Harvard University Press Blog

Great State Autism

In The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy, published last year, Edward Luttwak introduced the concept of “great state autism,” a collective national lack of situational awareness that reduces a country’s ability to perceive international realities with clarity. While the U.S. and Russia each suffer from obvious cases of the condition, Luttwak labels China’s autism an “especially virulent” strain, due to its ancient development in relative isolation and its sheer size, among other factors. Luttwak sees the affliction when, say, China flexes its military muscle in the face of a neighbor one day and then is surprised by the rebuff of a trade delegation to that same neighbor the next.

“In all great states,” writes Luttwak, “there is so much internal activity that leaders and opinion-makers cannot focus seriously on foreign affairs as well, except in particular times of crisis.”

They do not have the constant situational awareness of the world around them that is natural in small countries of equal advancement. After all, individual sensory and cranial capacities are much the same in smoothly operating states of a few million people, and in megastates such as the Russian Federation, the United States, India, and China, whose leaders face internal urgencies if not emergencies each day somewhere or other, in addition to their ordinary decision-making sessions and ceremonial obligations.

The result is not mere inattention. On the contrary, it is not only possible but common for great-state leaders and even entire ruling elites to make much of foreign affairs if only as welcome diversion from the harder choices of domestic politics, in which almost any decision that pleases some must displease others—and not mere foreigners whose political support will not be missed.

Great-state autism is worse than inattention because in the absence of the serious and earnest study that domestic urgencies make impossible, decision-makers cannot absorb in-depth information with all its complexities and subtleties, even if it is offered to them (which is unlikely: when intelligence officers adhere to the rule that their highest duty is to tell top leaders what they do not want to hear, their careers suffer). Instead, decisions on foreign affairs are almost always made on the basis of highly simplified, schematic representations of unmanageably complex realities, which are thereby distorted to fit within internally generated categories, expectations, and perspectives.

Now, in the recently-published Israel Has Moved, Diana Pinto describes Israel as suffering from its own case of autism, despite being a nation of far less territory than Luttwak’s Russia, China, India, or the United States. Pinto’s book is an unsettling take on Israel’s decades-long drift away from the European shadow in which it was founded and towards a new insularity. On the one hand are the country’s world-leading science and technology sectors, on the other its less successful international relationships.

Super-Israel at the technological heart of the new world economy suddenly becomes Israel the autistic with Asperger syndrome, the bipolar, the schizophrenic, the paranoiac, the psychotic, and even the psycho-rigid: in other words, an entity that denies the very principle of reality. These are very powerful, even terrifying, metaphors. They are not mine. Israelis from all camps—whether ultraorthodox or extremely secular, young or old, and coming from the most diverse cultural origins—used them freely before me as so many self-evident truths.

She writes of Israeli autism:

This condition, which occurs among the young (and Israel is both very young as a state and very old as a people), who are often quite brilliant in certain fields, defines those who cannot think of themselves as living in a world populated by others. They do not register the gaze or the emotions of others and are therefore unable to communicate or interact with them, because they do not grasp or understand what might motivate them… As with autistic people who feel threatened, Israel can reply to the aggressions of others (in its case most often real and not imagined) only by an excessively forceful and uncontrolled reaction, of which it often becomes its own victim.

Interestingly, while Luttwak makes no mention of Israel in his discussion of great state autism, Pinto cites China as the only other civilization whose “self-centeredness” resembles that of the Jews. Also striking are the contrasting conditions of each affliction’s incubation: Luttwak points to China’s ancient history of isolation from other states, whereas Israel’s defining characteristic is its keystoning of the lands along the Mediterranean Sea. In either case, the label seems a useful lens through which to observe these two major factors in the pursuit of geopolitical stability.

The Mighty, Majestic River of Persian Literature

We’ve just published Hamid Dabashi’s The World of Persian Literary Humanism, and write today to share news of a discussion of the book taking place this very evening at the Asia Society in New York. The event, which features Dabashi in conversation with Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, the University of Pennsylvania’s Robert I. Williams Term Professor of History, will be streamed live at AsiaSociety.org beginning at 6:30pm ET, and viewers are encouraged to submit questions throughout the talk.

