We’ve had more than a few homilies from the president about how Islam is a communion of peace. And I don’t doubt that there are hundreds of millions of Muslims who yearn for quiet and productive lives. May Allah be with them, according to their prayers.
If they are a majority in Islam--and I’m not sure they are--they are a silent majority. In any event, the defining strain among many Arab and Muslim states is the reign of violence and the dread fear of it. Or the fear of wishing out loud for the calm of faith and the assurance of plenty.
No, I am not deserting the president on this one either. Any country that is under siege by Al Qaeda is likely to have strategic and/or ideological interest to us. But it’s a big stretch to argue that we have a democratic interest in Yemen’s future. It will not be before hell freezes over that we may have such an interest in Yemen. That time is neither now nor tomorrow. And since history in the Arabian Peninsula moves in geological time, let’s stop deluding ourselves about another democratic ally.
The German Mujahid
By Boualem Sansal
Translated by Frank Wynne
(Europa Editions, 240 pp., $15)
I.
Barack Obama convened his first official summit before he was even elected president. In October 2008, then-candidate Obama gathered a gaggle of business and political heavyweights--Paul Volcker, Eric Schmidt, Jennifer Granholm, Bill Richardson, etc.--in a Florida community college gymnasium for what his campaign billed as the “Growing American Jobs Summit.” “No cheerleading,” Obama admonished the 1,700 people who packed into the sweltering gym expecting a campaign rally.
Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations
By Avi Shlaim
(Verso, 392 pp., $34.95)
Avi Shlaim burst upon the scene of Middle Eastern history in 1988, with the publication of Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Before that, as a young lecturer at Reading University in England, he had produced two books, British Foreign Secretaries Since 1945 (1977) and The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949 (1983), and several revealing essays on modern Middle Eastern historical issues in academic journals. But it was Collusion Across the Jordan, with its 676 pages of solid and well-written research, that thrust him into the academic limelight.
At least, that's what many of our old and deeply democratic friends seem to feel.
Now, it's hard to accept that the president of the
The Book of Genesis
Illustrated by R. Crumb
(W.W. Norton, 224 pp., $24.95)
A certain amount of sensationalistic misinformation was circulated in the press last spring, here and in England, when word got out that R. Crumb had done an illustrated version of Genesis. Crumb was the leading innovative figure of the underground comics movement of the late 1960s and has enjoyed a devoted following ever since. His graphic work, always memorable, is often physically aggressive, raunchy, and sexually explicit. Against that background of countercultural tawdriness, the press reports suggested that Crumb’s Genesis meant to make a mockery of the biblical text, and that some of it verged on pornography. Even though the jacket of the finished book bears a warning in bold lettering--"ADULT SUPERVISION RECOMMENDED FOR MINORS" (the same may be said, in fact, about Genesis itself)--these scandalous imputations are entirely groundless.
The Susan in question is Susan Rice. And, according to a New York Times article by Neil MacFarquhar, it's Stewart Patrick who gives her the good grades. Rice is U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. So who is Patrick? He is one of those hundreds of I.R. wonks in Washington who moves from fellowship to fellowship, eating up foundation money, and ends up being an expert in what actually amounts to nothing or maybe, just maybe, the same thing: "multilateral cooperation in the management of global issues; U.S. policy toward international institutions, including the United Nations; the challenges posed by fragile, failing, and post-conflict states; and the integration of U.S. defense, development, and diplomatic instruments in U.S. foreign and national security policy; the intersection between security and development, with a particular focus on the relationship between weak states and transnational threats and on the policy challenges of building effective institutions of governance in fragile settings..."
I won't torture you any longer. But rest assured: There's a lot more of the same junk in the bio put out by the Center for American Progress. Still, he has only himself to blame, being the Times source who called Ms. Rice a "multitasking workaholic ... [who] doesn't suffer fools." It isn't that she doesn't suffer fools gladly. She doesn't suffer fools, just plain and simple. How intolerant!
Yet the real problem is Ms. Rice's. No, forget about her passivist role in the Rwanda genocide. And forget also about her covert cooperation, when she was assistant secretary of state for African affairs, with Jesse Jackson in trying to rescue Liberian tyrant Charles Taylor from justice. Let's just look at now. Or, actually, the last nine months.
