Or my Alt-Title:  What We Talk About When We Talk About Supporting Egyptian Democracy. 

This post is simply to point my blog readers over to my weekly Thursday column, which is entitled "The Egyptian Treadmill: Why Washington Isn't Panicking About Egypt's Latest Crisis."  It looks at how the Obama administration views the ongoing crisis in Egypt and the various proposals for what it should be doing about it.  More discussion later but for now, I just hope you go read it! 

A few minutes ago I asked Twitter: should the Middle East Channel cover the events in Mali?  The first wave of responses was sharply negative: "Muslim =/= Middle East. Struggling to believe that this is a real question" (@lindsayiversen); "Sure, it's right next to Afriganistan" (@jimmysky); "Don't think I've ever seen a definition of "Middle East" that includes Mali"(@drjoyner) ; and a coveted "#headdesk" from Africa expert Laura Seay (@texasinafrica).  But not everyone agreed: Andrew Exum asked whether the Sahara should be seen as a natural boundary or as a highway;  Issander el-Amrani mused that "it is an issue on the periphery of the ME that can affect it, so yes."

When I asked the question, it wasn't because I misread my maps (see above, where Mali isn't part of the Middle East) or because I hoped to steal an exciting new conflict from my Africanist colleagues.  Nor was it because I think that "the Middle East" should be expanded to include anyplace where jihadist movements pop up, or where Western countries intervene militarily (hence FP's AfPak Channel, which is different from the Middle East Channel).  It was mainly because I've been receiving some excellent article submissions focused on the Mali policies of Arab states -- mostly, but not exclusively,  Algeria.  I'm still undecided as to whether that merits inclusion on the Channel -- right now, I'm leaning towards "Algerian foreign policy, yes; French realization that they are trapped in a quagmire they didn't think through, no."

But the Mali discussion then led to an ancillary, arguably more interesting one:  should Algeria be counted in the Middle East?  On what grounds?  Now, I think there's a very strong case for inclusion of North Africa in our conception of the Middle East.  If nothing else, the widespread regional impact of the Tunisian revolution should have settled that question.  I believe that Algeria's aborted democratic experiment of 1988-91, where the army's decision to step in to prevent Islamists from winning Parliamentary elections helped spark an exceptionally gruesome five year civil war, remains one of the least appreciated and most central events in the modern evolution of Islamist politics.  (See my POMEPS Conversation with Oxford University North Africa expert Michael Willis for more discussion of this). And of course, Morocco was invited to join the Gulf Cooperation Council.... just kidding. 

But just for fun, could there be a case for excluding North Africa from "the Middle East"?  It wouldn't be unprecedented. I recall some serious intellectual debates in the 1980s about Maghrebi exceptionalism.  North Africa had an entirely different experience of colonialism than did the states of the Levant or the Gulf (people tend to forget that Algeria was actually part of France for more than 100 years).  The EU's "Euro-Mediterranian" project and Barcelona process launched in 1995 offered an alternative institutional framework for these states which some thought might spark the evolution of a distinct Mediterranean identity (that didn't really pan out though).  Its economies, particularly its vast labor migration and remittance economies, connecting North African states to Europe far more than with the rest of the Arab world. 

What about realist definitions based on security complexes?  East of Egypt, the Maghreb doesn't really share the same security environment as the Levant or the Gulf, with little at stake in the great regional conflicts surrounding Israel, Iran, Iraq or Syria.  Political definitions? Tunisia may have hosted the PLO in exile, but it would be a stretch to argue that any North African country has really been central to the great political issues of the Middle East.  Sure, the Maghreb states are members of the Arab League, but so is Djibouti (and the exclusion of non-Arab Israel, Iran or Turkey rarely makes people define them out of the "Middle East").  And then there's the general incomprehensibility (to non-Maghrebis) of the local dialect despite the formal "Arabic is the mother tongue" thing (not to mention the Berbers, plus the political implications of the large Francophone communities). 

The Middle East Channel is going to keep covering all the countries of North Africa, no worries.  To me, the similar political institutions and dynamics of authoritarianism and opposition, the common language and membership in regional organizations, and the manifest belief on all sides that it is part of the Middle East are enough.   But it's an interesting thought experiment -- one which applies not only to Algeria or Mali but to other potential candidates:  South Sudan, after the secession?  Afghanistan?  Cyprus?   How does this fit with those intense political battles to refuse the "normalization" of Israel, and by implication its full membership within the "Middle East"?  Or with Gulf Arab campaigns to define Iran as Shi'a rather than as an authentic part of a "Muslim" (i.e. Sunni) Middle East? 

So no, Mali isn't part of the Middle East.  But thinking about it can be fun for the whole family!  And the discussion did produce one broad consensus which I whole-heartedly endorse:  FP should find somebody to run an Africa Channel.  

I returned earlier this week from a week in Saudi Arabia. I got to meet with a wide range of Saudi academics, journalists, activists, human rights lawyers, and former government officials. I had a long conversation with the leading reformist Mohammad Fahad al-Qahtani, who faces a prison sentence over his efforts to form a human rights NGO and his hard-hitting tweets. I traveled out to the Eastern Province and met with a number of leaders from Qatif. And, as recounted in yesterday's FP column, I got politely chewed out by Prince Turki al-Faisal and a legion of Saudis for my views on Bahrain.

