Middle Eastern Dominos

It strikes me that October 7 is turning out to be the most consequential regional event in a long time, certainly since the Arab spring of 2011 and maybe since the US invasion of Iraq. American officials are cheering the failure of Iranian ambitions along the arc through Iraq and Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon, and some Arabs thinking the same way:

A new Middle East is taking shape, with the Iran-led axis facing a significant setback. The Lebanon ceasefire marked a pivotal moment, signaling the end of an era and the onset of a political upheaval for the Iran-backed Axis of Resistance.

Here's a tweet with some good background on HTS and their leader. He calls himself "Abu Muhammad al-Jolani," a nom de guerre that references his desire to retake the Golan Heights from Israel. The sources I have found are very much divided on al-Jolani, some thinking he has changed his tone and beliefs, others thinking he is a violent jihadist in sheep's clothing.

A Syrian:

I hope now people will stop asking us if we regret launching the revolution. We regret nothing. We dared to dream, and we will not regret the struggle for our dignity.

How many refugees will return? Some are already crossing the border from refugee camps, but what about the ones in Europe? Some are tweeting about how excited they are to return, but much depends on what happens in Syria over the next month.

It was only 11 days from the launching of the rebel offensive to the fall of Assad.

David Roberts in Palestine and Egypt

Sultan Kaitbey Mosque, Cairo

David Roberts (1796-1864) was a Scottish painter and engraver best known today for the works he produced during journyes to the Middle East in 1838-1843. I discovered these via Robert Irwin, who used them for illustrations to The Arabian Nightmare. Anyway I love them.

David's Tower and the Walls of Jerusalem

Hebron

Jerusalem. These images are actually lithographs by Louis Haghe based on Roberts' paintings. I like some of these better in black and white but can't find many good images.

Silk Merchants Bazaar, Cairo

Ruined Mosques in the desert west of the Cairo citadel.

Gateway of the Metwaleys, Cairo

Gate of Victory, Cairo. More here.

Biden Quietly Winds Down the Drone War

Ryan Cooper:

Where Trump oversaw more than 1,600 air and artillery strikes in Iraq and Syria during his first 11 months in office, Airwars reports just four during Biden's term so far. Strikes in Somalia fell from roughly 75 last year to fewer than 10 this year, with no civilian casualties. And in Yemen, the annual total dropped from about 18 to maybe four, with fewer than 10 casualties of any kind. 

Which I think is great. But notice that Biden has said exactly nothing about this in public. I suppose he thinks talking about this would just make him look weak.

Tel Aviv and Dubai

Tom Friedman is fascinated by the budding tries between Israel and the UAE that have sprung up since Jared Kushner brokered a deal between these nations in October (New York Times). Since then, 130,000 Israelis have flown from Tel Aviv to Dubai, and this in the midst of a pandemic.

Something big seems to be stirring. Unlike the peace breakthroughs between Israel and Egypt, Israel and Lebanon’s Christians and Israel and Jordan, which were driven from the top and largely confined there, the openings between Israel and the Gulf States — while initiated from the top to build an alliance against Iran — are now being driven even more from the bottom, by tourists, students and businesses.

A new Hebrew language school that holds classes in Dubai and Abu Dhabi has been swamped with Emiratis wanting to study in Israel or do business there. Israel’s Mekorot National Water Company just finalized a deal to provide Bahrain with desalination technology for brackish water. The Times of Israel recently ran an article about Elli Kriel in Dubai, who “has become the go-to kosher chef in the U.A.E. … Last year, Kriel launched Kosherati, which sells kosher-certified Emirati cuisine, as well as fusion Jewish-Emirati dishes.” And, by the way, those 130,000 Israeli visitors helped to save the U.A.E.’s tourist industry from being crushed by the pandemic during the crucial holiday season.

This is certainly encouraging; better tourism and business deals than missile bombardment. It is also important, I think, that so much of this is being driven by governments in the region rather than dictated by great powers.

On the other hand, it all rests on accepting that some problems simply can't be solved now. The status of Palestinian refugees, the political rights of people in Arab autocracies, peace with Iran; all that is set aside. The liberating dream of the Arab Spring is forgotten. Instead, we're all going to get on with our careers and try to get rich.

As I have said before, this is pretty much all the world has to offer millions of people. Democracy is either not in the offing or, if it does come, partial, contested, unstable, and unbeloved. (Russia, Thailand, Burma, Ethiopia, Egypt, etc.) It is not at all clear to me that people in Tunis are in a meaningful way more free than people in Saigon (yes, that's what people who live there call it). In both places politics is mostly frustration, and while Vietnam is a dictatorship, Saigon has a booming business scene and double-digit economic growth. 

