Majalla 1569 - English

Net Investments

Are the eye-watering valuations of social media websites justiďŹ ed?

Inside the Iron Lady A detailed review of the new Margaret Thatcher biopic

Issue 1569 • January 2012

Established in London 1980

Holding

Hormuz Hostage

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9 770261 087126 The Majalla

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Credits

Established in 1987 by Prince Ahmad Bin Salman Bin Abdel Aziz Al-Majalla Established in 1980 by Hisham and Ali Hafez Chief Executive Officer Dr Azzam Al-Dakhil Editor-in-Chief Adel Al-Toraifi Editorial Secretary Jan Singfield Managing Editor Azeddine Senegri Senior Editor Maryam Ishani Editors Michael Whiting Amy Assad Designer Matt Dettmar Submissions To submit articles or opinion, please email: enquiries@majalla.com Subscriptions To subscribe to the mobile edition please download from the iTunes App Store Also available at www.issuu.com/majalla Disclaimer The views expressed in this magazine are those of the authors alone and do not necessarily reflect the opinion or views of The Majalla and its editorial team.

Al Majalla © 2011 HH Saudi Research and Marketing (UK) Limited.

All rights reserved. Neither this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior permission of HH Saudi Research and Marketing (UK) Limited.

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Editorial

Editorial The Majalla

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he first month of 2012 has witnessed heightened controversy surrounding Iran, the continuation of a grave situation in Syria and a period of uncertainty for traditionally influential geo-political actors in the Middle East. The Majalla has sought to remove ambiguity in this fluctuating arena, as we cut to the heart of all these topics in an incisive issue.

Our cover story this month deals with the extraordinary threat delivered by Iran to shut down access to the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz. Bryan Gibson analyses the historical precedent for such antagonistic rhetoric and argues that the current war of words between Iran and the West is a calculated bluff.

Indeed, such dangerous political brinkmanship can only backfire on an Iran that is increasingly economically vulnerable.

Highly regarded political scientist and specialist on Syria, Steven Heydemann, offers a unique perspective on the continuing Syrian crisis. Despite (or perhaps because of) a bloody and violent government crackdown that has lasted for more than 10 months, there appears to be no end in sight to the turmoil surrounding Bashar Al-Assad’s regime.

Heydemann casts his expert eye over the disparate opposition movements within Syria and considers whether an alternative government could be formed from an apparently disunited bunch.

It is easy to forget amidst the whirlwind of major events in the region that only very recently US military project in Iraq drew to an official close. Dr. William Quandt, former policy advisor to the US government, spoke with The Majalla about the American withdrawal from Iraq and how the astonishing events of the past year have affected US policy towards the Middle East as a whole.

The power of the social network has been hotly debated recently—not least in these very pages—but Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal’s purchase of a $300 million stake in Twitter aroused new interest. Desné Masie examines the economic realities behind the abstractions of online communities and asks how justified the astronomic valuations really are.

All these articles—and more—are available at www.majalla. com/eng. We hope you will visit us online and connect with us on Facebook and Twitter.

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Contributors Desné Masie Desné Masie's background is in marketing, journalism, and financial services. Capital markets and their regulation, media theory, and the sociology of economics are the subject of her PhD research at the University of Edinburgh Business School.

Steven Heydemann Steven Heydemann, PhD, is a political scientist who specializes in the comparative politics and the political economy of the Middle East, with a particular focus on Syria. His interests include authoritarian governance, economic development, social policy, political and economic reform, and civil society. He currently serves as Senior Adviser for Middle East Initiatives at the United States Institute for Peace.

Paula Mejia Paula Mejia is a contributing writer for The Majalla based in Tunisia.

As a freelance journalist and consultant for the African Development Bank, her work has focused on economic and social challenges in Africa, with a special focus on Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. She is a graduate of the London School of Economics, L'Institut D'Etudes Politiques de Paris and the University of Chicago.

Nicholas Blincoe Nicholas Blincoe is an author, critic and screenwriter living between London and the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. He was a founding member of the New Puritans literary movement and writes regularly for The Guardian and The Telegraph.

Bryan R. Gibson Bryan R. Gibson is a PhD candidate in International History at the London School of Economics and author of Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence and the Iran Iraq War.

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Contents

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Cover Story Holding Hormuz Hostage: Could Iran's threat to close the Strait of Hormuz be a mere bluff?

A Credible Alternative: Is the Syrian 12 Politics Opposition ready to govern?

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Choice Europe: A Season of the Apparatchiki 48 Editor’s The Face of the New Enemy

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Yemen’s Turn: With presidential elections due in February, what lies ahead for Yemen?

Arts Inside the Iron Lady: A review of the 52 The new Margaret Thatcher biopic

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Life Through a Kaleidoscope: Iran’s Queen of Arts

Human Condition Keeping the Faith: Canon Andrew White discusses his unique role as leader of a Baghdad parish ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Reading Mahfouz in Cairo: The Future of Education in North Africa

Candid Conversations Quantifying the Middle East: 36

Dr William Quandt reflects on the changing dynamics of a new Middle East

The Dissident President: President 42 ofProfile Tunisia, Moncef Marzouki

Critics The Struggle for Power in Syria: 60 The Politics and Society under Asad and

the Baath Party ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––– Securing the Arab Revolutions: Opportunities and Dangers

Final Word Iran: It’s the economy not the 62 The nuclear program

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Net Investments

Are the eye-watering valuations of social media websites justified? Probably

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DesnĂŠ Masie examines the buzzing enthusiasm amongst investors in social media stocks

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Politics

A Credible Alternative Is the Syrian opposition ready to govern?

After 10 months, widespread popular protests in Syria have not been stopped by a reactionary and violent government crackdown. All attempts to end a crisis that has caused thousands of civilian deaths have met with failure. After the Arab League’s most recent disappointment there are fresh calls for the UN to intervene, but should President Assad be forced from office? Is there a credible alternative?

Steven Heydemann

Photo © Getty Images

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cross Syria, there are growing indications that the regime of President Bashar Al-Assad is fraying. A ten-month campaign to crush the Syrian uprising has failed. The economy is reeling from the effects of sanctions. The Arab League has called for the removal of President Assad, and is pushing the UN Security Council to endorse its transition plan. Growing numbers of soldiers are defecting to the Free Syrian Army, intensifying regime concerns about the reliability of its armed forces. Zabadani, some 50 kilometers northwest of Damascus, has been ‘liberated,’ at least temporarily, and security forces are reluctant to enter many other areas during the day. Across the country, it seems, the regime’s control over territory is steadily eroding. Until recently, Damascus was largely spared from the security crackdown experienced by the rest of the country. No longer. Residents of the capital are now subject to a growing web of security checkpoints, and suburbs like Douma and Saqba have become arenas for guerilla warfare.

The fall of the Assad regime is not yet in sight. The ruling elite and security apparatus have, by and large, held together and the regime still enjoys overwhelming military superiority. Yet the gradual erosion of its power has clearly picked up speed, and the acceleration of events on the ground gives new urgency to questions about the state of Syria’s opposition. If the regime falls, is the opposition ready? The issue is not only whether the opposition can govern, but whether it can restore stability in a country fractured by months of conflict and put Syria on a path toward democracy and economic recovery.

As many opposition figures quietly acknowledge, there is ample cause for concern. Complaints about the absence of a unified and effective leadership are commonplace, both in the media and among the Western and Arab governments that have supported the uprising. Criticism of the opposition’s shortcomings has also been rife inside Syria, where protestors have called for more decisive action from their external leadership. Western and Arab governments have urged opposition factions to unite, to communicate more effectively with protesters on the ground, and to develop a compelling vision for Syria’s future.

Indeed, it was only in October 2011 that leading opposition groups established the Syrian National Council (SNC) as an umbrella coalition, and even then differences persisted. Not until its first General Assembly in Tunis, in December 2011, did the SNC take critical steps to address long-simmering issues of representation

and inclusion. It expanded its leadership in response, bringing in well-known figures such as Haitham Al-Maleh, Sadek Al-Azm, and others. Special efforts were made to bring prominent internal dissidents into its upper ranks as well, improving the SNC’s standing inside Syria.

These gains, however, were followed by setbacks. Important questions about democratic representation still linger, as do concerns about how the SNC makes decisions. Immediately after the Tunis meeting, the SNC embarked—purportedly at the urging of Arab League Secretary General Nabil Al-Araby—on a flawed and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to forge a unified platform with the National Coordinating Committee, a group that has controversially endorsed negotiations with the Assad regime. When the effort became public, members of both groups were angered, and negotiations were broken off. The SNC’s leaders have also occasionally stumbled over the future of Syr-

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ia’s foreign policy, hinting at pro-Western shifts that have angered some segments of the opposition. The SNC has also been compelled to adapt to the rise of the Free Syrian Army, which has contributed to the militarization of the uprising—a trend the SNC views with ambivalence—but has also acquired substantial legitimacy on the ground, at times eclipsing the SNC itself.

Yet the picture is not entirely bleak, especially in light of the severe political conditions that Syrians have lived under for the past fifty years. The scale of repression practiced by the Assad regime severely stunted the development of a meaningful political society in Syria (other than a small, beleaguered community of activists). The SNC has mainly political amateurs for members—newcomers to challenges of managing a political movement—and far less experienced at coordinating a mass uprising on a national scale.

Despite its inauspicious beginnings and self-inflicted wounds, the SNC has moved further in many ways that its critics acknowledge. The Council was never intended to serve as a political party, but as a transitional framework for coordinating the uprising and representing it to the international community. On this front, there has been slow but steady progress. SNC leaders have been proactive in building relations with the international community. Turkey, France, the UK, Germany, and the US now increasingly acknowledge the primacy of the SNC among the Syrian opposition, as does the GCC. Libya and Tunisia have pledged formal recognition. It has released a political platform that, if short on details, nonetheless commits the SNC to principles of inclusion, religious tolerance, a civil state, economic liberty, and the rule of law. Its members are involved in several serious efforts to chart a posttransition vision for Syria’s future. The SNC is also in active negotiation with the leadership of the Free Syrian Army—itself far less coherent or organized than its name might suggest—which has recognized the authority of the SNC and agreed to coordinate its activities with the Council. As the Syrian uprising approaches its first anniversary, the SNC is a becoming a more capable and politically mature organization.

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This progress is welcome, but as the Assad regime shows growing signs of strain the opposition needs to move much more quickly. The challenges and opportunities it will face depend heavily on how the Assad regime falls: whether it collapses, is brought down from within, or is removed through negotiations that produce meaningful political change. In any of these scenarios, however, the opposition must be prepared to respond. The opposition must demonstrate that it represents a viable alternative to the Assad regime, is equipped to fill what could be a dangerous void, and can provide the leadership needed to help Syrians recover from the traumas of the past year. There are clear indications that the SNC and the opposition more broadly are moving in this di-

rection. Yet more and faster progress is still needed, and there is more the international community could do to speed up the process. Too many Syrians continue to question the SNC’s credibility. It is now time to prove that the Syrian people have an opposition leadership worthy of their extraordinary sacrifice. Steven Heydemann, PhD, is a political scientist who specializes in the comparative politics and the political economy of the Middle East, with a particular focus on Syria. His interests include authoritarian governance, economic development, social policy, political and economic reform, and civil society. He currently serves as Senior Adviser for Middle East Initiatives at the United States Institute for Peace.

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Politics

Yemen’s Turn

With presidential elections due in February, what lies ahead for Yemen?

Is Yemen’s presidential election the first step towards a new, more unified and secure state?

Certainly many Yemenis and some influential international friends would like to think so. As with Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, Yemen will be closely watched for hints of the new world taking shaping across North Africa and the Middle East.

Thomas Alberts

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emen will hold a presidential election on 21 February. Yet opposition groups lack unity, sporadic fighting continues in the south, president Saleh’s son Ahmed Ali Saleh controls the military, and trust between the interim coalition government and mass social movements is in short supply. At the same time, the stakes could not be higher. Yemen adjoins one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes, while the increasing fragmentation of Yemen into local fiefdoms is playing into the hand of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

At the time of writing, Yemen is the first Arab country outside North Africa in which a wave of popular protest has toppled a sitting head of government. Is Yemen’s presidential election the first step towards a new, more unified and secure state? Certainly most Yemenis and some influential international friends would like to think so. But the journey is long and the risks and challenges considerable.

The Transition plan The GCC-brokered agreement concluded in November between Saleh’s General People’s Congress (GPC) and the parliamentary opposition bloc Joint Meeting Parties (JMP) envisages a two-stage transition. The first stage focuses on transitional measures. Notable elements are a new interim government of national unity controlled by the JMP, a joint military council, and the delegation of most of President Saleh’s powers to Vice President Abd Rabbu Mansour Al-Hadi, a GPC member who has occupied his current

post since 1994. The second phase begins with the presidential election and will consist of a rather loosely conceived ‘national dialogue’ ahead of electoral and constitutional reform.

The plan has its strengths. The joint military council is functioning well enough, the ceasefire is holding, and the consensus around Al-Hadi has enabled Saleh’s exile to Oman (after securing a highly contentious immunity deal).

However, the weaknesses are considerable. The transition agreement excludes extra-parliamentary opposition groups,

plan has been on the table for several years. In May 2010 Saleh launched a national dialogue initiative and the following month an inter-party agreement promised constitutional and electoral reforms and mandated outreach to extra-parliamentary groups. As a goodwill gesture, Saleh released several hundred political prisoners, including southern separatists and northern Houthis.

If there is historical precedent for the current transition agreement, there are also good reasons why the present juncture is unique. Firstly, there is the

In May 2010 Saleh launched a national dialogue initiative and the following month an inter-party agreement promised constitutional and electoral reforms and mandated outreach to extra-parliamentary groups notably the youth movement, northern Houthis and southern separatists.

Although it is not clear how influential their views are, support for social movements has increased significantly in recent years and point to a deepening fault line in Yemeni politics. Aware of this, JMP parties have fostered links with extra-parliamentary oppositions, although their outreaches are largely only replicating the fault lines of Yemen’s political landscape within the JMP bloc.

It is easy to focus narrowly on the past 12 months given the recent upheaval. In fact, the basic structure of the transition

extent of political divisions within Yemen. They are probably the deepest they have been since the 1990s civil war. Second, Saleh is no longer in the picture, although some suspect his influence is merely channelled through Vice President Al-Hadi. Most significant, however, is the retreat of central power.

The government in Sana’a simply does not control large parts of Yemen, particularly in eastern Hydramaut and Mahra provinces, and it is vulnerable in parts of the north where Houthi rebels hold sway, and south where both separatists and AQAP vie for influence.

