Sunday 19 October 2014

No Peace in the Middle East Until Circumstances Change

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Juan Cole is a widely known public intellectual. His blog, Informed Comment, which he has had since 2002, attracts thousands of readers. Also a professor of Middle East history at the University of Michigan, Cole has written a number of books on a verity of topics ranging from Shi`ism in 18th-century India, modernity in 19th-century Iran, and Napoleon in Egypt.

His most recent book, “The New Arabs,” published in 2014, focuses on the role of the youth movement in the events commonly referred to as the Arab Spring. To him, “Young people are the key to the rapid political and social change in the Arab countries that have been in turmoil since 2011,”

The New York Times wrote of his book, “The New Arabs” focuses not on Iraq, but on the Arab Spring, and in particular on the role that youth movements in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya played in bringing down the authoritarian regimes in those countries.”

In another review in Los Angeles Times, Nathan Deuel wrote: “Cole dazzles when exceeding his narrow mandate, moving beyond the three countries in question to compare Mubarak to Richard Nixon, proving how important Gandhi was to Cairo's revolution, or exploring the power of the WikiLeaks revelations. It's a small world — Cole argues that even President Obama's route to eletion owes a great deal to millennials.”

Juan Cole served as president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) in 2005. In 2006, he received the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. He testified before the U.S. Congress Select Committee on Foreign Relations in 2004 on the Iraq war. During the Bush administration and according to the NY Times, the White House asked information to be gathered about him.

"A post-war Iraq may well be riven with factionalism that impedes the development of a well-ensconced new government,” he wrote back in 2003.

On the war on ISIL, he wrote in his blog a few days ago, “Nor can Obama’s air and drone strikes in Syria actually hold at bay the forces unleashed by Neoliberalism and fossil fuel-driven climate change, as he asserts. Rather, they will likely further polarize these populations and make ISIL popular. Imperialism, having created many of the problems of the modern Middle East, isn’t usually the answer to them.”

Here is an exclusive interview with Juan Ricardo Cole, conducted before the bombings of ISIL strongholds by the US-led alliance.

Let me begin with this question. What do you think of Obama's recent speech? Do you think he should be faulted for acting so late and so feebly against ISIL? Will he be able to forge this alliance against ISIL so late in the game?

I don’t think there is too much difficulty in forging an alliance against ISIL. I don’t know what people would have expected him to do. Until the recent uprising of Sunnis in Iraq in early June this year, ISIL was one of the number of factions fighting in Syria. It was doing better than others and Syria is of course a mess. It is only when parts of Iraq fell to them that the world became alarmed and concerned. I don’t think it would have been easy to predict that even among the other factions, that is some of the Baa’th people, also collaborated with this uprising.

Do you think the alliance is working? Iran has refused to join while some other countries such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar are using their planes to bombard parts of Iraq held by ISIL?

Obama and Rouhani are on the same line in what needs to be done in Iraq. They may not discuss it in public but the presence of Islamic Revolutionary guards and Soleimani at Amerli are testimony to that.

How was this monstrous organization really created? Of course there are the usual conspiracy theories. What is your opinion as an informed commentator?

ISIL has a genealogy. It goes back to Abu Musab Zarqawi who was a Jordanian. In the late 1980’s, he was a young man. He then went to Afghanistan in 1989. He came back and was jailed by the Jordanian government and was part of a small group of fundamentalists in Kurdistan. The U.S. at the time of Bush and Cheney pointed to his presence in 2002 as a reason to invade Iraq. Of course Saddam Hussein actually tried to track him down and arrest him and then after the Iraq invasion of 2003, he founded Al Qaida in Mesopotamia which was evolved into ISIL.

All along funds were given from wealthy Salafi Sunnis from the Gulf states to various groups and ISIL. The Press has reported this, especially funds came from Kuwaiti businessmen. I don’t think there is any good evidence that the governments of the Gulf region funded ISIL, that is Saudi Arabia or others, at least not directly. It was not as if King Abdullah and Emir Al Sabah were sitting down and discussing how to arm Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi and his group. There is certainly no proof of it. There are Saudi individuals who are extremely powerful and wealthy who have spent money and channeled it to various groups. The governments of Kuwait and Qatar have been supporting the Muslim brotherhood which is actually a rival to ISIL. It is easy to make these allegations but whenever you try to track down any documentation there is none.

Who is this guy Abu Bakr Al- Baghdadi? They say he is an educated cleric with a PhD. What is his background?

He has a PhD in Islamic philosophy from Baghdad University. He is originally from Samarra. I don’t think he is particularly remarkable. At the time he did his studies it was not a high powered degree and I think people like that are a dime a dozen.

Was it during Saddam?

Yes it was in the 90’s during the Baa’th government. That particular department at the university was not specifically given a lot of funding. He is a Salafi and in his announcement, he quoted the Indian- Pakistani preacher, Abul Ala Mawdudi. He probably has been reading an Arabic translation of his work and that of other fundamentalist thinkers. As far as I know, he is not an original thinker.

