You shot who in the whatnow?

On of the most pernicious phrases in Middle East analytical gasbaggery is "over there, the enemy of my enemy is my friend."   This conjures up the images of sleazy, dusky men with hooked blades glittering in the moonlight, whispering in smoky rooms, and implies a lack of trustworthiness.  The person who says it generally does so with utmost confidence, as if the tiresome cliche they are repeating came straight from the fountain of previously-unrevealed truth.   I personally can't hear this without imagining the speaker in reflecting aviator shades and speaking with the froggy arrogance of Tom Clancy, but maybe that is a character fault of my own.   I think what bugs me the most about the phrase is that it suggests a fundamental and almost alien indecency.  I am no great fan of Arab politics, but, while the stakes generally have a more immediate life-and-death urgency, the general principles are not particularly different than anywhere else.  And, like anywhere else, one of the guiding principles is the (admittedly equally cliched) "politics make for strange bedfellows".

All that is a long-winded and fairly purple way of leading up to a bizarrely charming story about Yemen in Haaretz.  In it, the paper talks of a email they received from Shi'ites in Yemen talking about how they received information that anti-Hamas extremists in Gaza were calling on AQAP to attack Yemeni Jews and were also planning strikes on Israel itself, with weapons built by al-Qaeda in Iraq (specifically, the Quds-1 missiles).  Got it?

Now, I don't think it is impossible to imagine links between AQAP and regional Salafist groups- that has been one of the big fears for a while, as AQAP establishes themselves as a jihadi powerhouse.   I do think that it is unlikely that AQAP, currently harassed, is planning any strikes into Israel, particularly against (as the article states) the nuclear reactor in Dimona.  That is a little outside their comfort zone for the moment.  If they could, I don't doubt that they would, given the chance for glory and the resultant Israeli reaction, which would clearly not be in the best interest of Yemeni stability.   This seems to me more like politics- there is a kernel of truth here, to be sure, but it also is an attempt to get support for Zaydi revivalism against President Salih.  Afer all, they are alerting Israel (and Jews worldwide) of a threat inside Yemen- a little quid pro quo is nice, right?  What this also does is complicate the theory that Iran is behind all the trouble in the north, but I am sure the conspiracy-minded can square that circle.

To me, the most interesting thing here (beside the convolutions, for which I admit I am a junkie) is how it highlights the tension inside Yemen between Zaydism and radical Sunnism.  One of the great and largely unknown stories in Yemen is how the rise of Saudi-funded Salafi schools provoked a backlash in the Zaydi heartland in the north.   There were solid political reasons for Salih accepting Saudi money and letting hem found educational institutes, but, like so many times, it was a decision that led to hideous consequences down the road (thanks to Greg for helping to illuminate that story). 

That's why this is complicated.  You don't need a stock, faux-tough cliche to talk about why things are happening.  Those always obfuscate far more than they enlighten.  To get to where we are, all you need is an understanding of history and human motivations, none of which are particularly complex.   Even a convoluted article can make perfect sense.  It is a source of constant frustration that policy makers and analysts would rather assign a grand rationale to entire regions than try to figure out what is actually going on.

Double-Barrell Right-Wing Watch

We'll start first in Israel, where (via BMK) we see this sickening story from Ha'aretz. 

A right-wing Web site has posted a list with personal details of organizers of the left-wing protests in Sheikh Jarrah.
The details, which have been up for a week, include head shots of the activists, their phone numbers, e-mails, full addresses and pictures of their homes.

Unless there was proof, it would be irresponsible to blame this on the increasingly right-leaning theocratic government of Israel.   However, I believe that the atmosphere the Shas party and people like Avigdor Lieberman are creating helps to incite, and to provide justification for, this kind of teeth-baring internal battles; this hunting for heresies.   This is a silly example, but I think a telling one: the other day, as the girl was getting ready for work, she had on the local news, and they blurbed an interview with one of the Dixie Chicks (who is apparently touring with the Eagles. That is a show which: I will not be at).  Now, I don't care about the Dixie Chicks, and never have.  But it is amazing to think of the anger they provoked by saying they were embarrassed to be from the same state as George Bush.   Do you remember the ferocity those words were met with? 

