Valentina Pasquali

Washington D.C. – In an effort to identify the causes of, and possible solutions to the growing divide between public opinions in the United States and the Muslim world, Juan Cole discussed his most recent work, Engaging the Muslim World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), at a book launch hosted by the Middle East Institute in Washington D.C. Assessing the damage on Muslim perceptions of America inflicted by the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq of 2003, Cole argued that a withdrawal, albeit slow, of U.S. troops will contribute significantly to improving relationships with the region at large.

A professor of history at the University of Michigan, fluent in several Middle Eastern languages, and a frequent commentator on Middle Eastern affairs, Cole tried to extricate the causes of the growing disenchantment with the United States among the Muslim public, despite the many alliances the U.S. entertains in the Middle East and across the Muslim world. Take Indonesia for example, suggested Cole. According to a series of polls conducted over time by the Pew Charitable Trust and Gallup, in 2000 75% of Indonesians held a positive view of the United States. This figure fell to 15% in 2004 and has now regained some ground hitting 37% in 2009, still only half of what it was nine years earlier.

Cole believes that, alongside the languishing stalemate in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the occupation of Iraq devised by the Bush Administration is heavily responsible for this dramatic change in attitudes. In Cole’s most conservative estimate, 300,000 Iraqis have been killed during the war, as a result of fighting and infrastructure failures caused by military operations. Not to count the orphans, the widows and the millions of displaced citizens the war left behind. Additionally, scandals like that of the prison at Abu Grahib became major issues for Muslims around the world. “In an effort to curb the insurgency using harsh questioning techniques and torture, the Bush Administration ended up creating huge new numbers of insurgents,” Cole said at the Middle East Institute.

According to Cole, the U.S. needs to accept blame for a sort of idleness, the lack of a prompt and effective response to the deterioration of the situation on the ground (Cole reported that Sweden, for example, without having anything to do with the invasion, has already accepted 40,000 Iraqi immigrants.) Cole holds the American corporate media partially responsible for the some of the disinformation that kept the American people from understanding more about the tragedy that was unfolding. “We are not well served by our corporate media. I don’t think the U.S. public was ever aware of what the Iraq war really was for the Iraqi people,” lamented Cole. TV networks in particular had a tendency to sanitize the war, showing images of the craters that would be left by the bombs, but not of the blood and the corpses and the spare limbs that dominated the scene immediately following the explosion. This imagery, instead, made it regularly on outlets such as Al Jazeera. Because of the sanitization of the more gruesome aspects of the war, Cole believes that the human costs of the U.S. military engagement in Iraq were never fully recognized at home.

As all of this is on the minds of the Iraqis, and of people across the Muslim world, U.S. military presence in Iraq has, according to Cole, become utterly unacceptable. Yet, while polls show a certain amount of support among Muslims for violent retaliation against the U.S. armed forces based in the Middle East, even those who feel more strongly about the issue do not express any desire to ever hit the United States homeland. Mostly what people want is withdrawal, which is good news according to Cole, especially since President Obama seems determined to go through with it. To be fair, Cole did not argue that all Americans must necessarily disappear from Iraq at once, something that those he nicknamed “withdrawal extremists” are calling for. Cole simply claimed that Muslims would welcome a steady and consistent reduction of armed forces deployed in Iraq.

While being extremely critical of the policies of the Bush Administration, Cole also recognized that the situation in Iraq has improved and that U.S. forces exercise today far more command and control then ever before. However, he insisted that the relative stabilization of the country should not be understood as vindicating the invasion. “It would be like saying that, when the black plague began subsiding in medieval Europe, the Norwegian rat had been vindicated,” Call remarked ironically.

Overall, Cole’s present assessment is that Iraq has been building some fundamental capabilities and that there is increasing promise that it might come back together and at least provide for its own security. “I’m somewhat optimistic that Iraq might get its act together and that a U.S. withdrawal could actually be possible without ensuing disaster,” Cole suggested. The one issue that remains unresolved and that could create hurdles in the years ahead is the Arab-Kurd relationship, which is again showing signs of distress. The new American Administration should also be aware that, even in the best-case scenario of a fully recovering Iraq that maintains a positive relationship with Washington, relations between Baghdad and Teheran will continue to be warmer than the U.S. would like. “I think the U.S. will have to suck it up, because the Bush Administration created an Iran that is more powerful in the Middle East than it used to be,” argued Cole. What the U.S. can and should do, according to the University of Michigan’s professor, is to ensure a more hands-on leadership than the previous administration was able to practice. “I hope President Obama and Vice-President Biden will take more active control of what happens including in trying to tackle the case of the Kurds,” explained Cole.

Asked only in the Q&A session his opinion on the Arab-Israeli conflict, Cole did not even try to hide the hopelessness he feels about the situation: “I’m very pessimistic about the conflict. I really don’t see an end to it,” he admitted. Describing the newly formed Israeli government as the “farthest right we have seen in history,” Cole predicted that it could be decades before a solution is reached. Cole foresees three possible scenarios. He finds it unlikely that an agreement will be found on a variation of the two-state solution. Also unlikely, but not as much as one might think, is the apocalyptic view that Israelis will proceed with the expulsion of the Palestinians from Palestine, which would trigger a conflict of enormous proportion throughout the region. Finally, and more likely, Cole believes that we are about to witness a long period of, what he described as “apartheid,” which could continue for two to three decades. This would not be a stable long term solution, and it would probably attract increasingly strict sanctions on Israel, maybe not from the U.S. but certainly from the Europeans. But, according to Cole, Israel is really not capable of surviving without trading with Europe and, at some point, the conflict would just end with a one-state solution, where Palestinians will be granted Israeli citizenship. Apparently, one-third of Palestinians already appear willing to accept it, showing that this third scenario might be the more likely, albeit in the very long run.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

The results of two rounds of U.S.-led polling of public opinion in Iran, conducted in 2006 and 2008, portray a moderate Iranian people. The studies show Iranians as relatively pleased with their own system of government and electoral system, although critical of certain aspects of it. Iranians appear open to multilateralism and international organizations, even in the realm of human rights. While they are eager to push forward with the nuclear program, they don’t necessarily want to develop nuclear weapons. They long to be treated as an important regional actor but don’t wish for regional hegemony. They are suspicious of terrorist groups and even hold a generally positive view of the American people. In this overall temperate picture, deeply rooted animosity toward the U.S. Government remains as a fundamental component of the Iranian identity.

While Iran’s presidential elections approach, and as the Obama Administration and the U.S. Congress discuss opportunities for an overture toward Teheran, Washington Prism’s Valentina Pasquali spoke to Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org and the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland, about his experience assessing the Iranian psyche. Mr. Kull is a political psychologist who studies world public opinion on international issues. He directed both the 2006 and the 2008 surveys in Iran.

