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Ed Webb

The Oil for Security Myth and Middle East Insecurity - MERIP - 0 views

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opinion analysis MENA oil energy security US USA war military

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Jul 20 - Cached
  • Guided by the twin logics of energy security and energy independence, American actions and alliances in region became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The very thing the United States sought to eliminate in the Middle East—insecurity—became a major consequence of America’s growing and increasingly militarized entanglement.
  • In effect, the essential relationship of dependency between the United States and the Middle East has never been “oil for security.” It has in fact been oil for insecurity, a dynamic in which war, militarization and autocracy in the region have been entangled with the economic dominance of North Atlantic oil companies, US hegemony and discourses of energy security.
  • Oil’s violent geopolitics is often assumed to result from the immense power its natural scarcity affords to those who can control it. Recent developments in global hydrocarbon markets, which saw negative prices on April 20, 2020 have once again put this scarcity myth to bed
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  • Although the destabilizing contradictions of this dependency have now undercut both American hegemony and the power of the North Atlantic hydrocarbon industries, the oil-for-insecurity entanglement has nonetheless created dangerously strong incentives for more conflict ahead.
  • In a series of studies that began in late 1980s, economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler charted the extent to which the world’s leading oil companies enjoyed comparatively handsome rates of returns on equity—well ahead of other dominant sectors within North Atlantic capitalism—when major wars or sustained unrest occurred in the Middle East.
  • When oil prices began to collapse in the mid-1980s, the major oil companies witnessed a 14-year downturn that was only briefly interrupted once, during the 1990-1991 Gulf War.
  • The events of September 11, 2001, the launching of the global war on terror and the 2003 Anglo-American invasion of Iraq reversed the fiscal misfortunes of the North Atlantic oil companies in the previous decade. Collectively, they achieved relative returns on equity several orders of magnitude greater than the heyday of 1979 to 1981. As oil prices soared, new methods of extraction reinvigorated oil production in Texas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and elsewhere. In effect, war in Iraq made the shale oil revolution possible
  • fracking—not only benefitted from sky-high oil prices, generous US government subsidies and lax regulation, but also the massive amounts of cheap credit on offer to revive the economy after 2008
  • In response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iran hostage crisis, the Carter Doctrine declared America’s intent to use military force to protect its interests in the Gulf. In so doing, Carter not only denounced “the overwhelming dependence of the Western democracies on oil supplies from the Middle East,” but he also proposed new efforts to restrict oil imports, to impose price controls and to incentivize more fossil fuel extraction in the United States, all in conjunction with solidifying key alliances (Egypt, Israel and Pakistan) and reinforcing the US military presence in the region.[5] In effect, America would now extract geopolitical power from the Middle East by seeking to secure it.
  • What helps make energy security discourse real and powerful is the amount of industry money that goes into it. In a normal year, the oil industry devotes some $125 million to lobbying, carried out by an army of over 700 registered lobbyists. This annual commitment is on par with the defense industry. And like US arms makers,[9] the revolving door between government, industry and lobbying is wide open and constantly turning. Over two-thirds of oil lobbyists have spent time in both government and the private sector.[10]
  • A 2015 report by the Public Accountability Initiative highlights the extent to which the leading liberal and conservative foreign policy think tanks in Washington—the American Enterprise Institute, Atlantic Council, Brookings, Cato, Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Council on Foreign Relations and Heritage Foundation—have all received oil industry funding, wrote reports sympathetic to industry interests or usually both
  • For some 50 years, the United States has been able to extract geopolitical power from Middle Eastern oil by posing as the protector of global energy security. The invention of the concept of energy security in the 1970s helped to legitimate the efforts of the Nixon, Ford and Carter administrations to forge new foundations for American hegemony amid the political, economic and social crises of that decade. In the wake of the disastrous US war efforts in Korea and Southeast Asia, Henry Kissinger infamously attempted to re-forge American hegemony by outsourcing US security to proxies like Iran under what is referred to as the Nixon Doctrine. At the same time, regional hegemons would be kept in check by “balancing” competing states against each other.
  • The realization of Middle Eastern insecurity was also made possible by the rapid and intensive arms build-up across the region in the 1970s. As oil prices skyrocketed into the 1980s, billions of so-called petrodollars went to purchase arms, primarily from North Atlantic and Soviet manufacturers. Today, the Middle East remains one of the most militarized regions in the world. Beyond the dominance of the security sector in most Middle Eastern governments, it also boasts the world’s highest rates of military spending. Since 2010, Middle Eastern arms imports have gone from almost a quarter of the world’s share to nearly half in 2016, mainly from North Atlantic armorers.
  • For half a century, American policy toward the Middle East has effectively reinforced these dynamics of insecurity by promoting conflict and authoritarianism, often in the name of energy security. High profile US military interventions—Lebanon in 1983, Libya in 1986 and 2011, the Tanker Wars in the late 1980s, the wars on Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Somalia in 1993, Afghanistan since 2001, the anti-Islamic State campaign since 2014 and the Saudi-Emirati war on Yemen since 2015—have received the most scrutiny in this respect, alongside the post-2001 “low intensity” counterterrorism efforts worldwide
  • cases abound where American policy had the effect of preventing conflicts from being resolved peacefully: Trump’s shredding of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) nuclear agreement with Iran comes to mind; the case of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories and the Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara have likewise become quintessential “peace processes” that have largely functioned to prevent peace.
  • the myth of authoritarian stability
  • A year after the unexpected 2011 uprisings, the IMF’s former director Christine Lagarde admitted that the Fund had basically ignored “how the fruits of economic growth were being shared” in the region
  • In denouncing certain governments as “pariahs” or “rogue states,” and in calling for regime change, American policy has allowed those leaders to institute permanent states of emergency that have reinforced their grip on power, in some cases aided by expanded oil rents due to heightened global prices
  • From 2012 to 2018, organized violence in the Middle East accounted for two-thirds of the world’s total conflict related fatalities. Today, three wars in the region—Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan—now rank among the five deadliest since the end of the Cold War. Excluding Pakistan, the Middle East’s share of the worldwide refugee burden as of 2017 was nearly 40 percent at over 27 million, almost double what it was two decades prior.
  • profound political and financial incentives are accumulating to address the existing glut of oil on the market and America’s declining supremacy. A major war in the Middle East would likely fit that bill. The Trump administration’s temptation to wage war with Iran, change Venezuela’s regime and to increase tensions with Russia and China should be interpreted with these incentives in mind.
  • While nationalizing the North Atlantic’s petroleum industries is not only an imperative in the fight against climate change, it would also remove much of the profit motive from making war in the Middle East. Nationalizing the oil industry would also help to defund those institutions most responsible for both disseminating the myths of energy security and promoting insecurity in the Middle East.
Ed Webb

