Foreign Policy

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

Tuesday, May 14, 2013 by

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.

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How one academic warped Western views of the Middle East

Friday, May 3, 2013 by

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.)

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The Jihad, two years after Bin Laden

Thursday, May 2, 2013 by

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.

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30 years ago: Beirut Embassy bombing

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 by

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

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Iranian-linked plot in Toronto

Monday, April 22, 2013 by

[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.

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An Iran do-over for Obama?

Monday, April 22, 2013 by

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?

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Palestinians arming for war?

Wednesday, April 17, 2013 by

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.

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Flotilla raid to blame?

Friday, April 12, 2013 by

President Obama’s March mission to coax an apology from Israel for the 2010 flotilla raid that left eight Turks dead has brought the decrepit state of Turkish-Israeli relations back into the spotlight.

According to the popular narrative, the Israeli decision to confront the boats with maritime commandos was not only unjustified and reprehensible, but also drove a wedge between the two states, ruining a once-cooperative relationship.

The truth, though, is that the relationship was crumbling long before 2010. And not on any fault of the Israelis.

Turkey expert Michael Rubin, of the American Enterprise Institute, argues that the secular, relatively-free Turkey that Israel had come to trust began to disappear as early as 2002, when the Islamist Justice and Development Party won Turkey’s general election. Over the next decade, he writes, Turkey underwent a methodical revolution that transformed it from a staunchly secular state, to an Islamic one:

Gone, and gone permanently, is secular Turkey, a unique Muslim country that straddled East and West and that even maintained a cooperative relationship with Israel. Today Turkey is an Islamic republic whose government saw fit to facilitate the May 31 flotilla raid on Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Turkey is now more aligned to Iran than to the democracies of Europe. Whereas Iran’s Islamic revolution shocked the world with its suddenness in 1979, Turkey’s Islamic revolution has been so slow and deliberate as to pass almost unnoticed. Nevertheless, the Islamic Republic of Turkey is a reality—and a danger.

Since the 2002 election of the Justice and Development Party, Turkey’s increasingly theocratic orientation has expressed itself in the form of antagonism against Israel. One way this has been manifest is in Turkey’s dealings with Israel’s enemies. In addition to aligning itself with Iran, Turkey has effectively endorsed Hamas by inviting its leader Khaled Meshaal to meetings in Ankara in 2006 and then, of course, sponsoring the blockade-challenging flotilla in 2010.

Taking account of these observations, the deterioration of Turkish-Israeli relations has to do with a more consequential factor, which predates the flotilla raid: Turkey’s embrace of a hostile ideology.

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Islamists Rising in the Middle East: Where next for America? [Event]

Thursday, April 4, 2013 by

For readers in northern California: on April 11 at U.C. Davis I’ll be part of a panel on the rise of Islamists in the the Middle East, with Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, and Larry Greenfield, Senior Fellow at the American Freedom Alliance. Here’s the event description:

Since the so-called Arab Spring, upheavals and revolutions have racked the Middle East. So far, the Islamist movement has gained not only greater prominence but also political power in Egypt and elsewhere. Amid the tumult in Egypt, the Syrian civil war, and an imminently nuclear-capable Iran, what are America’s interests in the region? What’s fueling the rise of Islamists, and how should we view them?

Where are things heading in the Israel-Palestinian conflict? What should America’s policy be toward the region, and toward Israel in particular?

Join the panel for a discussion of these and related questions.

The Facebook event page provides the info on time and venue.

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Will the EU take a stand on Hezbollah?

Tuesday, April 2, 2013 by

Bulgaria’s February announcement implicating Hezbollah in a July 2012 bus bombing has brought a torrent of pressure upon the European Union to finally designate the group as a terrorist organization.

Indeed, a furor is swelling—with US House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Ed Royce deeming the EU policy “indefensible.”  The July attack, which was perpetrated in the resort city of Burgas and left five Israeli tourists dead, was the first on EU member state soil in decades that has been directly linked to Hezbollah. To compound the issue, two weeks ago a court convicted a Hezbollah operative of plotting another attack on Israeli travelers, this time on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus—also an EU member state.

Given these developments, will the EU join the US, Canada, and Israel in labeling Hezbollah as a terrorist group, thereby freezing its assets and rendering any operations illegal?

Since 2004, the Dutch have been lobbying their EU partners to join them in levying the terrorist designation against Hezbollah and the recent developments have certainly given their arguments a new gravitas. According to Dutch Prime Minister Frans Timmermans, “Bulgaria’s findings will quickly lead to fresh consultations in Brussels on designating Hezbollah a terrorist organization.”

But (and with the EU there’s always a “but”) fresh consultations do not mean any decision will be made. For the EU to designate any group as a terrorist organization, the member states’ diplomats must unanimously vote “aye.” And such a vote is unlikely due to one major roadblock: France.

Why, despite what we know about Hezbollah, would the French demur?

The answer isn’t pretty. According to the Washington Institute’s Matthew Levitt, “[They] feel that if you poke Hezbollah or Iran in the eye then they will do the same to you. If you leave them alone, then maybe they will leave you alone.” Words spoken by Claude Moniquet, a former French intelligence official, lend credence to Levitt’s assessment:  “Calling [Hezbollah] terrorist would limit France’s ties with Beirut and put French targets and personnel in Lebanon at risk of retaliation,” Moniquet said. “The Bulgarian report doesn’t alter this realpolitik. There were always plenty of smoking guns.”

Levitt and Moniquet’s observations suggest a naked cowardice and a moral bankruptcy that will only hurt the French in the long run. As we’ve seen countless times across history, far from pacifying Hezbollah, this approach will strengthen and embolden it.

If the French maintain such an attitude—and there’s no evidence to suggest they won’t—the EU is unlikely to designate Hezbollah a terrorist organization and the syndicate will remain free to operate in Europe making more attacks like the one in Bulgaria last July a sad inevitability.

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