At the request of many of my readers, including students, lawmakers, analysts, opinion makers, and citizens across the United States and the world for over a decade, I am pleased to launch this blog on history and politics.  I am grateful to the History News Network (HNN), a leading online media outlet for history discussions, for giving me this opportunity to engage readers on the web.  In this introductory note, I’d like to explain the framework and the goal of my new blog on HNN and why I chose to launch it this year.

 Since I published my very first book in Arabic in 1979 in Beirut (at the age of 22), I have authored twelve other volumes, many essays, and hundreds of articles on issues related to the history and politics of the Greater Middle East, the Arab world, and Muslim-majority countries.  My three decades-plus writing activities, in Arabic, French, and English, have spanned enough subjects and time periods to allow the history angle to be explored.  My first batch of books, mostly in Arabic and published out of Beirut between 1979 and 1987, focused on Arab Islamic history and the histories of ethnic minorities in the region, including in Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Iraq, and beyond.  My original focus was on the conflict in Lebanon but widened to reexamine the historical evolution of the caliphate and its successor, Arab nationalism.  My first book, published by the University of Kaslik (Catholic University) was titled Pluralism (I’ll comment on it in a future blog).  It was followed by a series of essays and books focusing on the battle between democracy-leaning concepts and totalitarian ideologies such as Baathism, Islamism (Salafist and Khomeinist), and systems of governance which can adapt to multiethnic societies.  In 1987 I published a book on Iran’s Islamic revolution outlining what Khomeinist strategies would project into the future. Let’s remember this was still during the Cold War, keeping in mind the complex equations between analyzing Middle East conflicts and the East-West confrontation.  This string of books, in addition to interacting with politicians, NGOs leaders, thinkers and minorities representatives from the region, all happening during a long conflict, enabled me to watch the play of strategies, particularly in the domain of war of ideas.  I have often engaged in exchanges in the press with writers and intellectuals from various backgrounds on issues as sensitive as identity and state structure.  The political ramifications of events in Lebanon and the region didn’t have the most important effect on my work, rather it was the intense exchange of ideas and arguments, a matter that very few in my pre-American environment had a chance to experiment with.  As early as the 1980s, I was watching the rise of political and doctrinal thinking which was at the root of the Arab Spring of the following century.  But the conditions of a country in conflict didn’t help free thinking emancipate fully.  In my near-future memoirs of the 1980s, I will detail some of these intellectual debates and experiences.

(My first book, 'al Taadudiya fi Lubnan', "Pluralism in Lebanon" including three volumes: History, Comparative Civilizational History and Modern History, published in 1979)

Towards the end of 1990, I immigrated to the United States and began teaching Middle East Studies at Florida Atlantic University after I obtained a Ph.D from the University of Miami in international and strategic studies.  The 1990s were more productive than the previous decade in terms of academic research, advising to Congress and Middle East NGO work.  In addition to pieces and essays published sporadically, I published my first American book with Lynne Rienner, again analyzing the ethnic conflict in Lebanon and challenging the traditional view on the nature of this conflict as portrayed by Western press and academia.  But my most exciting work was through advising, briefing and testifying to the U.S. Congress on the Middle East, and more particularly on the issue of minorities’ persecution in the region.  I participated in advising the research process leading to the voting of the International Religious Freedom Act in 1998.  The last decade of the twentieth century was the hiatus between the Cold War and the so-called War on Terror triggered on 9/11.  In my view, post-Soviet jihadism was rampant during that decade and American understanding of it was very low.  I addressed the forthcoming campaign against the U.S. and the region’s secular actors in my hundreds of lectures on campuses but particularly to the large contingent of seniors in south Florida’s universities.  The themes of these seminars and their substance were often communicated to writers, journalists and lawmakers.  My warnings about Salafi and Iranian strategies were found in the many journal articles I wrote in the early '90s, such as the first study I published in Global Affairs: The American Journal of Geopolitics, titled the “Syrian-Iranian Axis,” in 1992.

September 11, 2001 marked a turning point for me, as for many other scholars, not in my ideas, but in the capacity of delivering them to the public.  In less than a decade, I published four books, starting in 2005 with Future Jihad, Terrorist Strategies against America, republished in 2006 under the title Terrorist Strategies against the West.  My thesis, based on my work of the past two decades, claimed the U.S. and the West weren’t dealing with irrational extremist reactions to foreign policy.  Rather, I argued the global jihadists had a very clear ideology and long-term comprehensive strategies.  I have focused since on the study of these strategies both historically and with an eye to the future. U.S. academia lacked the concept that, as there had been Soviet studies, there should now been (and indeed, should have been), jihadist studies.  My concern wasn’t about theology, a matter many took into their hands and began debating.  My beef was the lack of attention paid to the geopolitical strategies of the jihadists.

My second post-9/11 book, published in 2007, was titled The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy.  With a self-explanatory title I attempted to answer the question raised by the 9/11 commission in 2004:  how come America didn’t know?  Again the answer was on a historical scale not in the realm of counter-intelligence.  In 2008 I published a third book in that series, The Confrontation: Winning the War against Future Jihad, where I advanced a series of recommendations in strategic choices for the future to win the conflict.  The trilogy of "Future Jihad," as it was baptized by some, essentially advanced two theses.  One is that the main foe to post-Soviet democracies is a global web of jihadists, both movements and regimes, and two, that the main response to that challenge should come from democracy and reform forces within the Arab Muslim world.  

During the post 9/11 decade I had the privilege to brief lawmakers on both sides of the Atlantic, give seminars to defense and national security sectors within the U.S. and NATO bureaucracies, teach courses at National Defense University and lecture on other campuses, and last but not least participate in many media interviews, both nationally and internationally.  However, one of the most informative activities I conducted was my advising to and interaction with Middle East and Arab democracy groups, either in exile or in their home countries.  Working on advancing the causes of freedom, aside from researching human rights and group rights of these communities, allowed me to learn more about the state of mind of civil societies in the region.  On July 4, 2010, I submitted the last piece of a manuscript to my publisher for a book which title was daring and was published in November of that year:  The Coming Revolution:  Struggle for Freedom in the Middle East.  Based on thirty years of research, observation, and interaction with public figures, community leaders, activists, and intellectuals from Iran to southern Sudan, I had argued against the dominant paradigm:  civil societies in the region, helped by growing technologies of communications and globalization, have reached a critical level of saturation against authoritarian regimes, and thus I predicted they will rise.  Hence, I projected that revolts, followed by sharp political strives that will hit the region, before the real democratic revolutions occurred.

In the Coming Revolution, the future of the region’s upheavals will be determined by who will eventually win the race:  Islamists or liberals.  We have already seen it in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and we will most likely witness it in Yemen and Syria.  It will boil down to who will employ the best strategies to win.  It also includes the U.S. and the West.

Today is the first anniversary of the release of The Coming Revolution.  In one year the book made historic predictions, even faster than my own projections.  Now is the time to evaluate this analysis and use it to see through the fog of the uprisings.  

In this blog I will try to look at the global evolution of these movements from a historical perspective and explore the multiple options various players have at their disposal.  At times I will focus on a particular event and at other times I will observe the big picture.  I may summarize my participation in important conferences and meetings and would possibly post conversations with persons who have fresh ideas to discuss.

Dr Walid Phares, Professor of Global Strategies and author on History and Conflicts.