Even before the president was inaugurated, she was, quite properly, being vetted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Rice was disappointed that she hadn't been given the big job at State. But the president had bigger fish to fry. So he gave State to Hillary, where she's been eating her heart out ever since. Adlai Stevenson graciously took from JFK the U.N. mission (not, by the way, the U.N. embassy, as Mrs. Clinton erroneously continues to label it) while Dean Rusk, a safe little nothing, got Foggy Bottom. Still, Rice is on the tube quite a bit. There are so many U.N. extravaganzas that she can't help but be. Her key word is "engagement." We'll engage with them ... and with them ... and with them, too.
The Information Master:
Jean-Baptiste Colbert's Secret State Intelligence System
By Jacob Soll
(University of Michigan Press,
277 pp., $65)
That resonant piece of verbal shorthand, TMI--or Too Much Information--would make a fine epigraph for our age. Anyone with an Internet connection today has access to exponentially greater quantities of writing, images, sound, and video than anyone on earth could have imagined just twenty years ago. Small wonder that we have become obsessed with the idea of "information" as an abstract substance independent of its content--something that we accumulate, measure, and "process," rather than ponder and understand. And small wonder that the management and control of information, whether by its "producers," by governments, or by corporations such as Google, has emerged as an increasingly important political concern, and as a subject of scholarship.
This was the maiden sally of the United States at the U.N. Human Rights Council, a resolution under the rubric of "promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development." Phew!
The measure was introduced by the U.S. and by Egypt, which, of course, has a long and sterling record as an insurer and defender of civilized liberties. After all, earlier this year, Freedom House gave the Cairo regime a ranking on its freedom of the press index, placing it with three other bastions of human rights at 128th out of 195 countries--a notch above the Central African Republic and a few notches below Congo (Brazzaville). Are we to expect that soon America will co-sponsor a motion with Saudi Arabia on the liberties of women?
The resolution passed in a voice vote, which means by acclamation. I am sure that the delegates from Cuba and China and other paragons of press freedom also shouted "aye" to the question. In any case, there was no "nay" or "abstain" recorded. So that settles it, I suppose, "freedom for all." Doubtless that the crime of insulting the president of Egypt, which can get you five years in jail, will vanish from the books ... and maybe from the courts, too. On the other hand, do not count on this.
The Camp David Accords were signed 31 years ago this mid-month. The actual Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty was sealed 30 years ago this coming March. This was negotiated between Menahem Begin and Anwar Sadat. (The immediate reward for Cairo was annual emoluments of $3 billion, just about what Israel has received for military aid.) No soldiers have taken up arms against each other ever since. No airplanes have flown hostilely over each other's air space, no tanks, no missiles, no nothing. Nonetheless, the normalization of relations that many people anticipated would emerge between the two nations (Egypt being the only historic nation in the entire Arab orbit) has never materialized. A poll taken of 1000 Egyptians in 2006 (true, in the shadow of the second Lebanon war) found that 92% considered Israeli an enemy nation.
Ali Salem, for a time one of Egypt's most popular playwrights and its fiercest satirist, visited Israel in 1994. His life has been one of near-penury ever since. He published a piece in TNR a while back and this did not make his life any better or easier. Salem's travail is not at all idiosyncratic. A few years ago, a distinguished Egyptian film director, a feminist whose name I simply cannot retrieve from my addled brain, was honored by the Jerusalem Film Festival. She was immediately thrown out of her union. And so it goes.
Landscape and Memory
by Simon Schama
(Knopf, 652 pp., $40)
We rush across the gleaming surface of the ocean, moving rapidly but smoothly above the untroubled beauty of the dark waters. Jagged cliffs and wild surf, rugged hills and lush grass pass beneath us. Music plays. Finally we reach our destination, where the action begins. It may be a prison from which a psychopathic bomber prepares to break out, or a clearing where poor Scottish farmers will discover the hanged bodies of their chiefs, or a village where women will be impregnated by aliens. Whatever the details of the action that follows, the sequence of images--from any one of the fashionable movie openings of the last two years or so--teaches the same lesson: nature is the realm of purity and beauty, and man imports violence to this separate world from his own corrupt and frightening habitat, the city.
