Author: issandr

Shatz on Khadra

Adam Shatz penned an excellent review piece on Yasmina Khadra’s work in the London Review of Books. Khadra — his real name is Mohammed Moulessehoul — wrote several extremely successful books in French under his wife’s name before being coming out openly to a massive fanfare in the French literary world. In his review, Shatz takes a look at what may have caused his books to be translated into English when so few Arab novelists are. Among the top causes are the current trend for what’s-wrong-with-Islam? books, a category Khadra fits neatly into because he is virurently anti-Islamist. But that, Shatz says, is ignoring the bigger and more complicated picture:

Khadra is a talented writer, but he isn’t a dissident. (As anyone who has spent time in Algeria knows, everyone there fancies himself a critic of the pouvoir, as they call their political system; the closer one is to the pouvoir, the more loudly one’s dissidence is proclaimed.) Whatever troubles Khadra once had with military censors, they are now a thing of the past. In a recent interview he declared that Algeria has ‘no political exiles’, which will have been news to exiled opponents of the military government such as Mohammed Harbi, a former FLN leader and modern Algeria’s leading historian. Though witheringly critical of Algeria’s Islamists, and of its business and political elites (the ‘political-financial mafia’), Khadra is notably indulgent of the army, which runs the country along with the Sécurité Militaire, the secret police, the regime’s ‘spinal cord’. Khadra’s books are prominently displayed in every Algerian bookshop, while La Sale Guerre (2001), a scathing memoir by Habib Souaidia, a former officer exiled in France, is banned.

It really is worth reading in full as a quick overview of Algeria’s recent history, and how the tragedy of the civil war has been manipulated by le pouvoir to create a group of anti-Islamist intellectuals who are quite mute when it comes to the military junta. It also applied to Algeria’s myriad feminist movements, which in some cases have been mostly regime apologists. This type of problem is at the core of the tendency in the West to quickly support “cosmetic democratizers” in the Arab and Islamic world — the Ahmed Chalabis and Benazir Bhuttos — or simply pyt up with the military types who say that the only alternative is the Islamists.

And while you’re at it, revisit this classic Shatz article on Fouad Ajami.

Spotted via Moorish Girl.

Baghdad Year Zero

The essential Iraq article of September seems to be Baghdad Year Zero, a Harper’s piece by Naomi Klein, which is both an interesting political essay and a fine example of investigative business journalism. It’s all about the neo-cons’ dream of making Iraq a shining example of neo-liberal economic policy-making, and how that dream failed miserably in the face of reality and probably helped fuel the degeneration of the situation in Iraq.

The great historical irony of the catastrophe unfolding in Iraq is that the shock-therapy reforms that were supposed to create an economic boom that would rebuild the country have instead fueled a resistance that ultimately made reconstruction impossible. Bremer’s reforms unleashed forces that the neocons neither predicted nor could hope to control, from armed insurrections inside factories to tens of thousands of unemployed young men arming themselves. These forces have transformed Year Zero in Iraq into the mirror opposite of what the neocons envisioned: not a corporate utopia but a ghoulish dystopia, where going to a simple business meeting can get you lynched, burned alive, or beheaded. These dangers are so great that in Iraq global capitalism has retreated, at least for now. For the neocons, this must be a shocking development: their ideological belief in greed turns out to be stronger than greed itself. 

The era of tough oil

The Chronicle of Higher Education reviews two books on The End of Easy Oil and concludes that the “securitizing” of oil issues has led and could lead to more instability and war in the Middle East:

“Rather than develop a sustained strategy for reducing our reliance on such sources, he says, American leaders “have chosen to securitize oil – that is, to cast its continued availability as a matter of ‘national security,’ and thus something that can be safeguarded through the use of military force.”

Klare argues that our demands for energy and those of other major powers will require the petroleum-rich Gulf states to “boost their combined oil output by 85 percent between now and 2020. … Left to themselves, the Gulf countries are unlikely to succeed; it will take continued American intervention and the sacrifice of more and more American blood to come even close. The Bush administration has chosen to preserve America’s existing energy posture by tying its fortunes to Persian Gulf oil.”

Even more worrisome, Klare says, is the intense and growing competition among countries such as the United States, China, India, and those in the European Community over petroleum supplies. “This competition is already aggravating tensions in several areas, including the Persian Gulf and Caspian Sea basins,” he writes. “And although the great powers will no doubt seek to avoid clashing directly, their deepening entanglement in local disputes is bound to fan the flames of regional conflicts and increase the potential for major conflagrations.”

“Muslims teach their children to hate”

As the Washington Post reported yesterday, the Council on American-Islamic Relations has sponsored a survey on perceptions of Muslims in the US, in which almost one third of respondents associate the term Muslim with a “negative image” (and only 2% with something positive). You can also see the entire survey here.