Dabashi’s book, one of the most ambitious on our docket this fall, presents an exploration of 1,400 years of Persian literature in order to reconceive the question of what it means to be human, which has so long been dominated by a Western perspective. He tracks the emergence and spread of Persian literary humanism (Adab) from Bengal to Istanbul, from central Asia to the eastern coasts of Africa, always with present-day Iran as its epicenter. In his own rich prose, Dabashi gives us Persian literature as a river, “mighty and majestic,” the navigation of which demands “a fluidity of narrative that comes to terms with its existential immediacy, as if it had no history, and yet is fully aware of the expansive history that it tacitly flaunts.” This river of Persian literature, he writes, is “flowing from an infinity of historical sources, comes to you with the massive volume of its abiding presence, and leads to the immortality of a yet-to-be-named sea.”

As Dabashi explains in the video below (after a long gaze on the book’s physical presentation), this is a story he’s always wanted to write:

We write the books we wish we had to read. This book, in particular, is in effect a love letter to the literary heritage that has made me—and millions of other people like me—possible. Possible, I say, in our language and diction, in the mode and abode of our being, but above all, in the cosmopolitan worldliness that is—and is made possible by—Persian literature. I have put everything I have in it. My defiance against European Orientalist traditions, against Iranian nativist historiography, and against North American comparative literary criticism, overcoming them all and thus reclaiming the magnificent worldliness of Persian literary humanism.

 

At the Asia Society’s website you can read an interview with Dabashi, and remember to tune in to AsiaSociety.org/Live this evening to join him and Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet as they ride the river of Adab.

"The Most Crippling Sanctions in the History of Sanctions"

“Look, imagine had we let the Republican Congress work out the sanctions. You think there's any possibility the entire world would have joined us, Russia and China, all of our allies? These are the most crippling sanctions in the history of sanctions, period. Period.” That was Vice President Joe Biden’s response when Congressman Paul Ryan criticized the Obama administration’s policy on Iran during last week’s VP debate. From there the two men sparred over which party’s approach would more “peacefully” resolve the threat posed by Iranian nuclear efforts, apparently each taking for granted that the sanctions themselves are nonviolent.

If we take Biden at his word and accept that these sanctions are the strongest ever imposed, Americans should be neither encouraged nor permitted to imagine them as peaceful. Not after witnessing the U.S.-orchestrated sanctions on Iraq from 1990 until 2003, recognized as the most devastating in history, and now judged by some to have verged on genocidal. Joy Gordon presents that view in Invisible War: The United States and the Iraq Sanctions, a chilling study of how the U.S. steered the UN Security Council towards the creation and perpetuation of a sweeping humanitarian tragedy.

The following excerpt from Invisible War details how the world developed a sense of sanctions as innocuous, a view that encouraged complacency and indifference despite mounting evidence of the injustice of punishing a nation’s people for the transgressions of their leaders. The passage also presents then-Senator Biden arguing for continued reliance on the Iraq sanctions, in an exchange much like that of last week’s debate.

-----

The Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court define genocide as including “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such . . . [by d]eliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.” Some have argued that the U.S. role in shaping the sanctions on Iraq turned an act of international governance into a genocidal enterprise; that U.S. officials deliberately and knowingly brought about the indiscriminate destruction of life as well as destroying the means to sustain life in Iraq.

The possibility that economic sanctions could be a human rights violation, or even a form of genocide, was not something that anyone imagined when the sanctions were first imposed on Iraq in 1990. Sieges and blockades in time of war, such as the siege of Leningrad, caused terrible loss of life. But economic sanctions, as a form of political pressure outside the context of war, had not. If nations of comparable size imposed sanctions on each other, as was the case with the United States and the Soviet Union, then the impact was little more than symbolic. If the United States sanctioned a small nation, such as Cuba, then the targeted nation could shift its trade to the Soviet bloc. Consequently, economic sanctions during the Cold War were never devastating. In fact, they were viewed as a “middle route”: they were seen as nonviolent, in contrast to military intervention, but also as having more of a bite than diplomatic efforts. As of the late 1980s there was little concern about the ethics or humanitarian impact of sanctions. For the most part, those who wrote about sanctions were concerned with whether they were likely to succeed in getting the target state to change its policies, or with the difficulty of keeping sanctions in place when the members of an alliance were losing trade opportunities.