My column seeks to focus attention on the challenge posed by America's alliance with Saudi Arabia to any policy based on promoting reform or meaningful change in the region. Washington and Riyadh simply see the region's politics very differently, have different priorities, and have often been working at cross-purposes -- especially with regard to the Arab uprisings, not only in Bahrain and the GCC but across Syria, Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, North Africa, and beyond. And Riyadh's own domestic institutions and practices are, as will surprise nobody and as fully described in the State Department's annual human rights reports, manifestly incompatible with the vision of universal freedoms and rights which President Obama has frequently articulated.

At the same time, it's easier to diagnose the problem than to prescribe a solution. Washington cannot easily think past its reliance on Saudi Arabia for its current approach toward Iran, the flow of oil, and the broader regional status quo, and the transition costs of moving toward something else can't be wished away. My column urges focusing more on protecting and supporting the emergent Saudi public sphere which is already giving voice to a wide range of political and social challenges. I believe that the rapid emergence of a radically new kind of Saudi public sphere over the last two years represents a more fundamental challenge than is generally believed -- not that it is going to necessarily lead to revolution, but that it deeply disrupts the existing political institutions and norms. Pushing publicly and privately for an end to the prosecutions over political speech of figures such as Qahtani and Turki al-Hamad, as well as the legions of less well-known young Saudis detained over their Facebook and Twitter postings, would be a start. There's more, including getting serious about the repression in the Eastern Province and the discrimination against Shi'a and women.

But is this enough? Two of the keenest American observers of Saudi Arabia are skeptical.

Greg Gause, author of the December 2011 Council on Foreign Relations task force report "Saudi Arabia in the New Middle East" and a vocal skeptic about the idea that the kingdom faces significant instability anytime soon, comments:

I think you are trying to have it both ways here. "Liberal vision" AND the existing security structure of American regional policy. I don't think that you can have both. The middle ground of talking about pushing for reform and the like in Saudi Arabia without really doing anything about it opens us up to legitimate charges of hypocrisy.

And Toby Jones, quoted in my column as the leading academic pushing for a wholesale rethinking of the American posture in the Gulf, responds to my sense that critique has to be framed within the terms of what Washington might realistically consider:

I think you're right, but we don't have to let DC's inertia and inability to see clearly as a pretext to soft-peddle on the best options in the Gulf. I'm not suggesting you're doing that, but a lot of people do. I'd like to see very clear justifications for why the status quo policy or at least continued emphasis on security, rather than a more robust kind of political engagement, is necessary. Lots of assumptions are made about Iran, about oil, etc., and almost none of them stand up to really close scrutiny.

I think Gause is somewhat too sanguine about the stability of Saudi Arabia and perhaps insufficiently impressed by the depth of the challenge posed by the new information environment and youth frustration. And I remain unsure of precisely what alternative American posture Jones would like to see in the Gulf and how it might get there without major disruptions along the way.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, the experienced journalist Ellen Knickmeyer suggests that the crucial question is really the sustainability of the patronage state -- which I think is right, and which along with the question of expatriate workers and Saudization of the workforce consumes the attention of most of the Saudi businessmen and economists I met. That's a whole other set of issues which need to be addressed, and I've seen some pretty alarming -- albeit contested -- numbers put forward on it. Maybe I can get the scholar who produced those numbers to publish them on the Middle East Channel … (hint, hint, scholar who produced those numbers?).

At any rate, Saudi Arabia does lie at the heart of the challenge I posed in my first FP column: What does the Obama administration want the Middle East to look like when it leaves office in four years, and how will its policies help to create such a region? I hope that this week's column helps to spark more debate and ideas.

My column last week arguing that American intervention would probably not have helped Syria has generated a lot of discussion, both positive and negative. Some of the discussion has been productive and useful, even if some has been of the predictably low caliber which anyone who has has been immersed in the Syria debate over the last two years would regrettably expect. Robin Yassin-Kassab published a particularly thoughtful rebuttal yesterday "Fund Syria's Moderates" on FP, which offers a good opportunity to respond to some of the major objections which have been circulating.

Read on

I'm in Riyadh for the week (where I've been hearing a lot of support for arming the Syrian opposition and an intensely sectarian Sunni-Shi'ia framing of the conflict -- but more on all that next week). But the FP column I filed before I left on intervention in Syria came out yesterday and I wanted to just quickly make a few comments on it and some of the responses I've received here. 

The column looks back at the failure to achieve a negotiated political solution to the crisis, and some of the flawed assumptions (including my own) which might have contributed to that failure. It is not a happy column -- how could it be amidst Syria's devastation? The failure of Annan's diplomacy does not mean that it should not have been tried, though, for reasons I outline in the column.  But some of the people discussing the column slightly missed the point when they suggested that I'm still supporting the Annan/Brahimi approach.   Actually, what I tried to argue was that the conditions which made it worth attempting last year have mostly disappeared.   It's too late to avoid the militarization of the conflict  or to prevent the sidelining of non-armed groups.  There's no diplomatic process or international consensus to save.  It's hard to imagine the "soft landing" for which that political track so desperately -- and correctly --  strove.  There's no going back.

