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Roundup

Historians' Take on the News: Archives 7-15-03 to 9-24-03

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What Bernard Lewis Thinks of Iraq Now (posted 9-23-03)

Tunku Varadarajan, commenting in the Wall Street Journal on an interview with Bernard Lewis, the Middle East historian (Sept. 23, 2003):

Of all the scholars of Islam, Mr. Lewis is the one whom Muslims would do best to heed. So I asked him recently if "What Went Wrong?" had been translated into Arabic. Not yet, apparently, though there's a version on the way. But "nine or 10" of his other books have been translated into Arabic, Turkish and Persian. Of one, "The Middle East and the West," published in 1968, he shares a charming story. "It was promptly translated into Hebrew by Israel's Defense Ministry, and into Arabic -- by Egypt's Muslim Brothers!" The latter, a fundamentalist group, published it in two versions, a full-length one, and as a shortened pamphlet to be sold outside mosques. The pamphlet's editor, in his introduction, paid Mr. Lewis an austere compliment, one he considers among the finest he has received. He wrote this of the professor: "I don't know who this man is. He is either a candid friend or an honest enemy, but in either case, one who refuses to deal in falsehoods."

In other words, he is frank without being transparent, a man of shades. Speaking of Iraq, he says, "I have different moods on different days. But overall, I'm cautiously optimistic. Some days there's more caution than optimism." U.S. troops had come under fire again on the day we met, and he was impatient to stress that it's time that "we put into effect an Iraqi government in Baghdad." He doesn't, emphatically, mean elections; those "should be the culmination of a political process, not its beginning." Instead, he'd like to see in place an administration of Iraqi "notables," responsible for overseeing the rule of law and freedom of expression. These last concepts, he says, "are not alien notions" in the Middle East. "What is alien is the idea of representation, and the notion of corporate or majority decision." Instead, there is a "tradition of consensus and consultation," one which was, in Iraq, devastated by Saddam's tyrannical rule. (The tradition of consensus, more generally, was destroyed in the Middle East by material changes: "Any tinpot ruler today has more resources at his disposal, and less need to consult his people, than Suleyman the Magnificent, or Haroun-al-Rashid.")

Lest you misunderstand, Mr. Lewis isn't a man who believes that democracy -- however alien -- cannot work in the Middle East. He believes it can. But he's a crusty realist: "Democracy is a strong medicine, which you have to give to the patient in small, gradually increasing doses. If you give too much too quickly, you kill the patient." But give you must. After all, "we've given the administration in Afghanistan, a place far more backward -- and Iraq is not, by the region's standards, backward -- an Afghan face. Why not the same for Iraq?" Of course the more complex devices of democracy -- such as federalism, with its centrifugal pulls -- must wait. "I'm not sure a federal constitution will work in Iraq. It's too sophisticated at this stage. Relaxation of authority has to come gradually. You can't create a functioning democracy overnight."

To his critics, this will confirm that Mr. Lewis is paternalist, a Western -- and they say this with distaste -- orientalist. But Mr. Lewis offers a refreshing contrast to the doom-mongers who extrapolate feverishly from every shootout in Fallujah, every dustup in which an American soldier is shot, or an Iraqi killed. Mr. Lewis has high hopes for Iraq. Why? Their "cultural and intellectual standards" -- set high in the years before Saddam -- have "miraculously, if precariously, survived his ravages." Also, the status of women is high in Iraq. As Mr. Lewis puts it -- perhaps paraphrasing a desert proverb -- "women are half the population and mothers of the other half." In the early formative years, it makes "a great deal of difference to have an educated mother." But his main reason for optimism is that "Iraqis have gone through everything, and are much less likely to be taken in by the fanatical groups in the region."

Although we "keep voicing fears that democracy won't work in Iraq, that's not what they're saying in the Middle East." There's a real terror there among the despots "that democracy in Iraq will work."