I think that is what is happening in Israel right now.  The far-right (the creator of the website boasts he was a close associate of Meir Kahane, something most people don't brag about) is emboldened.  Their simmering anger is allowed to come to the surface.  If you aren't for expansion, you aren't a true Israeli.   They have the wild-eyed and violently beatific glow of the righteous.   I would like to think, though, that incidents like this can backfire, and that a society as decent as Israel's will quickly realize the beast in their midst.

Over here, our beast is still going strong.  The Times has a great article about Alan Simpson, Republican from Wyoming, joining a "bipartisan commission for reducing the national debt."  Simpson is being pilloried from the right because he thinks that maybe raising taxes a little might be needed to fix the deficit (along with spending cuts).  I don't find this to be a remotely controversial idea, but it is anathema to the modern right wing (who I will not call conservative- this is radicalism).    The piece is full of great quotes, and Simpson comes across as a grown up, far more than Rush or Grover Norquist, who called him "old and grumpy".  Grover Norquist calling someone grumpy is like me calling someone drunk- a little hypocritical.   Here are some quotes, which were backed up by other grown-ups likes Howard Baker and Pete Domenici.

He trailed off, and then recalled the Reagan years, when the initial deep tax cuts were followed by years of tax increases to reduce deficits smaller than the current ones.
“Reagan didn’t put anything off the table, if he felt it was for the good of the American people to tweak the tax system,” he said.
As for the present, “I don’t believe we ever had a war where we didn’t have a tax to finance the war,” Mr. Simpson added.

That is the thing- Reagan did raise taxes, and he did negotiate with the Soviets, and he wanted arms control.  But today's movement, whose every member claims to idolize Reagan, would find all of this impossible and wrong.   Like in Israel, they are more concerned with punishing heretics and breaking the opposition then in actually getting anything done in the real world.   Conservatism to me is fundamentally an embrace of doubt.  Sadly, the far right here and abroad are blessed with the miracle of certainty. 

Israeli Politics

This is a guest post from a friend of mine who is in Israel right now and who did not want to use his name.  This is ok, since it is the first time I have ever seen him use capital letters.  The trade-off is worth it. Enjoy.

If you follow politics very closely, they can seem deceptively complicated.  The daily zigs and zags, actions and reactions, and diplomatic mind games appear to be part of a complex and continuous pas de deux between highly sophisticated and experienced actors.  But sometimes—more often than many of us who spend hours each day consuming and analyzing exactly this kind of minutiae would like to admit—it simply isn’t so.

Take, for example, the recent fallout from last week’s Israeli announcement of additional Jewish settlement-building in East Jerusalem during Vice President Joe Biden’s diplomatic visit.  I would argue that all you really need to know took place one year ago, after Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party placed a close second to center–left Kadima in legislative elections.  Despite the loss, President Shimon Peres gave Netanyahu the opportunity to form a government.  Instead of joining with Kadima to create a coalition with broad popular legitimacy, Netanyahu chose to align with a group of smaller, hard-line right-wing parties to form his government.  There’s probably a complicated answer to explain why this happened involving a close and nuanced (read: overly generous and tortured) analysis of Netanyahu’s actual views over time, but the simplest explanation is also the most instructive: Netanyahu wanted to be Prime Minister.  By joining with Kadima, he’d have had to take a backseat to Tzipi Livni, whose party garnered more votes.  Instead, he installed himself as head of state, bringing far-right characters like Avigdor Lieberman and Eli Yishai into top positions and setting the course for the next year.  And the simple, sad truth is this: They have him by the balls.