What is our civilization really good at, other than science and capitalism?

So it makes perfect sense to me that if there is going to be a thaw between Israel and the Arab world it would take place between businessmen. No Arab is going to study Hebrew out of love, but it seems plenty will for a chance to get rich.

Sometimes, you take what you can get.

Thomas Friedman on the Assassination of Qassim Suleimani

Qassim Suleimani has been a hugely prominent figure in all of Iran's proxy wars across the Middle East, but that does not mean his policies have been wise or successful:

On Nov. 27, Iraqi Shiites — yes, Iraqi Shiites — burned down the Iranian consulate in Najaf, Iraq, removing the Iranian flag from the building and putting an Iraqi flag in its place. That was after Iraqi Shiites, in September 2018, set the Iranian consulate in Basra ablaze, shouting condemnations of Iran’s interference in Iraqi politics.

The whole “protest” against the United States Embassy compound in Baghdad last week was almost certainly a Suleimani-staged operation to make it look as if Iraqis wanted America out when in fact it was the other way around. The protesters were paid pro-Iranian militiamen. No one in Baghdad was fooled by this.

In a way, it’s what got Suleimani killed. He so wanted to cover his failures in Iraq he decided to start provoking the Americans there by shelling their forces, hoping they would overreact, kill Iraqis and turn them against the United States. Trump, rather than taking the bait, killed Suleimani instead.

I have no idea whether this was wise or what will be the long-term implications. But here are two things I do know about the Middle East.

First, often in the Middle East the opposite of “bad” is not “good.” The opposite of bad often turns out to be “disorder.” Just because you take out a really bad actor like Suleimani doesn’t mean a good actor, or a good change in policy, comes in his wake. Suleimani is part of a system called the Islamic Revolution in Iran. That revolution has managed to use oil money and violence to stay in power since 1979 — and that is Iran’s tragedy, a tragedy that the death of one Iranian general will not change.

Today’s Iran is the heir to a great civilization and the home of an enormously talented people and significant culture. Wherever Iranians go in the world today, they thrive as scientists, doctors, artists, writers and filmmakers — except in the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose most famous exports are suicide bombing, cyberterrorism and proxy militia leaders. The very fact that Suleimani was probably the most famous Iranian in the region speaks to the utter emptiness of this regime, and how it has wasted the lives of two generations of Iranians by looking for dignity in all the wrong places and in all the wrong ways.

The other thing I know is that in the Middle East all important politics happens the morning after the morning after.

Yes, in the coming days there will be noisy protests in Iran, the burning of American flags and much crying for the “martyr.” The morning after the morning after? There will be a thousand quiet conversations inside Iran that won’t get reported. They will be about the travesty that is their own government and how it has squandered so much of Iran’s wealth and talent on an imperial project that has made Iran hated in the Middle East.

And yes, the morning after, America’s Sunni Arab allies will quietly celebrate Suleimani’s death, but we must never forget that it is the dysfunction of many of the Sunni Arab regimes — their lack of freedom, modern education and women’s empowerment — that made them so weak that Iran was able to take them over from the inside with its proxies.

The real tragedy of four decades of US-Iran conflict is that none of it was much wanted by the citizens of either county. There is no reason for the US and Iran to fight, except that intense mutual suspicion has made peace impossible, leaving various opportunists on both sides to advance their careers by stirring up trouble.

As for Suleimani himself, I think he is best remembered by some of his own words:

The battlefield is mankind's lost paradise – the paradise in which morality and human conduct are at their highest. One type of paradise that men imagine is about streams, beautiful maidens, and lush landscape. But there is another kind of paradise – the battlefield.

Khayamiya

Khayamiya is an Egyptian textile art, once used to make elaborate tents, which is why you buy it in Cairo's Tentmakers' Street.

Now these artisans mostly make quilts and cushions for sale to tourists, and the decline in tourism since the revolution has hit them hard.

The old style was entirely geometric, but these days representation is common, including political scenes like this depiction of the Tahrir Square protests.

With tourism drying up Egyptian merchants are trying to sell these online, but so far that hasn't replaced sales to visitors who want something to remember Egypt by.

Houthi Drones Strike Saudi Oil Refineries

Yemen's Houthi regime has been engaged in a campaign of long-distance harassment against the Saudi oil industry for more than a year, as part of their ongoing war. This week they achieved their first significant success:

Drone attacks claimed by Yemen’s Houthi rebels struck two key oil installations inside Saudi Arabia on Saturday, damaging facilities that process the vast majority of the country’s crude output and raising the risk of a disruption in world oil supplies.