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Photo © Getty Images

Election and after In terms of the transition agreement, Vice President Al-Hadi is the unity government’s consensus candidate and the only candidate on the ballot. One may wonder why the GPC and JMP don’t simply appoint Hadi as a caretaker president while a national dialogue works out the details of constitutional and electoral reforms. Why risk the pretence of a democratic election that might add confusion to an already volatile situation? As one election official told The Majalla (on condition of anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to the media), “If Al-Hadi gets 100 percent of the ballot but only 30 percent of the electorate vote, what does that mean?”

Yet allowing Saleh the face-saving gesture of completing his term rather than forcing a humiliating resignation probably is a price worth paying. And as the election official points out, the poll is better seen as a referendum, in which a vote for Al-Hadi counts as an endorsement of the GCC agreement. In other words, the measure to watch is voter turnout.

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Surprisingly perhaps, bar security, the logistics of holding a successful poll are not a major concern for observers. Yemen is not Tunisia; national polls were held in 2006 and 1999 (presidential) and 2003 (legislative).

The potential flashpoints are elsewhere, and they carry a considerable threat.

Watch this space Probably the most significant challenge will be keeping extra-parliamentary social movements onside. Established relations between these groups and JMP parties, particularly southern separatists and the Yemeni Socialist Party, and Houthi rebels and Al-Islah, are very important and give the JMP leverage in their dealings with the GPC. Yet the strength of these relationships, and indeed the coherence of these movements, is less clear, particularly in the south. The separatist movement enjoys widespread popular support, but lacks coordination and organization. A group calling itself the Revolution Salvation

Front launched in early January—ostensibly to represent the revolutionaries with a unified voice, but its influence so far seems limited.

A second flashpoint is the retreat of central power and increasing fragmentation of political authority. Local authority is increasingly the preserve of local tribes and merchant families, where it is not controlled by Houthis, separatists, or AQAP. It is also a mistake to assume an independent South would stay unified.

Yet politically, secession is impractical as southerners have little leverage to press the North, and northerners want to keep oil fields, gas infrastructure, and fisheries. Many observers fear moves towards federalism would encourage rather than placate separatists’ demands, and foreign powers, particularly Saudi Arabia and the US, are determined to prevent Yemen from fragmenting.

Yemen also faces a humanitarian crisis exacerbated by acute economic challenges. Ginny Hill, a Yemen expert at London’s Chatham House, describes Yemen 15

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It does not help that cultivation of qat, a natural stimulant hugely popular with men throughout Yemen, is increasingly displacing food crops and straining water reserves as a breadline economy where the struggle for survival is becoming increasingly desperate. Underscoring her point, a recent Unicef report warned that half a million children in Yemen are at risk of death or physical and mental harm as a result of malnutrition. It does not help that cultivation of qat, a natural stimulant hugely popular with men throughout Yemen, is increasingly displacing food crops and straining water reserves.

The considerable challenges are interconnected. Sana’a’s decreasing capacity to project authority leaves large portions of Yemeni territory up for grabs. At times of humanitarian crisis, this tends to create opportunities for local usurpers to develop their support, as has happened for Hezbollah in south Lebanon since the 2006 war with Israel. Yemen’s active and increasingly energised civil society is eager to improve Yemen’s established democratic traditions, and the unity government would do well to form closer partnerships on that front.

But this support sector can only help the government so far.

The poll on 21 February begins another chapter in the political transitions unfolding in the wake of last year’s uprisings. With Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad looking increasingly weak, the process begun in Yemen is a timely reminder that the past year’s popular uprisings are profoundly shaping the region’s future. As with Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (and Morocco’s quiet model), Yemen will be closely watched for hints of that future and any lessons that may help prepare for it. Issue 1569 • January 2012

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A Reluctant Leader After finally transferring his powers to his deputy and jetting off into exile, President Ali Abdullah Saleh has left behind a state beset by countless challenges— political, economic, military, developmental—each sufficient to bring about Yemen’s collapse. The man charged with picking up the pieces is Vice President Abd Rabbu Mansour Al-Hadi.

Al-Hadi’s promotion will become official with presidential elections on 21 February, in which he is the only candidate by consensus between Saleh’s General People’s Congress (of which Al-Hadi is a member) and the opposition bloc, Joint Meeting Parties. Although Saleh remains President until the elections—this face-saving condition of the transition agreement permits Saleh to complete his term rather than resign—the president’s powers are delegated to the vice-president, making Al-Hadi effectively Acting-President as well as President-Elect.

To put this delegation of powers into perspective, Al-Hadi is so close to Saleh that immediately on becoming de facto Acting-President, Al-Hadi requested Saleh remain on hand in an advisory capacity ahead of the February poll. Al-Hadi is seen as a weak politician. Saleh handpicked him to serve as Vice President in 1994, following Yemen’s civil war, in a move most observers attributed to Saleh’s preference for a Southerner. In Al-Hadi, Saleh found a loyalist who posed little political threat and gave his government the appearance of inclusivity.

During eighteen years in office, Al-Hadi has caused little controversy. While Saleh and his clan have dominated the political landscape, the Vice President has seemed satisfied to hover in the vicinity of power. Today the consensus opinion is that the “consensus candidate” chosen by the GCC and signatories to the transition plan has again been selected for his lack of offence to the principle signatories of the transition agreement.

Notwithstanding Al-Hadi’s meek political reputation, in a military context Al-Hadi’s personality is somewhat stronger. Born in 1945 in Abyan governorate, by his midtwenties he had graduated from the military academy in Aden, studied military tactics in Britain, and received military training in Egypt. As a young officer he completed four years of further military studies and training in the USSR. His rise continued following his return to Yemen, eventually reaching Field Marshal rank before moving into politics.

It is unfair to label Al-Hadi as weak or politically malleable without acknowledging his strengths. He did not seek, but admirably accepted, his elevation and has succeeded in presenting himself as a stable figurehead at a highly volatile moment in Yemen’s modern history. Support from Yemen’s parliamentary opposition Joint Meeting Parties (a five-way alliance between nationalists, Islamists and socialists) gives him valuable political capital, as does support from the GCC, US and European and Western powers.

But there are groups opposed to his candidacy. Extra-parliamentary groups in particular, notably the activist youth movement, demand more radical democratic reform and consider the current transition process as illegitimate.

Al-Hadi will find it difficult to disassociate himself from Saleh or shake suspicions that Saleh’s hand guides his. To his credit, however, Al-Hadi has not strongly courted power. In the present turmoil, when a steady hand is required, Al-Hadi’s apparent lack of ambition might be valuable. He is a reluctant leader—unwilling to dominate proceedings but happy to be of service—and in important ways, this is a much needed quality in Yemen’s next president. Whether it is enough, is a different question. Yet probably the only thing Yemen needs less than another strong-man is a political vacuum. On this point, all parties agree and this consideration, more than Al-Hadi’s accomplishments or abilities, has propelled him to the top office. Now that he is there, he will be challenged to maintain cross-party support and draw disaffected groups into the transition process.

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Cover Story

Holding Hormuz Hostage Could Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz be a mere bluff?

The war of words between Iran and the United States has escalated in recent months. Iran has responded to proposed US legislation to punish those who purchase Iranian oil by threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz, which is crucial to Gulf oil exports. In all likelihood, this posturing from Iran is an empty threat.

Bryan Gibson

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ran’s threat to close the strategic Strait of Hormuz—the narrow waterway through which one-fifth of the world’s daily oil supplies must pass— is a bluff, and the international community knows it. They know, just as the Iranian government knows, that if Iran were to close the strait it would deprive itself of the ability to export oil. Without the sale of oil, Iran cannot finance itself and its economy could collapse. In short, closing the Strait of Hormuz would hurt Iran far more than any sanctions the Obama administration could ever dream up, so why run the risk? The regime in Tehran is under considerable pressure and has few cards to play. With its back against the wall, the one card that the regime holds that truly terrifies the shaky economies of the West is closing the strait and depriving them of their lifeblood, oil.

Photo © Getty Images

Closing the Strait of Hormuz would hurt Iran far more than any sanctions the Obama administration could ever dream up, so why run the risk?

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The crisis began on 27 December, when Admiral Habibollah Sayyari, the commander of Iran’s navy, issued a warning to the United States and the European Union: if they were to proceed with their threat to boycott Iranian oil or punish those who purchase Iranian oil (as US legislation proposes), Iran will close the Strait of Hormuz. Former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance once described the strait as the “jugular vein of the West”.

Since the initial threat, the US and Iran have engaged in a war of words over the waterway. General Atollah Salehi, Iran’s army chief, warned the US Navy that a recently-departed aircraft carrier group— led by the USS John D. Stennis—must not return to the Persian Gulf. In his statement, Salehi said, “Iran will not repeat its warning … the enemy’s carrier has been moved out to the Sea of Oman because 21

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Cover Story

Whose sanctions?

There is no doubt that Obama is unwilling to start another war in the Middle East—especially in an election year—but his administration is not in complete control of American foreign policy. The sanctions that sparked Iran’s threat to close the Strait of Hormuz did not come out of the White House, but from the other end of Washington, D.C.’s Pennsylvania Avenue, where Congress sits. The proposed sanctions were amended to a defence appropriations bill over the objections of the White House in December.

The new law gives Obama some latitude in when to apply sanctions, but at the same time ties his hands in a wider sense. If the White House manages to negotiate an agreement with Iran about its nuclear program, abolishing the sanctions permanently is now a decision for Congress rather than the president.

Would enough legislators be willing to do this? Iran is deeply unpopular in the United States, especially amongst its political class and the influential pro-Israeli lobby: witness the relentless criticism that Obama has received for being ‘soft’ on Iran from Republican presidential candidates, with the exception of maverick Congressman Ron Paul.

Even more restrictive legislation is in the pipeline. If enacted, the Iran Threat Reduction Bill would forbid American diplomats from even talking to Iranian officials without informing Congress in advance. It passed the House of Representatives in December almost unanimously. Before reaching the president’s desk it must pass through the Senate. Obama could veto the bill, but a two-thirds majority in Congress can in turn override his veto. Even if the White House could eventually find enough votes to stop this—or persuade the Senate to reject it—it would likely be a bruising political battle the administration would like to avoid, especially while fighting a re-election campaign.

Although Congress is powerful, President Obama is ultimately the most influential individual in the American political system. Barring an Israeli strike, he will likely be able to put the brakes on escalating tensions for a while, if only by using the ‘get-out’ clauses included in the sanctions law.

of a [military] drill. I recommend and emphasize to the American carrier not to return to the Persian Gulf … we are not in the habit of warning more than once.”

Two days later, in an ironic twist of fate, the Stennis carrier group saved thirteen Iranian fishermen from Somali pirates in a magnanimous gesture of good faith. The following day the Iranian Foreign Ministry—in a rare display of gratitude—thanked the United States for rescuing its sailors, only to be contradicted by the Revolutionary Guards (IRGC), who called it a Hollywood-style publicity stunt. Then on 10 January, a US Coast Guard vessel (operating off Iraq in the northern Gulf) rescued another batch of Iranian sailors as their vessel was taking on water. And yet, in spite of these gestures of goodwill on the part of the Americans, the Iranian government continued its adversarial posture.

Throughout late January, Iranian authorities appeared to be divided on the question of closing the strait. On 21 Janu-

ary, in a remarkable twist, Iran backed away from its threats to the US Navy.

That day, a spokesman for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard said, “U.S. warships and military forces have been in the Persian Gulf and the Middle East region for many years, and their decision in relation to the dispatch of a new warship is not a new issue, and it should be interpreted as part of their permanent presence.” The about-face occurred after the US Navy, for the third time in less than a month, came to the aid of Iranian sailors that were in distress in the Arabian Sea on 18 January. Quite clearly, American efforts to prove their usefulness in the region have had an effect on the Iranians. Indeed, over the course of three weeks, Iran’s rhetoric went from outright hostility to humble acceptance of the American presence. But two days later—on 23 January—the European Union agreed to an oil embargo against Iran, and a senior member of Iran’s parliament reiterated the threat.

These confused actions do not suggest

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that a consensus has been formed within the Iranian regime as to the question of closing the strait.

It is important to recognize that a third factor is certainly at play here: Israel.

Since the initial rhetorical jousting between the US and Iran in early January, the hardline government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has initiated a propaganda campaign aimed at casting worst-case scenarios about Iran as fact while openly threatening to attack Iran’s nuclear program. In light of Israel’s tub-thumping, the Iranians have reiterated their threat to close the strait, but this time adding the caveat that they will do so only in the event that they are attacked.

While the threat of military confrontation between the US and Iran decreased in late January, Israel’s provocative brinkmanship keeps the threat to the strait a reality.

But regardless of these threats, two key questions need to be addressed: how likely is Iran to close the strait, and if so, how?

As much as the export of oil from the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz is crucial to the economies of Europe and Asia, the strait is equally vital to Iran’s economy, which exports approximately 2.6 million barrels per day (bpd)—the vast majority of which is loaded at the Kharg Island oil platform in the northern Gulf and transported to foreign markets through Hormuz.

This being the case, the likelihood of Iran following through on the threat to close the waterway seems remote, as it would seriously affect Iranian ability to export oil and harm its already weak economy, which is struggling under a harsh sanctions regime.

Threatening to close the Strait of Hormuz is not a new Iranian tactic. During the IranIraq War (1980-88), the Islamic Republic repeatedly threatened to close the strait to international shipping as a means of putting pressure on Gulf States—specifically Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates—to cease their support for Iraq.

Iran never acted on the threat, simply because it could not afford to lose an important source of revenue, especially because at the time the Iranian economy was also being hampered by American sanctions resulting from the 1979-80 hostage crisis.

On one particular occasion in August 1983, when Iraq announced that it in-

As much as the export of oil from the Gulf via the Strait of Hormuz is crucial to the economies of Europe and Asia, the strait is equally vital to Iran’s economy, which exports approximately 2.6 million barrels per day (bpd)—the vast majority of which is loaded at the Kharg Island oil platform in the northern Gulf and transported to foreign markets through Hormuz

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tended to extend the War into the Gulf, the Iranian regime responded by threatening to close the strategic channel, reversing promises made at the start of the conflict to keep the strait open.