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Barry Rubin: The 3 Revolutions in the Middle East World (posted 9-23-03)

Barry Rubin, writing for MERIA (Middle East Review for International Affairs) (June 2003):

The politics and ideologies dominating the region can best be seen as the product of two great regime-changing revolutions: Egypt in 1952 and Iran in 1979, respectively. Explicitly or implicitly, these major innovations were taken as exemplars of the proper ideology and methodology for seizing and holding power. They were not merely political revolutions but also represented comprehensive worldviews and paradigm shifts.

Now advocates of a third revolution have appeared, though they are still far more prevalent in the United States than in the Middle East. This third revolution would be one which advocated as its main features: democracy, moderation, human rights and civil liberties, a more free enterprise economy, friendship with the West, and peace with Israel, among other features. It is the model that has basically triumphed in most of the world, but certainly not in the Middle East. The idea is that Iraq would be a starting point and would then become a model whose success would encourage others to follow in its path.

One could argue that the failure of the two old revolutions in their own countries would encourage--indeed, make inevitable--their abandonment as a model for other places. The fact that the Arab world and Iran have suffered so many failures and defeats in the last half-century, while not attaining any of their major goals, should be very persuasive arguments. That this has not happened is due to many factors, though it can be most simply explained by the regimes' determination and clever strategy in maintaining the beliefs that justify their existence.(1)

What is undeniable, though, is that even today, the overwhelming majority of Arabs--though, ironically, not necessarily most Iranians--still see the two frameworks represented by these past revolutions as the very foundation of their political views and even of their personal self-image.(2) Although the product of these two revolutions--Arab nationalism and Islamism--can be seen as rival interpretations, they also have a great deal in common. They seek to answer the same question, solve the same problem, and share the same goals. Their sense of right and wrong, friends and enemies, methods and prescriptions, overlap far more than they conflict.

Both movements spawned by these two different revolutions attempted to answer the same basic question and provide the answer to it: Why were the Arabs, Iranians, and Muslims in general behind the West? How could they catch up and surpass the West? While the prescriptions were not entirely the same, both rested on revolt, mobilization, and conflict with the West.

While both could be said to embrace value-neutral technology, and Arab nationalism took the ideology of nationalism from the West (as well as other techniques from the Communist states), both also rejected the basic path taken by Western Europe and North America. A path which includes embracing such concepts as democracy combined with free enterprise, an emphasis on moderation and gradual reform, and a defense of the individual's rights against the state.

In this process of surpassing the West, democratic rule and moderation in general were largely discredited as useful tools for Arabs or Muslims in pursuit of their dreams. Cooperation with the West and with the existing political order was seen as illegitimate, though in practice often pursued. The proper goals of Arab politics were seen as being the expulsion of Western influence, the unity of all Arabs (and of all Muslims for the later Islamists), the destruction of Israel, mobilization of the masses from above, a statist and socialist-style approach to economic development, all under the aegis of a charismatic leader.

Of course, there were also important differences between these two revolutions and their successors. What happened in Egypt in 1952 was a military coup in origin and it brought to the fore ideas such as: the armed forces would be the vanguard in transforming society, Pan-Arab nationalism, the belief in a charismatic leader who would unite the Arabs and bring them to victory, and a statist economic system. This model took power in Syria, Iraq, and Libya, while, at times, threatening to do so in many other countries.

For intellectuals, activists, and others, regime change meant to transform a traditional system into an Arab nationalist one. And the goal of the oppositions in countries already ruled by such governments was to produce an even more militant regime of precisely the same type.

But a quarter-century later, while still enjoying support from the majority of Arabs, this system could be judged a failure. It had not gained political hegemony in the Arab world, united the Arabs, brought rapid economic development, banished social problems, expelled Western influence, or destroyed Israel. But what was the alternative? Traditionalism and liberalism were discredited, and Communism never really caught on.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, Islamic movements were seen as socially conservative, as pillars of the traditional order, which was largely true. Saudi Arabia promoted Islam as a counter to leftist movements; Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat backed it for a while in the 1970s for the same reason.