Valentina Pasquali: What would you say was the most striking result of your two rounds of surveys in Iran?

Steven Kull: What comes through quite strongly is the extent to which Iranians are not in a revolutionary mindset. There is this image of Iranians being swept up by the kind of zeal one associates with the early days of the Bolsheviks, that they have an ideology that they are aiming to spread. I just don’t see any evidence of this, in the polling data and the focus groups. Iranians are supportive of an Islamic state, but they are also reaching out to the West in a variety of ways: they endorse democracy and human rights, and endorse changes for the role of women. They are evolving and trying to integrate these liberal ideas into their own system. But it is a struggle; they are not, by any means, ready to abandon their Islamic roots. They perceive the West, particularly the United States, as exerting a destabilizing effect on them and making it more difficult for them to find their way. In short, on the one hand, the number of people who truly identify with the revolutionary Islamic mindset is quite small. On the other, I should also underscore that the idea that Iranians, underneath it all, love America, love the West, and can’t wait for the current government to fall so that they can become a western-style democracy, is also a dream unsupported by reality.

VP: Where do Iranian people stand on the nuclear issue?

SK: Both in the polling and the focus groups we found widespread determination on the part of the Iranians to acquire a capacity to enrich uranium, combined with a strong sense of the constraints that should be put on developing a nuclear weapon. A fairly large majority perceives that developing a nuclear weapon would be contrary to the principles of Islam. The Iranian elite and religious leaders have put forward this view and it would be very difficult for them to change course. Maybe public opinion doesn’t determine their decisions, but there is something to be said about the normative environment the leadership has created, rooted in the idea that it would not be legitimate to acquire nuclear weapons. I think it would require a significant trigger for them to switch course, something would have to happen that dramatically increased the threat to Iran. It’s quite unlikely that they would just abruptly cross that line.

Now, it is also clear that the Iranians are aware of the fact that having a nuclear energy program serves more purposes than just nuclear energy. They want to be one step closer to having nuclear weapons capability. They perceive that this would give them a number of benefits: greater status and a deterrent effect on other parties. Moreover, there is a widespread perception that neighboring countries are not complying with the Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT). Iranians think that others are secretly developing nuclear weapons and that the NPT regime is fragile, and, as a result, they want to be well positioned should the NPT regime collapse.

VP: In the discussion of your work in Iran, you addressed the overstated perception Iranians have of American power in the world. Were you able to assess what this perception was born out of?

SK: The majority of Iranians we polled think the U.S. controls most of what happens in the world. In the focus groups we did, some of the views that were expressed were particularly potent, for example the idea that the U.S. controls Al-Qaeda. Why? I don’t have an easy answer to that. It is a belief that seems to have a quasi-religious connotation. When Iranians use the term ‘the Great Satan,’ they honestly describe how they perceive the U.S.; something like a cosmic principle, and not just an ordinary state that happens to be rather rich and well armed. Certainly the long history of the U.S. having a highly intrusive role in Iran matters. In general, I would say that there is a tendency in that part of the world toward conspiracy theory, a tendency to see complex organizing themes behind the surface of things. Even on the Al Jazeera website there is a section called conspiracy theory. With respect to Iranians in particular, there also is a history of discovering at a later time that America was behind something that they had not previously assumed. And so it has become a kind of default position to assume that America is behind something. Iranians’ perception of being under siege works as an important glue holding their society together. I think the best comparison to try understanding Iran is America shortly after 9/11. America was so cohesive, and there was very little criticism of the government. All the polls showed that the people’s attitude toward the government or everything American became much more positive. It’s not that people were lying, or making things up. But when people feel threatened, they tend to huddle closer together. Iran has that same quality, constantly feeling under siege.

VP: What do you think is the effect of international sanctions on the psyche of the Iranian people?

SK: It’s not something we polled on directly, but based on my experience, sanctions contribute to this generalized sense of being under pressure by the West. It also justifies the economic failures of the current government and it feeds into this idea that the U.S. is hostile to Islam itself and is out to undermine it.

VP: What was the people’s view of President Ahmadinejad, at least at the time of your most recent survey?

SK: About two-thirds of the people we interviewed at the beginning of 2008 expressed a favorable opinion. Because we heard so much about people coming to Iran and hearing negative views of the president we proofed further and divided people according to income and education. People with higher education or higher income were not as positive, they were more divided about Ahmadinejad. And those tend to probably be the people that Westerners encounter more often when they come to Tehran.

VP: How would you explain the animosity of the Iranian people toward the U.S. Government?

SK: I think it is important to recognize how deep the roots of this animosity are and how far back they go. For many people in Iran the experience of the Shah was a very negative one and the U.S. was always associated with it. I don’t think other Muslim countries have a history that could trigger that depth of animosity. However, it is also true that Iran has a stronger than average attraction to the west. It’s kind of a complex love/hate relation, which you can find broadly in the Muslim world but is more common in Iran. There is some magnetism, while, at the same time, animosity toward the U.S. plays a huge role in the structure of society. So much that it would be difficult to break away from it. Many politicians and leaders embrace this national narrative rooted in a negative relationship with the U.S. An effort to change this approach would rattle fundamental structures in Iran, and could be very destructive to the Iranian identity.

I do think that there is a genuine desire among most Iranians to improve relations; the question is whether or not this can be done in a way that does not make Iranians feel like they are just submitting. They have a strong sense of pride and any agreement would need not to be received as some kind of defeat, or capitulation. I think that the proposition that Tom Pickering, and others, have put forward as far as the nuclear weapons program, to multilateralize it or to create some kind of structure with intrusive inspections and a limit capacity to enrich uranium, would go over. We polled on it and the majority of Iranians said they would accept it. And it has been alluded to by a few Iranian leaders. To actually bring it about would probably require a more complex bargain touching on a wide array of components, as for example the removal of some or all of the economic sanctions. From the first to the second poll we conducted in Iran, we found an increase in the readiness to support steps that would improve relations with the U.S., such as growing diplomatic contacts and more people-to-people exchanges. Probably, some combination of removal of economic sanctions, limited enrichment capacity with highly intrusive inspections, and greater cultural contacts, could be a package that, from all the indications I have, would be feasible. Clearly, giving up the idea of regime change is a key part of this grand bargain. I don’t have poll data to show this but, from everything I see, the Iranian people as well as the Islamic regime find the rhetoric of regime change annoying and threatening. Iranians don’t react thinking that the U.S. is simply going after their government but not after them. Rather, they see this as part of the American attempt to undermine their way of life. And they identify with the regime. I think this is the most important thing that U.S. government leaders can understand better. When we threaten the Iranian government, the Iranian people feel threatened too.

VP: According to your study, Iranians view most terrorist organizations in a negative light. However, this doesn’t apply to Hezbollah and Hamas, outlining a difficult relationship with Israel. What is your understanding of the general perception of Israel among regular Iranian people?