According Edgar O’Ballance, a journalist and academic, Iran had more than one means of closing the waterway. First, it could create a so-called wall of fire, whereby it would threaten to open fire on any unauthorized vessel passing by islands in the strait. Iran could conceivably fire on ships passing through the strait from islandbased artillery or from the air. Little has changed since 1983 in terms of the viability of this option—if anything, Iran’s military ability has improved, particularly given the expansion of its ballistic and cruise missile capabilities in recent years. The wall of fire option is undoubtedly Iran’s best chance at closing the strait to shipping. It will allow Iran to continue to export oil through the waterway, while inhibiting the Gulf States (and Iraq) from doing so. But, while this appears to be Iran’s best option, the US Navy is more than capable of disabling Iran’s military facilities around the strait.

A second option also harks back to the 1980s, whereby Iran could mine the waterway. While this would certainly slow international shipping through the strait, it would not stop it altogether. The US could—just as it did during 1987-88— conduct mine-sweeping operations and implement a convoy system, which would limit the effectiveness of laying mines. At the same time, by mining the strait Iran runs the risk of striking its own vessels, which are just as susceptible to a mine strike as any other ship. As such, it could negatively inhibit its ability to export oil.

And finally, O’Ballance suggested that Iran could sink a supertanker in the middle of the narrow waterway, which would prevent any other ships from passing. At face value, this option is one of the few ways in which Iran could close the strait for a long time, but upon closer examination, it appears that the main transit route through the strait is too deep for this tactic to prove effective, though it could have a deterrent effect.

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US-Iran: The Military Dimension While the US enjoys a massive superiority in conventional military forces, Iran has focused on building its capabilities to offset this. Dubbed ‘mosaic defense,’ Iran’s military relies on flexible, decentralized, and irregular forces to deter attack and inflict unacceptable losses on a more powerful opponent.

Iran’s fleet of major surface warships is small: it has fewer than 10. The vessels were mostly purchased by the Shah and are mostly obsolete. The last time it engaged the US in open combat—during the Iran-Iraq War—the Iranian Navy was outmatched and took heavy losses. The naval branch of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has subsequently assumed much of the responsibility for operations in the Gulf. According to the International Institute for Strategic Studies, both the Navy and the IRGC now rely heavily on more than 150 small, fast boats armed with torpedoes and anti-ship missiles. These aim to use their speed and an element of surprise to overwhelm bigger targets by attacking quickly from Iran’s extensive coastline. Iran also operates a few Russian Kilo-class submarines that are reportedly very difficult to detect, as well as some mini-submarines.

Iran has additionally invested in ‘area denial’ weapons, with batteries of anti-ship cruise missiles placed along its coast. Presumably, these are capable of striking ships sailing through the Strait of Hormuz. It also has an extensive arsenal of naval mines, which it used heavily in the Iran-Iraq War. The US, in contrast, maintains a powerful conventional force in the Gulf, headquartered at Bahrain. The US Fifth Fleet outnumbers and outclasses Iran’s conventional navy, and includes more than 20 ships. It is centered on a nuclearpowered aircraft carrier with 70 combat jets aboard, and is accompanied by a nuclear-powered attack submarine and an escort of destroyers and frigates. These have recently been joined by additional warships from Britain and France, and an additional American carrier.

Most analysts conclude that Iranian naval forces would be unable to oppose such a force for long before being destroyed or driven off. While they might be able to do some damage to American forces and temporarily disrupt shipping, the US Navy has been preparing for a clash with Iran with this in mind. It is unknown what new American tactics—like the use of armed drones—might bring to the fight in addition to its existing aerial supremacy.

tive in disrupting the West’s oil supplies—not to mention causing panic in already shaky global oil markets—such an act could very likely lead to a regional war with a high probability of foreign (i.e. US) intervention.

In its recent edition, The Economist discusses the possibility that Iran could rely on its asymmetric warfare capabilities, notably the use of fast-moving speedboats equipped with anti-ship cruise missiles, as well as its growing fleet of mini-submarines and armed drones. As The Economist points out, “The Iranians believe that with ‘swarming’ tactics in confined waters they may be able to overwhelm even the sophisticated defenses of an American carrier group.” In essence, this is a modern adaptation of the wall of fire option and could potentially render the strait hazardous to transit, but these tactics will not be able to deter shipping altogether. After all, at the height of the Iran-Iraq War—when both

Iraq and Iran were targeting international shipping—ships still entered the Gulf at great risk and still loaded up with oil.

The fact is that while Iran has the capacity to close the Strait of Hormuz for a limited period of time, doing so would harm Iran and its allies just as much as its enemies. There are two reasons for this.

First, if Iran were to force the strait’s closure, it would deprive itself of its primary thoroughfare for exporting oil. The only contingency available to Iran would be to transport oil via truck to a port south of the strait in the Sea of Oman, but that would be very expensive and logistically difficult. It is rather remarkable that Iran has not built an emergency pipeline bypassing the strait, after observing this strategic weakness during the war with Iraq.

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Iranian oil exports—would not tolerate such a move. If Iran were to close the strait, China would react in a very negative way. After all, according to Reuters, it purchases nearly 550,000 bpd from Iran—not to mention its imports from Saudi Arabia, which also have to pass through the Strait.

It is difficult to imagine that Iran would want to anger its Chinese ally.

At the same time, the Iranians know that closing the strait would violate international law and could be perceived by some (i.e. the US) as an act of war.

Given these international factors, it seems unlikely that the Iranian government would ever actually follow through with this threat, simply because it cannot afford to do so. After all, even during the height of the Iran-Iraq War, when the Iraq was regularly bombing Iranian ships and the US was conducting a massive convoy system through the waterway, the Iranians never moved to close the strait. But why?

The answer to this question boils down to domestic considerations. According to the Islamic Republic News Agency, Iran’s official news outlet, in 2006 over 90 percent of its oil exports were from the oil export terminal at Kharg Island.

In 2009, Kharg Island was reported to have exported 950 million barrels annually, which, when broken down to a daily figure, matches Iran’s known daily oil exports of 2.6 million bpd. Therefore, the Iranians are just as reliant on exporting oil through the Strait of Hormuz as the rest of the Gulf States.

The idea that Iran would close the Strait of Hormuz in response to a threat of boycott by the US and EU is highly unlikely, as closing the Strait would affect the Iranian economy far more than any foreign sanctions. In effect, the Iranian government would be sanctioning themselves. Given this, the Iranian threat to close the Strait is completely empty. After all, a regime committed to self-preservation like that in Tehran will not purposely commit suicide. Closing the Strait of Hormuz would result in just that. In short, the Iranians are bluffing and everyone knows it. Bryan R. Gibson is a PhD candidate in International History at the London School of Economics and author of Covert Relationship: American Foreign Policy, Intelligence and the Iran Iraq War.

On one particular occasion in August 1983, when Iraq announced that it intended to extend the War into the Gulf, the Iranian regime responded by threatening to close the strategic channel, reversing promises made at the start of the conflict to keep the strait open

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Human Condition

Keeping the Faith

Canon Andrew White discusses his unique role as leader of a Baghdad parish Canon Andrew White serves as Vicar to St George's Parish in the center of Baghdad. A significant part of his work is devoted to multi-faith dialogue and healing sectarian rifts in a complex environment. Despite his undoubted good work and successes, the so-called Bishop of Baghdad is no stranger to controversy.

Amy Assad

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Photo © Getty Images

anon Andrew White, vicar of St George’s church, is not your average pastor. Then again St George’s—which stands protected by 35 guards, blast walls and razor wire—is not your average church. Positioned just outside the Green Zone in Baghdad, complete with an onsite clinic, St George’s is the last remaining Anglican Church in Iraq. It has so far survived five bomb attacks. White, dubbed “the vicar of Baghdad,” and often pictured in a bulletproof vest, is escorted by a convoy of armed soldiers to his services, which include 550 families among loyal parishioners. “In spite of the bombs and violence, they are the happiest people I have ever met. It is humbling to serve them as their Abuna (Priest).” He tells The Majalla.

“I think history will judge the original decision to go into Iraq,” Said Barack Obama recently. “What’s clear” he added, “is that we have now achieved an Iraq that is selfgoverning, that is inclusive and that has enormous potential.” With America’s withdrawal from Iraq now complete, Obama’s last statement instigates little confidence.

Sectarian and religious violence has persisted in the country—increasingly challenging Iraq’s hopes for unity and future stability.

“Whenever my dad goes out, my mum, my brother and me, we never know if he is going to come home or whether he will get killed. That makes you tired.” says 18 Lina, an year old Iraqi and Canon White’s personal assistant.

White, who lives and works in the heart of this issue, explains “There are

still many, many bombs. There are many attacks. Most of them are not even reported. We have noticed that, in the last year or so, there have been slightly fewer attacks, but each individual attack is more sophisticated and more deadly.”

“This suggests that those doing the bombing are more organized. It also suggests that there are fewer examples of small-scale, tit-for-tat sectarian reprisals.”

Originally from the UK, Canon White is active as both a priest and peace-broker.

Having been resident vicar at St George’s since 2005 he previously served as Director of International Ministry at the International Centre for Reconciliation at Coventry Cathedral in England, and is currently the president of the Foundation for Relief and Reconciliation in the Middle East (FRRME).

Working under his conviction that peace cannot be achieved in the Middle East without tackling the underlying religious elements of its society, White holds regular reconciliation conferences with the High Council of Religious Leaders in Iraq (HCRLI). “In the words of William Temple, ‘When religion goes wrong, it goes very wrong,’ and religion has gone very wrong and it has been the source of so much violence.” He recently told Christian Today.

But, it is White’s astounding, seemingly unshakeable, self-confidence has earned him an unusual collection of friends—including senior and influential religious and political leaders, representing the Sunni, Shi’a, Yazidee, Shabach, Mandean, Turkmen, Christian and Jewish communities—and allowed him to approach even militant extremists with open dialogue.

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Photo © Getty Images

Subsequently, White has become a prominent figure in the Middle East peace process—a subject of mixed opinions. Reports that some involved were growing frustrated by his “meddling” in hostage negotiations and accusations cited in the Guardian in December 2010 that he took false credit for securing the release of the British hostage Peter Moore, sit alongside assertions that he was integral to assisting other hostage negotiations, and that his motivation is always “well meaning.” White also suffers from multiple sclerosis, though he responds firmly to critics who have questioned his ability to run his parish while coping with the disease.

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after a church in England because it is a degenerative disease and they were worried about my prognosis.”

“I have a good team of people working with me. Together, we feed 4,000 people every week. We provide medical care to over 2,000 every month. People can judge for themselves whether I am being held back by having MS.” White currently undergoes stem cell treatment at the church’s clinic, where over 2,000 Iraqi patients also receive medical care every month. The clinic employs Sunni, Shia, Jewish and Christian medical staff, who, he emphasizes, “work side by side to deliver high quality care to their patients, regardless of sectarian affiliation, modeling best practice in sectarian integration at a grassroots level.”

The clinic has just completed work on an extension to cope with high demand for its services which are all provided for free “both to ensure that even the poorest residents have access to the best facilities available, and also to prevent even the slightest hint of corruption.” White says.

“A little over two years ago, a bomb exploded close to the clinic. The motive for the attack was religious sectarian, yet the St George’s medical team, representing different sectarian groups, ignored the risk of secondary explosions and rushed out as one to treat the injured, saving many lives. Their united front sent a powerful and lasting message to a fractured, violent society. They bridged the divide that the bombers were seeking to widen.” He adds.

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Human Condition

In January 2011, a Full Meeting of the HCRLI was held in Copenhagen. “The outcome to that meeting was a joint declaration condemning violence against religious minorities and calling on the government of Iraq to criminalize incitement to sectarian violence. In the months that followed this meeting, violence against the Christian minority dropped close to nil.”

It has been said that changing Middle Eastern dynamics post the Arab Spring are responsible for unearthing buried religious and sectarian rifts in the region.

“People have said that the Arab Spring may be a Christian Winter for the indigenous Christians in much of the Middle East.

There is a lot of truth in that.” says White.

“The increased persecution of Christians and other minority groups is very damaging, not only for those communities but also for the countries that they are fleeing. Iraq, for example, is feeling the loss its Christian population very acutely.”

A complicated character, White is perhaps best sumarised by one online commentator: “He comes across as hugely committed to his calling; fearless about both the immediate risks to his life and about his deteriorating health and completely free from doubt about his own moral judgment—certainly an extraordinary man.” Another simply put it: “I don’t quite know what to make of him.

Either way the work he does speaks for itself.”

And how does White feel his work is appreciated by the Iraqi community?

“You should ask them.” He says.

Photo © Getty Images

Commenting on the on-going issue of security for St George’s and the clinic after the US withdrawal White says, “Iraq is a very dangerous place to work. 58 people were massacred in a Syrian Catholic church last year. Having US soldiers up the road in Camp Victory didn’t help them. People could attack us at any time, whether or not the Americans are here.”

“The only reason things might get worse when the Americans have gone is if some group decides to make a political statement. But there are already groups causing violence to make political statements, including the statement that the Americans must leave now.”

In the years since 1998 that White has been coming to Iraq he has come to know the most senior and influential religious and political leaders. “It is these relationships that enable me to bring together the High Council of Religious Leaders in Iraq (HCRLI).” He says.

The HCRLI comprises religious leaders with a sizeable following in Iraq, political influence due to links with the major political parties, a significant media following and links with those engaged in militia activity. A few months ago one of the Grand Ayatollahs who White met in Najaf told him: “It is necessary for us to work together…

The Western powers have all the might but that is not the solution. There must be dialogue to enable Muslims to find solutions to their own problems… You are the person who brings people together. “ From June 2007 to February 2009, seven Full Meetings of the HCRLI were delivered.

“One of these meetings” White says “in Beirut in August 2008, produced the first ever joint Sunni-Shi’a Fatwa in Iraqi history, condemning violence and terrorism, recognizing the rights of religious

and ethnic minorities, and asserting the importance of an Iraqi state governed in accordance with the Rule of Law.” This Fatwa was read repeatedly at 80 percent Iraq’s Sunni and Shi’a mosques, and through the broadcasts of Dubai based HCLRI Member, Sheikh Dr. Ahmed AlKubaisi, to his regional audience of an estimated 50 million across the Middle East.

According to White “This period of activity directly corresponded with a decrease in terrorist and insurgent violence and the emergence of the Awakening Movement, which we also supported by reaching out to Sunni religious leaders.”

“Clearly, work was also undertaken by many different agencies during the same time period” White quickly adds “but our work had a significant effect in creating the environment that made these changes possible. The members of the HCRLI would not have had the opportunity to meet, to form relationships and to compare ideas were it not for this program.”

