Rashid Khalidi: Facng a C-Span Audience

Philip Kennicott, in the Washington Post (May 13, 2004):

It's only 8:30 a.m. on the East Coast, so some of the angry Americans dialing into the glass-walled C-SPAN studio with the perfect view of the Capitol are very early risers. In the "Washington Journal" hot seat, for 45 minutes, is Rashid Khalidi, director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and author of a new book about colonialism, memory and U.S. policy in the Middle East.

It may be early, but Americans are already hard at work trying to calibrate other people's outrage. Oklahoma wants to be sure that New York has its priorities straight, that people who are inclined to be saddened about Abu Ghraib are at least as outraged about the decapitation of Nicholas Berg. It's a beautiful, bright Washington morning, the white dome glistens in the background, and out in the heartland, rage is being balanced in the scales.

"Get our planes up and flatten 'em," says a caller from Pennsylvania. When he gets this kind of question, Khalidi looks down at a notepad and starts writing. His face is scrupulously blank. He's very good at not taking the bait when the caller is just looking for a little anger endorsement. (Tell me mine is the rage that matters most, so many callers seem to say.) Khalidi is also deft at taking just that part of the question that leads him where he really wants to go.

"The caller shows a healthy skepticism," Khalidi says to a caller who has, in fact, shown what feels a little more like paranoia. The subject is the media, the media's preoccupations, and the degree to which journalists bring back to the American people an accurate view of a part of the world in which we are now, with troops "and treasure," as the cliche goes, deeply involved.

Khalidi's book, "Resurrecting Empire," is part a primer on the history of the region and part an effort to sketch an intellectual battle that, in his view, we lost before the war even began. There has been "a muzzling of expertise," says Khalidi, a failure of academics familiar with the region, knowledgeable in its history, fluent in its languages to put themselves forward at a critical time. Especially during the march to war. The administration also failed to consult or heed its own government expertise, an expertise cultivated and created at huge cost over the years, he argues. Into the breach, an ignorance breach, stepped political ideologues -- "neocons" he calls them -- who advocated policies that are turning out to be disastrous.

Among other scholars who specialize in the region, this isn't a radical take on the present state of affairs. Michael C. Hudson, director of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown, describes Khalidi as preeminent in his field, a courageous scholar and public figure.

"The whole question of academic expertise in the Middle East is a scandal," he says. "This administration is particularly knowledge-averse, not only to the academic world outside but to their academic experts inside."

This understanding, naturally, is disputed. Danielle Pletka, a vice president at the American Enterprise Institute (which in his book Khalidi calls a "nest of some of Washington's most outspoken hawks"), disputes the information gap idea.

"What one finds, particularly in an election year, is that the world is filled with two kinds of people," says Pletka, who acknowledges Khalidi's credentials as a historian but not as a student of inside-the-Beltway policy making. "The kinds that make policy and the kinds who felt that if only the policy people had read their book, their memoir, their article, the policy would be different."

Khalidi's argument is that the world isn't divided into the lucky experts who get to make policy and resentful experts shut out of the conversation. Rather, it is divided between experts and ignorant political ideologues.

"The country was going to war blindly," he says of the time when he was contemplating writing his first book intended for a general audience. He started speaking publicly on the dangers of blundering -- even with good intentions -- into a region where memory of past colonial regimes is still fresh. Friends said the lectures should become a book, which they now are.

"Resurrecting Empire" may remind some readers of other lectures made into books, as it covers and recovers the same ground, but it is based on long experience with the region. Even as he was finishing it, however, it was being overtaken by events. The fast-moving, good-news war of the early months was over. The long grind had set in. Words such as "exit strategy" were beginning to be floated. In his book, Khalidi called for an "international mandate" -- with international peacekeepers -- to run Iraq during its transition to sovereignty.

He's not so optimistic that will work anymore.

"The options are bad, worse and much worse," he says. "The U.S. is going to leave Iraq. . . . The only question is when do the troops leave." To all the politicians who talk of disaster if we leave, he says the disaster is already here.

Khalidi speaks quickly, more so in person than on screen. When you first meet him there's an unplaceable but familiar quality, something bright and brusque about him, suggestive of a good doctor with a lousy bedside manner. Smart, direct, a little impatient, all business. When he warms up to a stranger, the pace is just as fast, but the manner is softer, the language a bit spicier. On a park bench outside the Capitol, he stretches out his feet in the mid-morning sun, slouches a bit and waves vaguely toward the far end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

"The morons down there in the president's house," he says, with exasperation. What exasperates him is the contempt he feels has been shown for the Geneva Conventions at high levels in the administration. They have been "systematically derated," he argues, and it will come back to haunt us.

