by WALTER
RUSSELL MEAD
Coming in the middle of the American campaign season and timed to
coincide with eleventh anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the violence now
shaking the Middle East has inevitably turned into a US domestic issue. I’ll
write about that as the situation unfolds, but at the moment it seems most
important to think about what is happening over there — and then to think about
what this might mean for US policy or politics.
This is
not a subject I can write about dispassionately. Many of the places now
appearing in the headlines are places I’ve been: from the consulate in Chennai,
where I attended an iftar event with a group of American diplomats and some
leaders from the Islamic community in that storied and beautiful city last
month to embassies in Cairo, Khartoum, Tunis and elsewhere that I’ve visited
over the years. Many of the diplomats there are people I know, and in all these
places I’ve gotten to know religious, intellectual and cultural figures and had
the chance to talk to students and others about their concerns. Violence that
takes place somewhere when you know people on both sides of the barricades is
always painful to think about.
With
images on TV of smoke billowing from US embassies and angry crowds assembled
outside, more than ever, I am grateful all the time for the service of the
brave people who voluntarily represent the United States in places where at any
moment their lives can come under grave threat.
If
Americans are going to understand what’s going on and process it effectively,
the first thing we’ve got to realize is that this isn’t all about us. The riots
in Cairo are basically part of a local power struggle. Radical Salafists are in
a power struggle with the Muslim Brotherhood; attacking the US embassy forces
President Morsi (as the radical strategists presumably expected) to side with
the US, however slowly or reluctantly. That’s a win for the radicals, who want
to tar the Muslim Brotherhood as soft appeasers who side with the Americans
against their own outraged people.
Striking
at the embassy pushes Egyptian politics in a more radical direction short term,
and over the medium term it weakens the Muslim Brotherhood and strengthens the
more radical groups. After these last attacks, you are not going to see many
tourists or foreign investors traipsing to Egypt anytime soon. The already
struggling Egyptian economy has taken a hit that will cut employment. That’s
going to hurt, and it’s going to reduce the popularity of the government, much
to the benefit of the radicals who hope to replace it.
In many
other places, from the West Bank and Gaza to Yemen and Tunisia, the protest
movements are also more important for what they mean in local politics than about
global policy. Radical movements and imams who work with them seized eagerly on
the Youtube film to generate popular outrage and use mob anger to make a public
statement. Moderates who speak against violence or try to cool matters look
like American puppets; this is the kind of issue the radicals love, and we can
expect them to milk it for all it is worth.
It’s hard
at this point to assess how much of this was at least quasi-spontaneous public
reaction and how much reactions were stimulated and even shaped by organized
radical groups. In Cairo, there seems to have been a mix of angry street
protesters demonstrating more or less at random and organized activists with a
much more definite agenda, but we will not really know the answers for some
time — if ever. However, not all that many Middle Eastern Muslims are in the
habit of trolling Youtube for blasphemous videos. That the protests came when
they did and that in at least two cases (Egypt and Libya) well organized cadres
used those protests to make more dramatic actions strongly suggests that
something more than simple spontaneous outrage was at work.
Libya
looks even more like a planned operation. There, radicals apparently
allied to Al-Qaeda in some vague way and possibly cooperating with Qaddafi loyalists
made what appears at this point to be a well planned, coordinated military
strike against the consulate in Benghazi. Here the timing seemed clearly less
about the film than about the 9/11 anniversary, and it looks more like a
message from hard core radicals rather than explosion of popular rage.
Again, we
will know more as the smoke clears and at this point we are talking about
possibilities rather than conclusions, but ruling out some kind of planning in
at least some of the incidents on the basis of what we now see is naive.
In any
case, the biggest worry now may not be further attacks on US embassies and
consulates in the region; security is very tight at those facilities now and
unless something very unusual happens, crowds may gather outside the walls, but
perimeters will not be breached. There are no guarantees, but the US has been
thinking hard about these issues since well before 9/11.
The
biggest bomb in the region right now, and let us hope and pray that it doesn’t
go off, involves the relations between Coptic Christians and Islamic radicals
(and the mobs they can command) in Egypt. The news is only slowly getting to
Egypt that the film — one of the stupidest pieces of hack work I myself have
seen — was made by a Coptic Christian in the US. When and if the film is
actually viewed in its 14 minutes of amateurism and low production values, its
intention to vent the rage and frustration some Copts feel about their
treatment in Egypt will be clear. It is an angry, embittered and perhaps not
very spiritual Copt’s view of the way Islam treats his community — and a cry of
anger and frustration.