White also admits that “the gains made are fragile.” And, after a period of inactivity from February 2009 to January 2011 there was an increase in both sectarian attacks and Al-Qaeda inspired violence. The last three months of 2010 saw a marked increase in violence against the indigenous Christian community. “These included written threats that families must ‘Leave Iraq or die’. In the worst incident, fifty eight people were killed in the attack on the Syrian Catholic Church on 31 October 2010.” White says.

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Human Condition

Reading Mahfouz in Cairo The Future of Education in North Africa

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring a new political day is dawning in North Africa. But the burgeoning authority of Islamist groups in Egypt and Tunisia has provoked some skeptisim. If sweeping changes are to occur in these countries then education must play a crucial role, but might narrow education policies restrict much needed reform?

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Photo Š Getty Images

Paula Mejia

n late January the Egyptian Creativity Front marched on Cairo in an attempt to pressure Egypt’s new parliament to respect the freedom

of expression. Over the last couple of months, there have been rising concerns amongst artists and intellectuals over the future of public thought in Egypt. Their

concerns are rooted in the fact that a number of members of the new Parliament view certain forms of expression as offensive. Though the majority Freedom

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and Justice party—the political representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood—have long espoused their moderate characteristics, members within this group recently condemned the works of the Egyptian Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

Though these statements may come from a minority within the party, many Egyptians, and indeed their Tunisian neighbors, are concerned that the increasing influence of religion in the political system may have negative implications for freedoms of expression and public thought.

The condemnation of the works of Mahfouz, however, is even more disturbing because of the issues it highlights concerning education in both Egypt and Tunisia. While the relationship between intellectual freedoms and education may not be obvious, it is important to keep in mind the role that free speech plays in supporting an education system that encourages critical thinking.

Unfortunately for Egypt and Tunisia, critical thinking has never been a skill that their respective education systems have been equipped to teach. Rather, like many countries in the Middle East, Tunisia and Egypt have suffered a crisis in education for the last three decades—one of the characteristics of which has been the creation of a system that develops students capable of memorization but leaves them unprepared for tasks related to problem solving. Though not an explicit demand amongst protestors that brought about the revolutions in these two countries, in reality many of their grievances were directly related to these kinds of inefficiencies in public education.

Indeed, the education systems of these two countries are weakened by a number of contradictions. The most obvious of these has been the inefficient way in which the governments of Egypt and Tunisia have encouraged the development of this sector.

Astonishingly, both countries have invested heavily in education, committing over 5 percent of their GDPs to the sector.

They also have compulsory basic education, and have nearly achieved their goal of universal primary education with 94 percent enrollment.

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“The poor and the needy hurriedly left their shacks and headed to the public squares. For too long, they had buried those anxious feelings, but now it was time for them to follow their hearts. Their unprecedented gathering in the squares was quite a sight! There they stood, united, like a mighty giant with inexhaustible strength...In their unity, they felt like a resilient dam; and if they were to charge, they would turn into a gushing torrent. And with a roar, they pushed forward...like an unstoppable waterfall pouring from the highest mountain summit.”

Arabian Nights and Days (1981) by Naguib Mahfouz

“The novels of Naguib Mahfouz give a distorted image of Egyptian society.”

Nader Bakar, prominent member of the salafist Al-Nour Party

to education than those in urban areas, resulting in high primary drop-out rates in rural children, and especially amongst girls.

Moreover, in their attempt to widen access to education, quality has been sacrificed for quantity. In order to accommodate the growing number of students, in Tunisia “primary schools operate a double flow system, with students attending halfday sessions in the mornings or afternoons.

Hence time spent learning is shorter than in other countries,” according to a report by the African Development Bank.

The inefficiencies of the education systems in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere in the region have serious implications. Inadequate education and alternative training opportunities result in graduates with skills that are not in demand in labour markets. Once the infamous youth unemployment rates of the region are observed through this lens, it becomes easier to understand why such a high proportion of university graduates in the region are unemployed. In Morocco for instance, 61 percent of young people with secondary education or above are unemployed compared with 8 percent of uneducated youth, while in Tunisia 40 percent of university-educated youth are unemployed compared to 24 percent of non-graduates.

As a result of the impact on the economic opportunities of individuals that a poor education system has, it is no wonder that throughout the region, but especially in Egypt and Tunisia, the inefficiencies of the education system are seen as an impediment to development.

Now that both of these countries have had the opportunity to voice their political pref-

erences and elected governments are slowly being put in place, Egyptians and Tunisians across the political spectrum expect tangible results with regards to economic development, and especially unemployment. Given the role that an inadequate education system played in creating, or at the least exacerbating, the economic challenges of these countries, it would be only natural for newly elected officials to tackle the inefficacies in the education sector.

However, as has been illustrated by the encouragement of censorship by members of Egypt’s new politicians, it is unclear whether the religious values of some of the country’s new officials will stand in the way of education reform. The insistence of Islamist parties on their support for economic development should lead them to rethink any policies that might stand in the way of strengthening the system of education. This will inevitably involve teaching material that their conservative mores may not support, but the authorities must learn to differentiate between exposing students to a variety of subjects and forcing students to agree with every idea they are taught in school. Paula Mejia is a contributing writer for The Majalla based in Tunisia. As a freelance journalist and consultant for the African Development Bank, her work has focused on economic and social challenges in Africa, with a special focus on Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya.

She is a graduate of the London School of Economics, L'Institut D'Etudes Politiques de Paris and the University of Chicago.

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Candid Conversations

Quantifying the Middle East Dr William Quandt reflects on the changing dynamics of a new Middle East

In the context of the Arab Spring, traditionally influential states have been challenged to adapt to a rapidly changing political climate in the Middle East. In this interview The Majalla asks Dr. William Quandt to reflect on the United States withdrawal from Iraq, the Arab Spring and the US’s emerging grand strategy for the Middle East, if indeed there is one.

Andrew Bowen

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n the context of the Arab Spring, traditionally influential states have been challenged to adapt to a rapidly changing political climate in the Middle East. The Majalla asked Dr. William Quandt to reflect on the United States withdrawal from Iraq, the Arab Spring and the US’s emerging grand strategy for the Middle East, if indeed there is one. Quandt discusses the shifting influence of three major actors in the region: Syria, Iran and Iraq. He moves on to consider the influential regional role of Saudi Arabia and the GCC and concludes by examining the role of the US in a new Middle East.

William B. Quandt has been a prominent voice in American foreign policy in the Middle East for over 30 years. Serving in the National Security Council under the Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter administrations, he was front and center in the negotiations that led to the Camp David Accords and the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty and he is an expert on Palestine, Algeria, Israel, and Egypt.

Today he is an author, professor and member of the Department of Politics at the University of Virginia and a regular participant in discussions of US policy in the Middle East.

With the American withdrawal after almost a decade in Iraq, do you have an optimistic view of Iraq’s future?

I have visited and spent time in almost every Arab country except Iraq. I never went during the Saddam period and I never wanted to go when I would have had to be escorted by American military just to leave the Green Zone. As an outsider looking at it, I wish the Iraqis well. I think they have suffered far too much, but I don’t think it is going to be easy to reconstitute a functioning democratic Iraq any time soon.

There are some things that look more promising than others. I think the Kurdish area is doing pretty well, but it is doing well because it has essentially separated itself from the rest of Iraq, which sets a precedent for other regions in Iraq. There is a tendency within Iraq when you encounter problems to think going your separate ways is the way to go. We have seen that in Sunni provinces, and on the Shia side too. The idea of Iraq itself is under stress.

My impression is that the current Prime Minister is not an instinctive democrat; he wants to get his way. The last election in 2010 was a very interesting outcome, because the party that got the largest number of votes didn’t get to form a government. That’s the way it works sometimes in parliamentary systems, but it can leave a residue of somehow being cheated by those who did well but were left out of positions of influence, like the Iraqiyya Party, and so we have a weak government with somewhat questionable legitimacy.

I think had Maliki been a different kind of statesman, he might have tried to forge a collation not just with his predominantly

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Shi’a colleagues and the Kurds, but with Ayad Allawi by saying, “We’re the two biggest blocks, we’re going to have an Iraqi nationalist core government. The others can join us as they want, but we are the two big blocks and we will set the tone.” Instead, he basically left a big chunk of Iraq out of his government. It sounds as if that is again creating sectarian tensions that some people had thought were beginning to disappear in favor of a stronger government that would represent basically the Arab parts of Iraq. So I think there is a lot of work that remains to be done, this isn’t over.

I guess one shouldn’t expect easy transitions after Saddam’s terrible rule and the disruptions of the war. It’s going to take a long time, and I understand why people worry about a weakened Iraq becoming subject to Iranian influence and intervention. I think there is some risk of that. I think another risk is that, as they get their oil production up and running, the fight over who controls the distribution of the oil rent will become a very, very big issue. Iraq is at the point where four or five years from now it should be approaching very high levels of production, with huge amounts of money flowing in to whomever controls the central government. So, I think each political party will argue very strenuously over how that unique resource is allocated.

We don’t have very many examples in history of issues of that sort being handled in a generous and inclusive way. If Iraq can pull it off and make the oil resource genuinely a national resource, then the country has a potential future, economically certainly. If they don’t, it is going to become the issue they will fight over very intensively. You can imagine oil-producing areas saying, “Well, if the Kurds can separate, so can we.” If that’s the dynamic of the future Iraq, it’s going to be very tough for the country to hold together.

In Syria, it seems that Assad is drawing his last breath.

I think that is wishful thinking. It may be true, but it’s already been eight or nine months that he’s been under a lot of pressure, and I don’t quite see where the tipping point comes. Either there are massive defections from the regime, which can bring it down very quickly, or people in his own inner circle turn against him, or the Issue 1569 • January 2012

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opposition becomes much more coherent, organized, and violent, at which point it becomes a civil war, and then I don’t know why you would bet on the insurgents rather than the regime. Unfortunately, the truth is that the odds are not in favor of the insurgents unless there is outside intervention, and I don’t think the US, French, British, or the Turks are going to send in a military force, and Assad knows that. Assad faces a huge challenge—politically, I don’t think he can restore any semblance of real legitimacy—but I still don’t see how the opposition forces him out. That’s why this one strikes me as a really touchy case.

Where does Israel stand on Syria?

It is hard to read the Israelis on this because their initial instinct when the Arab Spring began was to be rather skeptical about it. Although there is no love for the

the Turkish-Brazilian effort on nuclear issues. I still don’t quite understand how that turned out so badly, but once that failed and we no longer had a framework in which to deal with that issue, I think things have been going downhill ever since.

So, for the moment, I think the United States doesn’t want to encourage the Israelis to pre-empt, to go to war, but I think there is a kind of low-grade destabilization effort going on already. That makes the idea of diplomatic engagement fairly difficult to square with a campaign targeting the nuclear capabilities. I can’t prove that any of this is being orchestrated from Washington or from Israel, but if it is not, it is pretty coincidental that computer viruses have just hit the nuclear related computers, explosions going off at missile bases, and things like that. I think we’re in a pretty tense period with Iran right now.

I understand why people worry about a weakened Iraq becoming subject to Iranian influence and intervention Syrian regime, it has been a very predictable regime; the ceasefire lines remain quiet, there are periodic proxy-wars in Lebanon and diplomatic standoffs and antagonisms, but in all honesty, since 1973 it has been a fairly orderly rivalry.

I think there are Israelis who deeply believe that they would be better off without the Assad regime, but there are those who say “Don’t be so sure.” You might end up with a more Muslim Brotherhood-influenced regime, it could actually increase unpredictability and instability, and you could end up with a civil war to the North.

At least Syria under the Assads has been stable. I don’t know what the balance between those two viewpoints is now, I do think a lot of Israelis have come to the conclusion that it is going to change in due course and they have to be ready for it.

But I’ve heard Israelis say “We are conservative these days; we can live with what we have known, but we’re not so sure we can live with what’s coming ahead.”

Do you sense any change in the USIran relationship at the moment?

I think now the relationship is antagonistic.

I think the turning point was the failure of

Is there a sense that when the going gets tough with an ally, Obama is willing to throw them under the bus?

Well, I know that is a view that particularly the Saudis have expressed, and I understand why particularly the disappearance of the Mubarak regime has preoccupied them. But in all honesty Mubarak was going to go, and the question was always, “What comes next?” So, as far as abandoning Mubarak, it is not as if we gratuitously tried to make his life more miserable by pulling the plug on him before he was already in very deep trouble. I would say that if Egypt is the test case, I don’t agree that Mubarak was abandoned. I don’t think he had a realistic prospect of passing on power to his chosen successor, and we then could all say that nothing is going to change and it would always be the same under a fatherto-son transition.

This was not the way it would work, and when the Americans tried to steer it towards Omar Suleiman, I think the Saudis would have been perfectly content with that outcome, it wouldn’t have been a destabilizing outcome on the international scene, but it wasn’t going to work domesti37

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cally in Egypt. So I’d say what happened in Egypt was destined to happen regardless of what the US tried to do, and I don’t accept the criticism that we abandoned Mubarak is quite accurate.

With Ali Abdullah Saleh [in Yemen], we tried to support the GCC in a soft transition. I don’t know whether it has worked yet, but I think there we have not been working at cross purposes with the Saudis. So again, if that is supposed to be the example of abandoning a longstanding ally, I think we have been very gentle and willing to take the time to get an agreed transition. I think we do accept that Yemen is Saudi Arabia’s backyard, and therefore they get the first call on how these things should be dealt with.

Syria is going to be a harder case. The Saudi position is more ambiguous; they have had a time when they got along well with Assad, but no longer, the same as us.

I don’t think any of us is very confident of where this is going next.

If there is going to be a parting of the ways in how the Americans and how the Saudis appreciate the new post-ArabSpring Middle East, I fear it will be over what do you do with these new regimes that are more heavily influenced by their own Islamic political parties, including now the Salafis in Egypt. This could put us and the Saudis on rather different sides of an ideological debate over the role of Islam in politics. We have come to terms with Islamic movements in some places, but it is going to be more of a challenge in Egypt if the Islamic movement there says the peace treaty with Israel ought to go, and the special relationship with the US ought to go, and women shouldn’t participate in political life.

The other thing that strikes me as being a potential issue in the US-Saudi relationship is Iran. If the Saudis begin to doubt that the US is effectively handling that issue, then you have a strategic problem.

I’m not sure we have the channels to keep this dialogue going in a serious and sophisticated way. We have transitions going on in Saudi Arabia, we’ve got people on our side who are not very knowledgeable about the Arab World, who are more preoccupied with domestic politics. I think at a time like this you need some very effective strategic communications going on.

What is your assessment of President Obama’s response to the Arab Spring?