The targeted oil facilities can process 8.45 million barrels of crude oil a day between them, the bulk of production in Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest oil exporter. Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant, said production of 5.7 million barrels a day — well over half of the nation’s overall daily output — was suspended.

Armed drones are so cheap now that any self-respecting terrorist force can use them, and Yemen has used them to launch a damaging strike across 500 miles. I mention this because it is a sign of changing military realities around the world, giving weak states another means of harassing stronger enemies and raising the cost of warfare. This reality is part of why the US military is so nervous about a war with Iran, since Iran can launch enough drones and missiles to shut down the Persian Gulf oil industry and make big trouble for US ships and bases.

Fear of this kind of warfare -- attacks by swarms of drones and cheap missiles -- is driving US military research and development, and is why we are spending billions developing laser weapons. Lasers are lousy weapons for killing people but they can disable drones and damage missiles, and they can fire very fast, perhaps (nobody really knows) protecting US assets from these new threats.

Meanwhile the immediate response of the Trump administration to this attack was to blame Iran, no surprise since they are always looking for things they can be mad at Iran about. And it is probably true that Iran supplied either the weapons themselves or the technical knowhow to make them. But the real cause is the disastrous Saudi war in Yemen, and the way to end this threat is for the Saudis and the Houthis to negotiate a peace.

Yemen's Houthis are Beating the High-Tech Saudi Military

The Houthi movement that dominates Yemen, which now calls itself Ansar Allah, has proved remarkably adaptable. They began around 2004 as a bunch of badly organized guerrillas who could do little more than set bombs and stage ambushes. But as the Yemeni government collapsed under the weight of its own incompetence, venality, and brutality, they quickly metamorphosed into a fighting force capable of taking or defending towns, and in 2014 they made an alliance with a faction of disgruntled army officers, staged a coup, and took over the capital of the country and most of the government.

This victory caused Saudi Arabia and its allies to launch an intensive air campaign against the Houthi regime using up-to-date US planes, missiles, and radar. Billions have been spent in this war, and the Saudis have halted the advance of the Houthis, preventing them from taking over all of Yemen. The Saudis keep the front lines of the conflict under constant aerial surveillance, attacking any group of vehicles and even launching million-dollar missiles at lone men carrying guns.

The Houthis have adapted by dividing their forces into units of 3 to 5 men, never more than can fit in a single vehicle, and they cache weapons near any place they might want to fight so their soldiers can travel around unarmed. They have stopped using any sort of electronic signaling. They have filled combat zones with networks of bunkers connected by zig-zag trenches. As a result they are able to concentrate their men to repel any attack on their lands despite the constant presence of Saudi fighter-bombers overhead.

And:

Where Ansar Allah has been notably more successful has been in the raiding war along Saudi Arabia's border, where it has fought a Hezbollah-style harassment campaign against Saudi border forces. Houthi forces have achieved great tactical success against Saudi border posts through offensive mine-laying on supply routes and ATGM [anti-tank guided missile] strikes on armored vehicles and outposts. The Houthi military has sustained more than three years of continuous raids and ambushes, demonstrating its resilience and depth of reserves. Ansar Allah is now one of the premier practitioners of offensive mine warfare in the world, utilizing a range of explosive devices, concealment tactics, and initiation methods.The Houthis make very effective propaganda use of video from such raids, with a dedicated cameraman attached to all raiding parties, irrespective of size. By March 2018, the Houthi movement had also fought a long-running deadly ‘cat-and-mouse’ game of rocket launches under Gulf coalition aerial surveillance, launching 66,195 short-range rockets into Saudi Arabia, killing 102 civilians, wounding 843, and depopulating several hundred small villages.

Lately the Houthis have been attacking Saudi oil facilities hundreds of miles from the border with missiles and drones.

All of this comes from a report posted on the web site of the West Point Center for Combating Terrorism. The report notes that while the Houthis now get a lot of support from Iran, that did not happen until after Saudi Arabia intervened in the Yemeni civil war. Even the US military recognizes that the Saudi claim that they had to intervene in Yemen to block Iranian schemes is baloney.

Of course by intervening in that war the Saudis have created exactly the situation they feared, an Iranian ally on their southern border, so how they will extricate themselves from this quagmire is a hard question. One doubts the Trump administration will be much help.

Max Abrahms, "Rules for Rebels"

Political science professor Max Abrahms devoted more than a decade to comparative research on rebel groups around the world, trying to figure out why some succeeded and some failed. In his new book, Rules for Rebels, he summarizes his findings in three golden rules:

1. Don't kill innocent civilians.
2. Create a highly centralized command structure under a clever leader.
3. Maintain your brand through total denial when things go wrong.

