[Peace] Fwd: Please Fwd: Tell Congress to Rethink Afghanistan

[C. G. Estabrook]

Niloofar Shambayati wrote:
> FYI.  Obama doesn't seem to know what he's getting us into.  We need to help
> Afghans rebuild their country and find non-military alternatives to death and
> destruction.  Please sign the petition at the link below.   Niloofar

I'm afraid Obama (meaning the group within his administration making these 
decisions) knows perfectly well what they're getting into, and mean to do so. 
Just note what he and his aides have said and done, both before and after taking 
office.  They're quite in continuity with US policy in the region.

For what the policy is, practically regardless of administration, see now Rashid 
Khalidi, "SOWING CRISIS: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East" 
(2009) -- subject of a mealy-mouthed review in today's NYT:

	March 15, 2009
	The Bad Old Days
	By JAMES TRAUB
	SOWING CRISIS: The Cold War and
	American Dominance in the Middle East
	By Rashid Khalidi
	
Had the White House aides who scripted Barack Obama’s remarks to Al Arabiya 
television in January consulted Rashid Khalidi’s latest work beforehand, the 
president might not have so blithely vowed to restore the “respect and 
partnership that America had with the Muslim world as recently as 20 or 30 years 
ago.” In “Sowing Crisis,” Khalidi, who holds the Edward Said chair of Arab 
studies at Columbia and is a major pro-Palestinian voice in American 
scholarship, argues that Washington’s drive for hegemonic control over the 
geostrategic and oil-rich axis of the Middle East stretches back three-quarters 
of a century, and has continued unabated to this day.

Khalidi’s central argument is that the Bush administration’s interventionist 
posture toward the Middle East is no mere post-9/11 aberration, but represents 
an especially bellicose expression of a longstanding campaign. Today’s enemy is 
terrorism; yesterday’s was Communism. And just as the threat of Communism was 
wildly exaggerated 50 years ago, so, these days, “the global war on terror is in 
practice an American war in the Middle East against a largely imaginary set of 
enemies.” Khalidi’s point is not that American policy toward the Middle East has 
been consistently hys terical; rather, he says, it has been consis tently 
cynical, exploiting an apocalyptic sense of threat in order to achieve the kind 
of dominance to which great powers, what ever their rhetoric, aspire.

Most histories of America’s role in the Middle East, like Michael B. Oren’s 
Power, Faith and Fantasy,” focus on the naïveté and misguided idealism of a 
nation much given to moral crusades. Khalidi looks to interests rather than 
principles. His story of America’s active role in the Middle East begins in 
1933, when the consortium known as Aramco signed an exclusive oil deal with Ibn 
Saud, the king of Saudi Arabia. Khalidi reminds us of familiar if squalid acts 
of American intervention, like the role of the C.I.A. in the 1953 overthrow of 
Mohammed Mossadegh, the prime minister of Iran, who had championed the 
nationalization of his country’s oil industry. Khalidi also describes 
lesser-known ones, including the delivery of “briefcases full of cash” to 
Lebanon’s pro-Western president Camille Chamoun in order to help Chamoun rig the 
1957 parliamentary election.

This brute meddling, Khalidi argues, not only kept the pot of civil conflict 
boiling in many already weak states, but also “profoundly undermined whatever 
limited pos sibility there might have been of estab lishing any kind of 
democratic govern ance in a range of Middle Eastern countries.” That carefully 
hedged sentence shows that Khalidi is no conspiracy theorist, and recognizes the 
complicity of Arab regimes in their own predicament. And the Soviets 
occasionally play the heavy as well, though Khalidi sees the cold war as a very 
un equal battle between a world-girdling United States and a defensive and 
fearful Russia.

“Sowing Crisis” vividly reminds us what it is like to be on the receiving end of 
American power. But it often reads like a polemic rather than a work of history. 
Khalidi’s sense of American motives and strategy seems flattened by his own 
preconceptions. God knows the United States has a great deal to answer for in 
the Middle East. But is it true, as Khalidi al leges, that President Truman 
favored Israel, and ultimately agreed to recognize the country, because he had 
more pro- Jewish than Arab voters to answer to? Only by check ing a footnote 
does the reader learn that this comment, which Khalidi quotes twice, comes from 
an American diplomat who may not have been in the room when Truman is said to 
have uttered it.

But the most pressing question “Sowing Crisis raises is not whether American 
behavior in the Middle East has been consistently self-serving and expansionist. 
It is whether Arab failure is, at bottom, a consequence of that behavior. 
Another way of putting this is: can the problems of the region be reversed by a 
fundamental change in American policy?

If American policy were chiefly responsible for the Middle East’s difficulties, 
then the Arab world would scarcely be the only victim. It is hard to argue that 
the proxy battles of the cold war did more damage to the Middle East than to, 
say, Southeast Asia. Yet Vietnam is a stable auto cracy experiencing rapid 
growth, and Thailand is a shaky and semiprosperous democracy. American policy 
makers were far more cavalier about the sovereignty of Latin American states 
than of Arab ones, yet Latin America is a largely democratic zone with both 
deeply impoverished and middle-range countries.

Why has the Arab world remained largely on the sidelines of globalization? There 
are, of course, many explanations offered. One of the most striking comes from 
the United Nations’ Arab Human Development Report, written by a group of Arab 
scholars in 2002. They concluded that Arab nations suffer from a “freedom 
deficit,” from pervasive gender inequality, from a weak commitment to education 
and from the widespread denial of human rights. They might have added that the 
experiences of colonialism and of the cold war have left much of the Arab world 
with the deeply ingrained habit of blaming its problems on outsiders.

Since Khalidi inadvertently caused Barack Obama some grief during the 
presidential campaign when it came out that Obama attended a party in 2003 for a 
man some Republicans called a “ter­rorist professor,”the president is un likely 
to dis play this book in public. But he should read it, not so much to chasten 
his sunny view of our recent past in the Middle East as to be reminded how very 
hard it is to make progress in a region where memories are long, and practically 
everything is blamed on the United States (or Israel).

James Traub is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine. His most recent 
book is “The Freedom Agenda.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/books/review/Traub-t.html?scp=3&sq=khalidi&st=cse

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/books/chapters/chapter-sowing-crisis.html?scp=1&sq=khalidi&st=cse