You have a blog and write about the Middle East on a daily basis.

What is the current state of affairs? As we are witnessing, The Arab Spring is long gone and there is a general malaise everywhere, to say the least. You also have a new book out, The New Arabs. There are some good reviews and there are some critical ones. Some say that it is too optimistic. What is your reaction to these critical voices?

First of all, those who are critical of my book are in the minority. My book is not about fundamentalism; it is an argument that there is a millennial generation of young Arabs, people born in the 80’s and 90’s. The argument is that they are distinctive from their parents. They are much more open as a generation; they are much more literate; much more wired and connected to TV and internet. And they are at least less religiously observant than their parents. Although this differs from country to country.

Lebanese and Tunisian youth are quite secular in this regard. They are not atheist or anything but they don’t go to mosque or read the Koran as much as their parents and so they are different. We saw them in the streets in 2011 and later. And we know what their slogans were and their demands were. They objected to Presidents for life, in Tunisia and Egypt as an example or the Presidents’ relatives taking over. They objected to the Republican dynasties like in Syria. And then they demanded free and open parliamentary elections. In Tunisia, in Libya and in Yemen, and in Egypt. Although in Egypt there was much more difficulty as it was rejected. These young people have set off a great deal of political change. What I saw in the Middle East in the late 60’s or 70’s, the general atmosphere was that people were looking for a man on a white horse to save them from imperialism and most of the societies were rural and illiterate.

Those were the days of Muammar Qaddafi and Abdul Nasser. ٌWhen people were asked what they wanted, they would say a revolution, and that meant a Che Guevara kind of revolution. And so I was very struck on how different these people and their horizon is today. I think they have put down a marker on the whole social change. Libya was a dreary police state. I think an outbreak of American style democracy was misreading of what was going on. They wanted to get rid of the dictators and they did.

Thus, I would be the first to note that the current state in Egypt is dark but I was there in March and there were mass labor demonstrations. Workers were out and the army had to negotiate with them. People who say Egypt has not changed at all are wrong. It has.

But in Libya things are not that rosy?

Again my book is not predicting that everything is going to be rosy. It is predicting that these millennia youth are a new force and they are turning things upside down. Sometimes there are improvements and sometimes they are negative aspects. It was always clear that Libya was going to have a very hard ride. With the fall of Qaddafi regime which micromanaged everything, most of the people had to deal with bureaucracy and administration. For a long time there was no private property in Libya. Therefore, when you dissolve those old structures, obviously there is going to be chaos and I think that is with any revolution.

A revolutionary process brings a lot of turmoil but what I am saying is the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s, Stalinist ways were common but today these young people have made it very difficult for the continuation of the status quo.

Is there really a Sunni/ Shia rift as we read in almost all the reports and analysis in recent times or there is something much more profound which goes beyond the religious differences?

Nobody is fighting over Sunnism and Shiism. The dispute didn’t grow out of differences in theology. Some journalists who have not attempted to read much history, not all of them of course, imagine these are eternal. But look at it this way: We don’t think that in the 18th century southern Iraq was Shiite. The conversion of the tribes in the south to Shiism probably occurred through the 19th and 20th centuries. So this division didn't’ even exist in the old days. And you say that people say Sunnis have been dominating Iraq in the 15th century and throughout the Ottoman period. That is because there were no Shi’ites; There existed some in Najaf and in Karbala but the situation that we now have in southern Iraq, which is predominately Shiite, is new in the last two centuries. And then it was into the major way people expressed their politics and so for instance in Iraqi books and magazines in the 1940’s and 50’s, there is very little mention about Sunnis and Shias, One of the big issues in Iraq at the time was landlord versus peasant. The rise of Communism and the Baa’th party socialist movement opposed Iraq’s landlords. A lot of poor were Shias and the landlords were Sunni. I went through the American military documents. They don’t mention anything about Shias and Sunnis but are quite afraid of Communism. At that point the issue of Sunni or Shia was not the big thing in Iraqi politics.

Even the Da’wa Party, the Shiite party which was popular in the 1950’s was afraid of Communism and the Baa’th party and they did cooperate with the Sunni members. In fact, ten percent of the party were Sunni then. But since 2003, a political vacuum was created in Iraq and people’s status was turned upside down. The Saddam Hussein regime had dominancy and the upper echelon was in power. Some of the Shias of Iraq came from London- Ahmad Chalabi like. They excluded the Sunnis; Tens of thousands of Sunnis were fired from their jobs between 2003-2004 the Americans made the economy collapse. They expected magical entrepreneurs to replace them which they didn’t. You had some educated, rich and powerful people suddenly reduced to laborers. The message in Iraq was that was the way they would be treated.

A minority in Iraq joined the Parliament but they were rejected. Under Maliki they were actively discriminated against, arrested and aerial bombardments took place. If you mistreat people, they rebel. And many were influenced by the Salafis. They were marginalized. The Iraqi Sunnis were the most secular people in the Middle East until the Americans came. So I say this Sunni/ Shiite divide has economic and political aspects.