"Everyone in the armed forces should be furious," he says.

He's not just worried about policies, but people.

"I have students all over the Middle East," he says. His daughters -- one is an archaeologist in Yemen, the other is at a legal institute in the West Bank -- are both there. He has extended family there. He travels there regularly.

"There are kids I know in the service," he says, worried about what will happen to them if they're captured. "Every time I hear these laptop neocons talk about international law. . . ."

He trails off, disgusted. "Neocon" and "neoconservative" are among Washington's most fraught rhetorical markers, used by some people in much the same way that "liberal" was once used to dismiss an entire category of supposedly failed thinking. Others, including the AEI's Pletka, see a more sinister resonance.

"I think the phrase 'neocon' is much more popular among people who think it shields their anti-Semitism," she says. "But it doesn't."

Which goes to the heart of one of the ideas in Khalidi's book: that the debate about Israel and Palestine, and proper U.S. policy in the region, has become so bitter that even experts dare not discuss it. In his book, he bemoans "the pervasive atmosphere of intimidation and fear that makes many experts on the region reluctant to express themselves frankly." It is not a problem that has limited his own public commentary -- which has brought him ample controversy.

Khalidi, 55, straddles a difficult line between academic historian and political commentator. When Columbia hired him from the University of Chicago, where he was director of the Center for International Studies and had taught from 1987 to 2003, it was considered a coup for the university. He became the first scholar to hold a new chair named for Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual who articulated the idea of "orientalism" -- the West's use of self-serving scholarship to define and control perceptions of people from the Middle East (and elsewhere). Khalidi has spent much of his career attempting to undo the habits of orientalism, to work back through the history and reinterpret it in a way that gives the West a better idea of what really motivates attitudes in places such as Palestine, Iran, Iraq and Egypt. His work on Palestinian history, and Palestinian identity, is particularly respected, but he has been an independent voice, often at odds with Palestinian intellectuals.

His thumbnail sketch of history, worked out in "Resurrecting Empire," goes like this: Once-great and often-autocratic civilizations of the Middle East were undermined by the 15th-century discovery of the New World, which reduced the Middle East's role in world trade. European civilizations, by contrast, flourished and eventually colonized the vast majority of the region. Local efforts at democracy were corrupted by colonial rulers. Oil made these interferences all the more egregious. Arabs and others turned to a sometimes aggressive nationalism to get the Europeans out; but nationalism, oil wealth and human nature corrupted these regimes, as well, and the people suffer still at the expense of cynical elites.

He has plenty of criticism for the leaders of the region, but no patience for blaming the region's woes on Islam. He has no patience for U.S. leaders who think they can bring democracy by force, rather than let it grow indigenously. He has no patience for people who think "they hate us because we're us."

"They like us, they like our values," he says. "They hate our policies."

He is, himself, a meeting point between the world he studies and the country he calls home. He is Arab American (his father was Palestinian, his mother Lebanese American), born in New York. His father was a U.N. staffer with high-level access to the backroom debates on Middle East policy. The affairs of the Middle East were dinner-table fodder. English and Arabic were spoken at home. He went to Yale (two years behind George W. Bush, he says), and felt isolated, especially as the 1967 Six Day War between Israel and Arab countries defined his political beliefs in a way that was undoubtedly in opposition to the way it defined the beliefs of students sympathetic to Israel. He ended up as a historian against his father's better judgment.

But there's no doing history of this part of the world without controversy. The New York Sun has labeled him "anti-Israeli" and poked into the financial backers of the Said Chair, which he holds, implying that he may be beholden to foreign governments or groups. Khalidi has also been regularly criticized by an organization called Campus Watch that has set itself up as a right-wing watchdog group covering academics whose work draws them into politically charged territory, especially the Middle East.

"He can't be characterized as objective," says Daniel Mandel of the Middle East Forum, parent organization of Campus Watch, citing Khalidi's view that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza is illegal. "Views of that extremity can't be considered objective or impartial."

"He is eminently respectable," says Georgetown's Hudson. "I can't say the same for Campus Watch."