The last year should be a lesson to those who called for arming the rebels, too. The shift to armed insurgency in the face of Assad's brutality and refusal of genuine political change has produced catastrophic results.  The poorly coordinated funneling of weapons and money to armed groups by various external players has produced greater bloodshed, the eclipsing of non-violent protest leaders, fragmentation into competing emergent warlords, the creation of an attractive open field for jihadist groups to exploit, the retreat of the uncertain middle ground into hardened camps, and the greater likelihood of post-Assad chaos. The problem is not that the U.S. or other outside powers didn't provide enough weapons, it is intrinsic to the nature and logic of such an armed insurgency.  

Read on

Today is the second anniversary of the flight of former Tunisian President Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali. But the new Tunisian republic's second birthday is not an especially happy one. A year ago, Tunisia was widely seen as the one Arab transitional country getting things right.  But today, there's much less optimism.  The economy continues to struggle, the constitution and elections remain unresolved, Islamist-secular polarization has intensified, and many complain about the over-reach of the ruling Ennahda party. Despair over Tunisia's fate has become as fashionable now as optimism was last year.   And as for Egypt... well, Egypt.  

How surprised should we really be with these travails, though? As I tried to persuade Nervana Mahmoud over Twitter this weekend, looking more broadly at other non-Arab cases might help.  Comparison only gets you part of the way, of course -- no, theory doesn't let you get away with not knowing your cases inside and out!  But at the least, a longer and wider comparative lens can help to show which parts of a country's political struggles are unique, demanding explanation in purely local terms, and which are common across many similar cases and therefore don't. 

Studying politics long enough usually somewhat lowers expectations about the virtues of democratic politics.  Democracy is usually ugly, messy, frustrating, and alienating -- even fully consolidated ones.  Politicians don't often set aside their self-interest for the greater good. Old elites generally don't just give up and walk away.  Opposition forces struggle for unity.  The media rarely avoids profitable sensationalism in the interest of rational public discourse. Intense competition with high stakes and uncertain results tends to drive mistrust, competition and fear.  Elections don't usually bring out the best in the political class.  Constitutional drafters disappoint. None of that means that democracy isn't worth pursuing -- quite the contrary! -- but a dose of realism can help innoculate against stampedes towards despair. 

And so yes, Egypt and Tunisia do look pretty bleak two years into their revolutions...  but that's pretty much what the comparative cases would predict.  Transitions from authoritarian rule are hard! Skepticism bordering on despair for democracy, polarization, fragmented oppositions, economic struggles, controverisal constitutions as democratic revolutions enter their second year.... well, let's just put it this way. There's a reason that "the terrible twos" are sort of a cliche. 

Read on

In case you missed it, my debut FP column came out yesterday calling for the "right-sizing" of America's Middle East strategy.  Basically, it argues that President Obama has done some really good things over the last four years, like getting out of Iraq, and has done a good job at avoiding the worst outcomes --  yes, even in Syria, where we could easily have just as terrible a civil war but with significant American military involvement. But as he gears up for his second term, this is the time for the new Obama team to take a step back and think about its longer-term goals for the Middle East.  He has his four more years: what does he want to do with them in the Middle East?  How are his policies helping to achieve those goals?

Basically, I argue that Obama does have a Middle East strategy shaped by an accurate assessment of the nature of the Arab uprisings and laid out very well in his mostly-forgotten May 2011 speech.  But that vision is too easily forgotten in the daily grind of crisis management and the inevitable compromises of tough policy choices, and needs to be adapted to the dramatic changes in the year and a half since his last major Middle East policy address.   The column, partly based on a longer article which I wrote with Colin Kahl which will be published in a few months, tries to lay out the logic of "right-sizing" --- not "disengagement" and not "retrenchment", but systematically changing the expectations and the reality of America's military and political role in regional affairs while pushing to build a new regional architecture based upon more democratic and independent allies in key countries like Egypt and Libya as the foundations.  

I hope you'll read the whole column over on the main FP page.  I'll try to respond to comments and questions when possible over here.   My next column is going to focus on one of the main strategic challenges, and arguably failures, of the first term.. but you'll just have to wait to see which one! 

The Middle East Channel Editor's Blog

On December 26, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi signed off on a new constitution. It was not a cheerful occasion for many politically active Egyptians, following one of the most intensely, dangerously polarized months in recent Egyptian history. The bitterly controversial two-round referendum approving the constitution revealed the depth of the political and social chasm which had been torn through the political class. I offered my own thoughts on the meaning of these events late last month in my "Requiem for Calvinball," but that was only one part of the wide range of coverage on the Middle East Channel of coverage of the crisis. So I'm pleased to announce here the release of POMEPS Briefing #17: The Battle for Egypt's Constitution, collecting our articles on the constitution and the political landscape left in the wake of this explosive crisis.

Read on