Reading list

Jamie Weinstein of The Daily Caller interviewed Elliott Abrams, former deputy National Security adviser to President George. W. Bush, and asked him what three books most shaped his understanding of the Middle East:
I would note four. Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong,” Michael Oren’s “Power, Faith, and Fantasy,” Natan Sharansky’s “The Case for Democracy,” and a somewhat older one: the Hebrew Bible.
The whole interview is interesting.  He asserts, for instance, that Israel's unilateral strike on the Syrian nuclear plant in 2007 avoided war and spurred negotiations.  Because both the U.S. and Israel declined to crow about (or even acknowledge responsibility for) the strike, Assad was able to save face without responding to it.  Because the strike made Syria fear the U.S. and Israel, it inspired Assad to come to the bargaining table.  Yes, sometimes that happens for reasons other than that we made someone love us.

Abrams believes it's possible a strike on Iran would have the same result.  I wonder, though, if we aren't dealing with an entirely different class of crazy there.  Though when I think about it -- Syria?  Iran?  Maybe I can't make a principled distinction between them.

7 comments:

E Hines said...

Because both the U.S. and Israel declined to crow about (or even acknowledge responsibility for) the strike, Assad was able to save face without responding to it.

and

...it's possible a strike on Iran would have the same result. I wonder, though, if we aren't dealing with an entirely different class of crazy there.

We'd also be dealing with an entirely different President here. I'm not sure Obama's ego would let him not crow about it. Look, for instance, to the careful leaks about Stuxnet and Iran's enrichment facility (which this cynic thought and thinks was both a brag and an attempt to blame Israel simultaneously).

On reading lists, I was in high school at the time of the '67 War, and hadn't until then thought much about the Middle East. Newsweek had the most objective, and complete, coverage of those events and their aftermath (far surpassing the Chicago papers and Time, for instance) in this high schooler's eyes. That coverage began my interest in the Middle East.

Eric Hines

Eric Blair said...

Syrians are Arabs. Iranians are Persians. Or more to the point, Iranians are not Arabs.

You can cow Arabs, despite their bluster. Persians you have to kill.

The Romans knew this.

Grim said...

So did the Greeks. Nor did they particularly mind the exercise. In fact, I would say that they found it to be tonic.

douglas said...

I suspect we (as a nation) are not having a taste for that same tonic.

Where does that leave us?

Eric Blair said...

I don't particularly think the Greeks found it a tonic, more like a big revenge blood feud or something like that.

When you consider that the original Persian wars ended around 449BC and Alexander didn't invade Persia until 334BC, you get the impression there is a long memory involved there.

Doug has a point, and I would agree that the nation is in no mood to go to war again in the middle east.

Perhaps the drones may make it possible not to do so in the way it was done before.

douglas said...

I don't know... Iran is not a bunch of terrorists running around from hideout to hideout. They're a real country, with a proud nationalism and in significant numbers, a religious fervor. If we can't bluster them down, or cow them, what's left? Does it even matter that we have Obama in office and not someone with a more traditional view of America's place in the world? If they decide they want war with us, as we have no stomach for it, what then?

My greatest concern there is that they'll decide to go big, instead of small and local, thinking they might actually get away with it. I suppose that answers my question above about Obama.

Grim said...

There's a principled distinction to be made, which is that Syria is either going to be a proxy state of Iran, or an independent and hostile state to Iran. Iran is a player in its own right.

The issue at stake is the Sunni/Shia conflict that we've all been watching play out in Iraq, but on a regional scale. Syria is chiefly Sunni, but the ruling class is from a religious minority, and it relies on Iranian support (as well as Hezbollah, which is also an Iranian proxy).

The forces resisting the ruling class in Syria are a hodgepodge of folks, but their most effective fighters are former allies (and sometimes former members) of al Qaeda in Iraq. They cut their teeth smuggling weapons and fighters into Iraq from Syria to fight us, then turned on AQI at the time of the Awakening. There are a couple of groups of these fighters, but the networks are the same old collection of allied tribal and religious warriors.

They have an outsized importance to the Syrian resistance because they are very effective (as you would expect, after a decade at war has taught them how to fight). Many secular and Western-leaning members of the Syrian resistance end up supporting these fighters because they need them. And we, of course, have abandoned them, giving them few other options.

What we should be doing is backing the Syrian rebels, but also trying to suborn the Iraqi element by finding some of our old Awakening allies who are still willing to talk to us. We should be able to set up a counter-network to at least divide the hard-core element.

Iran needs to be the loser in Syria, so as to set us up for success in making them the loser regionally. Syria is of some interest to the United States on its own, but it is of chief interest as a proxy war.