Not only were sanctions seen as innocuous, but the case of South Africa made them seem quite attractive. The Black South African population itself—the population most likely to be harmed by economic sanctions—called for sanctions against South Africa as an act of international solidarity. The sanctions imposed on South Africa were effective for a combination of reasons. They were accompanied by international diplomacy and social isolation of the apartheid regime within the international community. In addition to the international pressure, there was growing domestic opposition from labor, students, and political organizations, which emerged as forces within South Africa’s increasing urbanization and industrialization. One commentator noted that the “hurting stalemate” resulted in moderates from both sides negotiating with each other, and there were also reformist elites that emerged within the Afrikaner-dominated National Party. In any event, there was little ground to claim that the sanctions were hurting an innocent population against its will. In the end the apartheid regime gave way to democracy and sanctions were viewed as having an important and effective role in accomplishing this.

But the sanctions regime imposed on South Africa was anomalous in every regard: typically there is little support from the population that is harmed, and sanctions rarely induce the targeted state to change its practices. On the contrary, the more typical response is a “rally ’round the flag” effect in which the population supports the state in the face of what is seen as aggression by a foreign power. Furthermore, the most optimistic studies of sanctions in the twentieth century found that sanctions influence the target nation only about one-third of the time. Critics have argued that even this number includes cases that are overdetermined, and that if we look only at the number of cases where sanctions are clearly the determinative factor in changing a state’s policies, sanctions were clearly effective in only about 5 percent of the cases in the twentieth century.

The History and Philosophy of Representational Art in Islam

There exists a widespread belief that Islam can countenance no representational religious art, that any depiction of religious figures will trip the wire of Newsweek’s “Muslim Rage.” Such a belief is so firmly held in the west that it easily underwrote the government-propagated claim that the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi was a spontaneous reaction to the “Innocence of Muslims” film, rather than the premeditated assault it now appears to have been.

In fact, as those willing to grant the possibility of dissonance within a centuries-old religion understand, it is not actually the case that Islam so thoroughly outlaws representational art. What we’ve lacked, writes Jamal J. Elias, is a thorough understanding of the historical and philosophical origins of the contentious role of iconography in Islam. In the following excerpt from his forthcoming study, Aisha’s Cushion: Religious Art, Perception, and Practice in Islam, Elias explains his approach to filling this gap in our understanding.

-----

It is often claimed that Muslims do not have icons, idols, or pictures of God or religious heroes; indeed, in modern times, there undoubtedly appears to be a widespread Islamic cultural opposition to depicting human religious figures as well as God in visual form. One need only recall the publicity surrounding the making and release of The Message in 1976—a film about the birth of Islam in which none of the primary characters appears on screen out of concern for Muslim sensibilities. Similarly, one might look to the intermittent controversies over the American comedy cartoon South Park’s allusions to depicting Muhammad beginning in 2005 and culminating in threats against the makers of the series in 2010, causing them to self-censor airings of the relevant episodes. And although the Taliban do not represent a widespread Muslim ideal, their destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001 was religiously motivated to some degree, and religiously justified to every extent. More recently, the (at times violent) indignation following the publication of caricatures of Muhammad in a Danish newspaper in 2005, and the reaction to instances, threats, and rumors of the desecration of the Qur’an in the United States or in U.S. detention centers in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Cuba, underscore the obvious fact that Muslims hold complex attitudes toward religious images and objects, and that these attitudes do not reflect worldviews that are either naively unaware of or religiously oblivious to the power of images.

In fact, Muslim attitudes toward religious images and objects display apparent contradictions that not only are shared with Islam’s sister religions of Christianity and Judaism, but also are apparent in the history of image-rich religions like Buddhism and Hinduism. On the one hand, Muslims display a widespread (though not comprehensive) taboo on religious depictions, and a narrower—but still prevalent—distrust of treating material objects as supernatural or divine. On the other, they embrace a religious culture that is rich in images, reacts to the images of others in complex ways, and is spatially focused around an object—the Ka‘ba building in Mecca—and its associated primary ritual of pilgrimage, which incorporates somatic engagement with material objects such as stones and pillars.

Big Sticks and American Values

As we’re all no doubt aware, this week the eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks was marked by a new surge of violence and protest against Americans abroad, including the killing of J. Christopher Stevens, the U.S. ambassador to Libya. Embassies of the U.S. and its allies remain under siege across much of the Muslim world, in a process set in motion by the release of an apparently American-made film denigrating the prophet Muhammad. Since its very first spark, this round of violence has been made fodder for political dispute in the American presidential contest, and it’s bound to remain a focus in the weeks ahead.