Scholars, Spies and the Gulf Military Industrial Complex | MERIP - 0 views

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UAE gulf arms weapons military-industrial_complex academia research espionage rights

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Oct 19 - Cached
  • Until recently, there was little practical knowledge about what it meant for an academic to analyze the military activities of the Gulf states because there wasn’t much to study, other than some symbolic joint training exercises, sociological inquiry about the composition of the region’s armed forces, and limited Emirati participation in non-combat operations in places like Kosovo. The bulk of scholarship examined the Gulf in the context of petrodollar recycling (the exchange of the Gulf’s surplus oil capital for expensive Western military equipment) or the Gulf as the object of military intervention, but never as its agent.
  • it is no coincidence that two decades of research and funding for domestic weapons development in the UAE is now manifested in armed interventions in Yemen, Libya and the horn of Africa
  • The history of the United States and European states undermining regional governments—including its only democratically-elected ones—using covert agents posing as scholars, bureaucrats and businessmen is well-documented. Its legacy is clear in the region’s contemporary politics, where authoritarians and reactionary nationalists frequently paint democratic opposition forces as foreign agents and provocateurs. It’s also visible in the political staying power of religious conservatives, who were actively supported by the US and its allies in order to undermine leftist forces that threatened to nationalize oil fields and expropriate Western corporate property.
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  • Another element of this legacy is the paranoia that makes it difficult for regional governments to distinguish between academic researchers and spies
  • Imagine if Syria had imprisoned a British PhD student and kept them in solitary confinement for seven months with one consular visit—or if Iran covered up the brutal murder of an Italian PhD student by their police forces, as happened in Egypt in 2016. The double standards pertaining to academic freedom and the rule of law in countries formally allied with the United States and Europe and those characterized as rogue actors is so obvious it barely merits pointing out. The Emirati authorities certainly recognize this, and will continue to exploit this double standard so long as it remains intact.
  • Oil money, along with a new generation of rulers eager to use military intervention to demonstrate their power to domestic and foreign audiences, has made the Gulf not just a major weapons customer but an industry partner. The story of the UAE today is no longer Dubai’s position as a global finance hub, but Abu Dhabi’s position as an emerging player in high-tech weapons development.
  • Academic research is not espionage—but many parties (notably US and European governments) are implicated in the process that has allowed them to be conflated
  • Matt’s arrest and detention, therefore, is a clear message from UAE authorities that research into the country’s growing arms industry is off-limits, in much the same way that researchers and activists working on labor rights have found themselves surveilled, intimidated and imprisoned
  • The slow erosion of public funding for universities has bled dry the resources reserved to support PhD students, meanwhile trustees and consultants urge the adoption of for-profit business practices that generate return on investment, including partnering with defense technology firms for research grants.[3] The fact that educational institutions must go begging—hat in hand—to billionaire philanthropists and weapons conglomerates reflects both the growing share of defense industry involvement in industrial and research activities as well as the failure of our political system to levy sufficient taxes on the ultra-rich to directly fund basic investments in public education.
  • what does the weakening of US and European governments vis-à-vis their Gulf counterparts mean for the protection of students and scholars conducting overseas research?
  • Before my research on the Gulf, my focus was on the role of regional militaries (primarily Egypt and Jordan) in their domestic economies. The more I studied these cases the more I realized their military economies are not some peculiarity of third world political development, but a legacy of colonial militarization, the obstacles facing newly-independent states trying to industrialize their economies, and the extraordinary organizational and financial resources that weapons producers dedicate to proliferating their products all over the globe.
  • I do not know of any studies estimating the total number of academics and non-government researchers working on security and military-related issues across the globe, but I expect it is in the tens of thousands at the very least. At my home institution alone—The George Washington University—there are maybe a dozen faculty working on everything from the psychology of drone operators to the role gender plays in government defense contracting—and I’m pretty sure none of these people are spies. This kind of security studies—which examines topics like defense technology, the global arms industry and government contracting—is a growing field, not least due to the proliferation of information about these issues coming from the booming private sector. And as multinational defense firms and their complementary industry partners continue to chase investment shifting from the core capitalist countries to emerging regional powers like the Gulf States these latter sites will become increasingly important targets for such research.
  • Matt’s case should make us question not only the safety of Western researchers and our students but, more importantly, the continued harassment, intimidation and imprisonment of academics and democratic activists across the Middle East.
Ed Webb

Coexistence, Sectarianism and Racism - An Interview with Ussama Makdisi - MERIP - 0 views

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MENA history sectarianism sects race analysis Ottomans empire colonialism identities identity politics