The review I just read of this in the September 21 TLS focuses on the contrast between the Islamic State and Hezbollah. The Islamic State broke all these rules with abandon, and as a result, says Abrahms, united the world against it and was crushed. Its wanton killing only eroded its legitimacy, and its habit of welcoming any man willing to fight for the cause meant that its ranks were filled with uncontrollable thrill-seekers and psychopaths.

Hezbollah, on the other hand, has a tight command structure and a very strict program for new recruits, who must sit through a year of indoctrinary education. When it does kill innocents it either denies having anything to do with the murders or apologizes, as when Hassan Nasrallah went on al Jazeerah to apologize to the family of two Israeli-Arab children killed by a Hezbollah rocket in Nazareth. Note that the key point is not that rebels should never kill civilians, which is inevitable in war; it's that they are not seen to be seeking it or reveling in it. Many rebels, notably the IRA and the Jewish terrorists of the 1940s, have issued warnings demanding that all civilians be evacuated from target areas; if people stayed behind, well, then that was on them, wasn't it?

It's an interest argument, but it will take a lot to convince me. My impression is that while wanton violence often fails it sometimes succeeds. Abrahms' argument seems to be mainly statistical, i.e., he says rebel groups that intentionally kill civilians are 77 percent less likely to succeed. And maybe that's right, although I'm sure in practice figuring out which rebel groups "intentionally kill civilians" is rather complicated, and sometimes figuring out whether they succeeded is also hard. Hezbollah, for example, has succeeded in becoming a powerful group in Lebanon, but they have utterly failed to liberate Palestine.

The Spy Who Came Home

Fascinating article by Ben Taub at the New Yorker about Patrick Skinner, a former CIA case office in the Middle East who quit and became a beat cop in his home town of Savannah:

He joined the agency during the early days of America’s war on terror, one of the darkest periods in its history, and spent almost a decade running assets in Afghanistan, Jordan, and Iraq. But over the years he came to believe that counterterrorism was creating more problems than it solved, fuelling illiberalism and hysteria, destroying communities overseas, and diverting attention and resources from essential problems in the United States.

Meanwhile, American police forces were adopting some of the militarized tactics that Skinner had seen give rise to insurgencies abroad. “We have to stop treating people like we’re in Fallujah,” he told me. “It doesn’t work. Just look what happened in Fallujah.” In time, he came to believe that the most meaningful application of his training and expertise—the only way to exemplify his beliefs about American security, at home and abroad—was to become a community police officer in Savannah, where he grew up.

“We write these strategic white papers, saying things like ‘Get the local Sunni population on our side,’ ” Skinner said. “Cool. Got it. But, then, if I say, ‘Get the people who live at Thirty-eighth and Bulloch on our side,’ you realize, man, that’s fucking hard—and it’s just a city block. It sounds so stupid when you apply the rhetoric over here. Who’s the leader of the white community in Live Oak neighborhood? Or the poor community?” Skinner shook his head. “ ‘Leader of the Iraqi community.’ What the fuck does that mean?”

Of his time in Afghanistan he says,

Tactical successes are meaningless without a strategy, and it wore on Skinner and other C.I.A. personnel that they could rarely explain how storming Afghan villages made American civilians safer.

They also never understood why the United States leadership apparently believed that the American presence would fix Afghanistan. “We were trying to do nation-building with less information than I get now at police roll call,” Skinner said. Two months into the U.S. invasion, Donald Rumsfeld, the Defense Secretary, revealed in a memo that he didn’t know what languages were spoken in Afghanistan. Each raid broke the country a little more than the previous one. “So we would try harder, which would make it worse,” Skinner said. “And so we’d try even harder, which would make it even worse.”

The assessments of field operatives carried little weight with officials in Washington. “They were telling us, ‘Too many people have died here for us just to leave,’ ” Skinner recalled. “ ‘But we don’t want to give the Taliban a timeline.’ So, forever? Is that what you’re going for? They fucking live there, dude.”

Skinner spent a year in Afghanistan, often under fire from Taliban positions, and returned several times in the next decade. He kept a note pinned to his ballistic vest that read “Tell my wife it was pointless.”

The Bias Toward Action

So we've been launching missiles again, because faced with any kind of crisis we just have to "do something." Emma Ashford:

Mr. Trump evidently shares the assumption that America must do something in response to atrocities in Syria — a wholehearted embrace of the Washington bias toward action.

In this, Mr. Trump and his predecessor have something in common: Both he and Barack Obama came into office promising to change America’s foreign policy, but when faced with crises, both yielded to pressure to intervene. This bias toward action is one of the biggest problems in American foreign policy. It produces poorly thought-out interventions and, sometimes, disastrous long-term consequences, effects likely to be magnified in the era of Mr. Trump.