They [the Obama administration] didn’t anticipate that this would happen. The Middle East looked like a frozen landscape for a long time, and when Obama came to power he was more prepared to deal with the Middle East as he thought it was. He talked about engaging with various regimes and reviving the peace process—and the democracy promotion theme that had been prominent for a brief period under George W. Bush was not a top priority for him. It was a return to a more realist-based model of how the United States would deal with the Middle East; less transformative, less interventionist, more diplomacy. So I think it is fair to say they didn’t anticipate this. Nor did many other people anticipate this.

Tunisia turned out to be the easy case; we ended up supporting what happened and had a very realistic understanding of the limits of the Ben Ali regime. We may have been surprised by the way in which the Arab Spring unfolded in Tunisia, but certainly were not surprised about the depth of alienation, and there was no rear-guard action to support Ben Ali, and we ended up on the right side of that one, even though strategically Tunisia is not that big an issue for the United States.

But by the time things moved to Egypt— and Egypt is a much bigger deal for American strategy in the Middle East—there were benchmarks, and so when you saw the same kind of large-scale peaceful mobilization, I think it didn’t take too long before the American establishment, including the secretary of state and the president, realized that Mubarak had to go.

Where they fell behind the curve and where I think they deserve to be criticized was thinking that the change in Egypt could be managed to be fairly limited.

That is, if Mubarak and [his son] Gamal were pushed aside or agreed to leave, there could be a soft transition to someone like Omar Suleiman. Certainly they felt that that would be a good outcome; it would reassure the Israelis, and wouldn’t constitute revolutionary change, but it would satisfy the demands of the protestors to get rid of the Mubaraks.

I think that was a misreading of what most Egyptians wanted. I don’t think it was a wise decision to try to steer things in

that direction and it looked silly when Secretary Clinton went public to say Mubarak needed to stay on to oversee the transition.

It looked at that point as if we were fighting a rearguard action. My understanding is at a certain point Obama decided to cut loose from this position and sent a message to the Egyptian military saying the US would support them in moving against Mubarak and Omar Suleiman.

I think Obama understood that you couldn’t micromanage the transition in Egypt and make it an American-friendly outcome with someone like Omar Suleiman in charge. The US was slow in recognizing the depth and need for change—that on the whole was not an impressive performance— but ended up accepting the outcome.

The one link they worked hard to keep intact was the US-Egyptian military relationship. I can tell you there were times when there were high-level conversations multiple times a day, not so much between the White House and State Department and the Egyptian authorities, but with the Pentagon, and the Pentagon became the channel through which they dealt with the new Egypt. That may or may not be good, but no-one denies the military’s importance still in Egypt; their attitude toward our diplomacy is pretty critical, but they say military-to-military relationships are fine.

So, the US has preserved something and keeping that link in today’s Egypt is significant. But the US has not managed to position itself to be important in Egypt as it enters a very complicated transition to a new era in which the Muslim Brotherhood, with whom the US has no significant relationship, is going to have a bigger voice.

The US is going to have to begin talking to Islamist movements in Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco, whether we like it or not. They have been very selective about whom they have contacts with, but I think the US cannot conduct normal relations with Egypt without having a different mindset towards how we deal with the Islamist reality. The US will have to be reasonably modest in its expectations. Egypt is going to be a sensitive and delicate case and I’m not sure the US has a lot of real expertise for understanding the new Egypt.

The Arab Spring is such a complicated phenomenon. The manifestations of it in Syria, Yemen, and Bahrain are all quite

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different, and they really force you to think about the tension between American interests and American values. In places like Bahrain, America simply accepts that its interests require that it allows things to be done that it may not be terribly happy with, but that’s the way it goes. In Syria, the US simply doesn’t know what to do. The regime is problematic and they want to see it changed, but they don’t know much about the opposition, they don’t have much influence, and nobody wants another military intervention. So for a lot of people watching what is happening in Syria, there is a lot of frustration, but not a clear sense of what to do. So, you can say that the US is not demonstrating brilliant leadership, but in all honesty, I don’t know who is. Everybody is wringing their hands, calling for change, sanctions, and this and that, but if it doesn’t work, we may find that we’re dealing with a regime like Saddam Hussein in the 1990s: everybody senses that it’s not going to last forever, but it hangs on despite the sanctions. Ten years can be a long time, and the US has not been very creative at thinking through alternatives to the binary outcome of either ‘Assad stays’ or ‘Assad goes.’

Does President Obama have a grand strategy for the Middle East?

It’s a good question, but it’s difficult to now imagine the US having a single grand strategy for the Middle East. The Middle East is far too volatile right now to have a single overarching theme. It didn’t work very well for the Bush administration, which was all about regime change and democratization. If that is what grand strategy consists of, some of us would say, let’s not aim for grand strategy; let’s focus on problems as they come along. This is not a time to be imagining that the US can remake the Middle East according to some overarching template, and it’s also not a period when we have huge spare capacity for dealing with foreign affairs problems. We are deeply preoccupied with our economic problems and election issues, so being a little bit on the modest side concerning grand strategy strikes me as understandable.

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an outsized role in today’s Middle East. I think we have the relationship with Turkey in pretty good shape after the events in Iraq last year, and that’s deliberate. I think it is something that is not popular in the United States, there’s suspicion of the AK Party, some see Turkey drifting away, and so on.

But if you say “What has this administration gotten right?” they have worked hard on their relationship with Turkey and it’s in pretty good shape right now. They have kept their eye on getting out of Iraq, which I think is the right thing to do, but there is a debate over it. They haven’t said, “What is going to happen in Iraq after we leave?

And maybe we have to renegotiate everything.” There are a few benchmarks where they have been pretty clear minded.

to pre-empt against Iran; even on Libya, he was slow to commit to a secondary role.

He’s been criticized for it, but I’m not so sure we will look back on Libya and say US policy was so misguided. It put NATO and the Europeans in a more prominent position, and although the US was not highly visible, it did quite a bit.

If there is a new Obama doctrine, I think that it is: intervene, but don’t do it visibly.

It’s what the US is doing in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Unfortunately, it gives more and more scope, not to your overt diplomacy, but to your covert action and your military-to-military relations. So, the most interesting statements on foreign policy these days are being made by the Secretary of Defense. Odd, but true. That tells us some-

The one relationship we cannot afford to mishandle in the future is the one with China They haven’t been very successful at thinking through the difficulties of dealing with an Iran that is feisty and constantly belligerent, but geo-strategically important and matters for what happens in Iraq.

There are a lot of things at stake. Obama had an initial inclination to try to engage.

It’s a nice word and sounds like it’s worth pursuing, but it hasn’t succeeded. You can say they haven’t really tried it, that they haven’t really made the commitment. Or that it’s not doable and that they will just have to wait out the internal recomposition of the Iranian political space until there is someone there who is more willing to be pragmatic. Meanwhile you just try to contain and not let things spin out of control. But I don’t think we have a sophisticated understanding of Iran; we tend to get caught up in the rhetorical excesses, not quite of the George W. Bush “axis of evil” stuff, but not very far from it.

I think Obama comes across as someone for whom foreign policy challenges are still a work in progress. He is a cautious decision-maker. He is not as impulsive as George W. Bush was. He is very suspicious of getting dragged into another Iraq-style endless war. He has some benchmarks that inform his approach. He’s not going to get stampeded into an intervention in Syria; I think his instinct is to urge the Israelis not

thing about where the weight of American engagement with issues in the Middle East is shifting. I think in so far as the State Department has a uniform view of the world, the people there would say the Middle East is last decade’s preoccupation. The future is with Asia, and the US needs to pivot towards more engagement in East Asia, less in the Middle East, wrap up Afghanistan, try to extricate ourselves from these overextended commitments without it looking like we’re just rushing for the exits. So I think we’re in an odd transitional moment when we don’t know if Obama were to be re-elected he would all of a sudden have an Obama doctrine, but for right now a grand strategy is the last thing I would expect.

Do you think this is the end of the American moment in the Middle East? Is the region turning away from the United States?

Yes. But I think it came earlier. The American moment was always a bit of an illusion. We were never able to shape the politics of the whole region, nor should we have ever imagined we could. But I think the Bush 43 administration, coming out of the end of the Cold War and the sense that we were the only power that matters anymore, did have a very ambitious view after 9/11 that they were going to use this 39

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unique moment of American hegemony to change the Middle East in fundamental ways. The argument was over whether Iraq was the first project of many, or if we get Iraq right would it replicate itself all over and these dictators would all come tumbling down once we set the train in motion. I think by about 2005/6 it was clear this wasn’t going to happen.

So, if there was an American moment, it was a very brief moment and a largely illusory one. But when the Bush administration went into Iraq, they did so as part of a larger desire to remake the Middle East, and in that sense they thought there was an American moment. What I think we all need to learn from history is that outsiders who think they can come in and remake the Middle East always get it wrong. The British, who were much better equipped in 1920 to remake the Middle East had a pretty good run at it, about twenty yearsworth. But the resistance started almost immediately. By the end, you almost get the impression of “My god, when can we get out of here,” without spending more treasure and getting into more trouble. So it didn’t work well for the British who were

much more committed to the whole project and much better prepared for it.

In all honesty, the Americans don’t make very good imperial overlords. We’re impatient, we want quick results, we don’t train people up to be colonial servants and spend their entire careers in the Middle East, to learn the languages and go native, and so on. We send soldiers in for eight-month tours, and by the time they leave, they never want to go back. You don’t build empires that way; I don’t think you build empires in the twenty-first century in any case. But had we taken the whole Iraq project seriously we would not have done it the way we did it. The mistakes made after the overthrow of the Saddam regime were just embarrassingly frequent and they spoke to a real fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of Iraqi society. By the end of 2003/04, I thought “They’re not going to pull it off, they have already made too many mistakes, this is going to turn out badly”—there was already an insurgency in the making.

I would say the American moment is over, and the American interest in the Middle East is waning. There is a sense that the Middle East is no longer the fulcrum of

If there is a new Obama doctrine, I think that it is: intervene, but don’t do it visibly

world power. We have treated it as if it was, because of oil, because of 9/11, because of Israel. And yet, if you look around, what is happening in Europe is more important in terms of the world economy; China obviously is also more important because of the world economy and geostrategic concerns. Maybe the Arab Spring captures a bit of attention because it is new and kind of exciting. But if it turns out badly, let’s say Egypt has a difficult transition, the glue will disappear from that, US-Egyptian relations might become more strained.

The whole Salafi phenomenon in Egypt worries people; 25 percent of the vote is a fairly large number for a political movement that a year ago nobody really talked about. So there are a lot of reasons to think that we may be at one of those moments when attention is going to shift elsewhere. Where the Americans see the greatest danger right now is not in the Middle East; it is in the Pakistan-AfghanIndian border areas. Not so much because of Al-Qaeda, but because of nuclear weapons and Pakistan and the end game in Afghanistan. You can say that is somehow connected to the Middle East, but it is not the core of the Middle East problem.

If the Americans have a crisis to be dealt with in the world, that’s where they’re going to focus their attention, that’s where they’re going to spend their dollars.

Where they want to be for the future is more Asia focused. Not because China is an enemy today, but because they don’t want it to become one. I think their concern is that keeping some kind of balance in Asia will reassure our friends in Asia— who are a little nervous about China’s growing power—and allow us to manage the relationship with China in a fairly reasonable way. I think the one relationship we cannot afford to mishandle in the future is the one with China. It’s just too big and too important. So we should be spending a lot of time and effort thinking that one through, and making sure that these two big powers do not collide and get into real competition in ways that could be quite destructive. In international relations theory, people say, “Well, you’ve never had a rising power that easily claims its preeminent position without challenges, and that usually causes conflicts.” We cannot afford to let it happen this time.

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Profile

The Dissident President President of Tunisia, Moncef Marzouki

Moncef Marzouki is inheriting the momentum of the Tunisian revolution. He faces considerable challenges, but a respected political career and a reputation for honesty might not be enough to put the new president on sure footing.

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oncef Marzouki’s oversized glasses are his and his party’s trademark. Tunisia’s Congrés Pour la République (CPR) chose red spectacles to remind voters of their leader’s, at times, academic sensibilities about politics. “Democratic politicians have long had difficulty explaining to ordinary people that even if they try to avoid politics, politics nevertheless affects them. Dictatorship in the Arab world has managed to create a generalised sense of apathy in the population, with the regimes not having any popular support but managing to work nonetheless as a result of the apathy of their populations.” he told Egyptian Newspaper, Al-Ahram.

As elaborate as the words are, Marzouki’s calculations need to be clear. On his shoulders rests the leadership of the first great experiment in democratic politics in the modern Arab world.

He isn’t starting from a position of strength. While Tunisia’s first democratic elections went off smoothly, strikes and protests continue to plague the tiny African nation that made history almost a year ago today.

This time last year, in a small town, in a relatively unknown region of a small state, a Tunisian man tipped the scales of autocracy in the Middle East and began a cascading movement that changed the face of the region in less than a year.

Marzouki is inheriting that momentum.

Not long ago Tunisia was best known for its beaches and mix of Italian, French and Arab cultures. Today Tunisia is heralded as a leader and example of democratic applications in the Arab world. Marzouki’s plan? Go big or go home. His first order of business as newly appointed President of

Marzouki now looks to some to be a shrewd political player willing to compromise on core issues to gain political ground Tunisia was to spend political capital and ask of his nation a six-month political truce including a moratorium on strikes and protests to prevent what he warns would be akin to committing “collective suicide.”

The challenges are considerable. Foremost, he must build democratic institutions quickly and slow political Islam’s advance. Tunisia is the litmus test and Libya and Egypt are watching closely. Although such responsibility cannot be handled tepidly, Marzouki is confident: “If things aren’t working out within six months, I will submit my resignation”.

Leading Marzouki will be Prime Minister Hamad Jbeli. In October, voters handed victory to Jbeli’s Ennahda party and secured the most powerful post in Tunisia for the leader of moderate Islamist.

Marzouki’s task will be answering to the demands of Tunisians on domestic affairs.

But Marzouki is both close to home on the domestic concerns of Tunisians and far from it. He is a veteran opposition figure and has been called a dogged defender of human rights. In 1980, he joined the Tunisian League for the Defense of Human Rights and was unanimously elected chairman

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nine years later by its members. Five years into his tenure, supporters of former President Ben Ali forced him from the position, prompting Marzouki to symbolically run for the Presidency in 1994. For his audacity he was stripped of his passport, jailed, and ultimately forced into exile in France.

