Editor's Note:

This is the second in a series of SUSRIS "Items of Interest" providing transcripts from the recent Middle East Policy Council (MEPC) Capitol Hill conference series panel on the Future of the Middle East: Implications for the United States. The panel, held on June 26, 2007, featured five distinguished specialists on Middle East affairs, introduced by MEPC President Chas W. Freeman, Jr. Part 1, the introduction by Ambassador Freeman, was distributed separately and is posted on the SUSRIS web site. Additional panel presentations will be distributed via SUSRIS over the next several days.

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The Future of the Middle East: Strategic Implications for the United States
Middle East Policy Council Capitol Hill Conference Series on U.S. Middle East Policy

Moderator/Discussant

• Chas W. Freeman, Jr., President, Middle East Policy Council

Speakers

• F. Gregory Gause, Political Science Professor, University Of Vermont

• Fareed Mohamedi, Partner, Head Of Markets And Country Strategies And Practice, PFC Energy

• Afshin Molavi, Fellow, New America Foundation

• Wayne White, Former Deputy Director, Near East And South Asia Office, INR, State Department; Adjunct Scholar, Middle East Institute

• Anthony Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair In Strategy, CSIS

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F. Gregory Gause, III
Political Science Professor, University Of Vermont
Washington, DC
June 26, 2007

I'm quite struck by this concatenation of crises that Ambassador Freeman listed for us in his opening remarks. And I think that there is a tendency both here and in the region to see these as part of one crisis. That it is not an Iraq crisis and a Lebanon crisis, and a Palestine crisis; it's one crisis. It's a Middle East crisis. I cut out the headline from al Hayat two weeks ago, which was the day that the minarets in Samarra Golden Mosque, al Askari Mosque, were struck, that Walid Eido was killed in Beirut, and that Hamas-Fatah fighting really heated up.

And it was a banner headline that connected the three crises, and it said - youm fitna (ph) (in Arabic) - so we have a long day of civil conflict, but civil conflict doesn't really capture it - fitna is about the worst thing you can have in the Muslim world, Muslims fighting Muslims, general conflict - from Samara to Gaza passing through Beirut, right. So they thought it was one crisis.

People in the region think it's one crisis. Some of them think that it's a crisis that is united by the fact that Iran has its fingers in every one of those things. Other people in the region think it's a crisis that is united by the fact that we have our fingers in each of these things. I think that we should step back and try to think about this crisis in the Middle East as a broader crisis of authority, that it's heading the whole Muslim Middle East. Each of these three crises that we have talked about is a contest over the organizing principles of politics in the country. Of course it's a fight for power as well. Of course it's a fight for power. And the details in each case differ because of the particular histories in each place. But there is an underlying conflict in each case over how and to what extent Islam will define politics.

This regional crisis is not as violent elsewhere. It has been, but it's not as violent elsewhere as it is - has been in Palestine, in Lebanon, and in Iraq. But that doesn't make the crisis any less important in the places where it is less violent now. This crisis of authority is the defining context of political struggles across the Muslim world, particularly in the Middle East.

Now, this is not a binary conflict; it is not Islamists on one hand and secularists on the other hand. The Islamists are divided by sect and by strategy. The secularists are not really secularists. They don't want to separate religion from politics, at least in our sense, but they are not in favor of the complete Islamization of politics the way their opponents are. And these secularists are divided as well. There are authoritarian leaders. There are liberals who don't like authoritarian leaders, but see the alternative as worse and thus back the regimes. There are real democrats who are fed up with the regimes, don't particularly like the Islamists but think that they can deal with them and are willing to trust two alliances with moderate Islamists.

But this is the context of politics; it's the context in which al Qaeda has arisen and presented its challenge. It's the context of the electoral successes of Islamists across the region. It's the background of past civil conflicts in Algeria and Egypt in the 1990s, and Syria in the late '70s and early 1980s. And it's not always Islamists and opposition and the more secular forces in power. In Iran, it's the other way around. In Turkey, it's the other way around.

Now, I don't think that this crisis is best understood as a clash of civilizations. It's both a clash and a dialogue within a civilization, although it's linked to us in ways that I'll get to. It's also not best understood in a Bernard Lewis framework of a centuries'-long decline of Islam -- what went wrong? This is a modern struggle about ideas and power in the context of independent states and it's fought with modern means of political mobilization.

Even those groups, those Salafi groups, that self-consciously look to the distant past for their models of how politics should work, these groups fight these battles with means that are more Leninist than medieval. They are modern groups even though they evoke a past as a model for their politics.

These ideas I think are wrong because they put too much emphasis on us, this clash of civilizations -- what went wrong? They put too much emphasis on us, as opposed to the fight -- the real fight -- within this civilization, and these binary models don't appreciate the differences among the players in the region. I also don't think that this conflict, this crisis of authority is best understood as a Sunni-Shi'a conflict. It manifests itself in sectarian ways in some places, but it's never been a clear binary division.

Look at Iraq right now. Sure, sectarianism defines part of the political contest, but you have intra-Sunni and intra-Shi'a fights as well over power but also over ideas about what Iraq should look like. You know, who is going to win this crisis? Who is going to win this crisis of authority? It is not inevitable that the Islamists will win, though they are the best organized political force on the ground.