The concept of a bias for action originated in the business world, but psychological studies have shown a broad human tendency toward action over inaction. Researchers have found that World Cup goalkeepers, for example, are more likely to dive during a penalty kick, though they’d have a better chance of catching the ball by remaining in the center of the goal. . . .

The American policymaking system reinforces this tendency. Political pressure and criticism from opponents, combined with the news media’s habit of disparaging inaction, can render even the most cautious leaders vulnerable to pressure. America’s overwhelming military strength and the low cost of airstrikes only add to the notion that action is less costly than inaction.

So we end up with messes like the ones in Iraq and Libya, and we keep stirring the pot in Syria despite the lack of evidence that lobbing in missiles helps anything.

Listen to Talleyrand, a real genius of foreign policy: Most things are achieved by inaction.

How the Caliphate was Run

Fabulous Times story by Rukmini Callimachi about how he and a team of helpers entered Mosul while the rubble was still smoldering to look for documents left by the Islamic State. Much material had been destroyed, either intentionally or during the fighting, but they did eventually find many real documents left by the Caliphate's bureaucracy. Putting these together with interviews, they discovered that after taking over Mosul's administration Islamic State commanders purged everyone not male Sunni Muslim but ordered all the rest to get back to work or else. Some things ran just as before. Some things ran better, especially trash collection, since the city was patrolled by armed men quick to arrest sanitation workers for slacking.

“Although they were not recognized as a state or a country,” said one shopkeeper, Ahmed Ramzi Salim, “they acted like one.”

One new thing was the comprehensive seizing of land owned by non-Sunnis and its redistribution to Sunni farmers:

Folder after folder, 273 in all, identified plots of land owned by farmers who belonged to one of the faiths banned by the group. Each yellow sleeve contained the handwritten request of a Sunni applying to confiscate the property.

Doing so involved a step-by-step process, beginning with a report by a surveyor, who mapped the plot, noted important topographical features and researched the property’s ownership. Once it was determined that the land was owned by one of the targeted groups, it was classified as property of the Islamic State. Then a contract was drawn up spelling out that the tenant could neither sublet the land nor modify it without the group’s permission.

Callimachi eventually tracked down the man whose signature was on all of these transfers, Mahmoud Ismael Salim, "Supervisor of Land," and he turned out to be a mild-mannered bureaucrat with a combover who shuddered as he said he was forced to do it under threat of death:

On busy days, a line snaked around his office building, made up of Sunni farmers, many of them resentful of their treatment at the hands of a Shia-led Iraqi government. In the same compound where we found the stacks of yellow folders, Mr. Salim received men he knew, whose children had played with his. They came to steal the land of other men they all knew — whose children had also grown up alongside theirs.

With the stroke of his pen, farmers lost their ancestors’ cropland, their sons were robbed of their inheritance and the wealth of entire families, built up over generations, was wiped out.

“These are relationships we built over decades, from the time of my father, and my father’s father,” Mr. Salim said, pleading for understanding. “These were my brothers, but we were forced to do it.”

So sad, so predictable. I highly recommend the whole piece.

Incidentally the Times must have spent more than a million dollars on this one story, sending a team of people to Iraq five times and providing them with protection, then arranging for a committee of experts to review the documents for authenticity and help analyze them. I feel like one simple thing we can all do to keep  civilization going is to subscribe to at least one of the major newspapers and do our part to pay for this kind of work.

Three Senators Against Undeclared Wars

Yesterday's interesting news:

On Wednesday, in a show of bipartisan unity against unauthorized wars of choice, Senators Mike Lee (R-Utah),Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) courageously introduced a Senate joint resolution under the War Powers Act, directing President Trump to halt all current U.S. military activities in Yemen.

If passed, the president would have 30 days to stop U.S. forces and resources from continuing to assist the Saudi-led conflict against the Houthis there. The war has been raging on for two years and has resulted in millions of Yemeni displaced, starving, and suffering from a catastrophic cholera epidemic.

In a joint press conference, Lee and Sanders said the U.S. military has been “engaging in hostilities” with the Saudi-led coalition against the rebel Houthis in Yemen in two critical ways: refueling Saudi bombers and providing aerial targeting intelligence and reconnaissance. These activities should have triggered a declaration of war or an authorization of force under the War Powers Act.

“This legislation is neither liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican— it’s constitutional,” said Lee.

“As congress has not declared war or authorized military force in this conflict our involvement is unconstitutional and unauthorized,” said Sanders. “It’s long overdue for congress to re-assert its constitutional authority.”

This bill would force Congress to vote on continuing assistance to the Saudis. Congress would almost certainly vote to continue the war, but since most Senators don't want to put their support for the war on the record, this will most likely not even come up for a vote. Which I think is sad.