SK: There is a very negative view. The polling numbers are extremely negative and there is definitely a lot of hostility. It’s also striking that, while Iranians reject attacks on civilians quite strongly, when asked about Palestinians attacking Israeli civilians they are more divided. I think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is very engaging to Iranians, and other Muslims, because it is a very distinct and vivid narrative of Muslims being victimized, in their mind, by a Western based force that ultimately works on behalf of the United States. It’s not so much that they care about the Palestinians per se, but they identify with the Palestinians and the conflict strikes a very strong emotional chord.

But in all honesty, I don’t think you would find the desire to annihilate the state of Israel to be the majority opinion in Iran. My impression is that Iranians would probably be fine with the two-state solution, and that the Arab initiative that is in play right now would be attractive to them. I don’t see any real indication that Iranians are dead-set on some kind of maximal outcome where Israel is eliminated. They don’t perceive themselves as pursuing maximal outcomes at all. They perceive themselves as in a defensive mode.

VP: Do you have a sense of how consistent, or inconsistent, the mood of the Iranian public is? Your latest survey was conducted approximately 12 months ago; do you have reasons to believe that, were you to do another one now, the results would be fairly similar, or quite the contrary, completely different?

SK: All publics are pretty stable and so, as a general baseline, as a pollster you don’t expect big change. The most interesting question is what changes might be happening given the new U.S. Administration of President Barack Obama. To the extent that we have data from the Muslim world, but not Iran, I can tell you that people are hopeful, but on a wait-and-see mode. Iranians have an elaborate belief system that says it is impossible for the U.S. to change, that the U.S. is structurally the way it is, driven by lobbies, and particularly the Israeli lobby. There is this narrative that says that Obama couldn’t change these things even if he wanted to. But I still think that, underneath, there is hope nonetheless, and that, if the U.S. does offer an overture, it would be difficult for Iran not to respond in some way.

VP: While surveying people in Iran you were free to touch upon almost every topic, with the exception of the clergy and the role of the Supreme Leader. Do you have a sense of how much the lack of such discussion clouds the overall validity of the survey?

SK: To make things clear, it wasn’t the government that forbade us to ask these questions, they didn’t have any direct involvement; rather the local polling organization we selected did its own self-censorship. And I think that, if we had brought the issue of the role of the clergy up directly in the focus groups, people would have been uncomfortable. I certainly would like to understand this issue better. From what I read, I don’t see a lot of signs that people are burning to actually discuss it though. It’s not that they are fully content. In a sense, this is comparable to asking Americans about the Supreme Court. “Should we get rid of the Supreme Court?” Americans don’t really think about it. They generally like the Supreme Court, they have some respect for it, but it’s mostly just part of the furniture. In Iran, the clergy is not one of those things that people are accustomed to challenging, no more so than the Americans are accustomed to challenging the Constitution. It should be understood that the Council of Guardians can be criticized, for example, for excluding candidates from elections. People do it all the time in Parliament, and there are demonstrations against such decisions. Specific choices can be questioned. But whether the Council of Guardians ought to have any role at all, that’s probably a question beyond what Iranians are willing to discuss. This is, in a way, very similar to asking Americans whether the Supreme Court should have any role. Here, where we have a Constitution and a Supreme Court that interprets it. In Iran the idea that the clergy plays some role in the interpretation of Sharia law and the Koran is not seen as something to question. However people might have criticisms about specific decisions, like people here might have criticisms about specific Supreme Court decisions. To an extent that we have trouble understanding, Iranians don’t perceive Islam, and even the Islamic state they have, as intrinsically opposed to democracy. Again, we have constraints on democracy here as well, it’s not like the majority can make any decision it wants; it is limited by the Constitution and how the Supreme Court interprets it. Iranians would say that this is the same for them, although they would probably acknowledge that their system is more restrictive. But they don’t see it as intrinsically problematic. Words like democracy and human rights are popular words.

VP: What do you think a U.S. Government official should come away from these surveys with? What is most important to understand about the views of the Iranian people?

SK: The combination of openness to the West as well as the rootedness in the idea of an Islamic government. That democracy and an Islamic government are not contradictory. And that Iranians are not in a pre-revolutionary state, but even open to influences from the West. I think it’s very important to get rid of the notion that they are against us; they are simply struggling with the process of modernization, and that is a difficult process. They are people with very proud roots, they achieved very high level of culture, but in the current period they are not doing so well, which is humiliating to them. They are also not ready to abandon their roots. Even as they open up to Western influences. In the end, you have some rejectionists, as you might say, and you have those that are totally ready to go over to the Western model, but the big majority both wants to keep its root and be in a relationship with the West. The problem is that we are not good at talking to that group, we tend to threaten the former and seduce the latter, or treat them as some kind of ally, but we haven’t found a good voice for the middle masses. This approach is rooted in our fantasy that, underneath, everybody is like us and people really want what we have. I think we really must let go of this, while also understand more clearly that Iranians are not in a revolutionary mindset. A lot would follow from this, I think.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – On the eve of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s much anticipated visit to the Middle East, Elliott Abrams, former senior adviser on the Near and Middle East to the Bush Administration and currently senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, outlined the challenges Clinton will face as the new top U.S. diplomat, and portrayed a gloom state of affairs in the region, at the core of which is the stand-still in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“There’s very little belief, in the Middle East, that political negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians are possible,” Abrams, a leading neoconservative who was involved in the Iran-Contra scandal, said in a conference call with reporters. Currently, it is impossible to say who would even be a legitimate representative of either party at a negotiating table. In addition to a long-standing split within the Palestinian camp – where the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) represents only a part of the population, the other having embraced Hamas — the general elections recently held in Israel, and which have yet to yield a national government, only contributed to complicating the picture.

According to Abrams, the hope for a broad base coalition that would include both Likud and Kadima parties, an option more conducive to dialogue with the Palestinians, has already been crashed. Despite widespread popular support for such a solution, and Likud leader and Prime Minister-Designate Benjamin Netanyahu’s efforts, Kadima’s Tzipi Livni is resistant to aligning her party with Israel’s more conservative factions. “The U.S. would prefer a broader base government,” Abrams said. Nevertheless, it unlikely that Washington will put any direct pressure on Livni. “It’s hard to know what the outcome of a direct intervention would be, and how Kadima would react to it,” Abrams explained.

Political negotiations over the future of Palestine have been languishing for a long time. Discussions have long reached a point where the minimum the Palestinian Authority is willing to accept is more than the maximum the Israeli Government is willing to concede. Increased Palestinian ambitions make things worse. In Abrams’ opinion, the idea that the creation of a Palestinian state is a matter of urgency and should be attended to immediately is relatively new and was not, for example, part of the road-map. The road-map contemplated incremental steps and an interim stage before a state could ever be created. “I think these issues shouldn’t be taboo. One can envision many different combinations beyond what the Palestinian Authority wants now,” Abrams claimed.

