Author Archive:

Elan Journo

Elan Journo

Elan Journo is fellow and director of Policy Research at ARI. His book, Winning the Unwinnable War, looks at what went wrong with America's response to 9/11—and what we should do going forward. [More.]

Short notes on Iraq, Syria

Wednesday, May 22, 2013 by Elan Journo

A few brief comments on recent developments in the Middle East:

Tags: , , ,

Posted in Foreign Policy

Send a comment to the author

Iran to chair U.N. disarmament panel. Yes, really.

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 by Elan Journo

200px-Emblem_of_the_United_Nations.svgOver at FoxNews.com, Anne Bayefsky captures the latest absurdity emanating from the United Nations:

In case you didn’t think the UN could get even more bizarre (and dangerous), try this one. Iran will soon become the President of the Conference on Disarmament. The Iranians rotate into the job for four weeks near the end of May. Their qualification for the position? Iran is the member state that comes next in the English alphabet after Indonesia.

Iran will have the task of managing the 2013 Conference agenda, which includes “the cessation of the nuclear arms race and nuclear disarmament.” On the one hand, since the mullahs running the country are engaged in a mad race to acquire nuclear arms, chairing a meeting on disarmament may be a bit of a struggle. On the other hand, the Conference just talks, and talking for its own sake is an Iranian art form.

Bayefsky hits the nail on the head: “Now the proverbial foxes guard the chicken coop. It would be funny, except that the Iranian fox really intends to devour the chickens.” Read the whole thing.

Tags: , ,

Posted in Foreign Policy

Send a comment to the author

How one academic warped Western views of the Middle East

Friday, May 3, 2013 by Elan Journo

What’s fascinating about the late Edward Said, a literature professor at Columbia, is how much (deleterious) impact he managed to have not only within academia, but far beyond. His career stands as a rebuke to the facile notion that “academic” necessarily means divorced from life, irrelevant. More than a decade after his death, Said’s influence on the field of Middle East studies—and on how many people in the West think about the region—remains indelible. By this point you might be asking: How does an English professor re-shape the study of the Middle East? That’s one of the questions touched on in Joshua Muravchik’s insightful piece at World Affairs:

Columbia University’s English Department may seem a surprising place from which to move the world, but this is what Professor Edward Said accomplished. He not only transformed the West’s perception of the Israel-Arab conflict, he also led the way toward a new, post-socialist life for leftism in which the proletariat was replaced by “people of color” as the redeemers of humankind.  [...]

The book that made Edward Said famous was Orientalism, published in 1978 when he was forty-three. Said’s objective was to expose the worm at the core of Western civilization, namely, its inability to define itself except over and against an imagined “other.” That “other” was the Oriental, a figure “to be feared . . . or to be controlled.” Ergo, Said claimed that “every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was . . . a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.” Elsewhere in the text he made clear that what was true for Europeans held equally for Americans.

Muravchik’s lengthy article goes on to expose the dubious character of Said’s scholarship. Even some who sympathized with his outlook blushed at his methodology and dodgy inferences. And yet—tellingly—his views became a kind of orthodoxy.

(You might also consider reading Martin Kramer’s excellent monograph, Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America, which is now available in PDF online. In a review  years ago I praised it, noting how Kramer skillfully explains the unlikely triumph of false ideas.)

Tags: , , ,

Posted in Foreign Policy

Send a comment to the author

The Jihad, two years after Bin Laden

Thursday, May 2, 2013 by Elan Journo

Two years ago, Navy SEALs dispatched Osama Bin Laden in a spectacular raid on his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The notion at the time was that the jihadists were done for, with Al Qaeda decapitated and its operations soon to be decimated.

But as I argued in my book (released in 2009), bringing Bin Laden to justice was essential but would be far from sufficient to thwart what we call the Islamic totalitarian movement, the cause of those seeking Islamic domination worldwide. The basic reason is that Al Qaeda is just one part of the movement, and Bin Laden was just one leader. If we conceptualize the forces we oppose as just Al Qaeda, or just the Taliban, or just random losers, etc., we fail to recognize that our enemy is moved by ideas and a common goal.

It remains to be seen whether the Boston bombers had contacts with jihadist enablers or groups; perhaps yes, perhaps no. But the fact remains that even without Bin Laden, the pernicious ideas fueling the jihad remain potent and continue to empower attacks against us.

Tags: , ,

Posted in Foreign Policy

Send a comment to the author

30 years ago: Beirut Embassy bombing

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 by Elan Journo

Beirutembassy

The roar sounded like thunder, but there were no storm clouds in the sky; it sounded like the dynamite used by fishermen working the waters off the nearby coast, but far louder and closer. When the explosive-laden truck rammed the building and blew up, the blast tore away much of the building’s facade. A fine dust of glass and debris clouded the air. Broken pipes spewed out jets of water. Employees inside the U.S. Embassy in Beirut felt the entire building sway; they were the lucky ones. The guards at the front entrance were obliterated by the force of the explosion. Sixty-three people died, seventeen of them Americans.

For the driver of the truck, a jihadist, this was a suicide mission. The attack had been orchestrated on the ground in Lebanon by Hezbollah, an Islamic totalitarian outfit that Iran had helped organize, train, direct, and finance. Hezbollah’s mandate was to establish an Iran-style regime in Lebanon. It was Tehran’s proxy force, part of the jihadist vanguard, working to expand the Islamic revolution.