He grew the CPR from within France and continued to contest Ben Ali’S rule, returning to Tunisia when Ben Ali was toppled in January. His supporters praise his unwavering fight for democracy in Tunisia, and love his book, published in Arabic and French, ‘Dictators on Watch: A Democratic Path for the Arab World’.

Marzouki’s critics, however, portray him as propped up by French patronage and shrewd political strategies.

Marzouki was born on July 7, 1945, in Grombalia, near Tunis, Tunisia’s capital and biggest city. Marzouki was a well-connected affluent student who studied medicine, neurology, and public health at the University of Strasbourg in France. He took up the life of an academic, teaching medicine at Tunisia’s University of Sousse from 1981 until 2000.

Strictly left-leaning in his politics (he traveled to South Africa in the early 1990s to study post-apartheid democratisation), in 2003 he alarmed his supporters by signing a political cop-operation agreement with Islamist party Ennahda that was markedly silent on secularism.

With Ennahda’s 89 deputies in the new parliament, and CPR’s second place holding with 29 seats, Marzouki now looks to some to be a shrewd political player willing to compromise on core issues to gain political ground. Just before the October elections, he told Agence France Presse that the old “secular and Francophone” left was “totally disconnected from the real problems of Tunisian society,” a statement that ignored his own French education and patronage.

When Marzouki took the oath of office on 13 December, his admirers and supporters held their breath as the 66 yearold choked back tears. For advocates of a modern Middle East that balances Islam and secular politics and values human rights, Marzouki embodies a convergence of the past and the future. For neighboring states studying his steps, there is considerable hope in Marzouki’s appointment. Issue 1569 • January 2012

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Wealth of Nations

Net Investments

Are the eye-watering valuations of social media websites justified? Probably.

Last year it was LinkedIn, this year it will probably be Facebook, and next year likely Twitter. Shrugging off fears of a new dotcom bubble, enthusiasm among investors for social media stock is growing on the back of anticipated public listings, forecasted market growth in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, and major new investments like the recent purchase of a $300 million stake in Twitter by Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal. Are the high valuations we are seeing justified? And why are social media sites so important in the first instance?

Desné Maisie

market sees limitless potential in LinkedIn’s future growth, or these are signs of another major Internet stock bubble.

Social media, or Web 2.0, falls into the media and technology sector. As sectors go, media stocks are normally cyclical and particularly vulnerable to economic recession, and technology stocks can be tricky to evaluate because they reflect consumer trends and fast-changing innovations of normally non-essential products and services. Sometimes the market’s readiness lags behind analysts’ forecasts for the company. Also, the success of social media is particularly dependent on perceptions and trends of youth markets, and so it is highly sensitive to where users think are the coolest places to hang out on the Web.

Google is said to have lost intolerable amounts of money with its acquisition of YouTube, and everybody’s favorite media baron Rupert Murdoch recently admitted (by tweet) that his behemoth NewsCorp learned an expensive lesson (some analysts say in the region of $1 billion) in its loss-making acquisition of MySpace. The Global X Social Media ETF (exchange traded fund, a basket of representative stocks) has seen its value steadily decline over the past year.

It could be that investors have forgotten the lessons of the dotcom bubble. On the other hand, it might also be that the performance of the Global X Social Media ETF, which includes several of the lesser known social media companies, indicates the sector is being crowded by pretenders punching above

Photo © Getty Images

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here has recently been a buzz around investing in social media stocks, which follows a spate of highly subscribed initial public offerings (IPOs) in the sector. The success of the professional networking website LinkedIn’s IPO was dazzling, and the company currently enjoys a market capitalization of $6.8 billion. The deals website Groupon has a market capitalization of $12.2 billion following its recent IPO; games developer Zynga and Chinese social networking website RenRen are estimated at $6.2 billion and $1.53 billion respectively. The hotly anticipated IPO of Facebook, the world’s largest social networking site, has seen analysts punting its market value at a whopping $100 billion, which would make Facebook one of the world’s largest companies—surpassing McDonald’s and Disney. The microblogging website Twitter is thought to be worth as much as $10 billion. Are these stellar valuations justified for such a young sector?

Most of these companies have a price to earnings ratio (p:e) exceeding 20, which is appropriate for growth stocks. To put the investment risk in perspective, Google is seen as a sensible yet innovative technology stock. It is worth around $202.4 billion, and trades at a palatable p:e of about 21.3. Then consider LinkedIn. At the time of writing, LinkedIn stock is trading on a p:e ratio of about 1,388.50. Already vulnerable to short selling, LinkedIn’s stock could be regarded as heavily—even dangerously—overweight, as investment guru Warren Buffet has cautioned. Either the

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their weight, and looking for a free ride off the success of big-name brands like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Many companies failed during the dotcom bust a decade ago, but some impressive Web-based companies survived and became Internet stalwarts. Amazon and Google are examples.

Social media websites undoubtedly have solid business appeal. They can improve product awareness and increase sales, facilitate and maintain contact across international borders, and their capacity to share information at near-instantaneous speeds is unrivalled in human history. But they struggle to keep up to date with the changing tastes of Web users and make profits beyond advertising and marketing.

It might be that Murdoch’s social media consultants were not savvy enough to recognize the fickleness of this market, or to appreciate that MySpace had largely cannibalized the mostly teen users of social networking website Bebo. Similarly, Google is trying to gobble up market share from Facebook with its GooglePlus social networking platform, although so far it has not gained traction.

Have social media stocks market peaked even before they have had their day in the sun? Or were some of these developments premature? Web 2.0 is only now becoming an indispensable part of everyday life.

Some analysts think there is still plenty of room for growth, particularly in emerging markets where computers and mobile telephony are still being rolled out with great success. In developed markets, online gaming, instant messaging, and other variations of Web 2.0 are increasingly popular with the lucrative teens’ and tweens’ markets. Sounding a cautious note, social media consultant Colin Gilchrist says, “There is absolutely more room for growth, but not much. I do foresee some barriers going up, especially across continents, and people networking in silos.” Most of Facebook’s users are in Europe and North America, forecasts for Chinese social media stocks are uneven, and Twitter’s market growth is rapidly increasing in the Middle East and North Africa. Using some form of social media might become something as commonplace and necessary as owning a mobile phone or having access to email. Indeed, as social media websites increasingly incorporate telephony and email, it might become impossible to avoid them.

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There are therefore many optimists about social media, one of them being Prince AlWaleed bin Talal, who recently acquired a $300 million stake in Twitter.

Despite reservations from analysts about overweight valuations, strong brands like Twitter and Facebook might indicate that social media’s zenith is still coming, and not least because of the untapped potential of markets in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. While optimistic about the latent potential of social media, Gilchrist thinks valuations need to come down, and worries about the impact of big money chasing these organic platforms.

The monetization of social media platforms is a complicated issue. Online content and services providers feel they should be remunerated for their innovations, which also provide enormous value to our everyday lives. Similarly, the benefit

to advertisers is obvious. However, social media websites are distinguished from other websites because their content is user-generated; charge users and they will migrate to other social media. This is a critical aspect of the capitalization of social media: they require a business model that recognizes that people are their products and not their consumers.

Social media valuations will remain a dark art until the staying power of reputable and useful brands is established. For now, LinkedIn is the stock to watch to get a real sense of what this market will do next. Desné Masie's background is in marketing, journalism, and financial services. Capital markets and their regulation, media theory, and the sociology of economics are the subject of her PhD research at the University of Edinburgh Business School.

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Editor's Choice

The Ayatollah and the Pearl Harbor Moment Amir Taheri

Sir Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion have taught us that for every action there is an equal or opposite reaction. His third law begins with the words “A force is a push or a pull upon an object that results from its interaction with another object. Forces result from interactions.” One cannot help but muse that had this eminent physicist taken the decision to make his career in Political Science rather than Physical Science, whether he would today be applying the words of those famous laws to an analysis and understanding of the actions and reactions that have swept across the Middle East in the past year.

This January, as we reflect on the upheaval in the Middle East, two articles published in Asharq Al-Awsat stand out as clearly demonstrating the balance of action and reaction in political terms. Progress on the one hand is demonstrated in Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed’s article on the positive action emerging in Egypt regarding open discussions that everyone is getting involved in, whilst what can only be thought of as regression and a turning to the dark days of the past, is all too apparent in Amir Taheri’s account of Iran and it’s stance toward America.

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he United States’ global leadership is “finished” and capitalism is “on the verge of collapse.” The time has come for the Islamic Republic to “lead mankind on a new path”. This is the message that, this week, Iran’s top two leaders were trying to spread at home and abroad.

Inside Iran, “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei travelled to Qom on his sixth visit in a year, to mobilise the regime’s dwindling clerical base. Recalling the Prophet’s Ghazavat victories, Khamenei boasted that he was “on the threshold of new Badr and Kheybar moments.”

Thousands of miles away in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was boasting about how Latin America “once the backyard of the American Great Satan” was fast becoming “the advance post of global revolution” led

by Iran. Commenting on the visit, the daily Kayhan newspaper in Tehran went further: ”Today, Latin America is Iran’s backyard,” it asserted in an editorial Tuesday.

The delusion that the US is about to collapse and that its leadership role will devolve to Iran has become a major theme of Khomeinist propaganda. It is the centre of discourse in seminars, some attended by professional anti-Americans from Europe and the United States, and a favourite topic for editorials in the stateowned media.

Almost every day, the official news agency features an interview with some “international expert”, from places as far apart as Russia and Bolivia, claiming that the days of the “Great Satan” are numbered.

Perhaps influenced by such “experts”, generals from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) routinely claim that they are looking for an opportunity to “teach America a lesson.”

One effect of this escalation in Khomeinist hubris is the virtual disappearance of Is-

rael from official hate propaganda. There was a time when “wiping Israel off the map” was the surest way for every scoundrel’s 15 minutes of fame. Today, Israel is regarded as too insignificant an enemy for the mighty Khomeinist empire. The scoundrels have jumped many rungs higher to talk of wiping the US off the map.

Those officials less affected by hubris, offer a more moderate analysis. Foreign Minister Ali-Akbar Salehi, for example, says that, with US on the way out, Iran could share global leadership, notably with China and Russia, forging a “new world order”.

Propagandists disguised as academics are building an industry based on claims that the US has become a “paper tiger” and that anyone with an ounce of courage could twist its tail with impunity.

Papers are published on how the US, under President Barrack Obama, “ran away” from Iraq and is preparing to “run away” from Afghanistan. Much is made of the fact that Obama wrote letters to Khamenei without getting a reply.

By any account, the US does have the wherewithal to defend its interests.

It is spending over $700 billion, almost as much as the entire Iranian gross national product (GDP), on defence. The American military expenditure is double the total expenditure of China, Russia, India, Japan, Brazil, France and the United Kingdom.

The US has the world’s only blue-water navy capable of operating in all oceans.

(Last week, it was the US navy, not the IRGC’s world-conquering boats, which freed the captured Iranian fishermen held

by Somali pirates for months.)

The small portion of the United States’ air and naval assets concentrated around Iran and nearby regions provide many times more firepower than the “Supreme Guide” could muster.

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Photo © Getty Images

For Iran, provoking a military clash with the US is a bad bargain, to say the least.

The assumption that the US is “finished” as a major power is equally wrong.

Whatever happens, the US is the world’s third largest country in terms of territory and population. It is also the world’s biggest economy with a GDP of around $15 trillion, almost a quarter of total global GDP. Whilst economic and military power helped build America's leadership position, that position is not the fruit of raw power alone. For more than a century, to different people across the globe, the US has been a cultural and political magnet of unique pull.

There are no Americans who wish to immigrate to Iran; but go to the American consulates in Dubai or Istanbul and you will see lines of American visa-seekers going round the blocks.

Americans are not rushing to buy the Iranian rial that has lost 50 per cent of its value against the dollar in the past few month. Before the mullahs seized power one US dollar was exchanged for 70 IraIssue 1569 • January 2012

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Thousands of miles away in Caracas, the Venezuelan capital, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was boasting about how Latin America “once the backyard of the American Great Satan” was fast becoming “the advance post of global revolution” led by Iran nian rials. Last week, the dollar was worth 18,000 rials, whilst Iranians were queuing to buy the greenback.

Building strategy on crude anti-Americanism is both unwise and ultimately self-defeating. The course of history is strewn with the debris of anti-American dreams. In his time, Hitler forecast “the end of America” and the advent of “global Aryan leadership”. Japanese militarists sung from their own “end of America” hymn-sheets and Stalin and his successors degenerated Marxism into a crude anti-American cult. Mao

Zedong was the original inventor of the term “paper tiger”, to describe America. More vulgar despots such as Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi also used anti-Americanism. This article was printed in Asharq Al-Awsat Amir Taheri is a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat and has published 11 books in 20 languages.

Taheri's latest book "The Persian Night" is published by Encounter Books in London and New York..

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Editor's Choice

Who are the Salafists, the Liberals, the Muslim Brotherhood?

Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed

T

party posters, and following this, her popularity amongst ordinary people has more than tripled, according to the candidate herself. Whilst one of the Salafist al-Nour party leaders, Sheikh Mohammed Abdul Nour, who is running in the second phase of the Egyptian parliamentary elections, issued statements reassuring everybody that if the al-Nour party wins they will not shut down the banks or the beaches. More than this, he even told the Salafist supporters that the liberals are Muslims, just like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafists!

Here, the Egyptian Salafists are putting forward a model that represents the extreme Islamist right-wing on social issues in a society where controversy always accompanies elections. However politically, the most right-wing are groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Rashid Ghannouchi’s al-Nahda party in Tunisia. However following the al-Nahda party’s electoral victory, Ghannouchi immediately flew to Washington, not Mecca. He even visited one of the most strategically proIsraeli thank-tanks in America, and reportedly assured the audience that the Tunisian constitution and politics will not be anti-Israeli. He also reportedly expressed his support for a Muslim having the right to change his religion if he so wishes, and also said that he was in the process

of negotiating with Tunisia's secularists, in order for them to join the government.

When asked about Palestine and Israel, he underscored that Palestine is the least of his concerns, as he is more worried about finding jobs for more than one million unemployed Tunisians.

Of course, ousted Tunisian president Zine El Abedine Ben Ali would never have dared to issue any such statements or make such promises during his presidency, whilst nobody today has criticized Ghannouchi’s statements in this regard.

No doubt we are living a new era that is full of talk and rhetoric, and we do not know if such talk will prove to be empty promises or concrete pledges until we see the new reality on the ground. Do the Salafists in Egypt truly believe that women have the right to work and participate in social life in an equal manner to man? Do they accept that women, instead of staying at home with the kids, should run for parliament? Will they truly not shut down Egypt’s banks and beaches? Are the Islamists priorities now focused on securing employment for their people and not going to war to liberate Jerusalem?