Because of the unlikelihood that a political agreement will be reached in the near-term, Abrams encouraged all parties involved to focus on a step-by-step approach aimed at improving material standards of living in the West Bank, leaving Gaza aside for the time being. “The economy in the West Bank has not collapsed yet. It is actually in a decent state. Even more could be achieved if the Israelis loosened road blocks and checkpoints. We should work to strengthen some of those Palestinian institutions, like the police force, that one day will be needed for a Palestinian state,” Abrams advised.

In this context, Abrams believes that the issue of Jewish settlements in the territories should be downgraded. In his opinion, population growth in the settlements doesn’t have, per se, a huge impact on the daily lives of Palestinians, nor does it hamper the possibility of the creation of a Palestinian state. The real problem lies, instead, in potential land expansion. However, according to Abrams, there has been little evidence of this in recent years. “The U.S. should tell Israel to exercise pressure on its settlers to avoid outgrowth of the settlements. For the rest, we should keep our ammunitions for issues that affect Palestinians more deeply,” Abrams advised.

As for Gaza itself, the Israeli blockade still stands. As a consequence only humanitarian supplies (i.e. medicines and food) are being allowed in, while other kinds of products, for example materials needed for reconstruction efforts, are not. “I don’t think Netanyahu will mend this position,” Abrams predicted, indicating that one, although difficult, possibility would be to get these supplies into Gaza through Egypt. “The Egyptians will be resistant because they don’t want the Israelis to offload Gaza on them,” Abrams explained. Things are further complicated by the fact that Israel considers an even more porous border between Egypt and Gaza as a potential threat in terms of arms smuggling. The Israelis are convinced, and many Egyptians agree, that Iranian weapons come into Gaza via the tunnels under the Egyptian border. Reportedly, most arms shipments leave Iran by sea, circumnavigate the Gulf of Aden, and ultimately stop short of the Suez Canal and hit land in places such as Somalia and Eritrea, finally arriving in Gaza via land.

In the context of Iran, Abrams criticized the Obama Administration’s new approach. Irrespective of whether or not the U.S might eventually start direct diplomacy with Teheran, Abrams believes that Washington should have never taken the military option off the table. “We need to keep the Iranians off balance and we need to keep them worried,” Abrams said. “Instead, I think we left the Iranians with the feeling that the possibility of a U.S. strike is totally out of the question,” he regretted.

While it appears increasingly unlikely that the U.S. will attack Iran, it is hard to predict what Israel might do. “They do see Iran as an existential threat and they believe that a nuclear Iran could trigger a second holocaust,” Abrams explained. According to him, Israel will have to consider how effective a military strike could be and assess the political and social consequences it would have. Abrams disagreed that attacking Iran would trigger a backlash and increase support for the regime. While he conceded that this could happen in the short run, a military intervention could cause the Iranian people to doubt their choice of leadership in the long run.

Finally, Elliott Abrams touched on the nomination of Dennis Ross to be Secretary Clinton’s special adviser to South West Asia and the Persian Gulf. The choice of Ross, criticized in Iran for his pro-Israel stances, had long been expected and turned out to be for a less significant role than what had been anticipated.
“I’m not sure why he wasn’t officially nominated for Iran. There are many speculations as to why that happened,” Abrams said. Interestingly, Ross has not been given the role of an envoy, such as George Mitchell for the Middle East, and is not tasked with outreach. Rather, Ross might be assigned to a behind-the-scene role of private consultations with Secretary Clinton. Clearly, Ross’ final job will also depend on what approach the Obama Administration decides to take toward Iran and on when any form of direct engagement might actually start.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington D.C. – Only a few days before stepping down from his position as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations to accommodate President Obama’s appointee Susan Rice, Zalmay Khalilzad drew a few conclusions about his years at the UN, and about his career as a diplomat, at an event organized by the New America Foundation (NAF) in Washington D.C.

Describing his overall experience as a “net positive,” Ambassador Khalilzad argued that the UN is an institution that “can and has been useful,” whenever the United States finds ways to approach it effectively. During his tenure, Khalilzad stood apart from his predecessor John Bolton by being more attentive towards the opinions of other representatives. “The mere factor of engaging and listening moves your interlocutors towards your domain,” the ambassador said during his conversation with Steve Clemons, Director of the American Strategy Program at NAF.

Prior to serving as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Zalmay Khalilzad was the Chief of Mission at the American embassies in Kabul and Baghdad. In Afghanistan, he oversaw the strenuous negotiations that led to the drafting of the country’s constitution, was involved with Afghanistan’s first elections, and helped to organize the first meeting of the Afghan parliament. “We worked very hard during those days, using persuasion and engagement. Sometime we would summon the threat of the use of force, we had to deal with all sorts of people,” Khalilzad recalled. In 2005, the ambassador was transferred from Kabul to Baghdad. Although at that point things in Afghanistan seemed to be turning for the better, Khalilzad remembers that “the Afghan people were quite concerned with the general assumption that Afghanistan had already succeeded.”

Today, crippled by a new spike in violence and an increasingly corrupted central government, Afghanistan seems to have plunged back into its worst days. President Barack Obama’s more immediate plans entail sending more U.S. troops into the country. “I think it is a mistake to think that you can solve this as a military issue,” Ambassador Khalilzad claimed, stressing the need for a more comprehensive approach that focuses increased resources on strengthening governance. According to Khalilzad, the Afghan Government must also improve its below-standard performance. “Success in Afghanistan will not be achieved without the Afghan Government doing its part,” the ambassador argued. Khalilzad praised the idea put forward by the new administration of nominating a czar that would oversee U.S. policies towards Afghanistan and Pakistan as inherently interrelated (former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke was appointed to this job on Thursday). The ambassador also argued for a more active role for the UN in war-torn countries such as Afghanistan. With many players active on the ground, he noted, there is a growing need for coordination. “The right representatives from the UN can certainly do that job,” Khalilzad claimed.

Born in Afghanistan, Zalmay Khalilzad was the highest ranking Muslim in the Bush Administration (there are none yet in the cabinet President Obama has assembled.) “I am who I am but I don’t get up every day thinking that I’m a Muslim born in Afghanistan,” the ambassador claimed, denying that he ever felt particular tensions between his professional role as a representative of the U.S. Government and his personal ties to Afghanistan. Nevertheless, he admitted that Afghanistan remains “very close to his heart.” It was no coincidence that Afghanistan was at the heart of the conversation with Steve Clemons.

