washington, and they were very interesting. Most Middle Easterners are not and never have been fundamentalists, however, and only a tiny number have ever been terrorists, so if you are interested in actually studying the region, having an overemphasis on these phenomena would not be very helpful. It would be like insisting that Italian historians work only on the Cosa Nostra.

Kurtz has been at this for some time. He has argued that the Middle East Studies field is ideologically dominated by the work of Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said and that dissenters are denied academic positions in it. This argument is plain silly. Hires are made by history, anthropology, political science and other departments on a grass roots basis at universities throughout the country, and no such conspiracy could possibly be orchestrated. Said’s work, which remains controversial, almost never appears in the footnotes of the organization’s flagship journal, the International Journal of Middle East Studies. MESA includes in its member organizations the Israel Studies Society, and some of its members are transplanted Israelis teaching at U.S. universities. Several presidents of MESA, including persons Kurtz and other conservatives have viciously attacked, have been Jewish Americans.

Last spring Kurtz implicitly attacked the political scientists at the Middle East Centers at American universities for being postmodernist, leftist, anti-American terrorist-coddlers. The 14 or so tenured professors of Middle East political science at the federally funded National Resource Centers, however, include Leonard Binder of UCLA (who fought on Israel’s side in the 1948 war); Joel Migdal and Ellis Goldberg at the University of Washington, Seattle (exponents of the New Institutionalism and Rational Choice, respectively); Mark Tessler of the University of Michigan (with a Ph.D. From Hebrew University, who analyzes survey data quantitatively), Lisa Anderson and Gary Sick of Columbia (comparative politics and policy studies, respectively; Sick is a former naval officer and served on the National Security Council), and so on. Of the fourteen, only one (Timothy Mitchell at New York University) could be considered a postmodernist, and his work on the Middle East from that framework has been illuminating. None of the fourteen has ever to my knowledge supported any sort of terrorism.

Kurtz has no idea what he is talking about. The interesting question is why he should care. It may well be that this is a bank robbery. He wants Congress to give the little money that now supports the academic and linguistic study of the Middle East instead to partisan think tanks like his own Hudson Institute. Why should we fund a distinguished scholar like Leonard Binder and his students when we have Stanley Kurtz to tell us all about the Muslim world based on his vast fund of knowledge and his intricate knowledge of Arabic, Persian and Turkish? Or perhaps in his world, the study of manuscripts or the gathering of survey data is unnecessary. All that is important is to have a strongly held opinion, expressed with some panache.

Meanwhile, when Stanley Kurtz wants insights into contemporary Egypt, where does he turn? Why to the work of Diane Singerman, a political scientist at American University and a member of the Executive Board of the Middle East Studies Association of North America. (See his “With Eyes Wide Open: Who They Are; What We’re Getting Into,” National Review, February 20, 2002.)

If you’d like to see Congress increase Title VI funding for the professional study of Middle Eastern languages and cultures, contact the long-serving and prominent member of the House Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education Appropriations, Rep. David Obey (D-Wisconsin) at 2314 Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, D.C. 20515, phone: (202) 225-3365. Other committee members can be found at: http://www.house.gov/appropriations/members.htm, and you should especially write them if you are from their district.

US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld today sketched out his vision of a post-Saddam Iraq. He said it would be a country that was not attempting to acquire weapons of mass destruction. And, he said it would have a government that tended toward what we would think of as a democracy, but that neither a US or a British template would be imposed on it. It would be authentically Iraqi. He gave the example of the Loya Jirga (tribal council) in Afghanistan that made Hamid Karzai president of that country last summer.

I find all this extremely dismaying. First of all, either Iraq is going to have a representative, parliamentary government, or it is not. The UK *is* the template for that. Its parliament is not called the “mother of parliaments” for nothing. When we say India is a democracy or Australia is a democracy, it is because they have a parliamentary template! There is no indigenous “Iraqi” form of “democracy” that would pass muster in today’s world. I am afraid that if Rumsfeld is talking this way, what the Defense Department really intends to impose on Iraq is some form of authoritarian rule that has enough trappings of public consent that it can be fobbed off on the rest of us as vaguely democratic.

His choice of Afghanistan as an example was particularly inept. The Loya Jirga turns out to have been a mugging. The warlords and the secret police ran that thing and ensured a pre-ordained outcome. The “delegates” hadn’t been elected by the people. In its aftermath, Karzai has gotten to be mayor of Kabul, with powerful warlords running Herat and Mazar, etc. There continues to be faction-fighting and Taliban-like oppression of women. The country is fragmented. If this is what Rumsfeld foresees for Iraq, then he is taking us into a huge catastrophe.

* Both Colin Powell and Condi Rice have by now openly come out in favor of the University of Michigan admissions system, which awards points for various factors, including poverty, location (the Upper Peninsula students get points) and also race. They are thus in direct opposition to the position of President Bush. But, I think they had a duty to resign. In a democratic government if a minister or a close adviser differs deeply with the chief executive on a matter of important policy, the only honest course is resignation. Moreover, I suspect if the two of them had stuck together and made a stand, credibly *threatening* resignation over the issue, they could have forestalled Bush taking this step. Should the Bush position prevail at the Supreme Court this spring, I think the university should simply begin awarding extra points for urban poverty. It should not go to the Texas system of admitting the top ten percent of each high school graduating class, which is insipid and depends on de facto racial segregation. It should simply identify a race-neutral category such as urban poverty (in the Michigan context) that would have the same effect as giving points based on race.