Thus, Arab nationalism continued to be the dominant model--and still is today--but there was ample room for an alternative, which also expressed radical discontent, the demand for quick fixes, the possibility of wide unity, a vision of utopian solutions, and the promise of total victory.

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Ibrahim al-Marashi: What Did Saddam Call this War? (posted 9-23-03)

Ibrahim al-Marashi, research associate at the Center for Non-Proliferation Studies in Monterey, California as well as a lecturer at the US Naval Postgraduate School, writing for MERIA (Middle East Review for International Affairs) (June 2003):

While there has been massive coverage and analysis of the 2003 Anglo-American war with Iraq regarding the Western perspective of the fighting, relatively little attention has been paid to how the war was waged from the Iraqi side, tactically or conceptually. For example, the Anglo-American operation's official name was "Iraqi Freedom," and most Arab circles called it "al-Harb al-Khalijiyya al-Thalitha" (The Third Gulf War) but what did the Saddam regime call it?

The Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988 was not referred to as such in the official Iraqi discourse but rather as Qadisiyat Saddam, coupling the leader's name with the first battle ever fought in history between the Persians and Arabs, in which the Arab Muslims emerged victorious. The implication was that Saddam was fighting for all the Arabs and that he would win a tremendous and total victory.

That earlier battle, which took place in 637 AD, led by the Arab general Sa'd ibn Waqqas lasted for three days, resulting in the death of both the Persian general Rustum as well as the end of Persian Sassanian rule in Iraq.(2) The collapse of the Zoroastrian Iranian forces at al-Qadisiyya allowed the Arabs to spread Islam eastward, thus giving the battle a religious significance. As Ofra Bengio has written, "The myths woven around al-Qadisiyya are a most instructive example of the Ba'thi technique of using an event with a core historical truth that is deeply etched into collective memory in order to further the party's ideology of Arab nationalism and to appeal to the public by means of a challenge of great emotional power."(3)

Thus, by invoking the name of al-Qadisiyya, Saddam justified his war as a continuation of the struggle between Persian and Arab. Saddam's label of the Iran-Iraq war as al-Qadisiyya revealed his vision of how the war should end: a decisive Arab victory over the Persian masses, leading to the complete surrender of the Iranian nation.

The 1991 Gulf war was termed "Operation Desert Storm" by the Coalition forces, while Saddam used the term, "Umm Kul al-Ma'arik" or "the Mother of all Battles". This euphemistic title for the 1991 war reveals Saddam's emphasis on the scope and severity of the impending war with the United States. Nevertheless, the regime believed it would emerge victorious. In a military memo circulated among military units it states, "We are guaranteed victory because we are standing up to 30 nations, and that is a point of pride for us."(4) This statement infers that if the regime survives the "mother of all battles" that would mean a victory no matter what happened on the battlefield itself. And by this measure, the regime could well claim to have won the 1991 war.

Saddam euphemistically referred to Iraqi Operation Freedom as Ma'rakat Al-Hawasim, "The Defining Battle," to mobilize the Iraqi masses against the impending American attack in 2003. Perhaps the rhetorical use of this title indicated that this was the final, defining battle of the regime. Like almost everything that happened in Iraq between around 1973 and 2003, that matter was highly dependent on the mindset of Saddam Hussein.