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Jun 21 - Cached
  • What is the ecumenical frame and how does it revise Orientalist understandings of sectarianism?
  • My book seeks to offer a critical and empathetic story of coexistence without defensiveness—that is, to write a history that neither glorifies the Arab past nor denigrates the present and that explores the grim significance of sectarian tensions in the modern Middle East without being seduced by their sensationalism
  • a project of modern coexistence that not only had to be imagined and designed, but also built
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  • I wanted to understand how they sought to imagine and build a world greater than the sum of their religious or ethnic parts—commitments that remain evident, if one is prepared to recognize them, in Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan, Egypt and beyond. I call this modern iteration of coexistence the “ecumenical frame” to underscore the modern active attempt on the part of individuals and communities in the region to both recognize the salience of religious pluralism and yet also to try and transcend sectarian difference into a secular, unifying political community
  • Tribalism, communalism and sectarianism all refer to parallel formations in Africa, South Asia and the Middle East respectively that assume an unchanging essence that separates members of a single sovereignty or putative sovereignty. They are all static ideological interpretations of pluralism, and have all, to a greater or lesser degree, been massively influenced and even in many ways formally classified and invented by Western colonial powers
  • subject to conflicting interpretations that valorized “real” religion and demonized sectarianism, often in contradictory and conservative modes, but also in more liberal and even radical ways
  • The Orientalist view of sectarianism frequently analogizes sect as “like race” and, furthermore, it assumes that sectarian differences are inherent cultural and political differences similar to race. What do you think is the relationship of sect to race?  How should race figure in the story of coexistence you relate?
  • the Orientalists idealize the West in order to Orientalize the East. Second, as you suggest, this view transforms religious pluralism in the Middle East into a structure of age-old monolithic antagonistic communities so that one can speak of medieval and modern Maronites, Jews, Muslims and so on as if these have been unchanging communities and as if all ideological diversity in the Middle East ultimately is reducible to religion and religious community
  • The religious sect is conflated with the political sect; the secular is understood to be a thin veneer that conceals the allegedly “real” and unchanging religious essence of the Middle East. This view is dangerous, misleading and tendentious.
  • both race and sect urgently need to be historicized and contextualized—race belongs to US (and Western) political vocabulary; sect to Arab political vocabulary. Both the notion of age-old sects and that of immutable races are ideological fictions that have been manipulated to serve power
  • US scholars Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields have suggested we think of “racecraft” rather than “race relations” to underscore the ideological fundament of racist thinking that appears totally natural to its proponents. As I allude to in my book, so too might we think of “sectcraft” rather than sectarian or communal relations, both to underscore the ideological aspect of sectarianism and to emphasize the amount of work that goes into making sectarianism appear to be inherent, inevitable and unchangeable
  • to trace how an extraordinary idea of Muslim and Christian and Jewish civic and political community rooted in secular equality went from unimaginability to ubiquity in the course of a single century, and nowhere more so than in the Arab East after 1860
  • many scholars gravitate toward using categories and experiences that emerge in the US context and apply them, sometimes indiscriminately and often very problematically, to other parts of the world. I think it is important at some level to respect the fact that in the modern Middle East, progressive scholars and laypeople, men and women belonging to different religious communities, have throughout the twentieth century typically described and conceptualized their struggles against injustice and tyranny as struggles against sectarianism and colonialism, but not necessarily as a struggle against racism.
  • the national polities of the post-Ottoman period in the Arab East were established by European colonial powers. These European powers massively distorted the ecumenical trajectory evident in the late Ottoman Arab East. First, they broke up the region into dependent and weak states, and second, they divided the region along explicitly sectarian lines
  • the colonial dimension is crucial, and it clearly separates the US and the European period of nationalization from that of the colonized Middle East
  • why the investment in and privileging of certain epistemic categories of domination as opposed to others? The question of migrant labor illustrates how race and class and geography and history are intertwined in very specific ways—the Middle Eastern cases (whether the Gulf or in Lebanon) are indeed different from that of the history of migrant labor in the United States, which has always been implicated in settler colonialism.
  • One key difference, of course, between modern Western colonialism and early modern Islamic empires is that the latter, like their early modern Christian counterparts, did not pretend to uphold liberal representation, political equality or self-determination. So, temporality is one essential difference: ethnic, racist or sectarian discrimination in the Islamic empires was not justified or imagined as a benevolent burden to uplift others into an ostensibly equal level of civilization. There was no pretense of a colonial tutelage to help natives achieve independence in the fullness of time
  • In the Ottoman Islamic empire, there were indeed professions of Islamic superiority, notions of ethnic, tribal and religious discrimination, forms of bondage and slavery, and myriad chauvinisms and prejudices tied to kinship, geography, language, culture and ethnicity and so on, but not a notion of biological racism or the obsession with racial segregation and miscegenation that has been the hallmark of modern Western colonialism
  • a new and distinctive defensiveness among leading Muslim Arab intellectuals—that is, their need to defend Islam and Islamic society from missionary and colonial assault whilst also embracing or reconciling themselves to compatriotship with Arab Christians and Jews. This defensiveness persists
  • the great problem of scholars and governments in the West who have long instrumentalized and Orientalized discrimination against non-Muslims to suggest that there is some peculiar problem with Islam and Muslims
  • I think that scholars of gender and women’s history have a lot to teach us in this regard: that is Arab, Turkish, Iranian and other scholars who have explored the long history of gender discrimination—who have defied the fundamentalists—without succumbing to racist Orientalism or self-loathing
  • really historicize! It really is an effective antidote in the face of those who peddle in chauvinism, racism, sectarianism, tribalism and communalism
Ed Webb

Three Decades After his Death, Kahane's Message of Hate is More Popular Than Ever - MERIP - 0 views

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Israel analysis politics terrorism extremism

