The other Barnett is pissed, I am informed
Friday, September 7, 2007 at 11:32AM When I saw the subject line, I will confess that my first assumption was A. Doak Barnett, long-time China scholar (I don't know why, but I always think of him first even though I suspect he's retired). Then I thought of Barnett Rubin, who's an expert on Afghanistan. Then I considered Roger Barnett, a former fellow Naval War College professor with whom I--quite frankly--rarely saw eye to eye.
Then I clicked on the link a reader provided me (Brad B., methinks?)
Dean Barnett, who writes a lot of stuff seemingly all over the web (but limited to conservative circles) is very upset about a recent post and in general, I would surmise, regarding my analysis of Iran. Feeling betrayed because he once praised PNM (I don't get the sense he's read BFA, hence his comments about my not addressing irrational actors like radical Islamists in PNM--a complaint more than a few readers leveled at PNM, which is why I made a point of including such analysis in the sequel), Dean demands to know my sources and how I've come to my conclusions.
Luckily for Dean, my blog, with over 5000 posts, is searchable. In it, I detail my contacts and travels of the past three-plus years, plus all the stuff I read--every single article or book. It is easy to spot the evolution of my thinking on any subject in the blog. I basically lay it all out for anyone to see. After 18 years of working professionally with the military, intelligence community and the rest of the US Government and private defense sector, I do get around. And I've written my conclusions down in roughly 100 published (not just posted) articles and columns, plus the two books.
Dean comes at this blogging trade from a very different career path, so I can't say what his learning curve has been on radical Islam, although I would caution him not to raise the case of 9/11 in a post so focused on Iran. Bundling everything up as "radical Islam" can be very misleading, especially since al-Qaida (responsible for 9/11) is exclusive Sunni-derived and Iran is Shia.
Of the publicly available sources I would cite (and no, that doesn't define my universe of sources, because I actually do this for a living), Vali Nasr's "Shia Revival" if you want to get a sense of how the two don't go naturally together and--indeed--how their centuries of bloody conflict have basically defined Islam's history.
I also recommend anything written by the French academic Olivier Roy on radical Islam. I used his "Globalised Islam" in BFA. Fantastic analysis.
On Iran in particular I recommend Ray Takeyh, whom I've cited a couple of times in the blog. Houchang Chehabi, who served on my PhD board, also taught me a lot about Iran, in a dialogue going back to the mid-1980s. I also admire the work of Tehran-based professor Mahmood Sarioghalam. He's apparently a Davos regular.
More generally, I would recommend Stephen Prothero's "Religious Literacy." Turns out Christianity has long had a millennarian strain that: 1) is uncomfortably comparable to Shiism (see Nasr on this) and 2) has gotten quite a few people killed over the centuries and even here in America (most famously in recent history at Waco TX). Whether or not any of them yelled "praise Jesus" at the last minute, I have no idea, but I suspect the sentiment was there, however distorted by circumstance and ideology.
Religion is a very complex thing, as is international relations. I maintain this blog so I can reveal that sort of complexity as it relates to national and international security affairs (in terms of the sources required for analytical thought, the formulation of such analysis in general, and the type of career--both academic and real-world practice--that I believe is necessary for developing expertise), writing from my perspective as a long-time professional in the field.
When people agree with that analysis, I am--by their definition--very smart, experienced and credentialed. When they don't, I am--again by their definition--none of those things.
You learn to live with the criticism, always considering the source, and you simply go on sharing all your sources, analytical evolution and conclusions, trusting smart readers to figure out for themselves what they think is right.
Dean has agreed with that approach in the past. He no longer does on the subject of radical Islam and Iran in particular, believing the latter situation invalidates my entire approach to international relations. I will live with that, because I don't have any trouble finding plenty of very experienced people in my work that agree with my thinking and support it.
And yes, I mean the Gingrich comparison as a compliment to Ahmadinejad, who's one sly populist campaigner (check out his nationally televised 30-minute campaign vid from 2004: he puts Fred Thompson's good old boy-shtick to shame with a clever play on "this old car" to make him seem so humble compared to Rafsanjani).
