I am not a pessimist regarding the Middle East. It is just that it
is sometimes unpleasant to watch.
The world is evolving toward what I will call modernism although that
is too weak a descriptive. Some of the core ingredients of modernism
are not even in place yet. It is an revolutionary evolution though
and it is uprooting all societies and that disruption easily bursts
out in violence. Our challenge is to manage it if we can and accept
facts on the ground as temporary sideshows that will ultimately
succumb.
Does anyone now doubt that the Iranian mullahs will succumb? It is
only a matter of when.
Israel is a demonstration in the desert of modernism as work. And as
I have posted before, the military threat has actually waned unless
you really think that one can form an army of suicides. Low level
disruption is now turned inward in the Islamic world and regimes are
failing and changing.
To put this all in perspective. China went through a full seventy
years of what can only be described as adjustment to modernism.
India is still adjusting although with the present aid of rapid
growth. Africa has begun to get serious about this adjustment.
Islam has actually resisted the adjustment with a nasty two forward
one back type of movement.
It is this propensity to go backward that is so difficult to watch.
It does not last because you cannot wipe out people's memories and
halt their natural resistance to forced poverty.
An example of this is present day Iran. The next regime will be a
modernist democracy that dominates through example. They have the
educated middle class in place who are simply out waiting the
mullahs. Sooner or later the shoe will drop.
George Jonas on
Efraim Halevy: Israel’s ‘realistic optimist’
George Jonas Oct 24,
2012
During a recent visit
to Washington, D.C., Israel’s former top spook, Man In The Shadows
author Efraim Halevy, addressed a group of scholars, journalists and
foreign affairs types at the Wilson Center. For combining realism
with optimism, his sober presentation was the clearest analysis of
the current situation of the Middle East I’ve encountered.
Halevy, a former
Director (1998-2002) of Mossad, is in a position to know. Born in
England but arriving in Palestine as a boy just before it turned into
Israel, Halevy rose through the ranks of the institution he ended up
heading in 1998, after being recalled from his second career as a
diplomat to do so. Try envisaging an amalgam of the Orientalist
Professor Bernard Lewis and Dr. Henry Kissinger, wrapped into the
aura of James Bond — or better still, his boss, M, a spymaster
rather than a master spy. The scholar, envoy and ex-agency chief
comes across as an inter-disciplinary edition of all his parts.
In public speaking,
which he does without notes, Halevy creates the impression of
outspoken, direct, full-disclosure sincerity, so much so you’re
tempted to say to your neighbour “Wow, listen to this guy tell it
all,” until the speech is over and you look at your notes to
discover that whatever Halevy spilled it wasn’t the beans.
The man emerges from
the shadows to speak his mind, without quite telling us what’s in
it. He offers no comfort to left or right; hawks or doves; anti-,
post-, or ultra-Zionists. He offers none to the enemies of the Jewish
state either. He seems resolved, though, not to substitute what he
might like to see for what he actually sees.
Paraphrased (I’ve no
transcript of his Wilson Center remarks), these are some facts as
Halevy sees them. Put in my words, they add up to his portrait of the
contemporary Middle East.
- Religion, having declined as a political factor in the region after the First World War, erupted with a vengeance in the 1970s. It cannot be swept under the carpet and needs to be reckoned with as a key force, keeping in mind all its complexities and ramifications, including the conflict between the Shia and Sunni branches of Islam
- People inspired or fuelled by religion aren’t necessarily irrational. It’s misleading and dangerous to assume that rational discussions cannot be held with people whose arsenal includes suicide bombers. Note that groups launching suicide missions often send their children rather than go themselves.
- Governments in the region are increasingly losing grip on their own countries. Civil war is becoming the norm, with Egypt, Libya, Syria and Lebanon being overrun by spirits released from the Pandora’s box of the “Arab Spring.” Even the kingdoms of Saudi Arabia and Jordan are threatened. Iraq’s government has virtually lost the Kurdish third of its territory, for better or worse. And Pakistan, a country with nuclear weapons, verges on becoming dysfunctional. Halevy’s point is that certain Western initiatives, encouraging “reform,” may be detrimental to Western interests.
Halevy has written
elsewhere about the “policies of 2011” setting back the
achievements of 2003 in Libya, when Muammar Gaddafi was persuaded to
dismantle his nuclear program. “In light of the Libyan experience,”
Halevy wrote in The New Republic, “what nuclear aspiring nation can
now put its trust in a rollback deal of any sort? When NATO took
to the skies over Tripoli, Benghazi and Misrata, it delivered the
greatest possible blow to future non-proliferation diplomacy.”
- After a decade’s absence following the implosion of the Soviet Union, the Russians are back as a factor in the region. We disregard them at our peril.
- Democracy, western-style, is a fine form of government when it coincides with the culture of a region. It’s not the only form of functional government, though, and trying to force it on cultures it won’t fit is a mistake.
- Halevy doesn’t believe in “red lines” — limits set by one party threatening a military response against the other party crossing them. Drawing a red line confines the party that draws it as much as the party against whom it is being drawn. “It creates a commitment that cannot always be met.”
- Halevy doesn’t look at Iran’s efforts to acquire nuclear weapons as an existential threat to Israel. Why plant the notion in the minds of the Jewish state’s enemies that if Iran acquired the capacity to build and deliver the bomb Israel’s existence could be put into doubt? Halevy would rather say that acquiring nuclear weapons capability is an existential threat to Iran.
- In many ways, the relationship between the United States and Israel has never been better. Halevy tells a story of Barack Obama’s intervention saving Israeli lives in a recent incident to illustrate that there’s no “daylight” let alone bad blood between the White House and Israel.
Right. If you say
so, chief. Anyway, we may have four more years of the fellow, so why
give people ideas?
Realistic pessimists
are a dime a dozen; realistic optimists are as rare as gold.
(If they’re top-notch thinkers, like Halevy, it’s a bonus.) I’m
not knocking realistic pessimists, being one myself, but if anything
gets done in the world that is remotely beneficial, we usually owe it
to the efforts of realistic optimists. May their tribe increase.
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