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James M. McPherson: Bush Revisionism (posted 9-15-03)

James M. McPherson, in his column as president of the American Historical Association (Sept. 2003):

This summer the Bush administration thought it had discovered a surefire tactic to discredit critics of its Iraq adventure. President Bush followed the lead of his national security adviser Condoleeza Rice to accuse such critics of practicing "revisionist history." Neither Bush nor Rice offered a definition of this phrase, but their body language and tone of voice appeared to suggest that they wanted listeners to understand "revisionist history" to be a consciously falsified or distorted interpretation of the past to serve partisan or ideological purposes in the present. Or did George Bush and Condoleeza Rice mean to suggest only that those who now criticize the administration's Iraq policy have revised their earlier opinions? But few if any have done so. Almost all the historians I know of who maintain that the evidence for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction or support for Al Qaeda is ambiguous or false were saying the same things six months or a year ago. All who then insisted that Iraq posed little threat to the United States or its allies and that a war with Iraq would endanger American lives, security, and national interest far more than a continuation of the policy of containment and UN inspections, have not changed their position.

Whatever Bush and Rice meant by "revisionist historians," it is safe to say that they did not mean it favorably. The 14,000 members of this Association, however, know that revision is the lifeblood of historical scholarship. History is a continuing dialogue between the present and the past. Interpretations of the past are subject to change in response to new evidence, new questions asked of the evidence, new perspectives gained by the passage of time. There is no single, eternal, and immutable "truth" about past events and their meaning....

The administration's pejorative usage of "revisionist history" to denigrate critics by imputing to them a falsification of history is scarcely surprising. But it is especially ironic, considering that the president and his principal advisers have themselves been practitioners par excellence of this kind of revisionism. Iraq offers many examples. To justify an unprovoked invasion of that country, the president repeatedly exaggerated or distorted ambiguous intelligence reports to portray Iraqi possession of or programs to develop biological, chemical, and nuclear "weapons of mass destruction" that posed an imminent threat to the United States. In his State of the Union message on January 28, President Bush made clear his acceptance of a British intelligence report that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" to develop nuclear weapons. This assertion was "revisionist history" with a vengeance; the U. S. government knew at the time it was received that the intelligence was unreliable and learned soon afterwards that it was based on forged documents. Yet not until July did the administration concede its gaffe—and then tried to blame the CIA. That agency took the fall, but with respect to another administration justification for the war—Saddam Hussein's alleged ties to Al Qaeda—the CIA refused to provide any aid and comfort. An official in the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research offered (in the New York Times of July 12, 2003) a pointed description of the kind of revisionist history practiced by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al: "This administration has had a faith-based intelligence attitude: ‘We know the answers, give us the intelligence to support those answers.'"

In its foreign policy, too, the Bush administration has a strong commitment to this kind of revisionism. During his campaign for the presidency, Bush dismissed the previous administration's efforts at "nation building" with contempt. The government is now engaged in the most expensive experiment in nation-building in more than a half century—and so far the least successful. The Pentagon has constantly revised upward the cost of rebuilding Iraq—which at this writing stands at $180 billion and counting. Coming into office with a surplus in the federal budget and a commitment to a balanced budget, the administration is running the largest deficits in history, which will probably continue into the indefinite and seemingly infinite future. In his campaign for the presidency, Bush also insisted that as a superpower, the United States had an obligation to be "humble" in its dealings with other nations. Vive la revision!

For many of us, the term "revisionist historians" recalls distasteful memories from the 1970s of Holocaust deniers who called themselves "revisionists." One hopes that in resorting to this phrase now, the president's associates are not seeking to falsely and maliciously link present-day critics of the administration to those who misrepresented the past for nefarious ends. But even if they are not guilty of such an insinuation, by misusing the term "revisionist historians" to derisively deflect criticism, Condoleeza Rice and her cohorts are denigrating a legitimate and essential activity of historians.

The judgmental tone of Rice's derogatory reference to "revisionist historians" brings to mind a review of her book The Soviet Union and the Czechoslovak Army, 1948–1983, in the December 1985 issue of the American Historical Review (p. 1236) when she was an assistant professor at Stanford. The reviewer claimed that Rice "frequently does not sift facts from propaganda and valid information from disinformation or misinformation." In addition, according to the reviewer, she "passes judgments and expresses opinions without adequate knowledge of the facts" and her "writing abounds with meaningless phrases." I cannot testify for or against the accuracy and fairness of this review. But I am tempted to wonder, in the immortal words of Yogi Berra, whether we are experiencing deja vu all over again.