* The Los Angeles Times reports that the Indian firm NEC Engineering Private Ltd., employed front companies and phony documents to “export 10 consignments of raw materials and equipment that Saddam Hussein’s regime could use to produce chemical weapons and propellants for long-range missiles . . .” These shipments included “atomized aluminum powder and titanium centrifugal pumps” and were worth nearly $1 mn.; they were shipped “between September 1998 and February 2001.” The destinations were listed as other countries in the region, but they actuall went to Iraq. An Iraqi dissident author visiting Jordan also gave a secret interview to Pino Buonagiorna of the Milan “Panorama” in which he said the emphasis on Iraqi scientists developing weapons of mass destruction themselves is overblown, and that much can simply be imported, which is what Saddam has done.

*On Monday morning at 2 am police finally raided a mosque in the Finsbury Park district of London, which has been under surveillance for some time. The preacher there, Abu Hamza al-Masri (actually just an engineer) has attempted to justify the September 11 attacks. He had refused to heed warnings that his statements made him liable to arrest on the basis of the UK’s new anti-terrorism statute.

On Sunday, Sir John Stevens, head of London’s Metropolitan police, had warned that there are large numbers of al-Qaeda supporters in the UK who have not yet been apprehended. Worries have sharpened recently because of the discovery of an Algerian cell, presumably of the Armed Islamic Group, that had stockpiled poison ricin gas in a London apartment. A British police officer–Detective Constable Oake–was stabbed to death when he and others attempted to apprehend some of this group in Manchester. According to Jane’s Defence weekly, some 2800 Algerian militants were trained by al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. This is the third largest country cohort after Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Spokesmen for immigrant groups in the UK expressed concern about suspicions falling on all Algerians. Many Algerians, they say, are legitimately in the UK as asylum seekers and are not violent. The Algerian civil war of the past decade has killed more than a 100,000 persons.

*Returned Afghan refugees numbering nearly 2 million are in danger of starving and freezing this winter because the international community has not sufficiently followed through on its pledges, made at Tokyo over a year ago, to provide reconstruction aid. There are also troubling reports of the US military high-handedly arresting Afghans in places like Kabul without any due process, which is beginning to provoke protests among the Afghan population.

*Japan is signalling behind the scenes that Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi might well support a US war on Iraq without a second UN Security Council resolution authorizing it, as long as the US does provide compelling proof that the Iraqis are developing weapons of mass destruction. It would not do so in the absence of such proof. Presumably the Japanese stance on the issue is related to policy toward North Korea. But given how unpopular the war is in the Middle East, and how Japan has usually attempted to avoid stepping on toes there because it depends heavily on Middle East petroleum, this statement is remarkable.

Muhammad al-Shafi`i reports in Asharq al-Awsat today that the newspaper has acquired a copy of a letter purported to be from Usama Bin Laden and signed by him via an Islamic institute in Pakistan. The letter is a call by Bin Laden for an end to factionalism among (hardline) Muslims, especially those of the jihadi (holy war) tendency, who, he says, have fallen to fighting with one another rather than against the common foe. The letter gives Koranic and other justifications for such unity and the need to band together against a threat to Islam.

The letter is the first written document in which Bin Laden identifies himself with the jihadi tendency explicitly (though that should have been clear from the videotape found in Afghanistan last year where he was boasting about helping plan September 11).

The article also notes that a couple of books with an al-Qaeda orientation have appeared, including one entitled “The New Crusades” which is dedicated to the US Congress on the flyleaf. (That dedication is chilling since Bin al-Shibh says the Capitol was an al-Qaida target on 9/11).

This document shows that either Bin Laden is still alive and attempting to gain leadership over the jihadi tendency, or that someone else is trying to do so in his name. The jihadis include the Egyptian al-Jihad al-Islami and the still-militant faction of the Islamic Grouping; as well as Pakistani groups such as Soldiers of the Companions of the Prophet and Harakat al-Mujahidin.

It may well be that with the accession to political power of the Jami`at Ulama-yi Islam and the Jama`at-i Islami in the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan, new civil leaders of the jihadi tendency are emerging, focused especially on Kashmir, which have dissociated themselves from al-Qaida in order to avoid the Pakistani government manhunt. The abandonment of violence by a major faction of the Islamic Grouping is also disturbing to the remnants of al-Qaida.

French President Jacques Chirac issued a blunt and forceful warning today to the Bush administration that for it to launch a unilateral attack on Iraq without a second, explicit UN Security Council resolution would constitute a breach of international law. Too right! It is absolutely unacceptable that the Bush administration should act in such a high-handed manner, and can only have bad repercussions on the US throughout the world. It is a horrible idea. Launching a war with a security council resolution is risky enough! But at least then it would have some legitimacy.