We must recall that the three crises that we have in front of us today are occurring in countries where the administrative state has been weak -- as in Lebanon or in Iraq and in the Palestinian territories because outside forces - us, in the case of Iraq, the Israelis, and the international community as a whole in the case of the Palestinian authority, have worked to weaken that administrative state. But elsewhere in the region, the administrative state remains much stronger. The secular authoritarians in Egypt and Algeria won their civil wars in the '90s, as did the secular authoritarian regime in Syria in the early 1980s. The Saudis have been able to put down the al Qaeda threat to their regime. In Turkey, the administrative state, the army and the judiciary, are pushing back against justice and development. These states are not pushovers; they control resources, particularly in oil states. They have strong coercive apparatuses, and they have built patronage networks to give them a social base, and they have strong international support.

So the Islamists will not necessarily win this crisis of authority. So where does the foreign policy component come in? This crisis of authority does overlap with the current struggle for regional dominance because Iran supports Islamist groups, both Shi'a and Sunni, in an effort to extend its influence, and regimes in Egypt, in Jordan, in Lebanon, Fatah in the Palestinian territories, the Saudis, see these as threats to their own domestic stability because Iran supports a notion of politics that runs counter to the organizing principle of these regimes.

Sometimes Iran actively supports groups like Hezbollah and Hamas. Sometimes it doesn't. But it supports an idea that cuts at the political legitimacy of these regimes. Iran also uses the Arab-Israeli conflict to bridge the sectarian and the national gap and to mobilize support against Arab governance. Last summer's Israel-Hezbollah crisis is a perfect example. This is why these more secular governments would like to see some progress on the Arab-Israeli front, to take this issue off the agenda so Iran cannot use it to mobilize support against it.

And this is where we come into the picture. These more secular regimes have tied themselves to us to some degree or another. They accept our view of how the Middle East should work. The Islamists on the other hand do not accept American foreign policy goals in the region. This is, of course, true of the Islamists who want to kill us, like al Qaeda, but it is equally true of the wide spectrum of Islamist organizations, from the radicals to the moderates; from the gradualists to the violent.

None of them accept our idea of what an equitable Arab-Israeli solution would look like. None of them like the idea of American military bases in the region. None of them accept that we should have the kind of influence in the Middle East that we want to have. So what is to be done?

Well, we have tried in the post-9/11 period policy of smashing authoritarians and encouraging popular participation. What we have gotten, as Ambassador Freeman said, is civil strife, and the gains of Islamists at the polls. Of course they have gained. They are the best-organized social forces in these countries. This should be a warning to us.

Our ability to affect this crisis -- this crisis of authority in the region as a whole in predictable ways is extremely limited because it's not basically about us. So I would urge us to resist our impulse to immediately do something when things happen in the Middle East.

The Hamas takeover of Gaza is not a threat to American interests. Israel and Egypt, they will handle it. We should resist the temptation to throw ourselves in the middle of this. In the largest sense, I think we should back off our democratization push, but I think we have already done that.

No, I'm not advocating that we turn back democratic advances when they happen. I don't think we should be supporting the Turkish military and elements of the Turkish administrative state in their effort to in effect cut out justice and development from power in Turkey. The justice and development government in Turkey has basically been cooperative with American foreign policy interests.

I think we should be concentrating more on traditional state-to-state issues of regional power, working to prevent the spread of Iranian influence through traditional diplomatic means, state craft, working to make sure our violent enemies, al Qaeda and its ilk don't gain anymore. And I think we should basically be looking to get out of Iraq. And the Arab-Israeli conflict is too complicated to solve in five seconds, so I'll leave that to questions.

AMB FREEMAN: Thank you very, very much. That was very stimulating and broad. I think we will find in the discussion that we come to two issues which I will try to frame now, and hope to hear you speak to them later. The first was epitomized by a remark from an Iranian with whom I spoke several months ago, who said that when the United States began its drive for democratization of the region, people in Iran had wondered whether we knew what we were doing, and now they know we didn't know what we were doing.

Every democratic experiment worked for their advantage rather than to ours. Therefore they could understand, this man said, why we would have decided to abandon our drive for democratization. But, on reflection, Iran thought it was a pretty good idea, and was prepared to pick up where we left off.

And this brings me to the second point, which is whether Hamas does not represent more than a threat simply in the sense of being the first serious Sunni-Arab ally of Iran in the region, but also because it believes that it unites Islamism - political Islam - with democracy and a willingness to alternate in and out of power through elections in a way that ultimately threatens the legitimacy of the neighboring states -- whether Egypt, where the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a parent of Hamas, or Saudi Arabia where Salafi Muslims, calling themselves Wahabis, have found it necessary to ally with the al Saud to achieve power.

What Hamas believes it is demonstrating is that you don't need to ally with a prince or a strongman or a dictator to pursue your political agenda. You can legitimize it directly at the polls. And therefore ruling families and existing power structures no longer have the essential utility in the eyes of Islamists that they may once have done. I think we will probably come to a discussion of this too, which, in a way, fits exactly, Greg, into your crisis-of-authority theme.

We now turn to Fareed Mohamedi for a discussion of what some of this confusing turmoil may mean for all of us at the gas pump..  [continued]

[Part 3 will provide the presentation of Fareed Mohamedi, Partner, Head Of Markets And Country Strategies And Practice, PFC Energy]

[Reprinted with permission of MEPC]