shared by Ed Webb on 19 Feb 21 - No Cached
  • on November 5, 1990, Rabbi Meir Kahane was assassinated in New York City, a seminal event in the annals of American and Israeli history. Years after his death, Kahane’s killing is considered the first terror attack of the group that would later coalesce into al-Qaeda.
  • Kahane had spent the previous 22 years calling for Israel’s parliament to be dissolved and replaced with rabbinic rule over a Jewish theocracy, based on the strictest interpretations of the Torah and Talmud. He openly incited the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians—and all other non-Jews who refused to accept unvarnished apartheid—from Israel and the territories it occupied. He outdid all other Israeli eliminationists with his insistence that killing those he identified as Israel’s enemies was not only a strategic necessity, but an act of worship.[1] His ideology continues to resonate: In the September 2019 elections to Israel’s parliament the explicitly Kahanist Jewish Power Party (Otzma Yehudit) got 83,609 votes, putting it in tenth place in a crowded field of over 30 parties.
  • The victims of JDL-linked terrorist attacks in the United States were usually innocent bystanders: the drummer in a rock band who lost a leg when a bomb blew up the Long Island home of an alleged Nazi war criminal; the Boston cop who was seriously injured during his attempt to dispose of another bomb intended for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee; the elderly lady who died of smoke inhalation in her Brooklyn flat above a Lebanese restaurant torched after its owners were accused of sympathies with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); the young Jewish secretary who was asphyxiated when another fire burned through the Manhattan office of a talent agency that promoted performances of Soviet ballet troupes.
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  • Kahanists are the FBI’s prime suspects in the 1985 assassination of popular Palestinian-American activist Alex Odeh who died in a bombing outside Los Angeles because he called for a two-state solution (which became the official policy of the US government less than a decade later).[2] Odeh’s murder had far-reaching implications, scaring off a generation of Arab-American activists from advocating on behalf of Palestinians.
  • even many sectors of the Israeli right were embarrassed by Kahane’s shameless racism, and by the end of his first term in 1988 he was banned from running again.
  • Six years later, in 1994, the Israeli government, then led by the Labor Party, declared his Kach party a terrorist organization. But by that point, the Kahane movement had already been active for over a quarter of a century, leaving a wake of destruction. To date it has produced more than 20 killers and taken the lives of over 60 people, most of them Palestinians.[3] Credible allegations put the death toll at well over double that number, but even the lower confirmed figure yields a higher body count than any other Jewish faction in the modern era.
  • For decades, Kahanists—as followers of Kahane are called in Israel—have repeatedly attempted to leverage their violence to trigger a wider war and bog Israel down in perpetual armed conflict with its neighbors. And once Israel’s military might is truly unassailable, Kahanists say, Jewish armies must march across the Middle East and beyond, destroying churches and mosques and forcing their Christian and Muslim worshippers to abandon their beliefs or die at the sword.
  • Just months after the Oslo Accords were signed in Washington, DC on the White House lawn, a former candidate for Knesset in Kahane’s Kach party, Baruch Goldstein, committed the largest mass murder by a single person in Israeli history, shooting dead 29 Palestinians and wounding over 100 more at a mosque in Hebron. During the protests that followed, the Israeli Defense Forces killed perhaps two dozen more Palestinians. Exactly 40 days later, at the end of the traditional Muslim mourning period, Hamas began its retaliatory campaign of suicide bombings. Over the next three years this campaign would claim over 100 Israeli lives and harden many Jewish hearts against the prospect of peace with Palestinians. Today, Kahanists can convincingly claim credit for crippling the fragile peace process while it was still in its infancy.
  • In Hebron in 1983, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, Kahanist Israel Fuchs sprayed a passing Palestinian car with bullets. In response, Israel’s defense minister ordered Fuchs’s Kahanist settlement razed to the ground. A decade later in 1994, when Goldstein carried out his massacre, also on Purim, Israel’s defense minister put Hebron’s Palestinian residents under curfew and ordered the local Palestinian commercial district locked and bolted. The market has been shuttered ever since. Last year, Israel’s defense minister announced that the market would be refurbished and repopulated—by Jewish residents. On the same day, the state renovated nearby Kahane Park, where Goldstein is entombed, and where Kahanists gather every year to celebrate Purim and the carnage Goldstein wrought.
  • Many of Kahane’s American acolytes followed him to Israel, including top JDL fundraiser and Yeshiva University provost Emanuel Rackman, who took over as rector, and then chancellor, of Israel’s Bar Ilan University. Under Rackman’s tutelage, Bar Ilan’s Law School became an incubator for the Israeli far-right. The most infamous of these students was Yigal Amir. Inspired by the Goldstein massacre, Amir assassinated Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, dealing a death blow to Israel’s liberal Zionist camp. Amir carried out the murder on the five-year anniversary of Kahane’s killing.
  • Both American-born followers of Kahane, Leitner and Ben Yosef went from armed attacks against Palestinians to court room advocates for their fellow religious extremists. Both enlisted at Bar Ilan Law School after serving short prison sentences. Together with his wife Nitzana Darshan, who he met there, Leitner established the highly profitable Israel-based lawfare group Shurat HaDin or Israel Law Center (ILC). After Ben Yosef earned his law degree at Bar Ilan, his American allies founded the Association Center for Civil Justice (ACCJ), a US-based lawfare group that has earned millions of dollars and has for years funneled significant sums to Fuchs, Ben Yosef and other Kahanists.
  • After Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995, his Labor-led government was replaced by the secular right-wing Likud party, led by Benjamin Netanyahu, who promptly appointed ex-Kahanists Tzahi HaNegbi and Avigdor Liberman to cabinet positions. But that did not satisfy the appetite of the Kahanists, who resolved to coax the Likud even further to the right. Founded by longtime Kahane supporter Shmuel Sackett, the Likud’s Jewish Leadership faction succeeded in catapulting its candidate Moshe Feiglin into the role of deputy speaker of the Knesset where he called on the government to “concentrate” the civilian population of Gaza into “tent camps” until they could be forcefully relocated.
  • Today, prior membership in the Kahanist camp no longer carries any stigma within the Likud.
  • the original Kach core group has rebranded itself to sidestep Israeli law, now calling itself Jewish Power, and are consistently courted by the rest of the Israeli right
  • Kahanists have had even greater success penetrating the halls of power at the local level where their representatives on Jerusalem city council have been included in the governing coalition since 2013. In 2014, Kahanist Councillor Aryeh King—now deputy mayor—used widely-understood religious references to incite an assembly of religious Jews to kill Palestinians. Later that very night, a group of religious Jews did exactly that, kidnapping and beating Palestinian teen Mohammad Abu Khdeir, forcing gasoline down his throat and torching him to death from the inside out.
  • After Kahane’s death, top Chabad rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, also an American immigrant to Israel, inherited Kahane’s position as the most unapologetically racist rabbi in the country. In 2010 Ginsburgh helped publish an influential and vicious religious tract authored by one of his leading disciples called The King’s Torah, which sanctions organ harvesting from non-Jews and infanticide (if a Jew suspects that the child will one day constitute a threat).[9] Ginsburgh’s frequent tributes to Kahane’s memory, including repeated proclamations that “Kahane was right” have cemented the loyalty of third-generation Kahanists, including the latter’s namesake grandson, settler youth leader Meir Ettinger.
  • Thirty years ago, even if Israeli rabbis thought like Kahane and Ginsburgh they would not dare to speak these sentiments out loud, much less publish and promote them. Under Netanyahu’s rule, however, such sentiments are routinely supported financially and politically by the institutions of the Israeli state. In 2019, Israel’s education minister presented Ginsburgh with the Torah Creativity award at an annual event sponsored by his ministry.
  • The principles that Rabbi Meir Kahane popularized—that liberal democracy is an undesirable alien idea and that non-Jews must be driven down, and preferably out of Greater Israel altogether—have seeped deep into mainstream Israeli society.
Ed Webb