This is
the kind of provocation — even though by a marginal member of the community and
disavowed by the leaders — that can light firestorms of communal violence and
cleansing. That is what Egypt must watch out for right now, and if you don’t
like watching crowds marching against the US embassy, imagine what could happen
if angry mobs with clubs, axes and guns head into the Christian neighborhoods
of Cairo.
Episodes
of mass violence and killing of religious minorities throughout the former
territories of the Ottoman Empire — from the Danube to the Euphrates and the
Nile — have been all too common in the last 150 years. Sometimes the victims
have been Muslims (most recently in Srebenica but between 1850 and the
aftermath of World War One there were plenty of expulsions and massacres of
Muslims as Ottoman power retreated from Europe); on an even larger scale in the
modern Middle East they have been Christians and, sometimes, Jews and adherents
to variant forms of Islam. If anybody wants to think about worst case scenarios
in Egypt, this is the one to look at. Armenians, Chaldean Christians, most
recently the Christians in Iraq: it has happened before and though one very
much wants to discount the possibility, things like this could well happen
again.
The person
who comes out of all this looking smartest is Samuel Huntington. His book on
the “clash of civilizations” was widely and unfairly trashed as predicting an
inevitable conflict between Islam and the west, and he was also accused of
‘demonizing’ Islam. That’s not what I get from his book. As I understand it,
Huntington’s core thesis was that while good relations between countries and
people with roots in different civilizations are possible and ought to be
promoted, civilizational fault lines often lead to misunderstandings and
tensions that can (not must, but can) lead to violence and when conflicts do
occur, civilizational differences can make those conflicts worse.
The last
few days are a textbook example of the forces he warned about.
The
Islamic value — and it a worthy one on its own terms and would certainly have
been understandable to our western predecessors who punished blasphemy very
severely — of prohibiting insults to the Prophet of Islam clashes directly with
the modern western value of free expression. To the western eye (and it’s a
perspective I share), a murderous riot in the name of a religion is a worse sin
and deeper, uglier form of blasphemy than any film could ever hope to be. To
kill someone created in the image of God because you don’t like the way God or
one of his servants has been depicted in an artistic performance strikes
westerners as an obscene perversion of religion — something that only a hate-filled
fanatic or an ignorant fool could do.
When acts
like this take place all over the Islamic world, the message to many
non-Muslims is that the Islamophobes are right: Islam as a religion promotes
hatred, bigotry and ignorance. This will be held by many people to be a
revelation of the “true” face of a violent religion. Or, alternatively, some
will say that while Islam might be a good enough religion taken alone, Middle
Easterners are savage and ignorant haters who cannot be trusted and whose culture
(rather than their religion) is one that blends intemperance and stupidity into
an ugly stew of hate.
At Via Meadia we
don’t think either Islam or Middle Eastern culture can be so simply
categorized; that’s not my point. My point is that the gap between Muslims and
non-Muslims has grown wider; the reaction of the western world and the Islamic
world to these recent events drives us farther apart. The gulf of suspicion
between the worlds has grown deeper. Europeans will worry more and be less
welcoming to Muslim immigrants. Many Americans will draw closer to Israel, be
more concerned about any signs of increase in the US Islamic population and
have a harder time trusting the Muslims in our midst.
Those
reactions in turn will make Muslims in Europe, North America and the
Islamic-majority parts of the world feel more suspicious, more threatened and
more alienated.
These are
some of the chains of causation Huntington was thinking of when he warned that
the world faced the possibility for this kind of clash. The Obama
administration has worked very hard to reduce the chance of this kind of
division, but it seems clear at this point that a few hours can undermine the
efforts of many years.
Unfortunately,
Islamic radicals are deliberately hoping to promote a clash of civilizations in
the belief that a climate of polarization will strengthen their political power
in the world of Islam. Attacking the embassy in Cairo is an effort to push
Egyptian opinion in a more radical direction, but the radicals hope that this is
part of a larger push that will bring them to power across the Islamic world.
Like Boko Haram in Nigeria, which hopes to provoke a religious war with the
Christians partly in order to achieve power in the Muslim North, radicals use
the prospect of a clash of civilizations to further their own cause throughout
the troubled Islamic world.
The US and
more generally the west (including Russia, so perhaps I should say the
“Christian world” instead) has tried several approaches to this situation and
so far we haven’t been happy with the results. Confrontation, reconciliation,
cooperation: there are good arguments to be made for them all, but in practice
none of them seem to make the problem go away.
I’ll
return to this topic in the next few days, but one thing should be absolutely
clear to Americans. Since 9/11, we’ve had two presidents who attempted to deal
with our problems in the Middle East. Both presidents notched up some
achievements — but neither president got the job done.
The gap
between American opinion and opinion in much of the Islamic world is as wide
now as it was when President Obama flew to Cairo; things are not getting
better.
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