We talk about nuturing freedom and democracy in the Middle-East while we have supported and continue to support some of the region's most un-democratic elements.  Turkey is a great example of a progressive government in the region.  Unfortunately for the region Turkey would rather be considered part of Europe.

By backing Al Dawa and Chalabi we are choosing the people who want to keep the region more regressive and repressive.  To make real progress in the Middle-East we need to support people that want to move the region into the future...unfortunately we have chosen to back the people opposed to progress out of political expedience.

Juan Cole recently delivered his talk "The Shiite Crescent: Iraq, Iran and the Oil Gulf" to San Francisco State, UCB and Stanford students..

Dawa Good - Hizbollah bad
SCIRI Good - Iran Bad



So says the Bush Administration and Saudis "are passing bricks"

The problem I have with discussions like this is that you can find a counterexample for just about every point made here. In Iran, the US backed the Shah against the "religious right" in Iran. In Saudi Arabia, we indeed backed the "reactionary forces", the monarchy. But after about 1979, after the Mecca uprising, the monarchy co-opted the religious right and so we could hardly be seen as doing anything against them.

'The idea that a society of individuals who locate their sense of self in their tribe and their personal and family security in the power of their sheik can operate as some sort of post-Enlightenment democracy is surely the height of foolishness.'

<span>You could quite easily be talking about the Republican Party (tribe) and Skippy (sheik)</span&gt

It may be that the contradictory lessons drawn from politics in the Middle East stem from the fact that at root it's only about money. As the sergeant character in "Thin Red Line" said about WW II, "All for property!"

It can be argued that while ideas and loyalty are needed to motivate actual soldiers, the only thing that motivates the powerful is questions of power. For power substitute money, if desired. Therefore, all arguments by the elite about politics are rationalizations of maintaining advantages. The telling point would be the well-defined antagonism by the West, in the late 19th and the twentieth century, to self-determination in the Phillipines, Cuba, India, Iran.

Since power, in the form of money, has come to the Middle East those elites now act from the same root principles. And since power/money are mainly of benefit in the short term to those posessing it, long-term political health is not even secondary.

The unmentioned elephant in the room is Jonathan Schell's People Power ("The Unconquered World") which has confounded planners and movers. A huge factor only present recently is modern weapons.

Automatic small arms and a wide variety of explosive munitions give popular movements a significant counterweight to the numbers and technology of major powers. Once a weapon comes into use it tends to leak out into the wider world, and familiarity with its limits leads to countermeasures. So major powers can never ensure security if the population includes resisters.

Only police states can guarantee security, essential for commerce. That would explain the West's comfort with dictators. If a resistance  becomes a government it may not cooperate with commerce, so Mossadegh was dumped in Iran. It also explains why we supported Saddam over nominally democratic Iran in the 80's.

The message being sent is the same one as always, "Watch what we do, not what we say." The world knows to avoid our attention, if possible. It also knows that a nuclear capability is pretty effective at making the US leave it alone. We are ensuring that nations wary of us will move in that direction. If South Africa had oil in large quantities they would have kept their nukes. Then again, Mandela might still be in jail.

Brad, we backed the shah not against the "religious right," but against Mohammed Mossadegh, who was a secularist and seemed to be working toward building a democracy in Iran. However, Mossadegh was hated by the British for his attempts to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. And the U.S. in its cold-war fervor eventually decided Mossadegh might be getting too friendly with the Soviets. So we sponsored a coup to overthrow him and install our friend the shah. The shah brutally repressed all forms of dissent. However, he wasn't able to completely control the Muslim clerics, who therefore became the one group that could counter his absolute power. The fact that the clerics were the only institution that could oppose the shah resulted in the growth of political Islam (the political religious right) in Iran, which prior to the shah was a relatively secular place.

One can argue, therefore, that we didn't support the shah against the religious right, but instead, by supporting the shah against secularists, we helped foster the conditions necessary for the rise of the religious right.

If one considers the case of Pakistan, then I think it is a case of the wealthy, landed elite coopting the religious sentiments of the masses ("Islam is in danger"), against opposition of many of the Religious Right, to get themselves a state. Once the state was formed, the Religious Right quickly reconciled themselves to it. The state quickly became dominated by the elite and the military; and then these enlisted and coopted the religious right to their cause. Now the three - landed elite, military and religious right - are so intertwined as to be inseparable. Various US interests (e.g., the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan) have kept the money and arms flowing to the various regimes despite all these troubling features, and have helped them consolidate their hold on Pakistan. At present there does not appear to be any political force that can displace these and move Pakistan towards representative democracy.

I think what what we should be held responsible for is backing governments that are better for us than for the people they are governing. Our foreign policy in the Middle East has actually been quite consistent: we've backed those governments that we felt would be anti-Soviet and/or ensure our access to oil. We paid no attention  to how those governments treated their people. That's our biggest mistake in the Middle East--backing a lot of bad guys because we thought they would be good for us.

It is my understanding that the Shah demanded we not speak to any of the various opposition groups, many of whom were in France.  I gather we complied with this demand.  Rather stupid so we were caught by surprise by the strength of Khomenni when he returned to Iran.

It's a mistake to overestimate the intellectual coherence of American foreign policy.




Absolutely! Except that political science professors are always trying to spin grand theories about foreign policy and end up giving it a patina of coherence. But in reality, policymakers are rarely completely consistent and in many cases they are basically making it up as they go along (or, more charitably, responding to the unique characteristics of each issue). This is probably how it should be.




With respect to political Islam, one can say that in countries like Egypt, there may have been some tactical alliance with the religious right as they battled with the forces of secular nationalism that was often aligned with Moscow. The US had bigger fish to fry than to worry about a bunch of religious zealots.




One can certainly fault US policymakers for their excesses during the cold war. And certainly there were many decisions that were counterproductive to American interests. But at the end of the day it has to be remembered that overall the cold war was successful and we removed the scourge of communism from the world. The "blowback" we are experiencing now from our former allies in the fight against communism on the religious Islamic right is a price worth paying for cold war victory.

Just a little on Saudi history. The Saudi royal family is not Wahhabi or (for that matter) truly very religious, nor was it placed in power by the British. It came to power by forming an alliance with Wahhabi warriors and since then has always made concessions to the Wahhabis without ever fully endorsing their extreme vision. In fact, whenever the Wahhabis get too extreme (as in 1978 when a group associated with the Wahhabis seized the mosque at Mecca), the royal family has turned to the more moderate, non-Wahhabi ulama (clerics) to issue fatwas approving of the royal family over the Wahhabis. Given the House of Saud's secularlism, I don't think they are threatened by any Shia Iranian claims to religious purity--though they may very well worry about the political power of Iran.

"Shah the Iranians clearly didn't let hatred of Israel infect everything they do the way the Arabs did"

Can we not please? 

If you can come up with terms more neutral than hatred that will help prevent the level of the debate from descending.