I find something like this interesting because it raises such a host of related questions. The way Islam is portrayed in the Western media for example, which is almost always as violent or irrational. Not to say that Islam can’t be very intolerant and isn’t used to spread intolerance (Muslims should ask themselves why about half of the American respondents said “Islam oppresses women.”) But I don’t think it’s the case with Islam more than with any other religion. I mean, when we talk about Islam as a violent religion, have we forgotten the Crusades? the Inquisition? Abortion clinic bombings?

Also, the way all conflict in the Middle East is reduced to religion. The Palestinians happen to be Muslims, but the violence in the Occupied Territories has to do with nationalism, not religion. That goes for a lot of Arab countries, where the roots of violent action are more political/social/economic, and religious terminology is used to frame and give legitimacy to grievances.

Finally, I think the current US administration bears a lot of responsibility for negative stereotypes about Muslims. Bush has made several disclaimers about how all Muslims are not terrorists. But if you want to be running a perpetual and amorphous war, and you want to drum up support for it, then you need a perpetual and amorphous enemy, and all the talk of “evil-doers” and “thugs” and “ideology of hate” has rendered the entire Middle East, in many Americans’ minds, one large hotbed of fanatical, freedom-hating, inhuman terrorists. This is convenient.

State Department blues

Salon is running a particularly disturbing and very detailed opinion piece by a current State Department official. The piece chronicles ongoing attempts on the part of neo-cons to infiltrate the last bastion of the US government that might offer dissenting views on their unabandoned, destructive, pro-Likud plans to reshape the Middle East. The writer is understandably distressed at the prospect of the State Department being taken over after Powell’s term by someone like Wolfowitz or Condoleezza Rice.

Iraq’s elections

Here’s a few notes on some recent stories that have come out about Iraq’s elections following the recent confusion about whether they might take place in January as planned, later, not at all, or only in the half of the country that is not under the control of insurgents.

  • Time reveals, probably for the first time but in a disappointingly short article, that it took a House democrat to scuttle a CIA plan to covertly provide funds to pro-US candidates in Iraq:

    U.S. officials tell TIME that the Bush team ran into trouble with another plan involving those elections — a secret “finding” written several months ago proposing a covert CIA operation to aid candidates favored by Washington. A source says the idea was to help such candidates — whose opponents might be receiving covert backing from other countries, like Iran — but not necessarily to go so far as to rig the elections. But lawmakers from both parties raised questions about the idea when it was sent to Capitol Hill. In particular, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi “came unglued” when she learned about what a source described as a plan for “the CIA to put an operation in place to affect the outcome of the elections.” Pelosi had strong words with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in a phone call about the issue.

    Juan Cole has a good analysis of the situation, and I personally can’t wait to see coverage of this in the Arab press. This kind of stuff confirms everything people in this part of the world believe already, and I only hope that armchair political scientists (or even the real ones) will stop pretending that this administration cares about democracy. The fact is, the same people who stridently called for war in the name of reforming the region now only want to go so far. The neo-cons aren’t as ideologically committed to democracy as everyone things, which is kind of obvious if you believe the whole Leo Strauss legacy and their belief in enlightened elitism.

    I like the straight-forward by Condoleeza Rice’s spokesman though:

    “I cannot in any way comment on classified matters, the existence or nonexistence of findings.”

    All this being said, you can’t deny that the money Iran is pumping into groups like SCIRI and into the elections is a problem. It might be something one could address through diplomacy, if that kind of thing was practiced anymore. Mind you it’s not unusual in democracies for foreign countries to have influence over elections, it it?

  • The cunning plan to counter this is to have an overt election financing scheme, which will be open to all parties:

    The Bush administration is exploring several steps aimed at containing Tehran’s growing influence in Iraq, according to U.S. officials, who say a split between the Pentagon and the State Department has paralyzed the administration’s ability to craft a long-term policy on Iran for three years.

    As one measure, the United States has earmarked $40 million to help Iraq’s political parties mobilize — and, subtly, to counter Iran’s support for its allies in an emerging race to influence the outcome, U.S. officials said.

    With the election in Iraq four months away, the administration has grown increasingly alarmed about the resources Tehran is pouring into Iraq’s already well-organized Shiite religious parties, which give them an edge over struggling moderate and nonsectarian parties, the officials said.

    Over the past year, Iran has provided tens of millions of dollars and other material support to a range of Iraqi parties, including the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, the Islamic Dawa Party and rebel cleric Moqtada Sadr’s Mahdi Army, U.S. officials say. The U.S. funds will in theory be available to all Iraqi parties, although the U.S. goal is to bolster the prospects of secular groups — on the premise that Iranian-backed parties are unlikely to turn to America for training or money, U.S. officials said.

    • Of course no one’s taken money from both the US and Iran before.