On Blaming Climate Change for the Syrian Civil War - MERIP - 0 views

merip.org/...hange-for-the-syrian-civil-war

Syria climate migration protests war agriculture security food foodsecurity ideology economy policy UN thinktanks discourse

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Oct 20 - Cached
  • the Syria climate conflict narrative is deeply problematic.[2] Not only is the evidence behind this narrative weak. In addition, it masks what was really occurring in rural Syria (and in the country’s northeast region in particular) prior to 2011, which was the unfolding of a long-term economic, environmental and political crisis. And crucially, the narrative largely originated from Syrian regime interests in deflecting responsibility for a crisis of its own making. Syria is less an exemplar of what awaits us as the planet warms than of the complex and uncomfortable politics of blaming climate change.
  • much of Syria and the eastern Mediterranean region experienced an exceptionally severe drought in the years before the onset of Syria’s civil war: the single year 2007–2008 was northeastern Syria’s driest on record, as was the three-year period 2006–2009
  • it is reasonable to say, per the Columbia study, that climate change did make this particular drought more likely
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  • The widely reproduced claim that 2 to 3 million people were driven into extreme poverty by the 2006–2009 drought was drawn, extraordinarily, from analyses by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) of pre-drought poverty levels.[4] The claim that around 1.5 million people were displaced was derived from a single humanitarian news bulletin, seemingly on the basis of a misreading of the UN’s estimate of those affected—not displaced—by the drought. Using Syrian government numbers, the UN actually reported drought-period displacement to be around 40,000–60,000 families.
  • A presidential decree in 2008, which tightened restrictions on land sales across the northeastern-most province of Hasakah, led to the extensive loss of land rights and was credited by some organizations as a key factor in the increased migration from northeast Syria prior to the war
  • during 2008–2009 rural Syria was hit by triple-digit increases in the prices of key agricultural inputs. In May 2008 fuel subsidies were halved, leading to an overnight 342 percent spike in the price of diesel. And then in May 2009 fertilizer subsidies were removed, causing prices to rise anywhere from 200 to 450 percent. The fuel subsidy cuts had particularly devastating economic consequences, especially for farmers reliant on cheap fuel for groundwater irrigation.
  • The fact that a number of neighboring countries experienced equivalent precipitation declines during 2006–2009—or in Iraq’s case an even larger decline—but no comparable migration crises, suggests at the very least that the migration from Syria’s northeast must have been caused more by these Syria-specific factors than by the drought.
  • Proponents of the climate conflict thesis typically claim that drought-induced displacement caused a “population shock” within Syria’s urban peripheries, exacerbating pre-existing socio-economic pressures. Yet Syria’s cities grew rapidly throughout the decade before the civil war, not only during the drought years. By our calculations, excess migration from the northeast during 2008–2009 amounted to just 4–12 percent of Syria’s 2003–2010 urban growth (and this excess migration was not all triggered by drought)
  • as Marwa Daoudy concludes in her new book on the subject, there is “little evidence” that “climate change in Syria sparked popular revolt in 2011”—but “a lot of evidence” that “suggests it did not.”
  • a deep and long-term structural agrarian crisis
  • it is evident that northeastern Syria’s agrarian troubles—and especially those in the province of Hasakah—went all the way back to 2000, and indeed earlier. Production of the two main government-designated strategic crops, wheat and cotton, was in decline in Hasakah from the early 2000s onward. Land and settlements were being abandoned there well before the drought. Net out-migration from Hasakah during this period was higher than from any other province. And the reasons for this lay not in the drought but in the contradictions of Syrian development.
  • an agrarian socialist development program, promoting rapid expansion of the country’s agricultural sector and deploying Soviet aid and oil income to this end. Among other elements, this program involved heavy investment in agricultural and especially water supply infrastructure, low interest loans for private well drilling, price controls on strategic crops at well above international market value, the annual wiping clean of state farm losses and, as already indicated, generous input subsidies
  • Environmentally, the model relied above all on the super-exploitation of water resources, especially groundwater—a problem which by the early 2000s had become critical. And economically, Syrian agriculture had become highly input dependent, reliant on continuing fuel subsidies in particular.
  • Within just a few short years, Syria embraced principles of economic liberalization, privatized state farms, liberalized trade and reduced price control levels. At the same time domestic oil production and exports fell rapidly, thus undermining the regime’s rentier foundations and its capacity to subsidize agriculture
  • Irrespective of any drought impacts, these developments essentially occurred when the props that had until then artificially maintained an over-extended agricultural production system—oil export rents, a pro-agrarian ideology and their associated price controls—were suddenly and decisively removed.
  • As Syria’s pre-eminent breadbasket region—the heartland of strategic crop production—Hasakah was particularly vulnerable to economic liberalization and the withdrawal of input supports. No other region of the country was so dependent on groundwater for irrigation, a factor that made it particularly vulnerable to fuel price increases. Hasakah’s groundwater resources were also exceptionally degraded, even by Syrian standards
  • The region was also deeply affected by intense irrigation development and over-abstraction of groundwater resources within Turkey
  • It was Ba’athist state policies which had turned Hasakah into a region of wheat monoculture, failed to promote economic diversification and facilitated cultivation ever deeper into the badiya (the desert) while over-exploiting surface and groundwater resources. Moreover, these measures were taken partly for strategic and geostrategic reasons, bound up with regime interests in expanding and consolidating Hasakah’s Arab population (its project of Arabization), in controlling and excluding the province’s Kurdish population and in extending its control and presence within a strategically sensitive borderland and frontier region. During the heyday of Ba’athist agrarian development, Hasakah’s population and agricultural sector expanded like in no other area. With the collapse of this development model, rural crisis and out-migration were the inevitable result.
  • After an initial reluctance to acknowledge the depth of the crisis in the northeast, the government eventually embraced the climate crisis narrative with gusto. The drought was “beyond our powers,” claimed Asad. The drought was “beyond our capacity as a country to deal with,” claimed the Minister of Agriculture. “Syria could have achieved [its] goals pertaining to unemployment, poverty and growth if it was not for the drought,” proclaimed Deputy Prime Minister Abdullah al-Dardari.[12] Indeed, as the International Crisis Group reported, the Asad regime would regularly take diplomats to the northeast and tell them, “it all has to do with global warming,” blaming what was in essence a state-induced socio-ecological crisis on climatic transformations beyond its control.[13] This shifting of blame is essentially how the Syria climate crisis narrative began.
  • Official UN reports on the crisis in the northeast, which were produced in collaboration with the Syrian regime, were predictably drought-centric, barely mentioning any factors other than drought, omitting any criticisms of government policy and ignoring the existence of a discriminated-against Kurdish minority
  • International media reports on the subject were similarly focused on  drought, no doubt partly because of media preferences for simplified and striking narratives, but also because they relied upon UN sources and took these at their word
  • The climate crisis narrative reached its apogee in 2015, in the run-up to the UN Paris conference on climate change, when countless politicians and commentators turned to the example of Syria to illustrate the urgency of international action to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
  • regurgitated as a statement of fact in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and by Western liberal politicians and eco-socialist campaigners alike
  • climate change is also much more than a physical reality and looming environmental threat: It is simultaneously an object of discourse, debate and rhetoric, a potent meta-narrative that can be invoked for explanation, legitimation, blame avoidance and enrichment.
  • climate change is already regularly invoked to questionable ends across the Middle East and North Africa. It is used to explain away ecological catastrophes actually caused by unsustainable agricultural expansion, to make the case for investment in new and often unnecessary mega-projects, to obscure state mismanagement of local environmental resources and to argue against the redistribution of such resources to oppressed and minority groups
  • blaming climate change is often a distraction from the real causes of socio-ecological crisis
Ed Webb