Thirty years ago this month, so began the Iran-backed proxy war against America.

cc: wikicommons

Tags: , ,

Posted in Foreign Policy

Send a comment to the author

Iranian-linked plot in Toronto

Monday, April 22, 2013 by Elan Journo

[CNN reports that] Canadian authorities have arrested two men accused of planning to carry out an al Qaeda-supported attack against a passenger train traveling between Canada and the United States, a U.S. congressman told CNN on Monday.

“As I understand it, it was a train going from Canada to the U.S.,” Rep. Peter King, R-New York, chairman of the counterterrorism and intelligence subcommittee, said.

The news follows an announcement earlier in the day by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that they had arrested Chiheb Esseghaier, 30, and Raed Jaser, 35.

The two men are charged with “receiving support from al Qaeda elements in Iran” to carry out an attack and conspiring to murder people on a VIA railway train in the greater Toronto area, Assistant Police Commissioner James Malizia said.

“When I speak about supported, I mean direction and guidance,” he said. [emphasis added]

Received wisdom after 9/11 was that Iran’s role in terrorism was confined to the Middle East. That was false then. It’s false now: Tehran has a well-established role as a global standard bearer and enabler for the jihadist cause, a point I argue in Winning the Unwinnable War. While the Iranian role in the alleged plot in Canada remains to be proven, on the face of it this fits with the regime’s modus operandi.

Tags: , ,

Posted in Foreign Policy

Send a comment to the author

An Iran do-over for Obama?

Monday, April 22, 2013 by Elan Journo

protesters in IranMichael Ledeen writes in the Wall Street Journal that with “an Iranian presidential election coming in June, President Obama may be presented with a second chance to get his policy right.”

In 2009, when massive protests followed Iran’s disputed presidential vote, Mr. Obama sat by as the insurrection was brutally put down by the Tehran regime. But the rage against the regime is still intense, and if similar protests explode in June, the White House should be prepared.

The president ought to know from the example of the Arab Spring that seemingly secure despots can be toppled by popular will. The coming elections offer a chance for America to demonstrate its belated support for the Iranian opposition, and Washington would do well to encourage the Iranian people to rise up in the coming months.

Ledeen points to evidence that some opponents of the Islamists’ regime are eager to rise up. Perhaps they are. Their bravery is laudable. And it would be wise for Washington to back them. But it beggars belief that now, four years later, the Obama administration would somehow adopt the correct policy toward protestors. What signs are there that the administration has learned from its failures in the last few years?

Tags: ,

Posted in Foreign Policy

Send a comment to the author

Bowden in IBD: What are the search results when you Google “antitrust”?

Friday, April 19, 2013 by Elan Journo

My colleague Tom Bowden has a new piece at Investor’s Business Daily on the antitrust campaign against Google.

Yielding to the European Union’s threat of massive fines, Google will reportedly change the way it displays search results and, in some cases, even include links to rival search engines. Earlier this year, the Internet giant capitulated to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission after a 19-month investigation, promising to change its advertising practices.

How do the world’s most powerful governments get away with treating Google like a villain? After all, this is a company that has built a reputation for improving people’s lives in a thousand ways.

Just ask the millions of visitors who type keywords into Google’s legendary search engine, or who use the many other services — email, maps, videos, travel arrangements, comparison shopping, books, and the like — that Google offers for free. Yes, for free.

The answer lies buried in the unavoidable vagaries of antitrust law — an irrational regime that grants competitive grumblings the exalted status of legal injuries, then empowers government enforcers to override market outcomes.

Read the whole thing.

Tags: ,

Posted in Business & Economics, Government & Policy

Send a comment to the author

Palestinians arming for war?

Wednesday, April 17, 2013 by Elan Journo

The Palestinian Authority is conventionally regarded as far less militant than Hamas. With that in mind:

Almost $1b., about 28 percent of the [Palestinian Authority] budget, will be spent on defense, compared to 16% for education and 10% for medical services. In other words, a bulk of the PA’s funds will not be used for schooling, health or infrastructure, but for procuring weapons and maintaining a massive military structure.

Odd how a “government which is not officially at war with Israel, and has no formal army” has opted to invest so much money in militarization. [Emphasis added]. Where is the money coming from?

To maintain their military budget, and payments to prisoners, the PA will need over $1b. in foreign aid. [...] In essence, the world’s most advanced democracies will be helping the Palestinian government advance their militancy and tyranny.

The article, by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner at the Jerusalem Post, also notes that some $60 million a year is to be spent to “reward terrorism against Israel,” in the form of “payments to the families of Palestinian Arab terrorists incarcerated in Israeli prisons.” (On links between foreign aid and Palestinian militancy, see also this post from a while back.)

The whole article is well worth reading.

Tags: , ,

Posted in Foreign Policy

Send a comment to the author

Bombing at Boston Marathon

Monday, April 15, 2013 by Elan Journo

Let’s hope there are no further fatalities reported. Nothing definite known about the culprits yet, except that they managed to detonate two coordinated bombs and wreak havoc. CNN reports that the federal authorities are treating it as a “terror event.”

 

Posted in Foreign Policy, Government & Policy

Send a comment to the author