A good source of analysis of the "deterrable" consequences of Iran's achieving the bomb, see a great Center for Naval Analyses study on this by Henry Gaffney et. al. I suspect it's not available for public release, but it's a very sensible document that jibes nicely with Schelling's observations about the history of nuclear deterrence.
As much as I respect Dean's writing in general, I don't live or die with criticism from the blogosphere. If you're going to be a grand strategist, you have to tell people what they need to hear, not want they want to hear.
Good example? See my column this weekend. It's sure to piss off plenty. Then again, I find that it's perfectly okay to be an out-of-the-box thinker . . . until you jump out of somebody's preferred box. Then you're guilty of pathetically naive thinking.
But I got used to that phenomenon about a quarter-century ago.
Reader Comments (7)
I'm a Hindu. I'm pretty much equally dazed and confused by all of the Monotheisms. This "I'M RIGHT YOU'RE WRONG" thinking about religion is quintessentially Un-American. This is supposed to be a country in which the nature of your religious beliefs is your own business, and that foundational agreement to disagree is critical to our interface with the Muslim world.
Let us consider the venerable Treaty of Tripoli (1796)
Art. 11. As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/treaty_tripoli.html
So that's the first part. Whatever people want to say about Islam from their own personal perspective, let them, but this is not the Crusades with a Christian country on one side and a Muslim country on the other. We're fighting these guys for reasons which have nothing at all to do with religion on either side, and everything to do with political self-determination.
Should the Muslims be free to live under Muslim theocracies if they choose to?
Of course. If a group of people vote for a theocratic government because they wish to live under those laws, let them. Is force, civil war, revolution an acceptable way for power to change hands to a theocracy? Maybe - certainly the US has it's fair share of dictators who were considered allies and friendly powers over the years.
So this is not about religion.
It's about a political group using religious language to try and achieve a political end: a Sharia-based "superstate", the Ummah, a sort of Muslim European Union.
But that's not the same as a religious war. The distinction is that within Islam there is a "constitution" as well as a religion. Sharia is a *system of Law* and the primary motivation of a lot of the Fundamentalists is that they want to live under that system of law **as a political choice, not just a religious one.**
This is something that gets lost in the simple minded-rhetoric about Islam a lot, but there's actually a sophisticated and coherent political philosophy in there, and it's got a lot more influence on the current situation than people thing. Sharia as a nation-state level legal system, if you include the Islamic Finance sections, is about as livable as many other national legal / political codes. It's not some kind of abomination. It's a code of law, and people did just fine under it for century after century, including the Jews who were often far better off under Muslim rulers than Christian ones.
What does Osama want? He wants his chosen political viewpoint to be dominant in Saudi Arabia, and he can't get there with us interfering in Saudi internal affairs to keep the oil in the hands of a sympathetic regime. He also can't get it because of the bad blood between the folks in the region and Israel.
But if Osama was an anarchist, would his actions change any? No. It's the same set of tactics any small revolutionary group would use - the Anarchists of Europe are probably the closest historical parallel. Invading countries would not have freed us of the anarchists. Over-reacting to them, however...
It's not religion, it's just politics, with religion being used to get the troops moving. The Ummah - the "Muslim Superstate" is a very close parallel to the Holy Roman Empire back in the day and, I think, equally unlikely to be a major modern military force even if the Islamic Fundamentalists succeed in rolling over Saudi Arabia to create it. Muslims have proven to be perfectly able to keep their heads level when in possession of nuclear weapons - witness Pakistan - and yes, a new era of Mutually Assured Destruction would be awful - but if we were fast on our feet with the diplomacy, even a fundamentalist Saudi might be kept free of nuclear weapons.
Seriously. It's not unthinkable. Pakistan has bombs, and nobody's used them. So at that point, it's not that Muslims are inherently unstable as nuclear powers. What's going on is simply not that simple.