This just in:
A career diplomat from Bulgaria won a suspenseful and drawn-out race to lead the U.N. agency for culture and education on Tuesday, beating out an Egyptian candidate whose one-time threat to burn Israeli books had galvanized opposition....
It seems clear that Barack Obama doesn't consider Darfur a priority. Then again, with so many domestic and foreign policy crises looming, one might ask: Why should he care?
Quiet sobs echo through the atrium of the Al-Rifai Mosque in Cairo, where rows of seated mourners are surrounded by wreathes of white flowers. Women dab their heavily made-up eyes, while men stare solemnly ahead.
As the streets of Tehran demand freedom, a different group of Iranians gathered in Cairo last week to commemorate the 29th anniversary of the death of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Iranian monarch deposed by the 1979 Islamic revolution. The Shah was granted refuge in Egypt by President Anwar Sadat and died in Cairo soon after.
As President Obama prepares for his historic speech in Cairo next week, he faces a dual challenge--not only to redefine the troubled relations between the United States and the Muslim world, but also to clarify the place of democracy and human rights in his administration's foreign policy. The former would have been the centerpiece of his first speech in an Islamic nation no matter where he had chosen to deliver it. But it was the selection of Egypt as his venue that made the latter unavoidable.
"No," Mahmoud says as he gets back into the car, slamming the door. "They don't want. They are afraid."
I had come to Gaza’s border with Egypt to see for myself the infamous underground smuggling tunnels. Active since the 1980s, the number of tunnels has skyrocketed since the Israeli blockade of Gaza in 2007. Israel claims the tunnels are used to smuggle arms; their destruction provided much of the rationale for its recent 22-day offensive.
CNN International’s coverage of yesterday’s fighting in Gaza concluded at midnight with a rush of images: mangled civilians writhing in the rubble, primitive hospitals overflowing with the wounded, fireballs mushrooming between apartment complexes, the funeral of a Palestinian child.
Within a few minutes of Noman Benotman's arrival at the Kandahar guest house, Osama bin Laden came to welcome him. The journey from Kabul had been hard, 17 hours in a Toyota pickup truck bumping along what passed as the main highway to southern Afghanistan. It was the summer of 2000, and Benotman, then a leader of a group trying to overthrow the Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi, had been invited by bin Laden to a conference of jihadists from around the Arab world, the first of its kind since Al Qaeda had moved to Afghanistan in 1996.
Consider this scenario: The Saudis have gone nuclear. So have the Egyptians. Both countries had been signatories to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, but that agreement is now dissolved. Riyadh and Cairo acquired their weapons from Pakistan, a Sunni ally, in response to the nuclear threat from Shia Iran. Meanwhile, Iraq continues to fester, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is far from settled, and Iranian proxies remain firmly entrenched within Lebanon's combustible sectarian mix--a mix that pits Sunni against Shia and just so happens to exist on Israel's northern border.
Ever since the staggering pictures of naked Iraqi men being brutalized by young men and women in American uniform at Abu Ghraib first surfaced last April, only to be followed by the stunning news of torture and murder of prisoners not only in Iraqi detention camps but also in Afghanistan and Guantanamo, and now, most recently, the astonishing reports of American operatives abducting suspected foreign terrorists and sending them to our "allies" in Syria and Egypt to torture them on our behalf--with its corny, yet horrifying Orwellian name, "extraordinary rendition"--I rep
Along the serpentine road that heads east from the Yemeni capital of Sanaa to the desert, the barrel of a tribe-owned tank peers out over rugged, lawless territory where heavily armed local patriarchs shun government authority and harbor Al Qaeda militants. In the governorate of Ma'rib, a cigarette-smoking 10-year-old carries a Desert Eagle handgun in his belt, one of some 60 million weapons scattered throughout this country of 20 million people. At arms bazaars, or souks, anyone with a fistful of cash and minimal bartering skills can buy rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine guns. Yemen's ubiquitous weaponry is menacing and seems even more so when you consider that the country has been home to a string of terrorist attacks that began with Osama bin Laden's first in 1992 and culminated in the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in October 2000, which killed 17 sailors. Recently, several alleged participants in that assault escaped an Aden prison by drilling through a bathroom wall, raising suspicions about government cooperation with terrorists.