Beyond issues ravaging his native land, Zalmay Khalilzad also addressed the gravity of the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians, arguing that it is one of the key factors destabilizing the Middle East. According to Khalilzad, a widespread agreement already exists on the fact that the only solution to the conflict is that of two co-existing states. Only Hamas and Iran continue opposing the plan, Khalilzad said, and refuse to recognize the legitimacy of Israel. Nevertheless, the ambassador doubted that Israel could ever achieve anything with an exclusively military approach: “I don’t know if there is any military solution that is feasible. You can’t just get rid of Hamas,” Khalilzad said. Rather, in the long-term Israel might be better served by a strategy of engagement and by trying to turn Hamas into a more willing interlocutor.

A difficult moment for Zalmay Khalilzad came when he was asked about the decision of the U.S. Government to abstain from voting on the UN Security Council resolution of January 9^th, which called for an immediate cease-fire in Gaza. The cease-fire and the resolution itself had been negotiated directly by then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who spent three full days in the Middle East to personally participate in preparatory talks. Secretary Rice also personally attended the session of the UN Security Council in question and, then surprisingly, abstained from voting on her own resolution. “Our abstention was a matter of the timing of the resolution and not of the content,” Ambassador Khalilzad tried unconvincingly to explain at NAF. “Secretary Rice said clearly that we supported the content of the resolution,” he added.

Khalilzad, who was a fervent supporter of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, was also asked by a person in the audience whether he was ready to apologize for a decision that many now consider to have been misguided. The ambassador defended his stance explaining that it had stemmed from a personal assessment of what had gone wrong at the end of the first Gulf War. Then, U.S. troops withdrew from Iraq without toppling Saddam Hussein. This left the Iraqi people dealing simultaneously with a brutal dictator and with a strict regime of international sanctions. Khalilzad believed that something had to be done: “I stand behind what I wrote after the liberation of Kuwait,” declared the ambassador.

“On balance, I’m very satisfied,” Ambassador Khalilzad said in reference to his term at the UN. He admitted, however, to a number of areas where he wishes he had accomplished more but was not able to. Among others, the ambassador listed the crises in Darfur and Zimbabwe and the puzzle that is the regime in Burma. He also admitted to have not completed the kind of reform and streamlining of the UN bureaucracy that he had hoped to achieve while in office.

In the future, Ambassador Khalilzad sees himself doing research at a think tank, writing a book, and possibly participating in a working group that focuses on Afghanistan and its surrounding region.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism – Persian Edition

Bruce A. Williams is a Professor of Media Studies & Sociology at the University of Virginia. In the past, he has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Illinois, and the London School of Economics. His current research interests focus on the role of a changing media environment in shaping citizenship in the United States. He has received funding for this research from the National Science Foundation and the Cultures of Consumption Research Program of the University of London. He has published three books and more than forty scholarly journal articles and book chapters. Professor Williams recently came back from a trip to Israel where he attended an international media studies conference on media coverage of crises and conflicts. In this interview with Valentina Pasquali, Professor Williams offers his assessment of the quality of the coverage provided by U.S. media on the ongoing conflict in Gaza, a coverage that he says he has been following “obsessively.”

Valentina Pasquali (VP): There has been some criticism of the U.S. media coverage of the ongoing Israeli ground invasion of Gaza. What is your assessment? Do you find there to be biases in the way American media have been covering the conflict?

Bruce Williams (BW): As an academic, I don’t think the word bias is a useful one. I believe that anytime you tell a story, whether you are a journalist or anybody else trying to describe world events, you always have a perspective. I don’t believe there is any such thing as a neutral, objective perspective.

Rather, I can point out some of the things that I noticed in the coverage, especially in comparison to what I was watching and reading while in Israel. Please note that I don’t know Hebrew and, as such, I was following things on the English-language versions of the Israeli media, such as the Jerusalem Post, or on Sky News and Fox on the satellite.

I think that there are stark differences in the coverage in the United States and in Israel, at least as far as I’ve been able to see. But I wouldn’t capture them by saying than one is more biased than the other. I think they are just different.

The coverage that I saw in Israel very much emphasized the Israeli perspective, for example, in the very prominent, very individualized coverage dedicated to the soldiers who got killed. In the coverage that I’ve been following in the American media instead, I think the stories reflect the numbers. U.S. coverage talks a lot more about Palestinian deaths and Palestinian casualties, and this is a reflection of the difference between almost over 900 dead on the Palestinian side — by most accounts — as opposed to 13 dead — all of whom but three were soldiers — on the Israeli side. In the American coverage there seems to be more attention for Palestinian deaths because they so far outnumber Israeli deaths.

VP: Do you have an example of this?

BW: I’ll give you one that I was struck by when I was in Israel. The same day the U.N. school was hit by the IDF and 30 people seeking shelter there lost their lives, a rocket from Gaza destroyed a kindergarten in southern Israel. True, there were no casualties on the Israeli side, because the school was closed. But I happen to know that the Israeli Minister of Education was there that day debating whether she should open the schools or not. To me, the idea, on both sides, that schools can be destroyed is an important issue. I would have liked to at least see a brief mention of that in the American coverage. Maybe I missed it, but I did not. I recognize it is difficult for journalists, because the fact of the matter is that 30 Palestinians who thought they were safe and sheltered under U.N. protection were killed, while nobody was killed in the Israeli kindergarten. But it seems to me that one can at least point to that connection.

VP: What do you think of the prohibition to access Gaza imposed by the Israel Government on foreign journalists?

BW: To back up one step, I think the Israeli Government had a very well defined media strategy when it came to this conflict. It was not going to repeat what it saw as the mistakes made in the invasion of Lebanon. There was an attempt to keep reporters out, to tightly cover all of the information and images that were coming out of Gaza. Both in the U.S., and, for what I was able to see, in Israel, there were rather frustrated reporters having to stick by the military and having to take pictures from quite the distance.

Initially, over a short period of time, this led to the ability of the Israeli Government to shape the kind of coverage that they were getting. Overtime, however, such tight control has eroded. As a result, now we are getting some rather horrific images coming out of Gaza, images that are being shown on Al-Jazeera and in general produced by the Palestinians themselves.

My impression is that the media strategy that the Israeli Government developed was rather sophisticated and, for a short period of time, effective. However, I believe that the reality of media coverage of conflicts today is that any strategy that aims to control information has a pretty short lifespan.

My own sense is that the Israeli Government media strategy was designed for a very brief war, or incursion, one in which you get in, you do what you planned on doing as quickly as possible, then you get out and declare victory. But the longer this military campaign goes on, the more it tilts the coverage, and increasingly places the whole idea behind it in a pretty unfavorable light.

In this case, like in many military adventures, things can get out of control very quickly. What you are seeing now, I believe, is what is sometimes referred to as “mission creep.” You go in, you have pretty well defined goals to achieve, and, if you are initially successful, then you create many new goals. For someone who studies media, if we put aside the military and political issues that are raised, it is very clear that the longer this goes on, the more the coverage is going to support the Palestinian perspective.