Writing for Al Jazeera, Columbia University professor and HUP author Hamid Dabashi notes the parallels between these events and the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979, which also became a force in an American presidential election. Dabashi cautions against letting political pressures dictate American response:

The trigger-happy Republicans are pushing President Obama to do something rash. Presidential candidate Mitt Romany has accused President Obama of “sympathizing” with the attackers, as Aljazeera reports that “US warships steam towards Libya coast.” This is after Sarah Palin has criticised president Obama’s shortcoming and urged him “to grow a Big Stick.” The depth of this woman’s banality seems to have no limit.

The last thing that President Obama wants to do now is what President Carter did in 1979 and try something foolish like “Operation Eagle Claw.” If I were President Obama I would invite former President Carter to the White House and hang out with him for a weekend. President Obama must do absolutely nothing.

Dabashi is equally concerned with what he sees as a concerted effort by militant factions to take this offensive film as an opportunity to reverse the momentum of the Arab Spring and “derail a world historic succession of revolutions”:

Demonstrations in both Benghazi and Cairo have categorically denounced the violence that has resulted in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens. It is imperative that these denunciations be amply noted—as indeed President Morsi put it succinctly:  “We Egyptians reject any kind of assault or insult against our prophet. I condemn and oppose all who... insult our prophet. [But] it is our duty to protect our guests and visitors from abroad... I call on everyone to take that into consideration, to not violate Egyptian law... to not assault embassies.”

This is the difference between Khomeini n 1979 and Morsi in 2012. Beware the false fury. The US has done enough atrocities around the globe to be blamed for just about everything—but this is a different season—this is the season of the Green Movement and the Arab Spring—do not be fooled by these zealotries of the fanatics who are trying to steal the revolution. Diplomatic immunity of even a global hubris like the United States must remain sacrosanct for civilised life to be possible.

Dabashi calls on Obama to let the Muslim world itself denounce these attacks and restore order. “This is the season of the Arab Spring,” he writes, and “binary banalities of fanatics on both sides of the divide cannot derail the course of history anymore.”

Of course, clear-eyed observers of American politics have reason to worry that the aggression with which Mitt Romney has sought to employ these events to reverse Obama’s gains in the polls may yet ensure a wielding of the “big stick” that Palin calls for. Indeed, the contest has dramatically shifted from debating the economy to chest-thumping over the projection of “American values.” Jeremy Waldron, author of The Harm in Hate Speech, discussed the use of that phrase in diplomatic and political rhetoric since the attack in Libya with Brian Lehrer today:

 

As Waldron and Lehrer discuss, American law does not allow the prohibition of hateful and deliberately provocative speech like that of the anti-Islamic film at the heart of this week’s turmoil, but the American government and its citizens are nonetheless right to denounce and reject such speech in the most certain terms possible. Still, as Waldron highlights, while there are different views about the value of hate speech, violence is never an appropriate response.

The Politics of the Arab Spring Will Shape the Fate of Hezbollah

As escalating violence in Syria has captured the world’s attention, the role of Hezbollah in the conflict—and the organization’s position in the turbulent Middle East more broadly—has come under renewed scrutiny. Dominique Avon and Anaïs-Trissa Khatchadourian’s Hezbollah: A History of the “Party of God,” which we’ll publish later this month in Jane Marie Todd’s elegant translation, describes Hezbollah’s history from its 1982 founding to its inclusion in the 2008 Lebanese unity government, and provides a sourcebook of key documents, a lexicon of essential keywords, and a guide to organizational structure. Below, the authors discuss the insights their research provides on events now unfolding in the Middle East.

-----

We weren’t wrong when we underlined the religious dimensions of the 25 first years of the history of the “Party of God”: today, Sunni-Shiite tension is stronger than ever, and radical positions are now visible on both sides. In confronting the “complicated Middle East,” as General de Gaulle called it, we prefer to organize facts rather than to elaborate theories. Understanding the history of tensions in the Middle East can help us understand the climate today, and Hezbollah’s role in it.

Over the last fourteen centuries, confrontation with “unjust” authority has been a greater preoccupation among Shiites than among Sunnis. Sunnis have been more often in power and promoted the principle that Sheikh Abd al-Hamid al-Atrash, former president of the Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee, articulated at the beginning of the demonstrations in Egypt in January 2011: “give thanks if he who guides the community is just; be patient if he is not.” So, in keeping with its dual struggle—both “anti-imperialist” against Israel and in solidarity with “the poor” and the “disinherited” in the world—Hezbollah has applauded the revolutionary action against the dictatorial Tunisian regime. The “Party of God” has also praised the coup in Egypt, for those same reasons and also a specific one: the contentious matters between Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah and now-deposed Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak since the public disagreements during the Lebanon War in the summer 2006.