Ethics and Art at the Louvre Abu Dhabi

The Louvre Abu Dhabi has finally opened, five years late, on an artificial landform dubbed Happiness Island. This is a licensing deal for sorts; for $1.15 billion petrodollars, Abu Dhabi received the right to use the Louvre name for 30 years, during which time the franchise can borrow extensively from the Louvre and France's other state-owned museums. New York Times art critic Holland Cotter visited the new museum and produced a meditation on the intersection of art, politics, and ethics:

A walk through Mr. Nouvel’s domed museum complex, with its luminous shade and its breeze-channeling sea vistas, is an enchantment, almost enough to make you forget grim physical and social realities that went into creating it. And the manifold beauty of galleries filled with charismatic objects nearly persuades you not to remember that art is a record of crimes as well as of benign achievements. It takes an exercise in ethical balance to engage fully with our great museums, to walk the shaky bridge they construct between aesthetics and politics. A mindful visit to the Louvre Abu Dhabi requires this balance. That may be what is most universal about it.

Besides those "grim social realities" – for example that Happiness Island was built by contract laborers from South Asia, the palaces of ancient Egypt by slaves – there is the reality of art world insiderism. This gives us works like the one shown above, “Food for Thought — Al Muallaqat,” by Saudi artist Maha Malluh. I kind of like this, but it is an assemblage of stew pots blackened by use:

they retain the marks of the past but also the imprint of the stories told during mealtimes in nomadic tradition. Maha Malluh has transformed the pots into a visual poem, in tribute to classical Arab poetry.

Which is just the sort of thing that makes so many regular folks residents of flyover country grouchy about the snobbery of coastal elites. Elite art often appears as a celebration of division, that is, the division between people who get it and people who don't, to the greater glory of the former.

I find that I enjoy contemporary art best as a sort of lark. If I enter the museum in an exploratory frame of mind, ready to laugh at what amuses me and to be impressed by anything that seems amazing, I enjoy myself. But if I enter in the reverent mood I carry into cathedrals and the Met, I end up grouchy about the weirdness of a world that pays Jeff Koons millions for metal balloon animals. Do you suppose Maha Malluh was paid more for this assemblage of pots than the men who made these earned in their lifetimes, or he is perhaps not at that pinnacle of the profession yet?

Change in Saudi Arabia

Tom Friedman traveled to Riyadh to interview crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (M.B.S.) and talk to other Saudis, and the result is a long article that practically bubbles over with enthusiasm. He calls recent events the "Saudi Arab Spring":

Unlike the other Arab Springs — all of which emerged bottom up and failed miserably, except in Tunisia — this one is led from the top down by the country’s 32-year-old crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, and, if it succeeds, it will not only change the character of Saudi Arabia but the tone and tenor of Islam across the globe. Only a fool would predict its success — but only a fool would not root for it.

He emphasizes two things about the new regime. First, the anti-corruption drive, which led to the arrest of hundreds of wealthy Saudis:

The stakes are high for M.B.S. in this anticorruption drive. If the public feels that he is truly purging corruption that was sapping the system and doing so in a way that is transparent and makes clear to future Saudi and foreign investors that the rule of law will prevail, it will really instill a lot of new confidence in the system. But if the process ends up feeling arbitrary, bullying and opaque, aimed more at aggregating power for power’s sake and unchecked by any rule of law, it will end up instilling fear that will unnerve Saudi and foreign investors in ways the country can’t afford.

But one thing I know for sure: Not a single Saudi I spoke to here over three days expressed anything other than effusive support for this anticorruption drive. The Saudi silent majority is clearly fed up with the injustice of so many princes and billionaires ripping off their country. While foreigners, like me, were inquiring about the legal framework for this operation, the mood among Saudis I spoke with was: “Just turn them all upside down, shake the money out of their pockets and don’t stop shaking them until it’s all out!”

And second, the prince's move toward a moderate interpretation of Islam. The people around the prince do not consider the Wahhabi sect to be the real tradition of Islam, or even of Saudi Arabia, but a radical movement imposed on the people after 1979:

Indeed, M.B.S. instructed me: “Do not write that we are ‘reinterpreting’ Islam — we are ‘restoring’ Islam to its origins — and our biggest tools are the Prophet’s practices and [daily life in] Saudi Arabia before 1979.” At the time of the Prophet Muhammad, he argued, there were musical theaters, there was mixing between men and women, there was respect for Christians and Jews in Arabia. “The first commercial judge in Medina was a woman!” So if the Prophet embraced all of this, M.B.S. asked, “Do you mean the Prophet was not a Muslim?”

