A personal account by Eric Mandel director of MEPIN, the Middle East
Political Information Network.
By the
end of this year, my research and travels in the Middle East will have brought
me through Bahrain, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Israel, the Palestinian territories,
Jordan and Kurdistan, as well as many visits to Capitol Hill.
What
I’ve learned from security, defense and intelligence officials is this: When
Israelis and Arabs talk off the record, what they say differs markedly from
their public statements. America policymakers are too often unaware of what
Israeli and Arab experts and official say behind closed doors, even to one
another.
This may
not come as much of a surprise but it does mean that the American public, not to mention
elected officials, are often ignorant of the full breadth of information needed
to understand the most important issues going on in the Middle East.
As
Jonathan Spyer, a leading Middle East analyst, told me after his most recent
travels, “It’s very important for Western policymakers to be aware that
leaderships and elites throughout the Arab world today find a great deal of
common ground with Israel on the issues of the Iranian and Sunni Islamist
threats.”
“To an increasing extent,” he continued, “they
are also weary of Palestinian intransigence and see Israel as a model for
successful development. Much of that, however, cannot be said openly by these
leaders because this does not reflect the views of parts of the societies of
the leaders in question, where Islamist and/or Arab nationalist sentiments
continue to hold sway.”
Today,
despite some public lip service to the Palestinian cause, the Sunni Arab world
knows that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at most a “side issue.”
I
recently interviewed an Israeli military intelligence expert who had just
returned from private meetings in Europe with Arab and EU officials. He told me
that behind closed doors, their analysis of the Middle East, including Iran, is
often light years away from the public rhetoric offered by European — and to a
lesser extent, Arab Sunni government officials — to their citizens and the
world at large.
When
politicians or pundits make foreign policy critiques, unaware of what is
discussed privately between insiders in the Middle East, the public is
misinformed.
Most
Americans don’t realize that the conflicts of the Middle East are primarily
tribal and religious in nature, and that the primary allegiance is not to
modern states artificially constructed by the West 100 years ago, something
Arabs and Israelis know all too well.
Too many
Americans fail to realize this, but insiders know that if there were no Israel,
the Shiites would still hate the Sunnis, Iran would still aspire to hegemony,
Turkey would still be an unreliable NATO ally and Libya and Yemen would still
be chaotic.
Some
European officials, who vociferously defend the Iran nuclear agreement
publicly, privately acknowledge the dangers of the Iranian revolutionary
theocracy that acts against their values, from the hanging of gays to the
Iranian complicity in the Syrian genocide, the ethnic cleansing of Sunnis in
Iraq and Syria and the population transfer of Shiite families from Pakistan,
Iraq and Afghanistan into Syria.
Europeans
have long tried to have it both ways, appeasing illiberal Middle Eastern states
and actors in the hope that terrorism won’t land on its shores, while
rhetorically taking a value-based foreign policy position that ignores the
worst players in the region while saving all of their criticism for the only
democracy that shares their values.
It is
common today to unfriend people whose viewpoints do not corroborate one’s own
world view. Removing oneself from the opportunity to engage in dialogue that
conflicts with one’s own perspective makes it easy to delegitimize any
differing viewpoints and creates an increasingly more insular social media
community.
It would
be illuminating for American policymakers if they could hear what is said
privately about the Middle East among intelligence, security and defense
officials.
Not
making an attempt to understand the Middle East beyond the talking points of
like-minded sources is a prescription for America to get dragged into another
Middle East war in the not-too-distant future.
When the
gap between public policy statements and a fully informed politician is wide,
the chances for miscalculation leading to dangerous policy recommendations
greatly increases. The pieces of the Middle East puzzle do not fit into a
Western frame, and we ignore this at our peril.
No comments:
Post a Comment