Hezbollah’s stance on the politics of Arab Spring uprisings beyond Tunisia and Egypt grew more complicated. When some Iranian people demonstrated in the street to refuse the results of the last presidential elections in Iran in 2009, the leaders of Hezbollah said first that this was an internal problem, then followed the lead of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after he denounced the opposition. When a few months later some Bahrainis demonstrated against the Sunni power in Manama, this underlined the problems of inequality of civil rights between the majority of Shiites and the minority of Sunnis. And when, at the same time, Syrians decided to search for an alternative to the Assad regime, Hezbollah recognized the reality of protestors’ social and economic claims, but explained that willingness to overthrow the Syrian state was the expression of a US-Israeli plot with the help of Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Hezbollah thus urged an “internal” solution between the Syrian regime and the opposition, rejecting any “foreign interference.”

The "Cabul Prisoners" and the Buddhas of Bamiyan

Llewelyn Morgan’s The Buddhas of Bamiyan is the most recent installment in the Wonders of the World series edited by Mary Beard. The book mines the history and meaning of these colossal figures, which stood for 1,400 years before their destruction by the Taliban in 2001. In the post below, Morgan tells of a visit to the grave of a woman whose life story he came to know during his work on the book.

-----

On a grey and drizzly English day earlier this summer I found myself in a cemetery in Somerset, feeling more emotional than I should have in front of the grave of a stranger. I hadn’t had much to go on: it was somewhere in the village of North Cheriton, and it had a cross. But I had scraped the mud away from the short inscription and there she was:

IN LOVING MEMORY OF JULIA FLORENTIA MULOCK

WIDOW OF COL MULOCK CB BORN IN AFGHANISTAN

JUNE 24 1842 DIED AT NORTH CHERITON APRIL 23 1910

Julia Mulock, née Sturt, had become a minor obsession of mine as I wrote The Buddhas of Bamiyan. Aside from her remarkable early life, Julia came to encapsulate for me Britain’s long and spasmodically intense relationship with Afghanistan, a relationship as easily forgotten as this memorial in an English country graveyard.

Chapel and Graveyard at North Cheriton

Julia Florentia Sturt had been born in captivity in Kabul. Her mother was Alexandrina Sturt, a prisoner of the Afghans; her father, Lieut. John Sturt, was already dead. He had been an officer of Engineers in the British force occupying Kabul during the First Afghan War, a misguided attempted to establish a buffer zone between British India and the Russian Empire encroaching from the north. A series of tactical errors resulted in a chaotic British retreat in midwinter, under ferocious attack from all sides, through the mountain passes between Kabul and Jalalabad, one of the most notorious disasters in British imperial history. A measure of the horror of this massacre is that Sturt was said to have been “the only man of the whole force who received Christian burial.” Very few indeed survived it, but Sturt’s pregnant widow Alexandrina, her mother Lady Sale, and a number of other soldiers and dependents were taken into custody by Akbar Khan, leader of the Afghan resistance, and spent nine months as effective hostages while the First Afghan War lurched towards its messy conclusion.

In those nine months the “Cabul Prisoners” became celebrities, their predicament the object of rapt interest by the British press and public in a way that has been compared to the US hostage crisis in Tehran in 1979-81. The most celebrated of them all was Julia’s grandmother and namesake, Florentia, Lady Sale, a tough, no-nonsense army wife (her husband, Sir Robert Sale, was all this time besieged by Akbar Khan in Jalalabad) whose journals of her experiences later became a publishing sensation. On July 24 1842 (note that Julia’s grave inscription gets the date wrong), Lady Sale dryly recorded the arrival of her granddaughter: “At 2 P.M. Mrs. Sturt presented me with a grand-daughter;—another female captive.”

In the latter stages of their captivity, as a British “Army of Retribution” closed in on Kabul, the prisoners were moved up from Kabul to Bamiyan, high in the Hindu Kush. Conditions were grim, and they faced the awful prospect of being marched north, beyond the mountains, and sold into slavery. But they also had the opportunity to visit what a series of European visitors to Afghanistan over the previous decades had made a famous monument, the cliff face peppered with caves and containing the giant Buddha statues. Lady Sale’s journal was illustrated with “some very pretty and correct sketches” by another captive, Lieut. Vincent Eyre, including three images of the Buddha cliffs.