If we look at Netanyahu through this prism, the last year doesn’t look so confounding at all.  Relieve yourself of the possibility that the man might, somewhere deep down, have some actual views driving him.  His thirst for power is paramount, and it is revealing.   The man seems willing to take a lot of abuse from all sides as long as he remains, ostensibly, in charge—even though his power is essentially empty, as the events in Jerusalem last week demonstrated.  For example, Netanyahu himself admitted that he wasn’t aware of Interior Minister Yishai’s decision to announce additional building in East Jerusalem while Biden was in town.  Some seemed genuinely shocked by this apparent ineptitude; others, like Hillary Clinton, appeared to be intensely skeptical of such a claim.  But why is this so difficult to believe?  The ministers to Netanyahu’s right have been playing games like this for months, with nary a consequence.  (See, e.g., Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon sitting the Turkish ambassador on the floor and having pictures taken, just for fun.)

Surely the various challenges to Netanyahu’s authority bother him, but that’s precisely the point: He can’t do anything about them.  Without the parties to his right and his ever-creeping-rightward Likudniks—the Knesset’s deputy speaker called Clinton’s reported dressing-down of Netanyahu over the weekend a “meddling in [an] internal Israeli decision” and the product of “sheer chutzpah”—Prime Minister Netanyahu would just be Benjamin Netanyahu, the guy with the crazy wife.  As one senior Likud official told Haaretz last week, “Netanyahu knows that if he breaks up the bloc, he’s finished.”  This is the simplest and most forthright assessment of today’s Israeli politics that I have seen, and it is one that has been known here since day one of the current regime.

Not that you would know it from the American reaction to last week’s “insult.”  Many on the Israeli right and in Netanyahu’s inner circle bashed the United States’ response as opportunistic and disingenuous; they are right.  It’s quite telling that what triggered the “worst crisis” in U.S.–Israeli relations “in 35 years” was not the substantive policy—East Jerusalem was always excluded from the settlement “freeze” the Americans pushed so hard for last fall—but the timing of the announcement.  Of course, optics are important in this region, where pride seems to drive daily and long-term decision making to a depressingly high degree.  For the Israelis, embarrassing the U.S. Vice President and giving their supposed future partners in peace the finger in one blow was clearly an amateur move that has backfired in a serious way.  But if it took these ill-timed remarks for the U.S. State Department to realize that Netanyahu is a hostage to his far-right domestic coalition, well, let me just say: we’re all pretty fucked.  (Not least of all because, on several previous occasions, ministers in the Netanyahu government made ill-timed announcements—coincidentally, of course—about expanded settlements.  So even if we score the Obama Administration only on hyper-vigilance for “insults,” it has mostly failed.) 

Biden supposedly made the high-profile trip to Israel to “reassure” the Israeli people that the United States has their backs.  The desire was to improve President Obama’s standing in Israel in order to, perhaps, buy credibility with the public and earn the Administration an opportunity to lead the two sides towards an eventual peace.  In fact, nothing could be more counterproductive for all three parties—the Americans, the Israelis, and the Palestinians.  Giving the impression that the U.S. continues to write Israel a blank check will not convince the Israeli population that peace is in its interest and that continuous settlements in disputed (and even undisputed) territory is a mistake.  Instead, it will only lead to more provocations by those who prop up the Prime Minister.  (Even the Finance Minister has gotten in on the act.)  To change the equation, the United States needs to begin treating Netanyahu like the figurehead he is.  Threats to “assign blame” have to be credible.  Moves to demonstrate American anger and frustration have to come with consequences for Jerusalem, or they will fall on deaf ears.  Only then will the Israeli electorate be moved to reconsider whether it wants its most important policy to be determined not by consensus but by ultra-right religious politicians.

Perhaps last week’s turbulence has awoken the U.S. policy team from its slumber.  If, for example, Secretary Clinton’s list of demands is real, things may change—even quickly—in the coming months.  But I won’t be holding my breath.  Today at a Likud party meeting, Netanyahu got right back into the business of serving red meat to those who keep him in charge: “The building in Jerusalem—and in all other places—will continue in the same way as has been customary over the last 42 years.”

