Mediocrates
11-08-2005, 05:36 AM
http://hnn.us/articles/17382.html
Can We Do Business with Islamists?
By Martin Kramer
Mr. Kramer (http://www.martinkramer.org/pages/899529/index.htm), author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
Martin Kramer delivered these remarks on September 20, at an open briefing on Islamism and U.S. policy. He shared the podium with Alastair Crooke, founder of the Conflicts Forum (http://www.conflictsforum.com/). The event took place at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.
I am pleased to speak here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Back in 1980, CSIS published one of my earliest efforts, a "Washington Paper" entitled Political Islam. I banged out that study on an old typewriter in Cairo, where I was doing research for my Ph.D. CSIS helped to launch me on my way as an authority. So I am delighted to revisit the same subject here, albeit at an interval of 25 years.
String of debacles
When I look back over those 25 years, I am struck by this fact: some of the greatest debacles in Western policy resulted from engagement with Islamists. Let me run through the most famous instances:
First: the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. That embassy was still full of personnel after the revolution, because some people believed it possible to engage the new regime. They miscalculated the forces at work in the revolution, and the extent of their hostility to America.
Second: Iran's humiliation of France. France, it will be recalled, attempted the ultimate engagement, by receiving the exiled Khomeini in Paris, and allowing him to command the revolution from there. The French were certain they had the inside track with the new regime. But Khomeini turned against the French over Iraq, and it wasn't long before Frenchmen were being abducted and blown up in Beirut, and Iran's loyalists were setting off bombs on the Champs Elysees.
Third: the U.S. engagement with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. The partnership against the Soviets created a false impression among many Americans that the jihadists were our SOBs. The failure to plot their trajectory left the door open to the first World Trade Center bombing, and then 9/11.
Fourth: the British attempt to engage Islamists, or at least neutralize them, by allowing them unparalleled freedom to act on the territory of the United Kingdom. The term Londonistan summarizes the effect of that policy. Britain reaped the resulting whirlwind on July 7th of this year.
So smart people, many of them with experience "handling" Islamists, have been wrong about them time and again. They have told us they know how to talk to Islamists, how to channel them away from violence, how to find common ground. And leaders, governments, and everyday people have paid the price for their errors. It has been the worst precisely in places where Islamists were given the most space to organize, preach, plan, and operate. So when old intelligence hands tell us that they have a bright idea on how to engage Islamists, we should first ask them to give us an accounting for errors past, and tell us the lessons, if any, they've learned.
One of the lessons we have learned these last 25 years is that there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of Islamism. Way back when I wrote Political Islam, many people feared that a tsunami of Islamist revolution might sweep the region. But the progress of Islamism has been erratic. It has been most potent in places that have been subject to war and occupation, and where the state is weak: Afghanistan, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and Iraq. Where states are stronger, regimes have kept Islamists in check or at bay. Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Algeria--all of them have faced Islamist challenges, which they have turned back. Islamism has faltered in these settings for two reasons: first, Arab rulers were more resolute and ruthless than the Shah; and second, the Islamists were less adept at forging alliances than Khomeini.
They have been less adept at forging alliances because they have been unwilling to compromise on their core values or their insistence that they dominat e any system in which they participate. To put it in a word, they are intolerant, and so they stir deep misgivings among other opposition groups and potential sympathizers in the West.
Drawing distinctions
After all these many years of exclusion, there are signs that some Islamists are changing gears. But here we have to make careful distinctions. True, many of the wishful thinkers about Islamism also say that we must learn to distinguish among Islamists. But they wind up making no distinctions at all: instead they tell us that all Islamists, from the Muslim Brotherhood through Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Al Qaeda, are co-optable at reasonable prices. This airbrushes away some very profound differences. So let me propose an easy two-category typology of Islamist movements.
Category one: Islamist movements for which entry to politics would be a step up. These are movements that have been marginalized for so long that they have resigned themselves to operating within limits. You won't see them marching with guns in the streets; they have been wholly domesticated. The Ak Party in Turkey is the model: their moderation is itself the outcome of Turkey's well-defended secularism. Turkey's Islamists have felt privileged just to be legalized and permitted to run, after decades of trial and error. Other domesticated Islamists include parts of the Iraqi Shiite establishment, and perhaps some members ofthe Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. (At least that is what Saad Eddin Ibrahim has been saying.) These movements might be co-opted and accommodated at relatively low cost, since they make fewer demands on the system.
Category two: Islamist movements for which entry to politics would be a step down. If you are an Islamist leader who has never spent a day in jail or exile, if you have access to great wealth or hold territory or wield lots of guns, if you already run your own Islamist mini-state within the state, you are not going to give up tangible sources of power for a gamble at the ballot box. You might take a few seats in parliament to better defend your hard assets, but you are not going to give up those assets for a few seats.
In this category, I would place Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian Hamas. These movements have a strong sense of entitlement, and a record of rejecting offers of political inclusion that do not privilege them. The cost of bringing these movements in is high--they place heavy demands on the system, because they insist on retaining their mini-state privileges.
The most significant of those privileges is stockpiles of weapons. Both Lebanon and the Palestinians have been through dark chapters of warlordism, which they are trying to put behind them. Hezbollah and Hamas are the main obstacles to the turning of this page.
They say they will never give up their guns. They insist on stockpiling a vast array of weaponry, most of which cannot threaten Israel, but all of which undermines the fragile authority of the Lebanese state and the Palestinian Authority. In Beirut, Hezbollah still mounts paramilitary displays, and in Gaza and the West Bank, no demonstration is complete without the public display of weaponry. Yesterday, 10,000 Hamas militia militants paraded through Gaza with assault rifles, rockets, and anti-tank missiles. This is not like the gun culture of America, which is focused on the individual's right to bear arms. This is militia competition, so familiar from other failed states where warlords compete by shows of armed strength.
Can We Do Business with Islamists?
By Martin Kramer
Mr. Kramer (http://www.martinkramer.org/pages/899529/index.htm), author of Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle East Studies in America, is editor of the Middle East Quarterly.
Martin Kramer delivered these remarks on September 20, at an open briefing on Islamism and U.S. policy. He shared the podium with Alastair Crooke, founder of the Conflicts Forum (http://www.conflictsforum.com/). The event took place at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington.
I am pleased to speak here at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Back in 1980, CSIS published one of my earliest efforts, a "Washington Paper" entitled Political Islam. I banged out that study on an old typewriter in Cairo, where I was doing research for my Ph.D. CSIS helped to launch me on my way as an authority. So I am delighted to revisit the same subject here, albeit at an interval of 25 years.
String of debacles
When I look back over those 25 years, I am struck by this fact: some of the greatest debacles in Western policy resulted from engagement with Islamists. Let me run through the most famous instances:
First: the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran. That embassy was still full of personnel after the revolution, because some people believed it possible to engage the new regime. They miscalculated the forces at work in the revolution, and the extent of their hostility to America.
Second: Iran's humiliation of France. France, it will be recalled, attempted the ultimate engagement, by receiving the exiled Khomeini in Paris, and allowing him to command the revolution from there. The French were certain they had the inside track with the new regime. But Khomeini turned against the French over Iraq, and it wasn't long before Frenchmen were being abducted and blown up in Beirut, and Iran's loyalists were setting off bombs on the Champs Elysees.
Third: the U.S. engagement with the mujahideen in Afghanistan. The partnership against the Soviets created a false impression among many Americans that the jihadists were our SOBs. The failure to plot their trajectory left the door open to the first World Trade Center bombing, and then 9/11.
Fourth: the British attempt to engage Islamists, or at least neutralize them, by allowing them unparalleled freedom to act on the territory of the United Kingdom. The term Londonistan summarizes the effect of that policy. Britain reaped the resulting whirlwind on July 7th of this year.
So smart people, many of them with experience "handling" Islamists, have been wrong about them time and again. They have told us they know how to talk to Islamists, how to channel them away from violence, how to find common ground. And leaders, governments, and everyday people have paid the price for their errors. It has been the worst precisely in places where Islamists were given the most space to organize, preach, plan, and operate. So when old intelligence hands tell us that they have a bright idea on how to engage Islamists, we should first ask them to give us an accounting for errors past, and tell us the lessons, if any, they've learned.
One of the lessons we have learned these last 25 years is that there is nothing inevitable about the triumph of Islamism. Way back when I wrote Political Islam, many people feared that a tsunami of Islamist revolution might sweep the region. But the progress of Islamism has been erratic. It has been most potent in places that have been subject to war and occupation, and where the state is weak: Afghanistan, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories, and Iraq. Where states are stronger, regimes have kept Islamists in check or at bay. Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Algeria--all of them have faced Islamist challenges, which they have turned back. Islamism has faltered in these settings for two reasons: first, Arab rulers were more resolute and ruthless than the Shah; and second, the Islamists were less adept at forging alliances than Khomeini.
They have been less adept at forging alliances because they have been unwilling to compromise on their core values or their insistence that they dominat e any system in which they participate. To put it in a word, they are intolerant, and so they stir deep misgivings among other opposition groups and potential sympathizers in the West.
Drawing distinctions
After all these many years of exclusion, there are signs that some Islamists are changing gears. But here we have to make careful distinctions. True, many of the wishful thinkers about Islamism also say that we must learn to distinguish among Islamists. But they wind up making no distinctions at all: instead they tell us that all Islamists, from the Muslim Brotherhood through Hamas, Hezbollah, and even Al Qaeda, are co-optable at reasonable prices. This airbrushes away some very profound differences. So let me propose an easy two-category typology of Islamist movements.
Category one: Islamist movements for which entry to politics would be a step up. These are movements that have been marginalized for so long that they have resigned themselves to operating within limits. You won't see them marching with guns in the streets; they have been wholly domesticated. The Ak Party in Turkey is the model: their moderation is itself the outcome of Turkey's well-defended secularism. Turkey's Islamists have felt privileged just to be legalized and permitted to run, after decades of trial and error. Other domesticated Islamists include parts of the Iraqi Shiite establishment, and perhaps some members ofthe Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. (At least that is what Saad Eddin Ibrahim has been saying.) These movements might be co-opted and accommodated at relatively low cost, since they make fewer demands on the system.
Category two: Islamist movements for which entry to politics would be a step down. If you are an Islamist leader who has never spent a day in jail or exile, if you have access to great wealth or hold territory or wield lots of guns, if you already run your own Islamist mini-state within the state, you are not going to give up tangible sources of power for a gamble at the ballot box. You might take a few seats in parliament to better defend your hard assets, but you are not going to give up those assets for a few seats.
In this category, I would place Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Palestinian Hamas. These movements have a strong sense of entitlement, and a record of rejecting offers of political inclusion that do not privilege them. The cost of bringing these movements in is high--they place heavy demands on the system, because they insist on retaining their mini-state privileges.
The most significant of those privileges is stockpiles of weapons. Both Lebanon and the Palestinians have been through dark chapters of warlordism, which they are trying to put behind them. Hezbollah and Hamas are the main obstacles to the turning of this page.
They say they will never give up their guns. They insist on stockpiling a vast array of weaponry, most of which cannot threaten Israel, but all of which undermines the fragile authority of the Lebanese state and the Palestinian Authority. In Beirut, Hezbollah still mounts paramilitary displays, and in Gaza and the West Bank, no demonstration is complete without the public display of weaponry. Yesterday, 10,000 Hamas militia militants paraded through Gaza with assault rifles, rockets, and anti-tank missiles. This is not like the gun culture of America, which is focused on the individual's right to bear arms. This is militia competition, so familiar from other failed states where warlords compete by shows of armed strength.