That old lady in North Cheriton wouldn’t have remembered anything about Bamiyan, or the emotional scene when a force led by Lady Sale’s husband rescued them in September 1842. But she probably did retain some memories of the amazing reception when her family visited Britain in 1844. When they first landed at Lyme Regis (from a ship which the press were delighted to discover was called the True Briton), Lady Sale, her husband, daughter and granddaughter Julia were mobbed by well-wishers: “as soon as their presence became known,” according to The Times, “the nobility and gentry of the neighbourhood, and the inhabitants of Lyme, vied with each other in offering their congratulations, while the church bells poured forth their merriest strains of harmony…” There were similar scenes in Londonderry, Liverpool, Southampton, and London. Lady Sale was the heroine of the hour. At Astley’s Amphitheatre a circus performance culminated in “Lady Sale” fighting a double sword combat “with six Afghans, whom she put to flight.” This lionizing of Lady Sale isn’t so hard to analyze, a substitute victory that softened the dismay Britain had felt at the humiliating retreat from Kabul.

We catch a (slightly jaundiced) glimpse of the family group on their return journey to India at the end of 1844, in letters of Sir Henry Hardinge, the Governor General of India: Sir Robert Sale, “one of our military heroes seen to most advantage with a sabre in his hand,” the “very coarse” Lady Sale “coming out with a direct plain oath,” “Mrs [Alexandrina] Sturt pretty but unfeeling, the little daughter born in captivity.” Alexandrina Sturt could be forgiven for being emotionally withdrawn, we might think. As for Julia, incredibly, captivity in Afghanistan wasn’t the greatest trauma that she suffered early in life. On the eve of her fifteenth birthday, her mother Alexandrina was killed alongside her new husband, Major James Garner Holmes, beheaded by rebellious troops during the “Indian Mutiny.”

At 17 Julia married a military man 25 years her senior (they consistently falsify their ages in the census, not making Julia any easier to trace). Julia’s later years were no bed of roses, following her husband on his postings around the Empire. She lost two sons who followed the family tradition into the army. But it was to all appearances a happy marriage. Certainly Julia’s final years at The Old Rectory in leafy North Cheriton (a comfortable house up the hill from the graveyard where she now lies) were as far removed as it is possible to imagine from the place and circumstances of her birth.

America's Long War for Oil

June’s Journal of American History is a special issue on “Oil in American History” featuring nearly two dozen essays on the theme, all of which are currently available full-text online. Below, we’ve posted a short excerpt from Toby Craig Jones’s contribution to the issue, an article entitled “America, Oil, and War in the Middle East.” Jones, whose Desert Kingdom: How Oil and Water Forged Modern Saudi Arabia we published in 2010, is at work on a book about America’s oil wars.

-----

Capturing oil and oil fields and establishing direct or imperial control over oil has not been part of the United States’ strategic logic for war. But protecting oil, oil producers, and the flow of oil has been. This is a critical distinction. The period between 1990 and the end of the long war in Iraq marks only the latest stage of American militarism in the Gulf. If oil and American oil policy—rather than the behavior of Saddam Hussein, the politics of the war on terrorism, or a handful of other political factors—are kept in focus, then one can argue that this period constitutes not a series of wars, but a single long war, one in which pursuing regional security and protecting oil and American-friendly oil producers has been the principal strategic rationale. That the permanent shadow of war has settled over the Persian Gulf in the last three decades is largely the direct outcome of the ways that oil has been tied to American national security and the ways that American policy makers linked security to militarization.

It might be tempting to argue that the escalating involvement of the United States and its history of militarism and military engagement in the Gulf region have provided a kind of security for the region. After all, oil has continued to flow, the network of oil producers has remained the same, and thus the primary interests of the United States in the region have been served. But three decades of war belie this argument. War is not tantamount to security, stability, or peace. Even in the periods between wars in the region the violence carried out by regimes against their own subjects makes clear that peace is not always peaceful. The cost has been high for the United States and especially for people who live in the Middle East. In thirty years of war, hundreds of thousands have died excruciating and violent deaths. Poverty, environmental disaster, torture, and wretched living conditions haunt the lives of many in Iraq, Iran, and elsewhere in the region. Of course, the burden of death and destruction does not fall entirely on the United States and its policy of militarization. The politics of war have primarily served the interests of regional leaders who have, often from a position of weakness, exported violence to deflect internal challenges to their authority. And international political rivalry, particularly during the Cold War, drew in the other global powers, most notably the Soviet Union, which also helped facilitate insecurity and disorder in the Middle East.