Frankly, we could simply have ignored these Al Queda more or less completely and still come out ahead by a massive margin. 9/11 should have been treated as a matter for Interpol and special forces rather than as a major foreign policy event.
The mistake we made was that we involved nation states in fight against non-nation state actors.
Invading countries is no way to handle non-state actors.
Death from above, in various appropriate forms, is.
Ask yourself how Mossad would have handled 9/11 if it had happened in Israel. That's probably what we should have done. And there would be no "Global War On Terror" - there'd be three or four or five hundred dead guys shot in the back of dark alleys, and generally life would go on without us breaking the bank fighting wars against states that are largely irrelevant to terrorism.
You are wise befitting your call name.
But clearly you have to make at least one answer, despite the transparency of his intent.
Vinay,
The Mossad point is an interesting one to debate. The way I look at it, we were slated to try the tried and true method with Iraq, and we were slated to a certain amount of failure as a result. To me, the question was never about the difficulty, but our subsequent reform, which I think is compelling and continuing. We weren't cut out for the Mossad route prior to this crucible. Our system of military simply would not change without failure.
And if it was going to happen anywhere in the region, Saddam, very bad guy that he was, certainly deserved it. But the Iraqi peoples certainly deserved a better postwar effort from us.
Interesting post - your rebuttals have become quite smooth BTW.
Ahmadinejad has associated himself with a major hardline Ayatollah to the right of Khameini as well as a millenarian Shia sect that expects a more imminent arrival of the occulted hidden imam. However, I think his formative orientation in terms of his political worldview is with his experiences with the Pasdaran and the rough-and-tumble revolutionary committees of 1979-1981, He was also a big city mayor with an "anticorruption" bent ( you like the Brezhnev analogy for Iran - Ahmadinejad is a Persian Andropov lite with a common touch - perhaps given his bombastic rhetoric, he's an Andropov-Khrushchev hybrid).
You were a Sovietologist so you know what I mean when I say that the US IC " bench" on Iran is incredibly thin compared to what we had for the East bloc to analyze the Soviets. Not only were we very strong internally, we had academics like Pipes and Ulam willing to advise the USG and tens of thousands of folks learning Russian in any given year.
How many inside the USG are Farsi or Dari fluent ? More than the fingers on one hand? How many in the pipeline at present - fifty ? Is anyone inside the Bush administration or the bureaucracy listening to Gilles Kepel or Oliver Roy ? The threat posed by Iran is orders of magnitude less than the Soviet Union but Teheran is even more opaque to our analysts than was Moscow and the fault here is primarily our own.
Simply engaging the Iranians in any kind of talks probably trebles the volume of HUMINT.
Is this a result of the intelligence services being built around winning against the Soviets, and being poorly adapted to a new operating environment, in the same way that the military was? I haven't read much about that, but it's not the kind of thing I follow, but it seems to make sense.
But why the assumption that terrorism is a military issue, rather than a policing one?
I think that the kinds of groups that handle organized crime - say the DEA for one example - would be far more capable of doing anti-terror operations right up to that last Death From Above moment.
I would, as many do, compare Rafsanjani more with Andropov, meaning the practical type on high, pulling strings.
To me, Ahmadinejad has always been about trying to revive the revolution of his youth. Those guys disappeared from Brezhnevian USSR, save in the technocratic form presented by Gorby's generation. Ahmadinejad is a sort of Madame Mao (anti-Gorb): modest revy credentials, wants to revive the spirit and focuses on the weirder stuff and stale populism but almost brags about not understanding economics, so social conservatism is his bag.
The current mayor of Tehran, the jet pilot, is the guy who finished third after Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad in 04 and did well in the midterms. It'll be interesting to see if Rafsanjani supports Qalibaf, in an Andropov-to-Gorby-like effort, in 2009.
But I agree on the talking for sheer humint, especially through third parties we should invite in for the talks, like the Chinese and Indians. That worked well with Hill and the DPRK.