From my experience, I believe that the best thing is to wait and see. We should follow the principle of “the proof of the pudding is in the eating.” We might have misunderstood or misjudged these “fundamentalists” who were previously prevented from reaching power under the pretext of their extremist views; or they might be cunning as the fox. This article was printed in Asharq Al-Awsat

Photo © Getty Images

he Egyptian scene has caused us a lot of confusion! We can no longer differentiate between the Islamists and the Liberals, between the Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood, in the same manner as we could in the past.

It seems we will be preoccupied for some time learning the new concepts and names in Egypt, and this is just after the first year of the Arab revolutions. This is part of the positive action that has taken place, namely the open discussions that everybody is taking part in about taking future positions based upon information and awareness.

Some people may take false positions in order to win elections, but public opinion is now aware of this tendency. This is something that all politicians around the world do to some extent; politics is not a dogmatic profession, but rather positions vary according to the prevailing circumstances.

Salafists in Egypt, like Salafists elsewhere in the Islamic world, are concerned about social affairs, and deal with such issues based upon strict religious guidelines. The Salafists are the true “fundamentalists”, in the original sense of the world, meaning they seek a return to the “fundamental” ideas and principles of the faith, as they see them. Women’s issues are one of their controversial priorities, and they are concerned with controlling all aspects and details of women’s lives. However despite their strict interpretation of Islam, Egypt’s Salafists took everyone by surprised when allowing a female Salafist al-Nour Party parliamentary candidate to appear on a party poster.

Insaf Khalil, a female Salafist al-Nour Party candidate running for a parliamentary seat in Egypt’s coastal city of Ismailia would previously promote her electoral campaign with posters of flowers, rather than posters bearing her own image.

However the Salafist party leaders have asked her to put her own picture on the

Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed is the General Manager of Al-Arabiya television. Mr Al-Rashed is the former Editor-in-Chief of Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper and Al-Majalla magazine. He is a regular writer for Asharq Al-Awsat.

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The Arts

Inside the Iron Lady A review of the Margaret Thatcher biopic, starring Meryl Streep Feminism, class struggle, Christianity, and keen ambition are all addressed in Phyllida Lloyd's new biopic of Margaret Thatcher, The Iron Lady. Meryl Streep has won plaudits for her portrayal of the divisive Stateswoman, but does the film manage to make Thatcherism relevant today?

Nicholas Blincoe No one walks quite like Margaret Thatcher. She scurries with her knees bent, the handbag swinging like a tightly wound metronome. In the recently released film, The Iron Lady, Meryl Streep captures Thatcher’s walk just this side of parody.

We see the elderly Thatcher darting across a corridor, unseen by the machinegun-toting policemen who share her home—or keep her prisoner, as her husband Denis Thatcher remarks. The way she moves, she might be the clockwork Iron Lady.

She is certainly a shell of her former self.

Thatcher is suffering from dementia and her beloved husband is long-dead, a hallucination who is Thatcher’s sole companion in a lonely old age.

The Iron Lady is framed as a series of reminiscences in Thatcher’s failing mind.

The key internal drama is her struggle with hallucinations. She knows that the ever-present Denis is a symptom of her dementia, or madness as she unfashionably insists upon calling it. Yet if she succeeds in banishing Denis then she will truly be alone (Thatcher discounts her loyal daughter, Carol, played affectingly

by Olivia Colman. She always preferred the company of men, we are told). Such a sad, quiet tone inevitably casts a pall over her life. There are grand events, of course. We see the murder of Thatcher’s chief of staff, Airey Neave, and the attempted killing of Thatcher herself by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA), the decision to sink an Argentine destroyer in the Falklands War, and her final deposing by disloyal ministers.

These events are given an operatic gran-

deur by director Phyllida Lloyd—music swirls, leaves fall, courtiers weep—but they are snapshots that lack the urgency of a continuing unfolding drama.

The film may have its failings, but it is a bona fide commercial success with sell-out screenings across the United Kingdom. It has also provoked a national debate on Thatcher’s legacy. Thatcher remains as divisive a figure twenty years after the end of her Prime Ministership as she was in her pomp. She is either loved or loathed, and if one is English— and even more so if one is Irish or Scottish—then it is impossible to assess her reign with a cool head. The film allows us to look at her again and ask what her real story is—perhaps especially because the film fails to find its own answer.

Reviewers have wondered if Thatcher’s success is a feminist story. She was the first woman to become a prime minster by winning a general election (Indira Gandhi and Golda Meir were appointed in backroom deals, in the absence of suitable men). Phyllida Lloyd argues that the film is feminist in its way, because it puts

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the story of an old woman at the centre.

However, Guardian columnist Suzanne Moore reflects the view of many when she writes that no matter how much she admires Streep’s performance, good women “strong and true” will not identify with the film. Feminism is a politics based on sisterhood and solidarity and Thatcher never sought female allies, indeed, she often did without any allies at all, but simply cracked on regardless ( ‘to crack on’ is part of a lexicon of old-fashioned, understated English verbs that get a revival in screenwriter Abi Morgan’s subtle script).

Perhaps, instead, we should see her success as part of a class struggle. The best biography of Margaret Thatcher, One of Us by Hugo Young, places a great deal of weight upon her relationship with her father, a shopkeeper and small-town politician. On this view, her enemies were the vastly more privileged aristocrats and squires of her own party who hoped to govern by making as few waves as possible, cooking up deals in private and presenting an imperturbable face to the voting public. Thatcher could not do imperturbable:

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even after professional vocal training took the strident corners off her voice she was still the most shrill and intense figure in British public life. More crucially, she felt her party’s quietism had succeeded only in managing the decline of a once great nation. Her aim was to restore the greatness to Britain.

The Mayor of London, conservative politician Boris Johnson, combines the class and feminist interpretations when he claims that Thatcher’s struggle was against male complacency. It is this side of Thatcher that has proved so inspirational to American Republican activists who view her as a rightwing rebel against the politics-as-usual attitude that afflicts Washington. In this sense, she is almost more American than British: a valued politician whose attitudes are shaped by strong Protestant Christianity. In The Iron Lady, this side of her philosophy is rather bizarrely given voice via a misquotation from Gandhi: “Watch your thoughts because they become your words … your words become your actions … your actions become your habits … your habits

become your character.” She believes wholeheartedly in the power of individuals to shape the destiny of nations simply by doing the right in their everyday lives.

In short, she believes in the heroism of small lives in small towns. The irony is that her own northern town was too small for her: her drive, conviction and ambition made her a world figure.

In Abi Morgan’s script, Thatcher declares that the problem is that everyone wants to ‘be’ something, rather than ‘do’ something. The tragedy for Margaret is that she was ultimately trapped by the pressure to be the Iron Lady. In the end, she was beyond all reason, incapable of confronting the world except as an unbending and unforgiving colossus in perpetual motion—handbag in hand. Nicholas Blincoe is an author, critic and screenwriter living between London and the Palestinian city of Bethlehem. He was a founding member of the New Puritans literary movement and writes regularly for The Guardian and The Telegraph.

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The Arts

Life Through a Kaleidoscope Iran’s Queen of Arts “Iran was a very peaceful country before the revolution,” says Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. At 87, she still has the art world clamouring.

Amy Assad Against the backdrop of the Second World War and the Iranian Revolution, Iranianborn Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian has led a colorful life, to say the least. At our meeting place in a London hotel lobby, she sits surrounded by an entourage.

As two generations of family members who have travelled with her from America are thoughtfully introduced, one by one, an added reason for Farmanfarmaian’s widespread appeal becomes apparent.

A veteran of the 1950s New York art scene, Farmanfarmaian’s charm secured her the close friendships of the likes of Andy Warhol and Milton Avery, among numerous other contemporaries. Today, she still has strong Persian features—at that time an exotic look that captured the imagination of many including the sculp-

tor Alexander Calder, who once trailed around after her at a party in his impatience to meet her. “Finally he said, ‘I am following this young lady for 15 minutes and nobody has introduced me to her.

Introduce to me to this girl!’ So I was introduced to this fat and white-haired man and he was … ho ho ho… laughing like this,” she reveals mischievously.

Described as a mixture of Minimalism and Abstract Expressionism, Farmanfarmaian’s own work combines the rich heritage of the Persian techniques of mirror mosaics, geometric patterns and reverse-glass painting with a modernist finish. Now 87, Farmanfarmaian—still adventurous as ever—is quoted as saying that she is on a “constant quest for the new.” She is also enjoying a renewed prominence. Widely recognized as one of Iran’s most influential working artists, with a permanent collection in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (MOMA), she was among ten contemporary nominees for London’s Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) Jameel prize last year. She released her second book, Monir Farmanfarmaian: Cosmic Geometry. It is a first, extensive monograph of her work that was published on 31 October 2011

by Damien Editore and The Third Line.

With one of her pieces having soared past

bidding expectations at the Sotheby’s October 2011 auction of Arab and Iranian contemporary art, she is certainly maintaining her presence.

Well-earned prestige and an intimidating repertoire of friends do nothing to prevent one from feeling at ease around Farmanfarmaian. Her art, as an imitation of life, is distinctive in its captivating use of colors and dazzling mirror work. She has grandmotherly warmth, a contagiously husky giggle—and is unexpectedly unassuming.

Recalling her time in New York in the 1940s as a young woman straight out of Iran she says, “I became very friendly and very popular to the social life of art in America because I was very…” One of her companions interjects, “…beautiful, young, exotic!”

And relating a rather frosty meeting with Jackson Pollock, she says, “Once, we talked and he thought most likely I’m very stupid and ignorant, and left.” She freely declares her admiration for his art.

Farmanfarmaian’s own work combines the heritage of Persian techniques of mirror mosaics, geometric patterns and reverse-glass painting with a modernist finish. “I work very much with the old traditional Iranian art but I try to make it modern and up to date,” she says. Her artistic inspiration and developed style has also come from extensive travelling: “I went to shrines, I went to private homes, I went to palaces and it was always some part that was mirror work. I chose mirrors because of their 3,000 year tradition in Persia.” Farmanfarmaian has studied the traditional techniques and rituals of nomadic tribes in Iran, touring ancient cities to absorb their vernacular architecture and complex ornamentation. “Little by little from flower painting to painting flowers behind glass, and I said alright I’ll mix this one with mirrors. I love these shiny things.”

Less glowing episodes in Farmanfarmaian’s life were entwined with the 1979 Iranian Revolution. “It was really like any other revolution, like the messes you see in Libya, Syria and Egypt—it was awful,” she recalls. As her husband was a direct descendent of the Qajar-era shahs, and therefore deemed an enemy of the revolt, she was compelled to abandon her home and country. “Everything I had in the house, it was confiscated, everything: my art, my draw-

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ing, my mirror work, painting, clothes. We came out with three suitcases for two weeks and never went back.”

Farmanfarmaian, born in 1924, experienced her first artistic epiphany as a child in Iran during her “first real contact with art,” while living in the small town of Qazvin. She recalls that “the houses were colorfully decorated with painting on the door panels or on the ceiling, with beautiful flowers, nightingales and stained glass. When I was laid down for my afternoon nap I would count the rows of nightingales and flowers.” Years later, she felt dissatisfied at the Tehran University of Fine Art, having found more inspiration in the postcards brought in by her French teacher at school depicting paintings by the French modernists. “I was intrigued by their abstract nature—they reminded me of Qazvin’s flowers.” In a response that later becomes apparent as typical spontaneity Farmanfarmaian drew a conclusion, “I said I must go to Paris then, that is the center of beautiful art!”

But the Second World War thwarted her efforts to depart for occupied France. “So I decided that instead I would go to Morocco and from there to Paris, and they said ‘No, the Germans are there you cannot go’— heh heh heh!” Finally, still determined, she decided to wait it out in America. “And after the war I [could] go to Paris and study art.” After landing a place on a US warship with her brother and two of his friends, they travelled for 27 days from the south of Iran through India, then Australia and on to Los Angeles. “They put me in as a nurse and my three companions down in the soldier’s department.”

Once in LA, Farmanfarmaian decided she had to go to New York: “I had seen New York in the movies and I thought that that must be the best place for school and that everything must be the best.” Subsequently, she would attend Parsons School of Design—a new experience in more ways than one: “They had a lot of nude drawings,” she says “In Tehran we never had nude drawings… sometimes we had a man but with a long shirt, shorts and tucked in here that was all.”

After graduating in the early 1950s, beguiled by New York’s world of Abstract Expressionism, Farmanfarmaian became friendly with a gentleman who lectured in the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

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The Arts

“I used to go there very often, he came to me and said you are stranger looking than the others, where are you from.” He would introduce her to others in the MOMA curatorial crowd, as well as the co-operative galleries on Manhattan’s 10th street. “Once a month the great artists would attend: Jackson Pollock, Larry Rivers, Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning, Milton Avery, Phillip Johnson and Frederich Kiesler,” she says, “I got to know these artists personally and went to their exhibitions.”

Farmanfarmaian was invited to many parties after that. “I remember one friend’s house: Peggy Rice, her husband was Bernard Rice. They had the magnificent long stone houses, the antiquity and the modern art.” This was where she met Calder, and later became friendly with his wife.

“He was very kind and sweet. He invited me to his studio in Connecticut and gave me a small piece of mobile. I still have it.”

She would also form a close bond with the artists Milton Avery, Louise Nevelson, and Joan Mitchell. While working in the now-redundant department store Bonwit Teller as a fashion designer and layout artist Farmanfarmaian became friendly with her shy colleague, Andy Warhol. Asking her what was he like, she says, “Crazy!”

She then thinks a minute, “No, as a young man… very quiet, thick glasses.”

Farmanfarmaian returned to Iran in 1957 to marry and rapidly established herself as an artist, holding exhibitions across

Europe, the US, and Tehran. These years were described as her golden years of creativity, when her signature style combining ancient Iranian design techniques with her Western experiences came into fruition.

Returning for visits to New York during the 1960s, she would also witness Warhol’s growing success. “I saw him all the time in New York Times, Time and Life magazine.

It was wonderful. He was so popular, selling his work for 60,000 dollars.” In the early 1970s her daughter Nima—who would later organize and accompany Warhol on his trip to Iran—was writing for his Interview magazine. “She said, ‘Mummy, Andy wants to see you.’” During their meeting, Farmanfarmaian asked him, “Don’t you remember that we used to paint shoes for $25 a shoe and how happy you and I were?