The region’s autocrats have also remained in power. As citizens began to challenge ruling regimes in early 2011 in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and Oman—three of the closest allies of the United States in the region—it became clear that those governments are all too willing to turn the weapons of war, purchased mostly from the United States, on their subjects. It is also clear that those regimes are hardly stable and that they are and will remain perennially vulnerable to domestic and regional shocks, which poses a real dilemma for U.S. policy. In addition to factoring in the human toll of wars and the moral dilemmas they raise, Americans trying to determine the true price of oil in the United States must take into account the financial cost of maintaining a massive military presence in the Gulf region. Roger Stern estimates that between 1976 and 2007 the total cost of maintaining the U.S. military in the Persian Gulf was about $7 trillion, and that figure does not include the costs of the 2003 Iraq War.

The increasing willingness of the United States to use force and violence to shore up the flow of oil to global markets has not been a sign of American strength but rather of its limits. Popular political discourse in the United States often posits Americans and their government as unwitting victims of an unhealthy and unsustainable addiction or as dupes of duplicitous oil producers. It would certainly be wise to break this addiction to oil, but to do so requires coming to terms with the history of that addiction and the multiple costs it entails. But it is hardly clear that any such reconsideration is happening. Instead, the United States appears set to continue along a familiar path. Having crafted a set of relationships with oil and unstable oil producers and having linked the fate of those relationships to American national security virtually ensures that while the United States is wrapping up the most recent oil war, its military and political strategists are already preparing for the next one.

-----

Visit the companion website for the “Oil in American History” issue of the Journal of American History.

The Rise and Fall of Syria's President for Life?

Roger Owen writes in The Rise and Fall of Arab Presidents for Life that he became interested in the subject in the spring of 2009, and soon after decided to write a book. It was virtually completed by the end of December 2010, “just as the first rumblings of opposition to President Zein El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia suggested that these systems of quasi-monarchical government were much more vulnerable to popular pressure than almost anyone had previously imagined.” Faced with the question of whether or not to amend his work to reflect the inchoate Arab Spring, Owen compromised: “I would adapt my manuscript to take account of the fall of two presidents, Ben Ali of Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt; the tremendous pressure faced by three more, Bashar al-Asad of Syria, Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen, and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya; and the announcement by Omar al- Bashir of Sudan that he would not seek another term as president when his present term expired in 2015. This meant, in effect, the end of the system that my book seeks to explicate as a particular form of modern Arab political practice.” Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen and Muammar Qaddafi of Libya have of course since been removed from power. In Syria, however, Bashar al-Asad remains. With the massacre last week of over 100 villagers in central Syria ratcheting international outrage yet higher, an end to Asad’s reign may be growing closer. We offer below an excerpt from Owen’s book that outlines the common features of the system of Arab monarchical republics, which may also be seeing its end.

-----

The systems of Arab presidents for life were many decades in the making, having their origins with the (mostly military) leaders who came to power from the late 1960s onward and soon learned how to construct the coup-proof regimes that would allow them to remain in offi ce for as long as they lived. From then on, only one Arab republican president, Abdul Rahman al-Iryani of North Yemen, left office more or less of his own free will when his term expired in 1974. Other unusual exceptions were Ahmad Hassan al-Bakr of Iraq and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, who got pushed aside by ambitious subordinates, while two more, Gafar Nimeiri of Sudan and Chadli Bendjedid of Algeria, were removed by fellow military officers in 1985 and 1992, respectively.

As of 31 December 2010, the list of longtime presidential survivors included Muammar Qaddafi, who got rid of the Libyan monarchy in 1969; Ali Abdullah Saleh of North Yemen (1978–) and a United Yemen (1991–); Hosni Mubarak of Egypt (1981–); Zein El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia (1987–); and Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan (1993–). By then, just one—Hafiz al-Asad of Syria (1970–2000)—had managed to pass on power to his son, Bashar. But there was every reason to suppose that others, like Mubarak, Saleh, and Qaddafi, fully intended to try. Meanwhile, at least two of the Middle East’s remaining monarchies, Morocco and Jordan, had become significantly more presidential in their exercise of royal authoritarian power.