            Here’s a question for an intrepid journalist to ask the administrations in Jerusalem and Washington: “Do you realize that things said by Israeli officials in Hebrew can get translated into English and distributed on the Internet?”  A silly query, maybe, but yet neither of these nations has been acting like the answer is “yes.”  This is a problem.  Cognitive dissonance is nothing new to the Middle East—neither to its people nor to its politics—but recent events have elevated the societal epidemic to an unprecedented level.  And, sadly, the Americans seem to have caught the bug.

Other Article

This one is a long semi-fisking, so it gets its own post.  Also, I get paid more if I have more posts.

That second sentence contains many errors.

The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs has a strange piece about Yemen's famous vote in the 1990 Security Council.  Briefly, Yemen, newly unified (not "reunified") voted against the US coalition to get Iraq out of Kuwait.  The US shut off aid, and the Gulf countries (especially Saudi Arabia) kicked out their migrant Yemeni workers, which destroyed precious remittance money.  This destroyed a fragile economy that was dealing with unification (for context, look at how long rich Germany struggled to merge two economies).  The reverberations of this vote are only now subsiding, with the Gulf is recognizing that maybe Yemen shouldn't fail. I think the article, by Ian Williams, does a good job in talking about that aspect.


I say it is strange for a few reasons.  First, there is this paragraph.

A few years ago, an incident like the Christmas Day crotch bomber might have precipitated another heedless attack on Yemen, a small faraway country of which U.S. politicians like Joseph Lieberman know little and care less. Somehow, they can always countenance a military response against almost any Arab country. When ignorant intelligence goes to war hand-in-hand with such galloping prejudices, the consequences of a massive American incursion into a complex and variegated society such as Yemen would be unimaginable—if it were not that we have actually seen the results in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Nothing could be more calculated to turn Hillary Clinton’s words about Yemen becoming a regional and global threat into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

No, I am second to few in my disdain for Joe Lieberman, as his Yemen comments were insane.   But it is strange to be a moral scold when the outcome has been the opposite of what he criticizes.  I also don't quite get how he seems to distance Hillary Clinton from American actions, as if she was standing on the outside and warning people about this self-fulfilling prophecy, instead of being part of the team that crafted as far better one, one which I imagine the author might approve. 


It gets odder, though.

He (Gordon Brown) even seems to have reinforced Obama’s disinclination to send in the bombers and the Marines, not least since both Washington and Sana’a seem to have realized that too visible an American hand would be guaranteed to unite all the contending parties under a jihadist banner.

Not a jihadist one.  Certainly it would be a propaganda boon for AQAP and sundry other jihadists, but it wouldn't unite the south and the Huthis.  This is a wild misread of the situation.  Still, just a misread.  We haven't gotten to the crazy yet.

Even so, while Brown’s Jan. 27 conference on Yemen was important, in terms of combating terrorism, it was only a sideshow to George Mitchell’s mission to Israel. Economic development and some reining in of corruption in Sana’a might ease the tribal and regional conflicts, but as long as the U.S. sides uncritically with Israel then al- Qaeda will recruit people to carry out its work—and to sanctify whatever tribal battles it puts itself at the head of.
And unless Obama stops the checks and votes going to Binyamin Netanyahu, Mitchell will fail and the bombers will succeed.

Wait, what? Where the hell did Israel come from?   Part of me feels like this was put in just to give Marty Peretz a seizure.   But no: for an article that criticized the "ignorant intelligence" and "galloping prejudice" (a nice phrase, admittedly) of the US, to then assume that the number one concern in Yemen happily dovetails with the ax the author has to grind is the height of narcissism.
People in Yemen don't particularly care for what is happening in Palestine, and yes, it animates some, but it is of far less concern than food, water, money, and the combined neglect and oppression of their own government.   It is the tribal and regional conflicts that are providing the majority of the fuel for AQAP, and a good bulk of its recruiting theology.  There is no need, except for reflexive prejudice, to include Israel into this.  I can't stand the current Israeli government, and am very worried about its rightward lurch, but that doesn't have anything to do with Yemen.  Much like Lieberman and the neo-cons, the author is imposing his worldview onto Yemen, grafting their as awkwardly as that of the most rabid, US-centric warmonger.  Neither side leads us any closer to a solution. 

The Israeli Right

My friend Brett in Israel has tipped me off to a couple of fascinating articles that document the language mechanisms and perhaps the mentality of the extreme right in Israel, an issue that is troubling both for the sake of peace and for the future of a decent, modern, democratic ally.

The first is a disturbing Harretz commentary by Bradley Burston.  In it, he tackles some of the more hideous assaults on law and decency that are becoming more commonplace- flouting court orders, campagins against human rights groups, increasing gender segregation, etc.  His conclusion is that the Israeli right is afraid of peace, and wants only to create the "world's last remaining legally mandated Jewish ghetto."   I think that language might be hyperbolic and create a few extreme ahistorical symmetries for the sake of emotional punch, but I understand the sentiment. 


The picture becomes a little more clear when reading the next article in Coteret, titled (even more provocatively) "Israeli McCarthyism, Circa 2010".   Author Hagai El-Ad quotes Israeli parlimentarians using the language of treason and violence against fellow Israelis who don't particularly like their country's actions in Operation Cast Lead.   Here are a couple of choice samples (all from article, with El-Ad's comments)


MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi – New National Religious Party) begun with a short introduction to the concept of treason: “My friends the members of the Knesset. Treason was defined as a crime so to prevent soldiers and civilians from providing ammunition to the enemy to destroy Israel. That’s treason…


MK Danny Danon (Likud) presented the concept of truth: “The question is very simple and we will know the answer within a few months. If these organizations did not give false information to the Goldstone Report – then all the fuss is for nothing. I’d be wasting precious time of the Israeli Knesset. But if they indeed passed false information to Israel’s enemies – if they fed them false data – we need to say: enough.”
This suggests the following philosophical question: what is a worse crime – feeding one’s enemies with false data, or with real one? Or, putting the sarcasm aside for a moment: how is MK Danon going to find out if the questions raised with regard to the IDF’s conduct during Cast Lead are true or false, if there won’t be any credible investigation into Cast Lead?

This is indeed scary stuff, but I am of mixed minds about it.  No: let me clarify a bit.  It is frightening and stomach-turning and awful.  What I am ambivalent about is its long-term ramifications.

The language will strike almost any American as the kind of stuff we hear from the American right- the with us or against us mentality, the Michelle Bachmann overdrive to root out traitors, the idea of the last decade that dissent equaled treason (funny how that has disappeared).   And that, weirdly, is why I am not too terribly worried about Israel- countries do go through periods of historical insanity.  It may seem like we are still in one, but I think it is petering out, even if it is not yet dead.  So I feel to take a moment of madness and assume it will destroy a place might be over-reaching, and playing into the idea we have now that every day is the most important one.

But this isn't a call for complacency, either.  I am not totally sold on the above.  Israel is in a strange spot right now- the heroic generation is all but gone, and the new leaders seem to want to simultaneously move forward but also feel the need to show how tough they are.  The younger generation doesn't seem to want to do much with politics or the wearying wars, but to innovate and live their lives.  Into this vacuum steps the worst actors.   Israel is also young and buffeted with enemies.  If America could lose its bearings because of one (obviously enormous, but not catyclismic) strike, a country like Israel, always on the edge of attack, can be more easily pushed over.

However, there have been signs of counter-protests.  A decent and liberal people can only be pushed so far.  But for now, this is a scary trend.  Silly or malicious people in the 2000s liked to say that the neo-cons cared more for Israel than America.  This was nonsense, but it seems what the neo-cons managed to do was provide a vicious template for their Israeli counterparts.