More than two months have passed since the Gaza invasion. Nearly 600 children were killed, civilians bombed and homes destroyed, even UN shelters. In some way, back in 2009, Haaretz journalist, Gideon Levy, in a chapter in his book, The Punishment of Gaza, predicted this latest war. What does the future hold for Palestinians? It seems that every few years, Israel does the same thing and afterwards people forget. Is hope for peace a forgotten Idea?

I think it is important to stand back from the politics of it and look at the situation structurally. Seventy percent who live in Gaza were ethnically cleansed starting from 1927 from what is now southern Israel and they lost everything, their property and received no compensation for it. And they were locked out from their country by Israeli policy. Forty percent still live in refugee camps. And Israel conquered that area in 1967 forward. There was no amelioration of their lives after Israel occupied the land. In fact, Israelis took over 40 percent of the good land in Gaza. They gave it to the Israeli settlers, 8000 of them moved in. Although the Israelis moved out supposedly in 2005, they continued to have a siege and bombed the port and put it under economic blockade. We are talking about one million and more people who have continued to suffer. This is illegal under International law. The Israelis say if only the Palestinians acquiesce to them they will have peace. But of course nobody is going to acquiesce to them. They resist. They could get back to their villages in an hour or two if they could cross. But now they find Ethiopians and other nationalities in their land.

Until there is a comprehensive peace settlement where the people of Gaza are retributed with millions or even trillions of property damage, until they are allowed to have statehood, their land and water in their own hands and their own laws, there will be resistance and there are going to be attacks coming from Gaza. Israelis are going to reply to those attacks. There will be tit for tat. The Israelis demand that Palestinians accept this unfair situation and in some ways the PLO accepted it in the West Bank. They put in more settlements in the West Bank and used it politically. What good did it do? I view the situation intolerable for Palestinians. And thus I don’t blame them for resisting. I don’t expect that there will be peace as long as Palestinians are kept under occupation and the Israelis are preying on them.

Is it true that Hamas wanted this war as it has been accused of both by Israel and some others?

I think it is the wrong way of thinking about the problem. I think it ignores this broader structural situation. There was no Hamas to speak of until the 1980’s. They were not in power in the 1990’s until the Israelis took over much of land. In the early period of Israeli aggression and expansion, there was no Hamas to blame it on. I don’t think what changed was that Hamas was elected. By the way, the Israelis allowed Hamas to be elected. There have been periods when there was a cease fire; when Hamas did honor the cease fire but it was Israel that provoked them. It is not as if no one condemns Hamas for firing these rockets. However there is something in the International law that is called proportionality. The military campaign against Gaza was out of proportion. Until the circumstances change, peace won’t happen and in my view Israelis are determined for the circumstances not to change. That Palestinians remain stateless and open to Israelis controlling their economy and their resources. This is a large scale serial robbery.

The robbery victim is unlikely to go quietly.

With the last Operation against Gaza, Operation Protective Edge, don’t you think Israel is losing its image and legitimacy among world public opinion more so than ever?

It is certainly the case however I think it is very consequential. As long as the United States will veto the UN resolutions there are no UN sanctions. Basically, the U.S. gives Israel the get out of jail free card and there is no prospect of that changing. Civil society organizations can sanction Israel by boycotting its goods but it has a relatively minor effect and there are no political consequences. The U.S. in enabling this situation to continue.

Unfortunately, I don’t expect anything to change. We will be sitting here talking about the Gaza war of 2022.

Has Obama's policy towards Iran and the nuclear negotiations been constructive? Do you see some kind of detente taking place between the two countries?

I believe Obama wants detente and Rouhani does too. But there are forces from both sides who don’t and would benefit from a conflict between the two countries. There are certain basic demands that Obama has that has to satisfy the critics in order for him to make a deal. He has been pretty consistent in reaching out to Iran. There is also evidence that the Rouhani administration is very serious in trying to mollify the West with regard to the nuclear enrichment program. As you know, one of the easy ways to make a nuclear bomb is to enrich the reactors. That is what the North Koreans did. It is not completely impossible to do that with light water reactors. But if you are making heavy water reactors that is suspicious. The one in Arak is. The whole world including Germany, France and the UK are asking why you are doing that. How can we make sure you are not making the bomb? Ahmadinejad’s administration just brushed them aside but Rouhani has said that we can make adjustments to the reactors and he is offering that.

Then there is the issue of how much enrichment of uranium will be permitted. You need to enrich to about 5 percent to make fuel to run reactors and provide electricity. But if you enrich uranium to 95 percent, you have fissile material for a bomb. Iran insists on enriching to 5 percent but seems willing to give up higher levels of enrichment. They have to give assurances and put safeguards in place to mollify the west, perhaps accept surprise inspections. They have a long way to go. Even if they agree to these restrictions, then Obama has to get a Republican House to agree to accept the enrichment program. It is his government that has to accept to do the deal.

Then I presume you disagree with Kissinger’s latest statement that Iran is more dangerous than ISIL?

I have never agreed with almost anything Henry Kissinger has ever said since I was a teenager!




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