Then one of his ministers got out his cellphone and shared with me pictures and YouTube videos of Saudi Arabia in the 1950s — women without heads covered, wearing skirts and walking with men in public, as well as concerts and cinemas. It was still a traditional and modest place, but not one where fun had been outlawed, which is what happened after 1979.

I do not consider Tom Friedman to be a person of good judgment – for starters, he supported Bush's invasion of Iraq – but knows a lot more about the Middle East than I do, so maybe it is worth taking his enthusiasm seriously. Actually it may be that his support for overthrowing Saddam and his admiration for the new regime of M.B.S. stem from the same source, his sense that the Middle East is so messed up that only radical shake-ups have any chance of leading to real improvement.

I have three serious concerns about the events in Saudi Arabia. The first is that the prince and his father have taken a very hard line against Iran and regularly compare Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to Hitler, and I worry they could either stumble into war or provoke one if they got in trouble domestically. The second is that M.B.S. seems like a would-be tyrant to me, and the history of the Middle East is full of leaders who talked radical reform when they came to power but clung to it until they themselves became the corruption. And the third is what the Saudi proponents of puritanical Islam might do in response to these reforms; a repeat of the violent struggle in Egypt between the military regime and the Muslim Brotherhood seems well within the possible.

But it feels good to me to think that change for the better is at least possible.

Saudi Arabia and Israel as Allies

This Haaretz columnist thinks Saudi Arabia is trying to instigate a war between Israel and Hezbollah, by way of enlisting Israel in its struggle against Iran. Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri recently resigned, and he was widely considered to be Saudi Arabia's man in Lebanon. Why did they have him step down?

It is plausible that the Saudis are trying to create the context for a different means of contesting Iran in Lebanon: an Israeli-Hezbollah war.

With Assad clearly having survived the challenge posed by Saudi-backed rebels, the Saudi leadership may hope to move its confrontation with Iran from Syria to Lebanon. By pulling Hariri out of his office, they may hope to ensure that Hezbollah gets stuck with the blame and responsibility for Lebanon’s challenges, from caring for Syrian refugees to mopping up Al Qaida and ISIS affiliates.

That could, the Saudis may believe, lead Hezbollah to seek an accelerated confrontation with Israel as a means of unifying Lebanese support for their dominance. As indicated in a different context - this week’s arrests of Saudi princes in a putative corruption crackdown - King Salman and MBS have little patience to establish their desired order.

Israeli leaders have been preparing for the next war with Hezbollah since 2006. Iran’s increasing assertiveness across the region makes clear that, even more than the last war, it will be a fight to diminish the Iranian threat on Israel’s borders. Israel and Saudi Arabia are fully aligned in this regional struggle, and the Saudis cannot help but be impressed by Israel’s increasing assertiveness to strike at Iranian threats in Syria.

Wheels within wheels.

In Saudi Arabia, another Modernizing, Dictatorial King

In the Europe of the 18th and 19th centuries several kings tried to shake up their kingdoms and bring them up to date. Casting aside traditional alliances with the nobility and the church they sought a new power base among the educated, moneyed class of rapidly growing cities, and in a newly professionalized officer corps. To compensate for the loss of prestige rooted in tradition, they glorified themselves as reformers. They often relied on hired foreign experts to carry through their schemes and add glamour to their regimes.

It struck me, reading about the recent moves of Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, that they might fit into this pattern: he wants to be the Frederick the Great of Saudi Arabia. His iron fist moves against his own relatives have been accompanied by others designed to win the support of the urban middle class: more freedom for women, limits on the power of the conservative clergy and a call for a "more moderate Islam," moves to modernize the economy. He launched this house cleaning as head of a new committee to root out corruption, which seems to me like a transparent bid to ally himself with the urban populace against the rest of his own family.

In Saudi Arabia the king has been more of a first among equals in the princes of his generation, rather than a sovereign, and Mohammed's moves can also be seen as an attempt to break free of these limits. After all there are hundreds of princes in his generation, and if the rule-by-family consensus tradition is not broken there would be a veritable Parliament of royals. So here is another reason for an ambitious man to attack Saudi tradition and seek new sources of authority: because the tradition would set stark limits on royal power.

I am not sure how Mohammed's aggressive foreign policy fits into his plans. Maybe that's just how he and his father think. But maybe taking a very tough line against Iranian influence and stepping up the war in Yemen is another attempt to unify the kingdom around the king and his son. If so, this seems to me like a bad omen for the next several years.

Sotheby's Islamic World Sale

Some highlights from Sotheby's upcoming Arts of the Islamic World sale in London. This is a prince's coat from India, embroidered with Basra seed pearls,19th century.