VP: How do Israeli journalists feel about their own government media strategy? Are they frustrated or do they think they have sufficient access to information?

BW: I think they are also very frustrated. I think that journalists, whether they are Israeli, American or anyone else, want to be there, want to see it for themselves. What is interesting is that, at a time like this when Israeli public opinion is still overwhelmingly in favor of this conflict, Israeli journalists would be unlikely to write very critical things, even if they were given access. However, I think they feel incredibly frustrated that they are not given access.

VP: You mentioned that one important reason why the coverage has been changing and tilting towards a more pro-Palestinian perspective is the fact that images from Gaza have increasingly been broadcasted out by Al-Jazeera and by the Palestinians themselves. Do you think that U.S. media organizations are doing all they can to get access?

BW: What truly strikes me is that the situation in Gaza looks a lot like the situation journalists face in Baghdad. There, as long as you stay inside the Green Zone, you are relatively safe. At the same time, the more you stay inside the Green Zone, the more what you see, what you say, and what you can write is shaped by what the American and Iraqi governments want you to see, say and write.

However, if you leave the Green Zone, the work becomes very dangerous. There already are many dead journalists to prove this.

I would imagine that Gaza is also a pretty dangerous place to be. It is hard to say what more journalists could actually do a situation that appears so dangerous and volatile.

I read the New York Times the closest, the Washington Post coming second. My opinion is that the Times’ coverage has been of a very high-quality, even-handed but realistic. I also think that, like in much of the rest of the coverage, overtime it has become more and more critical of Israel.

VP: The assumed notion that the U.S. media coverage is tilted towards a pro-Israeli perspective seems to have roots in opinion pieces and editorial pages rather than news coverage. Do you agree?

BW: I kind of disagree. However I can see why it could look that way from a Palestinian perspective.

Moving away from the day to day newsgathering that gets done, I think it is important to point out that, unlike many previous actions taken by the Israeli Government, including the invasion of Lebanon, Israel enjoyed this time an unusual amount of international support, right from the get-go.

I believe that is because of Hamas. It is certainly not surprising that the United States would aggressively defend Israel’s right to act and denounce Hamas. The European Union was also very supportive of Israel’s right to intervene. This is a result of the fact that Hamas controls Gaza and the recognition that it was Hamas that ended the cease-fire with Israel.

All this said, I was struck by how even-handed The New York Times was in its own editorial pages. From the very beginning The New York Times recognized Israel’s legitimate right to act but also urged them to get out quickly and to deal seriously with the Palestinian issue.

The paper was very much in line with this idea that Israel had a very short window of time to act. They needed to do what they needed to do very quickly and then they had to put broader attention to a real peace settlement.

But, as I said, I do understand where some of the concerns could come from. To go back to something I said before, to the long-term threat of the rockets that get launched from Gaza: in the end I think that they pose very little real risk to the Israeli citizens. I don’t know how many Israelis have been killed by these rockets, but I’m sure it’s a pretty small number. I don’t want to minimize this. I certainly wouldn’t want to live thinking whether there was someone that would try to mortar Charlottesville, Virginia, every day. It is an intolerable situation. But this amounts to a sort of existential crisis, a crisis of how people feel as they try to live an ordinary life.

Living in the Gaza Strip for the same kind of ordinary Palestinian citizens, instead, is a nightmare. It’s not an existential question; it’s a question of starvation, of not having a job, and not having any sense of what a future could look like. From the perspective of ordinary Palestinians, the situation just seems to keep getting worse and worse. We are further away from having a Palestinian Government that can speak for all Palestinians in some kind of a peace settlement. We are further away from this than we were five years ago, further away that we were even three weeks ago. That is a horrible situation.

VP: Do you think that this even-handedness is true only for the New York Times? Or does it apply in general to the U.S. media?

BW: To be honest I have not seen the Wall Street Journal editorial page, but I think the Washington Post has been pretty even-handed. With the exception of maybe Fox News, I think there is recognition that Israel has a right to defend itself, but, at the same time, that it has an obligation to do this very quickly and that it must deal soon with some kind of serious attempt to negotiate a peace settlement with the Palestinians.

In any case, I think that, by far, the best and most interesting coverage I heard is on National Public Radio. For example, NPR recently interviewed Mustafa Barghouti, who is someone that I have actually met and I have huge respect for. He is not politically affiliated either with Hamas or Fatah. In this respect, he speaks for a Palestinian view that I agree with. One of the things he said in his interview with NPR is that Israel and the United States have tried to turn Hamas into the bad guys and Abbas into the good guy. At the same time, it’s not like they have done anything that would lead Abbas to succeed.

In another story that I heard on NPR just this morning, Palestinians in the occupied territories were being interviewed and said what Barghouti has been saying, that there are many more military checkpoints now that they were a year ago. And the truth is that, no matter what Ehud Olmert has said, he has not closed down not even the settlements his own government declared illegal. From this perspective, there is a feeling of real hopelessness now.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University in New York City. His research and teaching encompass the history of the modern Middle East with an emphasis on the emergence of national identity and the involvement of external powers in the region. He is particularly interested in the role of the press in the formation of new publics and new senses of community. An American of Palestinian descent, Professor Khalidi has often been an outspoken voice in the debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In this phone interview with Valentina Pasquali he expresses his criticism for the coverage of the ongoing Israel invasion of Gaza offered by the U.S. media, which he calls “one-sided” and “unbalanced.”

Valentina Pasquali: What is your opinion of the coverage of the ongoing Israeli invasion of Gaza provided by the U.S. media?

Rashid Khalidi: I find the coverage absolutely appalling, extremely one-sided and not meeting the lowest of journalistic standards. It consists of a mere repetition of Israeli talking points, without any attempt to determine whether they are accurate or inaccurate. There is also a lack of proper coverage of the Gaza side, despite the fact that the majority of the casualties are in Gaza.

The U.S. media has quietly submitted to the Israeli-mandated blockade of Gaza that has kept journalists out for well over a month before this invasion began. The American media has been systematically manipulated with the talking points that are being distributed by the Israeli Foreign Ministry, which have become the backbone of the American coverage. This is actually one of the best examples of media manipulation I have ever seen. And it is all part of the Israeli planning for the offensive.

What is interesting is that the Israeli media has covered extensively this effort to ensure an Israeli spin to this operation. But nobody talks about it here in the U.S.

For example, in keeping with the recommendations of the Winograd Commission — this looked into the Israeli failure in Lebanon in 2006 and determined that Israel had failed to control the message — the Israeli Government set up the National Information Directorate, under the control of the Foreign Ministry, six months ago. This has been planning for the management of the invasion’s PR for months.