The Jordanian State Buys Itself Time | Middle East Research and Information Project - 0 views

www.merip.org/...mero021213

Jordan election monarchy reform authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 13 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • the elections have afforded the regime room to breathe
  • For the moment, the state seems confident that it commands the loyalty of the silent majority. For years, polls have found that most Jordanians are politically conservative, holding positive impressions of the king and royal family and darker views of political parties -- including the Islamists. Jordan has long been regarded as an oasis of stability compared to its neighbors who have faced invasion, foreign occupation and insurrection. Polls and interviews indicate that Jordanians put a high premium on a sense of security, the maintenance of which is of course a mainstay of regime rhetoric.
  • The opposition, on the other hand, draws its strength primarily from concerns about the economy and complaints about corruption in the cabinet and Parliament. Many in the opposition also note the state’s well-documented history of using “political reform” as a sop to critics. [3] In tough times, the regime pledges to open up the political system, but then offers changes that do little to alter the established power structure.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • holding an election that is pronounced clean and successful may be of less value to the state than is now apparent. As the year progresses, the public is likely to evaluate the new parliament and government by their ability to address popular concerns
  • High turnout and good reviews of election day are the foundations of the state’s claim to have a new mandate. But election monitors in Jordan have made the same point time and time again: An election is much more than the casting of ballots, and a successful poll does not equate to the advent of democracy.
  • monitors were also unanimous in their assessment that the system underpinning the vote falls considerably short of ideal. Their criticism centers on the distorted representation inherent in the election law and the political culture that gerrymandering promotes. Jordan’s voting system boosts the fortunes of candidates whose support base lies in large tribes or localities, while handicapping political parties and unaffiliated candidates who have national agendas. In Jordan’s last five parliamentary elections, most of the seats have gone to such independent or “tribal” candidates. Once elected, the MPs have little ability to shape national policy in any event, since the king appoints all other branches of government.
  • The incentives created are perverse. Voters may feel pushed to back the candidate who returns home bearing spoils from the treasury, rather than the one who represents their vision for the nation. Indeed, deputies in past assemblies have been lambasted for passing out rewards to supporters while ignoring national issues -- one voter, on election day, derided previous parliaments as “service departments.” Polls have found that large portions of the public see parliamentarians as highly corrupt. It is easy to see how this system becomes self-reinforcing. Voters feel that their vote means little on the national stage, while candidates for office seek to become local patrons while feathering their own nests. The result can be vote buying and coercive campaigning.
  • the “tribal” bias of the election system boosts turnout, since the groups that benefit directly from the parliamentary spoils system show up to keep the spoils coming
  • ambient mistrust
  • According to a July 2012 poll by the International Republican Institute, more Jordanians think the country is going in the wrong direction than the right one and many feel deep discontent with the weak economy and perceived government corruption. The same poll found Jordanians taking a dim view of politicians in general, and parliamentarians in particular, who despite being elected appear less popular than royally appointed officials. And in a September 2012 CSS survey, a big portion of the public said the state's reforms had been insufficient -- though large majorities still said it was better to change the system through political action than through street protest.
  • There are indications that the new parliament is more representative -- or at least more diverse -- than the old one. Candidates from al-Wasat al-Islami, a centrist Islamist party, came away with 16 seats, a substantial increase in their representation. Leftists also picked up around a dozen seats (depending on who is counting). Whether either of these groups will be credible to the protesters in the streets is an open question: In the past, many leftist and Islamist MPs have been characterized as “safe,” regime-aligned candidates rather than a genuine opposition. Palestinian Jordanians likewise seem to have gained ground, now holding roughly 35 seats as opposed to 20 or so in the last parliament. Women’s representation also increased slightly, with women taking two national list seats and two district seats, in addition to 15 seats from the 10 percent quota they are allotted under the election law.
  • If Parliament is unable to make serious progress toward improving the economy, an item which usually tops the list of the public’s grievances, that will also have consequences. The first challenge the new deputies will face, the yearly budget, will be doubly critical, establishing both the MPs’ economic credentials and their ability to have a serious debate
  • What the state has won is time, which it may use to carry out a reform program, to appease its core constituents or to do a bit of both. In the past, Jordan’s electoral exercises have generally been preludes to consolidations of regime power. But history is not destiny. The state may travel down the path of reform it has laid out, toward parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy, even at the cost of upsetting its traditional clients. Or it may attempt to delay reform again, using the same bait-and-switch it has employed for decades
  • The unfolding disaster in neighboring Syria will likely keep security high on the local agenda; on the other hand, the state faces another moment of potential crisis, as sometime early in 2013, probably April, conditions of Jordan's IMF loan agreements will require the state to engage in another round of subsidy removal like the one that triggered the November 2012 unrest
Ed Webb