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Juan Cole: Is Israel in Violation of the Geneva Accords? (posted 9-15-03)

Juan Cole, writing on his blog (Sept. 14, 2003):

Israel has been the occupying power in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967, and as such its actions are judged in international law by the provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. All Palestinians under Israeli occupation are considered "protected persons" by the Geneva Convention. (Article 4: "Persons protected by the Convention are those who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever, find themselves, in case of a conflict or occupation, in the hands of a Party to the conflict or Occupying Power of which they are not nationals.") If you have not read the Fourth Geneva Convention, you should, since it also applies to US actions in Iraq.

Israel's stance is that the Fourth Geneva Convention does not apply to its occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, because these territories were acquired in a "defensive war" and involved taking them from other countries (Egypt and Jordan) that had "illegally" occupied them. However, the convention itself makes it clear that it applies to all situations in which a subject population comes under the authority of a foreign occupier. It does not matter who started the war. That is a red herring. The US military considers itself always bound by the Convention, in Bosnia and elsewhere. It is not required that the occupying country be an aggressor. Read the text. The United Nations Security Council considers Israel bound by the Convention in the Occupied Territories. The UN did not award the West Bank and Gaza to Israel in 1948, and has never recognized any claims to annex them. The UN Charter, to which Israel is signatory, forbids the acquisition of territory through warfare, and so Israel cannot claim to own the West Bank and Gaza, though its occupation of them is not necessarily itself illegal. It is tragic that Israel, a country born in reaction against the ineffable atrocities of the Nazi regime, should reject the applicability of the Geneva Conventions, which were intended to ensure that the gross violations of human rights perpetrated by the Fascists were not repeated. This rejection is not consistent with the character of Judaism as an ethical religion, nor with Israel's best side as a contributor to human progress.

Moreover, the legislative history of the Fourth Geneva Convention makes it absolutely clear that the drafters intended it to apply to situations where there were national liberation movements, not just to conventional warfare. Since the Sharon government has now begun simply firing missiles from US-made fighter jets into occupied apartment buildings in its bid to murder leaders of the Palestinian militant groups, knowingly killing civilians along with the guilty, a mere detail like defying the Geneva Conventions, of course, is a small matter for it. (Note that although I just said guilty, no judicial proceeding had ever found them so; that is why it is legitimate to speak of them having been murdered; that is the word we use for extra-judicial killing).

If such protected persons in an occupied territory commit a criminal act, they may be tried and punished, but they must be tried and jailed in the occupied territory, not moved elsewhere. Amnesty International noted of previous Israeli expulsions of Palestinians:

"The Fourth Geneva Convention, which: - defines "unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement of a protected person" as a grave breach of the Convention and therefore a war crime. (Article 147). - prohibits "[c]ollective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation" as well as "[r]eprisals against protected persons and their property." (Article 33) - stipulates that: Individuals or mass forcible transfers, as well as deportations of protected persons form occupied territories to the territory of the Occupying Power or to that of any other county, occupied or not, are prohibited, regardless of their motives. (Article 49) - states that: Protected persons accused of offences shall be detained in the occupied country, and if convicted they shall serve their sentence therein. (Article 76)

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which reflects customary international law and: - defines deportation or forcible transfer of population as "forced displacement of the persons concerned by expulsion or other coercive acts from the area in which they are lawfully present, without grounds permitted under international law". - defines as a war crime in Article 8(2)(b)(viii) "the deportation or transfer of all or parts of the population of the occupied territory within or outside this territory" by the occupying power. - stipulates that the deportation or forcible transfer of population would also constitute a crime against humanity, when carried out in a widespread or systematic way, as part of a governmental policy. (Article 7 (d))."

See http://www.amnesty.org.il/israel/pr_154.html

So, if Israel would like to charge Arafat an