Perhaps this should come as no surprise to those who have read the long history of political republics, beginning with the emergence of powerful figures such as the Caesars of ancient Rome. Then, too, there are the cases of the two powerful leaders of the revived form of republicanism represented by the American and French revolutions, with George Washington fighting off the various influences suggesting that he become another type of monarch and Napoleon Bonaparte agreeing to become emperor in the interest of ensuring that the revolution could be continued on a permanent basis.

Nevertheless, it took some little time to understand how, in a roughly similar republican context, roughly similar pressures encouraged the leaders of the world’s newly independent states to take their first step in the process toward permanency by allowing themselves to serve on and on without thought of retirement. It remains true that, in the Arab world at least, the general rationale of such systems, their structures, their politics, and the ways in which they sought to legitimize themselves remain little researched and poorly understood. All this in spite of the work of a small group of academic researchers, mostly political scientists, who have begun either to explore the present political dynamics of individual Arab presidential security states such as Algeria, Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia or to look comparatively at certain aspects of these same dynamics either across the Middle East or, in a few cases, across all or most of the former colonial world.

Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam

The British Museum’s major new exhibition, Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, is being hailed as a milestone in the “public recognition and acceptance of Islam at the heart of British life.” As British Museum Director Neil MacGregor notes, the exhibition will “enable a global audience to deepen their understanding of the significance and history of the Hajj. In particular, it will allow non-Muslims to explore the one aspect of Islamic practice and faith which they are not able to witness, but which plays such a major part in forming a worldwide Islamic consciousness.”

As part of our ongoing relationship with the British Museum, we’ve just published the North American edition of the beautiful book designed to accompany the exhibition. Ventia Porter, the book’s editor and a Curator in the Museum’s Department of the Middle East, explains in her preface that the book is meant more as a companion to the exhibition than as a conventional catalogue:

Our intention has been to gather the history, the voices of pilgrims and the material culture associated with the Hajj together in one place. We felt this was greatly needed because the story of Hajj crosses so many very different disciplines, from religion, history and archaeology to anthropology, travel and art history, each of which often forms the subject of self-contained publications. We therefore brought together a group of distinguished scholars who themselves take us on a journey and help us delve deeper into the subject. Karen Armstrong invites us to look at Hajj within a broader context of pilgrimage; M.A.S. Abdel Haleem explains the rituals of Hajj and their meaning and also gives us an insight into the experience of a Hajj in rural Egypt. Hugh Kennedy explores the history of the Hajj in early Islam and then focuses on two key travellers. Nasir-i Khusraw and Ibn Jubayr, whose fascinating accounts provide such insight not only into the practicalities of the journey but the deeper meaning of why they undertook it. When you compare the writings of these early pilgrims with those of today it is clear that, although the method of travel and Mecca itself may have changed over time, the act of pilgrimage—that need to touch the holy place, the reactions to seeing the Ka‘ba at Mecca for the first time—have not changed at all. Robert Irwin picks up the history in the thirteenth century and, in a veritable tour d’horizon, he introduces us to more travellers and tells the story of Hajj during the Mamluk and Ottoman periods, though into colonial times and up to the twentieth century. It then falls to Ziauddin Sardar to bring us up to the present day: he looks at how the enormous growth in numbers has changed Hajj in the modern era and demonstrates how it is organized today.

Running in parallel with the history of Hajj is the story of the material culture that surrounds it, whether paintings evoking the journey; archaeological finds from the Hajj routes; manuscripts, historic photographs and tiles illustrating the holy sanctuaries at Mecca and Medina; certificates and pilgrim guides commemorating the direction of Mecca. In addition, there are the objects taken by pilgrims on Hajj or brought back as souvenirs, and the beautiful textiles made annually especially for the Ka‘ba. The works of photography, painting and sculpture by contemporary artists add a further dimension to the art of Hajj. All of these complement and personalize the history, allowing us to glimpse the experience through individuals, deepen our understanding and see how art has been used in the service of Islam. These objects, many of which are included in the exhibition, are illustrated throughout the book; some are highlighted in themed spreads on subjects such as “sacred geography,” the tiles of Mecca and Medina, the Futuh al-Haramayn manuscripts and the sacred textiles. There is also a focus on particular Hajj routes, with detailed maps: across Africa, from Syria and Cairo, and that remarkable endeavor, the Hijaz Railway.

You can get a sense of both the power and the beauty of the material included in the exhibition and book from this short video produced by the British Museum: