Robert J. Pranger

The Goat and the Butcher: Nationalism and State Formation in Kurdistan-Iraq since the Iraqi War (review)

The Goat and the Butcher is an important work as it sheds light on and analyses the development of Kurdish nationalism in northern Iraq and Turkey and the emergence of the de facto Kurdish state in northern Iraq from the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to the end of 2005. Even though it mainly focuses on the link between capitalism, the butcher, and nationalism, the goat, i. e. Kurdish nationalism, the book also examines Turkey’s relations with its neighbors, including Syria, Russia, Iran and Israel and explains the impact of those relations on Kurdish nationalism in Turkey as well as in northern Iraq. The book gives different reasons for the rise of Kurdish nationalism in the region. The American invasion and occupation of Iraq and the rejection of the 1 March Resolution 2003 by the Turkish Assembly appears as the main reason. The author argues that fierce Iraqi resistance to American troops and the rejection of 1 Mart Tezkeresi forced the U.S. to cooperate with Kurdish troops and peshmergas to fight against Iraqi resistance groups. This helped Kurdish leaders to gain the upper hand in northern Iraq vis-à-vis the Turkish government. As a result of this “changed” relationship, red lines established in February 2002 in an agreement between the US and Turkey (which were: Musul and Kerkük would be occupied by the U.S. forces; not by Kurdish troops; the U.S. would not permit the PKK/Kongra-Gel to gain strength in the region etc) and other red lines determined late, have been erased or changed. The violation of the 28 February agreement between the U.S. and Turkey in which the Americans promised to provide Kurdish peshmerga with only light weapons and to collect them after the fighting was over; the

American Foreign Policy After Iraq

Given the ongoing and intense controversy in the United States over the Iraq war and a draw-down of American forces from that country’s turmoil, it may seem premature at this time to think of any foreign policy “after” Iraq, but increasingly we will see evidence of such thinking in the debate on how to end this conflict. America’s greatest strength is its optimism, even at the lowest points of public despair. Questions are even now being raised, as the 2008 presidential campaign becomes the center of national attention, about basic foreign policy issues for the future, despite the pessimism surrounding American conduct in Iraq. These broader issues concern a fundamental problem: what is right for the American people in foreign policy? From basic tenets of national interest and rule of law flow four important topics that any intelligent citizen — not only academics and government officials — must confront in light of the US experience in Iraq and in the wider war on terrorism since 9/11. First, there are not only American objectives in the world but American limitations as well. Second, any ideology of power — left, right, or center — must be compatible with America’s traditions of lawful conduct of government. Third, wider civilizational values of robust citizenship, natural law, and cosmopolitan inclusiveness, each with its origins in classical Greece, invariably prove necessary to support any tradition of responsible government in foreign as well as domestic policy. And fourth, any doctrine of national interest must be consistent, rather than in conflict, with an idealistic worldview. A discussion of each topic will illustrate some of the issues that should receive attention in the course of this debate on the fundamentals of future American foreign policy.

American Foreign Policy: Types, Choices, Futures, Priorities

A new American president will now confront the extraordinary complexity of his countrys foreign policy. Presidents, even without foreign affairs backgrounds, have already formed ideas about basic directions that the nations international policies should take, and it is these fundamental inclinations to which this essay addresses itself, an essay divided into four parts: (1) types of foreign policy, (2) some recent examples of presidential choices about direction, (3) future possibilities for a new administration that entered office in January 2009, and (4) limitations on the foreign policy choices of the new president—the old bugaboo of priorities.

Plain Talk about Iraq

The Iraq problem confronting the United States today began in the Arab world and continues there. Surely the great majority of Arabs are Muslims, but the source of the crisis in Iraq is Arab. As Saudi prince Khaled bin Sultan writes in his 1995 memoir, Desert Warrior, King Fahd’s “first instinct” was to attempt a solution of the Iraq-Kuwait dispute over oil production in 1990 through mediation among Arab brothers, but after two days of such efforts he saw no use in continuing. Nonetheless, having been given personal assurances by Saddam Hussein that he would not attack Kuwait, the king was shocked and troubled when he received news of the Iraqi invasion at 2:00 a.m. on 2 August 1990. Into what began as an inter-Arab crisis the United States moved massive military forces at the king’s invitation, a decision that was to lead in subsequent years to deep religious unrest in the kingdom and beyond and, ultimately, became a major underlying cause for 11 September 2001. The outcome of the 1990–91 war, into which all the Arab world was swept on one side or the other, proved indecisive as far as Saddam’s ambitions were concerned, thereby leading to the American invasion of Iraq and his toppling in 2003. Unlike in the Desert Storm war of the early 1990s, the United States has occupied Iraq itself, and without a comprehensive Arab policy. The George W. Bush administration, upon taking office in 2001, trumpeted its disdain for the hyperactivity of previous American presidencies in the area of a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians, which has always been a common concern of all Arab governments and a preoccupation of pan-Arab sentiment.

The Iraq Problem Will Remain with Us

Iraq, by any static or dynamic measure a medium power, has sought hegemonic status in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Peninsula, where the twentieth century’s greatest powers have repeatedly asserted their superior claims to hegemony: most notably the United States, Russia (before and after the October 1917 revolution), and Great Britain. A weaker nation seeking such dominance in an environment already crowded with competing great-power claimants finds itself part of what can be called “the Iraq problem” in global politics, a dangerous game not only for ambitious lesser states seeking their place in the sun but for those giants determined to maintain the status quo against these upstarts. The pace of ambitious nouveaux riches in world affairs will likely quicken with expanding acquisitions of weapons of mass destruction. This makes the contemporary case of Iraq versus the United States so urgently important to understand as both precedent and warning: the court of adjudication in this instance has been war, but hopefully peaceful solutions to the Iraq problem will be discovered to head off even more disastrous consequences for international stability in the future.

The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (review)

On recent business trips to Saudi Arabia, it has been my pleasure to attend the last prayer of the day (isha) in a large Riyadh mosque where a friend is imam. Many participate, and everyone seems welcome regardless of national or religious affiliation. Afterward there may be some friendly conversation, including hopes expressed that I will become more sensitive to the religious truths of Islam. Such regular prayers, plus the special Friday service with a sermon ( juma), constitute the everyday essence of religion for Muslims and those, like myself, who as non-Muslims may feel a need for communal worship at the end of a busy day in a city and country that prohibit public assembly by other faiths. Of course, it always helps to know the imam! In this sense, Islam is similar in some superficial way to Episcopalianism with its set prayer times, including Evensong. In a word, this is a religion of private faith as most of the world practices such faith. Politicization of Islam introduces the additional element of political relevance and, most importantly, ideology. Ideologues, sometimes as imams but often not, transform personal piety into collective secular action in the name of religion. The salience of ideology as a “science”—and art form—dates from the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath, when politics became more than statecraft in a technical sense as activists turned their sights on the hearts and minds of mass publics. In this transformation, the Middle East has actually lagged behind the West in perfecting ideological regimes and warfare. A broader survey of the dynamic interaction between ideology and power in this strategic region of the world may be found in a book edited by Peter J. Chelkowski and myself and published by Duke University Press in 1988, Ideology and Power in the Middle East: Studies in Honor of George Lenczowski.

The Milosevic and Islamization Factors: Writing Contemporary History in the Balkans

Looking back on Yugoslavias break-up and the subsequent warfare involving Bosnian Muslims, Croats, Albanians (Kosovars), and Serbs, two constants seem fundamental over the past two decades: Slobodan Milosevic and the ascension of Islam to independent statehood. Most academic and popular accounts, as well as official US and European positions, have placed emphasis on Milosevics machinations to build Great Serbia, yet in the Serbian narrative itself the rebirth of Islamic power in Bosnia and Kosovo proved fundamental. This essay examines both narratives and concludes with some observations about writing contemporary history and certain risks from a hasty, inadequately prepared foreign policy consensus.

Death in Babylon: Alexander the Great and Iberian Empire in the Muslim Orient (review)

The author of this book, an associate professor of Iberian studies in the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures at Stanford University, describes the analytical treatment in this volume as springing from “an interrelated network of specific ideas and approaches rooted at once in phenomenological philosophy, literary criticism, and classical studies . . . a work of creative synthesis.” Vincent Barletta’s central, substantive focus is “the expansion of Iberian [Spanish and Portuguese] empire into Muslim Africa and Asia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries” as chronicled by its historians. But his methodology goes well beyond his impressive command of this literature to (1) an interpretation inspired by Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, with the famous otherness of the redhaired man, encountered at the beginning of the novella, who presages the death of Gustav von Aschenbach, (2) the “absolutely unknowable” otherness of death in the work of the French phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas, and (3) the centrality of the “great white trope,” Alexander the Great, in the literature of Iberian expansion. This last point is critical for Barletta: “My argument, simply put, is that Alexander was both a trope for empire and a trigger for the theorization of deeper, more immediate accounts of human being at a pivotal moment in world history. . . . To gain an adequately contextualized understanding of that moment, and what we in the twentyfirst century have inherited from it (even as I write the introduction, my own country’s armed forces are seeking to control areas of Afghanistan and Iraq once held by Alexander), it will be necessary to move beyond traditional modes of literary analysis and investigate the ways in which human agents have made use of written texts to shape and theorize both our social world and those structures that underlie it.”

Resetting Iran in US Policy

The Obama administration seems to have given considerable attention to the diplomatic idea of resetting various areas of US foreign policy. As Iran and Israel move toward possible war over regional hegemony with each other—a conflict that looms sooner rather than later—nuclear capability provides leverage for both powers. It is incumbent on the United States to intervene as a third-power mediator, rather than as leader of sanctions against Iran, in order to maintain a stable balance of power in the Middle East. This position would represent a genuine resetting of US foreign policy.

Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East (review)

This book is part of a series published by I. B. Tauris on the Islamic Mediterranean. As described by the publisher, “This series, involving some of the leading experts on the Middle East, focuses on the relationship between the individual and society in the Islamic Mediterranean, covering everything from literature to economics and casting its methodological net wide across the humanistic disciplines.” One can hardly think of a more important region for discourse today, no more so than because it is the publisher’s aim to tap a “hitherto overlooked area of scholarship,” as well. Outside In: On the Margins of the Modern Middle East, edited by Eugene Rogan of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, is published in association with the European Science Foundation at Strasbourg, which has organized various workshops and conferences in a project on “Individual and Society in the Mediterranean Muslim World.” This volume, focusing on “marginality derived from a broader discussion of norms and resistance in law and society and our shared interest in those who did not fit within the parameters of accepted social norms” (Rogan’s introduction), has been produced by ten participants in these study programs. Marginality is an important division of what is called “history from below,” historical research into the lives of common people—grassroots or non-elite social history. An illustrious catalogue of historians, social and political philosophers, novelists, and others have worked in this area since the French Revolution. In the course of just over two hundred years, important subdivisions within this historiography have appeared—among others, Marxism and socialism more broadly, women’s history, postcolonial “subaltern” studies, and that research influenced by Michel Foucault.