Illuminated manuscript of the Diwan of the Persian poet known as Hafiz, from Qajar, 19th century.

An Ottoman agate-hilted dagger with gem-set silver scabbard, Turkey, probably 18th century

Detail from a page of illumination in gold, India, Deccan, Bijapur or Golconda, circa 1600

A gold and silver-inlaid brass penbox, probably Seljuk Mosul, late 13th century

Details from a large painted three-panel screen depicting the City Palace at Udaipur and Lake Pichola, India, 19th century

A gilt saddle-axe (tabarzin), North-West India, Bikaner, 18th century

A princess seated in an interior, possibly Desavarati Ragini, attributable to Mihr Chand, India, Oudh, circa 1770

A large pair of enamelled bracelets with tiger heads, North India, 19th century

The Arab Spring, Failed Hopes, and Self Doubt

The Arab Spring, a great movement for democracy, human rights, and hope, has crashed and burned. Outside Tunisia it has led only to some combination of civil war and renewed repression. Algerian writer and activist Kamel Daoud wrote a moving essay about these events for a French newspaper that has now been translated and published in the Times. It makes me wonder.

Daoud admits that the dreams of the protesters and the rebels are dead or dying, but he does not attribute this to any sort of natural disease. He believes that those dreams were murdered. They were murdered by dictators like Assad with their airplanes and poison gas, by cynical foreign governments, by lies. The liars claim that attempts to establish Arab democracy only empower radicals like the Islamic state and lead to chaos and foreign intervention:

For President Abdelaziz Bouteflika of Algeria, the Arab springs were “devastating conspiracies.” According to a private Egyptian television channel, even ‘‘The Simpsons’’ contained proof of untoward foreign designs in Syria. The political chaos in Libya has fanned distrust as well.

The foreign-intervention theory is used as a weapon against local dissenters. In 2016 Bouteflika, ailing and immobilized, announced that he would seek yet another term, after having the Constitution amended so that he could stay in office for the rest of his life. When his opponents countered his proposals by invoking democratic values, government media accused them of being traitors, Western agents or Zionists.

The case of Syria — subject to alliances with Iran or Russia and playing against Saudi Arabia, Qatar or the United States — gives weight to such propaganda. It seems to demonstrate that any demand for democracy eventually translates into chaos, and chaos invites the return of colonialism. The same goes for Libya. Better then to submit to one’s dictators than compromise oneself with foreigners.

I want to agree with Daoud that the dream of Arab democracy remains alive, and that things might have gone differently. But I am not sure. I am not much of a believer in luck or genius. I think most of what happens in history is driven by vast, long-term forces that we only partially understand and can rarely control. It seems to me that people who point out what happened in Libya when the dictator was overthrown are onto something. The situation did not degenerate into chaos for no reason at all; it degenerated because Libyans are deeply divided among themselves by region, tribe, class, attitudes toward Europe, and their interpretations of Islam, so much so that once the heavy hand of dictatorship was removed the situation spontaneously combusted. Can democracy flourish in such circumstances? Assad has held onto power in Syria not just because he has airplanes and poison gas, but because he has the support of many Syrians. Foreign powers meddle in Arab conflicts not just for their own nefarious purposes but because various Arab factions are always begging them to.

Consider events in Iraq and Egypt. In Iraq the US removed the dictator and his whole apparatus, and so far the result has been corruption, conflict, terrorism, the rise of the Islamic state, a devastating civil war, and the effective secession of Kurdistan. Consider the still smoldering ruins of Mosul, once one of the Arab world's great cities, as collateral damage from this experiment. In Egypt democracy was established and an election held, but the winner was from the Muslim Brotherhood. The secular, western-oriented people who began the protests and launched the revolution recoiled in horror from what their countrymen had chosen and allied with the military to overthrow the Morsi government and return Egypt to dictatorship. The hard, rational part of my brain says this all proves that most of the Arab world is simply not suitable for democracy.

But even as I reach that conclusion I doubt it. Americans always used to say that Latin America was unsuitable for democracy and pointed to the numerous failures, but right now most of the region is democratic, and some of those democratic nations are thriving. Am I just being smug and indifferent when I write off the dreams of Daoud and millions of others? Is my resignation just an excuse for the west's clumsy combination of military meddling and moral indifference? For my refusal to endorse spending American dollars and soldiers overthrowing Assad? I don't know.

I would never tell Daoud or an other citizen of a dictatorship to give up hope; hope is a precious thing in any circumstances. But I am not myself optimistic that things will get better in the Middle East any time soon.

Pilgrimage Scroll

Details from a scroll showing a Shiite pilgrimage, purchased by cartographer Carsten Niebuhr in Karbala, Iraq, 1761-1767. Source.