We are now seeing it put in practice. I have received, through my own sources, some of the daily briefings with bullet points sent out to the media by the Foreign Ministry and the game played by Israel is very clear. This is amply covered in the Israeli media, even in English, and yet the U.S. media chooses to look at things in the way the Israelis want them to. This interview is the first to date where anybody even asks me about this issue.

VP: Do you find any specific U.S. outlet being more of a victim of such manipulation or is this a general trend?

RK: It is a general trend. Television is particularly vulnerable, but I find it across the board, in commentary on television, in commentary on the newspapers and in the general daily news coverage. The bottom line is that you cannot cover a conflict if your journalists are not allowed to be on the ground. U.S. media are submitting to this ridiculous blockade since November and they are covering exactly what Israel wants them to cover. As a result there is an inherent built-in bias. You don’t have journalists on the frontline covering the deaths of over six hundred people. And the four or five Israelis that have been killed have been covered by hundreds of journalists. There are no western journalists, except one working for Al-Jazeera, in the whole of the Gaza Strip.

VP: Do you see any qualitative difference between opinion pieces and straight-out reporting?

RK: Some of the reporting has been better than average. I have actually not seen much in the way of opinion pieces on the American media that reflect anything but an Israeli point of view. There might have been, but I haven’t noticed. Instead, some of the reporting from stringers inside Gaza, for example in the New York Times, has been adequate.

VP: What do you think of Israeli media coverage of the invasion, of the English-language media especially?

RK: The media coverage is much better in Israel, especially when it comes to the print press. There is a greater variety of commentary in the Israeli media. I have read at least eight-twelve opinion pieces which are far more hard-hitting than anything I’ve seen in the American media. I’m currently writing an op-ed for the New York Times and, if they publish it, I think it will be the first piece in the U.S. media.

VP: What do you think is the effect of this kind of coverage on the American public and, as a result, on the political debate in the U.S.?

RK: It reinforces the universal pro-Israel bias of the American political class. We are at a point where you have to watch the Daily Show to get a sense of how unbalanced the American coverage is. On Monday they had a very amusing piece showing how one-sided the American coverage, on both the Republican and Democratic side, has been on this issue.

VP: Given the restrictions that the Israeli Government is trying to impose on foreign media, what would you say American media organizations should do that they are not doing?

RK: They should not cover any story unless they are allowed to go in. Any self-respecting journalist should demand that their editors and publishers insist on access to both sides, which is been denied only by Israel, as a condition for covering the side that dominates the battlefield, which is the Israelis.

VP: Would you want to add any other thought?

RK: I would want to add that images tent to trump words. And the images that Israel produces and that might engender sympathy are few and far between, whereas the images that come out of Gaza in spite of this systematic, and quite cynical, censorship have been heart rending and have balanced out to some degree the spin that has dominated the written media or the television. You can see in the front page of the New York Times the day it published the image of the dying Palestinian child. Even in the very limited coverage of the carnage in Gaza that is allowed in the American media, the images outweigh the words. Israel is suffering the same kind of problem it had in 2006, in 1982 during the invasion of Lebanon, and during the first couple of years of the intifada in 1987-1988, when the images outweighed all the lies and the spin and the manipulations. This might happen now again, it depends on how long this operation continues.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism

Washington DC – The United States’ misread of Iran and its influence in the Middle East and the sometimes misplaced efforts to counter that nation’s regional ambitions were the topic of a day long conference organized by the Middle East Institute in Washington DC.

Recent offers of multi-million arms sales to Saudi Arabia and Israel by US President George Bush signal that Washington continuously worries about a rising Iran and strives to contain it. However, as Professor Gary Sick of Columbia University argued, the current administration seems to overlook the reality that other policies it pursued across the Muslim world in recent years might have actually contributed to conferring increasing centrality to Iran in the Middle East. “Iran is emerging as the leading regional power in the Gulf. The reason for that is really quite simple – it is us,” Professor Sick said.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11^th 2001, the US overthrew the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Iran’s worst enemy to the east. Then it decided to topple Saddam Hussein’s government, Teheran’s worst enemy to the west. Finally, “we were kind enough to oversee the establishment of a Shi’a government in Baghdad for the first time in history,” Sick pointed out. “At the end of that game Iran was a lot stronger than they had been before,” he said, noting that the US doesn’t seem to be aware of the consequences that its own policies have in the Middle East. A dangerous perception is emerging among the leadership across Arab states; “I think most of the Arabs actually suspect that we are in fact promoting Iran to a position of primary,” Professor Sick said.

Fundamentally, countries in the Gulf and in the Levant demand a higher consideration for their role in the region and the acknowledgment that they have national interests that are separate and independent of both the US and Iran.

The View from the Gulf

On the on hand, the Middle East is still thwarted by the struggle between the two Muslim branches of the Shi’ites and the Sunnis and the tensions between them remain at the root of the animosity generally felt toward Iran. Saudi Arabia is particularly worried that Teheran is challenging the status-quo in the Muslim world to emerge as the new predominant power. Because of the widespread fear that Washington will strike a deal with Teheran, the US approach toward the Middle East is often ill-received by leaders in the Gulf States; “They are not going to forget the Shah era when his country was the police of the area on their account,” said at the Middle East Institute Wahid Hashim, an Associate Professor of Political Science at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah.

On the other hand, the enmity of the Arab countries toward Iran is only truly hard-felt at the government level while people across the region seem to be eager to engage in a closer relationship, both economically and culturally. “There is a fever in the area, anti-America, anti-Israel, and Iran is the only knight who will stand up to America. That is why many people support the Iranians,” Professor Hashim explained.

The United Arab Emirates (UAE) are preoccupied with the growing influence Iran is projecting in the region for the effect it could have on its own Iranian community – 400,000 according to the most recent estimates – and the country’s domestic stability. These concerns, mixed with the fear that the US might be looking for the opportunity to cut its losses in Iraq leaving the region to deal with an emergent Shi’a Islam, “has led the Gulf States to feel that it is better to engage Iran than to leave it to its devices,” said Ibtisam Al-Kitbi, Assistant Professor of Political Science at UAE University.

In fact there are mounting signs of a push for engagement; Ahmadinejad attended a GCC summit in Qatar and later traveled to Saudi Arabia at the invitation of the Saudi King to observe the annual hajj ritual. There have been high-level exchanges between the Iranian and Kuwaiti foreign ministries. Egypt started discussing restoring diplomatic relations with Teheran and Ali Larijani of the Supreme National Security Council recently visited Cairo. Egyptian President Mubarak met with Haddad-Adel, Chairman of the Iranian Parliament, for the highest-level contact between the two countries since 1980. In the meantime, the UAE and Iran have begun talks on a trade agreement.