  • Hold on a minute. There is a friend of Iran who’s taken quite a lot of money from his friends in Washington. And he’s back in the game: Ahmed Chalabi has been acquitted from the evidence against him, who were found by an Iraqi judge to be without merit:

    The judge, Zuhair al-Maliky, said in a telephone interview that he decided about a week and a half ago that “the evidence was not enough to bring the case to trial.” If more evidence emerges, he said, the case will be reopened.

    The move appears to be a minor victory by Mr. Chalabi over the interim government led by Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, a longtime rival of Mr. Chalabi’s. The government announced the counterfeiting charge against Mr. Chalabi in August, while he was on vacation at a summer home in Iran. At the time, it appeared to many that the charge was a move by Mr. Allawi to dissuade him from re-entering the country.

    But Mr. Chalabi did return to Iraq and proceeded to denounce the government, meeting with reporters to proclaim his innocence and vow to return to political life. He aligned himself with Shiite religious leaders here, recasting himself as a champion of Shiite rights.

    It was the latest twist in Mr. Chalabi’s fortunes since he returned to Iraq in the spring of 2003 after decades in exile. Once favored by the Bush administration to be Iraq’s first leader after Saddam Hussein’s fall, he has spent the last few months fighting for his political future.

    Well he probably has his financing sorted out by now, as well as the advantage of not being seen as a US puppet like Allawi. Ahmed Chalabi may be one of the early twenty-first century’s great political survivor, you have to hand it to him.

  • Kevin Drum reminds us that there recently was an election in Iraq for four vice-chairmen of the Iraqi National Accord and that the candidates who were elected were, in order, a Shia fundamentalist, a communist, a member of interim prime minister Allawi’s group, and a sunni fundamentalist. He asks if this is a taste of things to come. It’s been little-reported and there are some good links to follow up, so read it.
  • Even King Abdullah is getting lukewarm about elections (mind you, he’s always felt that way about elections at home):

    “It seems impossible to me to organize indisputable elections in the chaos we see today,” the king told French daily Le Figaro before meeting President Jacques Chirac in Paris.

    “If the elections take place in the current disorder, the best-organized faction will be that of the extremists and the result will reflect that advantage.”

  • Trust the Tehran Times to be interested in the conference on the election planned in Egypt in mid-November. If things were going to happen as planned — i.e. the elections held in January — would there be a need for a conference? Why isn’t the election-monitoring being planned right now with the OSCE or some other organization with election-monitoring experience? There might not be anything intrinsically wrong with postponing the election, but it would be nice that the planning is taking place with the help of organizations with a proven reputation at running elections.
  • From my hotel room I just watched Thomas Melia, a Georgetown professor and “expert on democracy and governance” argue on BBC World that “commentators should be careful” and refer to the upcoming elections in Iraq as only “partially democratic.” He’s just returned from Baghdad where he conducted a survey on the issue, so I hope that what this means is explained further when it’s published.

    • I think I’ve said it before, but you really couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

    Language barrier

    The Guardian’s Middle East editor, Brian Whitaker, continues his look at Arab publishing and literature in Language barrier.

    I would only add that the state of affairs that Whitaker describes is not true for French publishers, which do quite often publish Arabic novels, either in translation or those written in French by Arab authors from North Africa or Lebanon. In fact, some very successful publishing houses like Actes Sud have specialized in publishing non-European literature. I can’t really think of anything equivalent in the English-speaking world.

    We linked the previous one here.

    Whodunnit?

    Hamas: Arab State May Have Helped in Syria Killing:

    “We were not convinced initially, this would be treason for an Arab security apparatus to be involved in this,” Hamas Lebanon head Osama Hamdan said of a report in the Al-Hayat daily.

    The Arabic daily said an Arab country had given the Israeli spy agency Mossad information about the movements and habits of Hamas leaders abroad.

    “Now, because of what happened yesterday or through other information, there are indications that this may be case,” he said.”

    I would bet on Jordan, or perhaps even the Syrians themselves. Who else would have that kind of information? And why would they share it with Israel — what would they get in return? Hell, you can’t even dismiss the possibility that it could be Egypt considering the difficulty it is having in negotiating with Hamas these days, and the fact that it will sooner or later have to confront it in Gaza if the pullout takes place. If we’re lucky, we’ll known in ten years. If we’re not, we’ll either never know at all or find out soon enough after someone gets assassinated.

    Update: It looks like they think it’s Jordan. And some people do think they will hit back:

    Hamas may retaliate by striking outside Israel, ex-ambassador says:

    Retaliation against Israelis outside their country could follow last weekend’s assassination in Damascus of a Hamas official, a respected Canadian analyst on the Middle East said yesterday.

    “There will be a tendency to explore overseas operations,” said Michael Bell, former Canadian ambassador to Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and Egypt”