He said, ‘But Monir, it was so much money!’ He was fun, poor thing.”

Farmanfarmaian was also in New York during the outbreak of the Iranian Revolution. Her husband, an international lawyer visiting clients outside Iran, urged

her to stay put. “My husband kept saying ‘Stay there for another two weeks, don’t come ’til I come and we’ll come back together.’ Then they burned the cinema in south of Iran. I said to my husband, ‘To hell with it, I’m coming back. I don’t wait for you anymore [sic.], something is going to happen there.’ So I went.” She describes the scene that she encountered: “There was screaming on the roof ‘God was great, God is great!’ I was really upset, crying.” On her husband’s suggestion they took the children to New York for a short holiday. The plan was to “Come back again if everything is quiet there.”

But they did not go back. In 1991, while exiled in New York, her husband passed away. She says: “In 1992 because I was very sad, I thought maybe I can do better in Tehran. I came to Tehran; it looked to me so miserable, so different, everybody in the black veil with the beard, without the tie. I said, ‘No, I cannot live there.’ I went back to New York.” Farmanfarmaian did eventually return in to Tehran in 2003, about which she sais, “Fortunately, my mirror work is successful and the only place I can do it is in Tehran.”

This latest segment of Farmanfarmaian’s life is considered to have inspired some of her best work. Drawing her mirror designs on paper to her specifications before they are cut by craftsmen, she seems gripped by the intricacies and endless possibilities of creating complex geometric shapes. “I became aware how these old masters can mix the form of their hexagon to pentagon and pentagon on octagon,” she says, “I asked how they could do that. They said, ‘Each of them is a shape inside a circle, all you do is divide the circle.’”

Farmanfarmaian never stops searching for new methods: “You can create a thousand different designs in each of these forms which haven’t been discovered yet by artists. I am touching just a corner of it I think—just a corner of it—I think the new generation and new artists can create magnificent pieces of this geometric design to integrate them.”

Her energetic productivity may well be attributed to a member of that new generation, which now stands to benefit from the timeless quality of her mirror works— glittering collages, echoing the infinite reflections of a life well lived.

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The Critics

A History of Power The Struggle for Power in Syria: Politics and Society under Asad and the Baath Party

by Nokalaos van Dam I.B. Taurus 2011 A review of the fourth edition of The Struggle for Power in Syria: Politics and Society under Asad and the Baath Party.

This book, now in its fourth edition, is a thorough and highly informative study of minority groups in the Syrian Arab Republic. The work covers the constitution, history, and effects of minority groups on internal politics of the state, with an emphasis on the ruling Alawi group. Author Nikolaos Van Dam has revised this edition to include an account of the rule of Bashar Al-Assad; previous editions dealt exclusively with the rise of Bashar Al-Assad’s late father, Hafiz Al-Assad, following the break-up of the United Arab Republic

and the Ba’thist coup in 1963. The core of the book remains the same as previous editions, if slightly updated. New chapters

A New Time for Democracy Securing the Arab Revolutions: Opportunities and Dangers

by Wadah Khanfar, chaired by Mehdi Hasan SOAS At SOAS—the School of Oriental and African Studies in London—the former Director General of Al-Jazeera Wadah Khanfar gave voice to the challenges of the post-revolution era in the Arab World. Having left Al-Jazeera (AJ) in 2011, Khanfar has become a regular speaker on conferences and lectures worldwide, speaking about the Arab Spring uprisings and AJ’s role throughout its coverage.

Wadah Khanfar defined the Arab Spring as the uprising not only of the people but also of a new version of democracy. In a conference organised by the Middle East Monitor, the former Director of Al-Jazeera said the social media have given people direct power over governments, creating what he defines as a “2.0 Democracy.” The senior journalist said that people began to realize to what extent they have power and that social media would redefine the way democracy functions, by making “people participate in decision making directly.”

Speaking at a conference at SOAS in London, the former head of the Qatar-based network explained how the revolution began as a virtual movement, organised by the youth without any ideological or political constraints. According to Khanfar youths started devel-

include an analysis of Bashar Al-Assad’s presidency, and a fascinating addition of various ex-military and government personalities’ memoirs in the final chapter, all summarised succinctly by Van Dam. As with previous editions, this work is a must-read for those interested in Syrian history. The bibliography is a wonderful tool for students of Syria and the Middle East in general, containing extensive references in both the English and Arabic language. Van Dam’s writing is clear and authoritative, a particular boon considering the otherwise confusing sectarian make-up of Syrian society.

Van Damn documents the rise of minority groups in Syria, including Alawi, Isma’ilis, Druze, and Greek Orthodox Christians. While he is careful to acknowledge that there are many distinct minorities in Syria not distinguished by religious differences (for example, Kurd and Armenian ethnic minorities), his analysis of sectarianism in Syria uses predominately these religious classifications. Beyond the

oping networks outside a formula that was controlled by the State, through social media such as Twitter and Facebook, with “new imagination for the future.” The horizontal way in which these social media work created a unique link between the youths, because “these networks are democratic by nature and, in this way, were a great way to liberate movements and people from the traditional society concepts.” For Khanfar, this challenged the traditional political separation established by the ideology which has dominated the scene for the last six decades: Islamists, Secularists, Leftists and PanArab nationalists; “this structural organisation was changed by their own conceptions; the youth never asked about ideology, sect, race, nationality, it eliminated barriers within the Arab world.”

The networks linked to the youth factor were the real force of the Revolutions. Khanfar highlighted the fact that young people do not operate within the same frame as other active groups in society, as they are “spontaneous in taking decisions, whenever they feel there is a great opportunity they take a step forward, they don’t wait to have consultations, meetings, and conferences to decide about it, you see the proposal on the Facebook page, you see people going for it, and if the idea becomes popular in a few hours it becomes a decision.”

According to Khanfar’s opinion, they succeeded due to one reason—surprise. “Governments, political groups, analysts, everyone was taken by surprise and the ones that went to Tahrir Square found that tens of thousands were joining them, not just the youth, but also other sectors of the society who felt the same call for action,” said the journalist. Only a few days later, the traditional movements and parties joined the revolution, as well as the media.

Concerning the use of social media by traditional media such as AJ, Khanfar said that their new reliance on them was not “a choice but a necessity” and even if at the beginning some editors

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religious differences, he is keen to show how important regionalism is to Syrians’ identities, as well as when and how religious, regional, or ethnic distinctions play a role in Syrian politics.

His account of this plethora of minorities unfolds from a backdrop of Sunni dominance in Syria, which ended most visibly with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

His brief account of this Sunni dominance sets the scene for the minority groups’ acceptance of an Arab socialist or Ba’th party ideology. Van Dam’s sympathetic account of the plight of these minorities shows how an ideology of secularism and equality, as articulated by the Ba’th party, could gain popularity among these groups.

From here, Van Dam documents how the formerly oppressed minority, the Alawis, became the dominant force of the new Ba’thist government. Various purges of different minorities and strategic deployments of Alawis to the top positions in various state institutions follow, culminating in a final showdown within the Alawi elite be-

tween Hafiz Al-Assad and Salah Jadid. Van Dam’s account of the rivalry and Hafiz Al-Assad’s eventual triumph contains little that is not found in regular biographies of Hafiz Al-Assad. Rather, Van Dam’s account is distinguished by a superb analysis of the nature of Assad’s power, and how it is inexorably linked to sectarianism.

The final chapters of the book develop this analysis of Ba’thism and Assad’s power. They highlight the inability of secular Ba’thists to curb sectarianism, and links this failure to a paradox about how the party derives its political power. The rise of the Ba’th party in Syria, and the Alawis and Hafiz AlAssad specifically, was to a large extent only possible by leaning on traditional, sectarian power structures. Even if Ba’th leaders genuinely believed the party’s socialist agenda (as Van Dam believes they did), the transformation of these sectarian power structures into more equitable systems undermined the very power on which the Ba’th party relied.

The dominance of the Alawi over the others has bred animosity amongst those gov-

erned peoples—be they the minority Greek Orthodox, Druze, or Isma’ili groups, or the majority Sunnis. After years of minority rule in Syria, there are many groups who would seek to ‘settle the score’ should the current political system collapse. As such, Bashar Al-Assad’s government now fights fiercely to maintain power.

While this fourth edition of Van Dam’s book reads mostly as a historical exposé of domestic politics in Syria, one of the book’s main conclusions links the political stability of the country to the persistent minority rule of the Alawis. Considering this incredible political continuity—the Ba’th party has been in power since 1963, and the Assad family since 1970—The Struggle for Power in Syria is essential reading for anyone interested in Syria today. While it is difficult to speculate about the current revolts in Syria given the government’s tight control over information, Van Dam’s book offers an accessible and concise lens which to understand Syrian society’s current predicament.

Photo © Getty Images

were reluctant about it, in a few days they realized the potential and benefits of embracing them. As an example, the former Director General explained how the fact that footage of low quality made the audience take those images more seriously, because even if they were shaky, they were much “more close to reality” and by consequence, more trustworthy.

At SOAS, Wadah Khanfar defined three major trends in the Arab world during the Arab spring: against dictatorship, against corruption and for independence. According to Khanfar, now the opportunities are clear—to correct an “historical mistake of dictatorship, authoritarian regimes and lack of legitimacy and to develop the first governments that belong to the people.”

If the opportunities are clear, so are the dangers. Khanfar called for a “Marshall Plan” in the region in order to support these countries. Huge deficits, lack of resources and unemployment were the main issues referred to. Moreover, he argued that the Arab world should intervene not only through long term investments, but also through a “direct injection of cash.”

For Wadah Khanfar, the ultimate challenge in order to “secure the Arab revolution” is how to transcend the values that the youth spread in the streets into something useful for political parties, institutions and governments. Khanfar acknowledged that the road ahead is still a long and complicated one. However, the rise of political Islam as a Western concern was devalued by the journalist. “We might see chaos, but do you expect us to transform our reality towards a magnificent and stable democracy in one year, while these regimes have been destroying the fabric of the society, the culture and ideology for the last seven decades?

We need some time and we need to embrace this change and support it, because there is new life, new dynamics, beauty and political imagination emerging.”.

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Final Word

Iran: It’s the economy not the nuclear program Adel Al-Toraifi

O

n the 8th of August 1988, the price of foreign currencies and gold in Iran collapsed to the point that dozens of Iranians committed suicide because they were unable to settle debts or had lost their wealth, as the newspaper Keyhan reported at the time.

Some historians assert that the Iranian riyal's loss of two thirds of its value was a national catastrophe for the regime, particularly as the country had not yet recovered from the 1987 money markets' shock. The difficult economic situations were one of the main reasons for Tehran's acceptance of a ceasefire according to conditions it considered unfair but the regime had to “drink the poison” —as late Imam Khomeini said—so that the people would not die from starvation.

Historians differ over the main reasons that led to the collapse of the Iranian economy but there is an almost consensus that the attempts by some Revolutionary Guards' naval units to plant sea mines in the Strait of Hormuz targeting US navy vessels in the Gulf in April 1988 and the lightening US operations that followed, ultimately led to the downing of the Iranian Flight 655 in July 1988. All these desperate attempts to threaten the safe passage through the Strait rebounded quickly on Iran politically and militarily and it found itself incapable financially of continuing the war.

Some of the events of 1988 were repeated earlier this month. Iranian Navy Commander Habibollah Sayyari came out to say "closure of the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers is easier than drinking water" and the Iranian navy tried to flex its muscles through major exercises and the testing of an assortment of weapons. The Iranian Government later denied its intent to close the Strait and sent a message to the EU demanding the reopening of negotiations, which received angry international reactions to the Iranian show of force and the policy of blackmail as a means for negotiations.

At the time the Iranian regime was threatening to close the Strait, US President Barack Obama was signing a decision putting into effect a new package of American sanctions to be imposed on Iran. It was a bold and direct decision imposing sanctions on Iran's Central Bank which is responsible for the Iranian Oil Company's revenues and through which the country’s financial transactions are conducted. This caused the Iranian riyal to lose 35 percent of its value since the announcement of the sanctions last September.

The Iranian regime is undoubtedly in a state of shock and anger because its economy is being directly targeted. It appears they have no other option for avoiding the anticipated collapse of their financial markets and evidence of this is the threat to stop trade exchange with the United Arab Emirates and the draft bill in the Iranian Shura Council to sever commercial ties with Saudi Arabia after the Bahrain events; threats which were not carried out because they were bound to increase Iran’s economic isolation.

However, Iran’s threats should be considered seriously, not because it is capable of closing the Strait, but because the Iranian regime is now in the position of being economically and politically blockaded. The ruling conservatives' camp is split: One side pushing for confrontation and the other wishing to avoid a clash with neighboring countries or foreign forces deployed in the Gulf. Hence the Iranian decision remains confused and we cannot know which direction it will take.

That being said, what would happen if the Iranian regime decided to risk it militarily? Can it really close the Strait? In an important scientific article published by researchers Joshua R. Itzkowitz Shifrinson and Miranda Priebe from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology entitled "Crude Threat: The Limits of An Iranian Missile Campaign against Saudi Arabian Oil", they concluded that Iran lacks the necessary mili-

tary competence. They answer that such a scenario might impede navigation for a period between 3 days and 3 weeks to remove the mines and sunken ships. As to Iran's ability to disrupt the Saudi oil installations with ballistic missiles, Saudi defenses are capable of repelling any missile attacks and these will not affect the production lines because of its superior air force, its possession of early warning systems, and the presence of modern land defense systems (International Security periodical: Summer 2011).

No one can predict the Iranian regime's behavior. The regime leaders are used to exercising the brinkmanship policy. But during the several times when the regime was in danger, the desire for its survival prevailed. There is an almost consensus that the Iranian regime's closure of the Strait or the threat to navigation in it, will subject Tehran to a confrontation, not just with the Gulf countries or Western forces but also with other international forces like China, India, and Japan. These countries will not accept having their oil imports stopped by an Iranian decision.

The Iranian regime faces a real challenge.

Its problem is not just military as much as it is an economic and political one, both internally and abroad. If the regime leaders do not realize that the collapse of the riyal is more dangerous than the foreign presence in the Gulf waters, or agree to make concessions in the nuclear dossier, then Iran will without any doubt drag the region into a futile war that will cost everyone dearly in human and financial terms.

The Iranian populace do not aspire for hegemony over the Gulf waters or to impose the Shiite ideology influence on the region by force of arms. Their main concern remains that their national currency has a value so that they can have a dignified life like the other Gulf countries. The Persian proverb says: "You can close the city's gates but you cannot shut its people's mouths."

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