Ordering Egypt's Chaos | Middle East Research and Information Project - 0 views

www.merip.org/mero062912

Egypt SCAF MB ikhwan elections analysis authoritarianism

shared by Ed Webb on 05 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • Shafiq’s campaign was based on ‘asabiyya (group solidarity), he said. “We have reintegrated the big families of Gharbiyya,” he explained, rattling off the names of 11 clans that urged a vote for Shafiq
  • the brigadier left the room mumbling, “All this trouble over one vote.”
  • Thus far the SCAF has departed from the rigged elections of the Mubarak era, when a key objective was to depress the vote. Now the generals need buy-in from the electorate to offset the ongoing popular mobilization in streets and workplaces, so they seek to drive up turnout in elections that appear clean.
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  • The local councils in this country are nests of the old system, with corruption up to their knees. It’s time to cleanse these sites because this is where the day-to-day interactions with the people happen
  • “We’ve been working in this society for 25 years and have done well in parliamentary elections in Minufiyya since 1987.” They agreed that anti-Brother rumors, money, the security services and police, and the strength of the old ruling party had factored into the result. Yusuf added that many army privates are recruited from Minufiyya.
  • more autocratic reconfiguration than political transition
  • plenty of dubious activity probably happened away from polling stations. In all nine of Minufiyya’s electoral centers, the Muslim Brothers told the same story, lamenting the amount of money that had filtered into the local towns and villages. Many of the people allegedly distributing cash were local council representatives from the former ruling party. The Shafiq campaign also lodged complaints against the Brothers, but they were less convincing, such as the claim that a Brother had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a shopkeeper. At any rate, along with the high stakes, the aggressive campaign tactics on both sides are one reason why the runoff’s turnout eclipsed that of the first round (46 percent)
  • the Brothers will likely fall prey to the SCAF’s ultimatums, as they clearly are not up to the task of wresting power from the military
  • If Mursi moves to favor the street, the generals could mobilize the state and anti-Brother discourse in the media to paralyze his presidency. Should Mursi instead cut a deal with the SCAF, he will enrage the protest movement, parts of which were involved in swinging the election his way. And, given the constitutional declaration, Mursi’s presidency has an asterisk beside it before it even begins. [5]
  • The three separate entities are not coequal in power. As the presumed champions of the old order, the SCAF remains a leviathan with national support despite its deep unpopularity among activist networks. The SCAF miscalculates all the time but never in ways that endanger its tightening grip over the Brothers and the third forces.
  • comparisons with the mighty Pakistani army are not misplaced. [6]
  • Since Mubarak’s ouster in Feburary 2011, the SCAF has called the Egyptian people to the polls five times. Three occasions have been particularly momentous: the March 2011 constitutional referendum, the wintertime parliamentary contests and now the presidential runoff. In each of these three instances, the generals have pulled a bait and switch, gutting the voting of meaning after it was over. Ten days after the referendum, which received 77 percent of the vote, the SCAF unilaterally decreed an additional 54 amendments that the public had never seen. Then the parliamentary elections helped to construct an elite arena that excluded the revolutionary forces from negotiations over a pacted transition. [7] The elections thus produced two parallel universes: one of the transition and one of revolution. [8] Key political forces, including the Brothers, kept the country stable while the SCAF reestablished the state’s control over the street. Finally, minutes after the presidential polls closed, the SCAF mooted the last exercise with its second constitutional annex.
  • what happens when an electoral exercise does not yield a predetermined result or an absurdly large margin of victory for the incumbent? Is it unequivocally about voter choice? Does it cease to be a spectacle? The experience of post-Mubarak Egypt to date suggests that choice and spectacle are not mutually exclusive. The outcomes have not been preordained; in the presidential race, the rulers’ preferred candidate lost. Yet the hubbub surrounding the elections has assisted in ingraining a supra-constitutional force into the political system while promoting an image of Egypt as polarized between two, and only two, views: the fuloul and the Brothers. In the medium term, at least, the SCAF will aim to play these poles off one another in monarchical fashion while simultaneously tamping down the politics of the street. This deleterious outcome -- rather than democratic empowerment -- is likely to be the legacy of Egypt’s first post-Mubarak presidential election.
Ed Webb

Middle East Report Online: Dead-Enders on the Potomac by From the Editors - 0 views

www.merip.org/...mero012911.html

Egypt US USA diplomacy politics authoritarianism democracy democratization

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Jan 11 - No Cached
  • Arab populations have heard a variation on Washington’s long-standing theme: “The Obama administration seeks to encourage political reforms without destabilizing the region.” That sentence, taken from the National Security Network’s January 27 press release, says it all: Democracy is great in theory, but if it will cause any disruption to business as usual, Washington prefers dictatorship.
  • The reasons for this stance have changed little over the decades since the US became the superpower in the Middle East. Strategic interest number one is the flow of oil from the Persian Gulf to the world economy, unimpeded by a rival hegemon or a regional upstart that might raise prices dramatically or deploy the oil weapon to extract political concessions from the West. Number two is the security of Israel. But third -- not to be confused with tertiary -- is the stability of satrapies that Washington can trust to safeguard its other interests and initiatives, whether the US-sponsored “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians (and the blockade upon Hamas that Egypt helps to enforce) or the campaign to curtail Islamist movements for which Tunisia’s Ben Ali so eagerly signed up. The US rewards its clients with cash and copious armaments, with scant regard for their records on democratization or human rights. After the Yemeni regime canceled elections in 2009, its aid package was quintupled. There have always been numerous dissenters within the US foreign policy apparatus who know the damage that is being done, but they are resolutely kept out of positions of real authority.
  • Amidst the hand wringing in the mainstream media over Obama’s “limited options” in Egypt, through whose Suez Canal cruise oil tankers and the warships of the US Fifth Fleet, the truth is that the entire debate over democracy promotion in the Arab world and greater Middle East has been one long, bitterly unfunny joke. The issue has never been whether the US should promote democracy; it has been when the US will stop trying to suppress it. The bargains with tyrants lay a “commitment trap” for Washington, which must solemnly swear allegiance to each strongman lest others in the club have second thoughts about holding up their end. The despots, in turn, assume that the Marines or their equivalents will swoop in to the rescue if need be. Most, like Ben Ali, are mistaken, if nothing else because an ambitious underling is often waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, just as Iranians have not forgotten the Carter administration’s eleventh-hour loyalty to the Shah some 32 years later, neither will Pakistanis soon forgive the US for standing by Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
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  • When it comes to the aspirations of ordinary Arabs for genuinely participatory politics and true self-determination, those vaunted American values are suspended, even when “special relationships” and hydrocarbon riches are not directly at issue. And the anti-democratic sentiment is bipartisan: On this question, there is less than a dime’s worth of difference between “progressive” Democrats and Republican xenophobes, between pinstriped State Department Arabists and flannel-clad Christian fundamentalists, between oil-first “realists” and Israel-first neo-conservatives. There is none.
  • Ed Webb on 29 Jan 11
     