The View from the Levant

A similar guarded approach marks the foreign policy of countries in the Levant, although at least two of them – Lebanon and Syria – have a traditionally closer engagement with Iran. Even these countries, however, might be ready to swing both ways depending on where they feel their demands may be more promptly met.

The alliance between Damascus and Teheran for example, the longest standing in the Middle East, is not free of problems. Their relationship is not, as many might think, centered on economics, or even ideology. Syria is a secular regime that views itself as the champion of Arab nationalism while Iran is a devoted theocracy. “Syria and Iran are truly the odd couple,” said Murhaf Jouejati, Adjunct Professor at the National Defense University in Washington DC. “Their alliance is interests-driven. It is truly a marriage of convenience. For Iran, Syria gives it the reach into the Arab-Israeli conflict. For Syria, Iran is the big brother on the block – a block that is a very threatening environment to the Syrians,” Professor Jouejati added. In his opinion, the alliance could end if Syria were to find the security guarantees it demands somewhere else; “Syria is trying to signal the United States that it could and would do away with its alliance with Iran if it were able to resume talks with Israel, if it were able to have ironclad guarantees that it is going to recover the Golan Heights,” Murhaf Jouejati concluded.

Iran’s interests in Lebanon are a function of Teheran’s desire to end its regional isolation. “These goals are achieved by supporting an organization struggling to recoup Arab land occupied by Israel – Hezbollah,” explained Judith P. Harik, the President of Matn University in Beirut and leading expert on Hezbollah. Iran’s strategy in Lebanon follows a dual path; Teheran provides financial and economic support to the Shi’ite community and simultaneously backs Hezbollah’s resistance against Israel. The latter has taken the form, over the past 25 years, of training, equipment and financial resources. As far as Teheran’s support to the Shi’ite community, Professor Harik, who maintains close sources in Iran and within the Hezbollah movement, reported what she was told by Iranian engineer Hossam Khoshnevis, who “would take up residence in Lebanon so as to quickly implement and manage reconstruction and rehabilitation of a wide range of institutions and infrastructure,” she said. Khoshnevis’ projects include working on 330 damaged or destroyed schools serving an estimated 700,000 students, repairing 20 hospitals and infirmaries and rehabilitating nearly 550 miles of roads.

Despite the support offered by Teheran, Professor Harik is convinced that Hezbollah works as an independent organization and that Teheran’s leaders may not have as much leverage over them as previously thought. “It appears that Iran’s Lebanese ally may thus have to be dealt with as a partner of Iran rather than its client and as such Hezbollah should be considered and addressed directly as Lebanese actors with a Lebanese agenda rather than a simple agent of Iran,” Harik explained.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the following six years of war have contributed, in the eyes of neighboring countries, to further deteriorate these already tense dynamics. Teheran has been taking advantage of the power-vacuum that the war created in Iraq. “It increased its support to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq and for the military wing of that organization (Badr). It also supported all the new political elites in Iraq and established strong contacts with them while Arab states have remained outside the immediate political intervention inside Iraq,” said Fares Braizat, the Director and Senior Researcher of University of Jordan’s Centre for Strategic Studies. For Jordan, Braizat explained, the invasion of Iraq has been a major security and humanitarian problem. “Terrorists crossed the border from Iraq and three hotels in Amman were bombed,” he explained and added; “We have around 700,000 Iraqi refugees in Jordan today. That puts a lot of pressure on basic infrastructure in Jordan, in terms of health, education, water and all that.”

The View from Inside Iran

Not only is the region as a whole ridden with suspicion and antagonism, but Iran itself is shaped by complex domestic dynamics. “I have always believed that if we could somehow get Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, if we could tie him up to a chair sitting right there and pump him full of sodium pentothal and get him to speak for 12 hours about the Iranian regime, he could not tell us exactly what was going on,” said eloquently Ken Pollack – the Director of Research at Saban Center for Middle East Policy of the Brookings Institutions - in his remarks at the Middle East Institute.

Dwelling on the intentions of the Iranian leadership can be a tricky game, at the center of which is the country’s complicated structure of power. “The question of who speaks for Iran and what are the intentions of Iran come to the point of who really runs the country,” said Hooshang Amirahmadi, Professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey and founder and President of the American Iranian Council. Compared to other Middle Eastern countries where the power rests within a limited group of oligarchs, such as Saudi Arabia, Iran has a multilayered structure. Amirahmadi attributes the intricacies typical of Iranian politics to the constitution written in 1979 with the purpose of reconciling the tensions between religion and democracy that are at the foundation of the Islamic Republic. It is the constitution that gave birth to the two branches of government, the elected and the unelected ones, and their several bodies. “The struggle within the constitution is always how to maintain the dominance of Islam in a society where the population is also given some voice,” Amirahmadi said, “and the solution was that it created a series of parallel – and not just parallel but multiple – centers of power to deal with that issue.”

The Iranian government is not only multifaceted but is also undergoing important transformations. President Ahmadinejad himself has started a trend toward progressive decentralization, which is slowly empowering the provincial governors against the government ministers. Amirahmadi believes that the power structure in Iran is experiencing a process of securitization and militarization, causing the rise of the military establishment in the form of the National Security Council, the Army, the IRGC, the Qods Forces, the Basiji forces and the police forces. “Of course this is the byproduct of the United States’ counterproductive policies toward Iran because the environment around which Iran now lives is a military/security environment,” the President of the American Iranian Council told the audience at the Middle East Institute.

These trends are destined to accelerate exponentially while Iran also experiences a generational change in its leadership, a culminating moment being the general elections of 2009. The current elite is an aging circle of people who has ran the country continuously for the past 29 years and is now facing two new constituencies trying to get their hands on power, explained John Limbert, a former Ambassador and hostage of the Iranian government during the Iran hostage crisis that lasted from 1979 to 1981. On one side “there are the veterans of the Iran-Iraq War and of the fierce political battles of the 1980s,” Limbert said. On the other there are “what the Iranians call gheyr-e-khodi, the outsiders,” among which for example are the huge numbers of newly educated Iranian women. These groups are challenging the traditional power centers and, in the opinion of Limbert, are destined to reshape the political landscape of the country.

In focusing solely on the institution of the Presidency and in viewing Iran as a political monolith united behind Ahmadinejad, the US is missing out on the country’s several and conflicting centers of power and on the fundamental evolutions that are taking place within the political system. Where exactly Iran is headed is very hard to tell. Ambassador John Limbert said; “I look at Iran today and to me the 29-year-old revolution is like a train. It has gone into a tunnel and it is still there. It has not come out yet. Maybe it has not come out because the engineers and the passengers are still arguing about its ultimate destination.” It easier instead to predict that, unless the US stops assuming that Iran will simply stay as it is and unless it begins to gain a better understanding of the many conflicting dynamics that traverse the region, counterproductive policies will keep flowing from Washington to the Middle East.

Originally reported and written for Washington Prism