    Harsh. Possibly fair.
Sherry Lowrance

The Reawakening of Nahda in Tunisia | Middle East Research and Information Project - 0 views

www.merip.org/mero043011

Tunisia Islamism protests

shared by Sherry Lowrance on 17 May 11 - No Cached
  • The essays were supposedly an inspiration for the Turkish party’s so far deft strategy of being a mildly Islamist government in a resolutely secular state.
  • Overwhelmingly, Tunisians insist that their revolution was a spontaneous, youth-driven affair, propelled by the anomie felt amidst rising education, rising expectations and rising unemployment. Facebook activists amplified the voices of revolt i
  • But to claim for Nahda a privileged place in the “pressure” that caused the revolution is to invent a lineage that does not exist -- and many Tunisians resent the attempt.
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  • Victimhood has been Nahda’s signature
  • pieces of political theater: Nahda is trying to inscribe itself in the annals of a revolution from which, as an organized political force, it was largely absent.
  • But if Nahda’s political role was muted in the first Tunisian revolution, it was loud in the second
  • January 30, he and his movement increasingly defined the themes for the post-Ben Ali transition.
  • the Committee to Defend the Revolution, an alliance of 25 organizations including the powerful General Union of Tunisian Workers, the National Lawyers’ Movement, the Tunisian League of Human Rights and the Communist Workers Party of Tunisia, a group that is particularly strong among university students.
  • The women among the activists are particularly keen to safeguard the country’s personal status code, which bans polygamy, grants women equal pay and permits the legal right to abortion.
  • We will not try to change the code in any way,” vows Ghannouchi with emphasis. “We see it as compatible with Islamic law.
  • To national and foreign media alike, Ghannouchi has said that the code derives from shari‘a; that wearing hijab is a matter of personal choice; and that stoning and amputation cannot be seen as contemporary punishments.
  • In policy, alliances and even ideology, it would seem that Nahda’s future is to be the Tunisian equivalent of Turkey’s Justice and Development Party: an Islamist movement that operates within the confines, if not of a constitutionally secular state, then of a heavily Europeanized and secularized one.
  • No one knows the salafis’ strength. Most think the groups are small. But, powered by Saudi money and the fervor of Tunisian cadre who learned their creed in the Afghan and Pakistani jihad, they could grow, especially if the economy remains in rough shape.
  • One of the very few political parties the Higher Committee barred from running in the July 24 elections was Hizb al-Tahrir, a salafi youth movement that had called for an Islamic caliphate and the abolition of political parties.
Ed Webb

On the Breadline in Sisi's Egypt | Middle East Research and Information Project - 0 views

www.merip.org/mero032917

Egypt food economy politics policing Sisi protests analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 04 May 17 - No Cached
  • By February 2017, food inflation reached 42 percent. [3] Key staple goods have been particularly affected: Over the past year, Egyptians have seen the cost of bread and cooking oil go up by nearly 60 percent. [4] To put this into perspective, in the year leading up to the 2011 Arab Spring, food prices in Egypt were subject to an annual increase of around 15 percent. [5] Citing these and comparable developments, scholars have argued that grievances arising from food insecurity were a key factor in the outbreak of the 25th January Egyptian Revolution. [6]
  • In recent years, austerity measures have been thwarted by street-level mobilization in Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan, Yemen and Mauritania.
  • In total, we identified 24 food protests occurring between March 6 and 7, 2017, in 17 districts across five governorates.
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  • Rather than trying to occupy squares and politically symbolic urban spaces, protestors acted locally to where they lived, inflicting an immediate cost on the authorities by impeding the flow of traffic and disrupting the functioning of local government.
  • Since the 2013 coup that ousted Islamist president Muhammad Mursi, the military-backed government has used a draconian anti-protest law to detain thousands of protestors. It is striking then that of the 24 food protests that we were able to identify, only four were met with any kind of repression
  • fearful that the protests may scale up again following Friday prayer, the Ministry of Endowments issued a sermon that called on Egyptians to reflect upon the country’s tightened economic circumstances and to be prepared to make sacrifices for the homeland. [22] This was followed by President Sisi himself making a public statement, pledging that the bread quota would not be cut again.
  • the trajectory of the mobilization suggests that economic grievances alone do not predict the scale of protest. Between March 6 and 7, millions of Egyptians faced an immediate threat to their food security—but only a small minority of those affected took to the streets in what were highly localized protests
  • as the March protests clearly show, the poor, both rural and urban, are also willing and able to mobilize against subsidy cuts. The class dynamics of bread subsidies seem not to have been lost on Egypt’s poor, either. In Alexandria, women protestors chanted, “They eat fino [higher quality] bread, and we can’t find our bread.” Several protestors interviewed by the media complained about the quality of subsidized baladi bread, with one woman commenting that it should be used as chicken feed. “Would the Minister of Supply eat this?” she asked the camera, as a group of children jostling around her yelled out “No!” in unison. The regime’s behavior in the face of these disruptive protests shows that not only were the authorities unprepared for this backlash, but that the regime fears provoking this constituency further, manifest in the Minister of Supply’s immediate volte-face and the police’s reluctance to crack down on residents. Even small localized protests, this suggests, can be an effective tool for extracting concessions from Sisi’s regime.
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