24 October 2015 – The opening line in my book about the Middle East is:
“I normally live in a world seemingly corralled by algorithms, so when I travel to the Middle East I must bring to my soul an element of chaos to a culture that continually plays its deadly, dystopic sameness.”
Having traveled to the Middle East purely as fact-finding trips of my own in keeping with a personal agenda I keep “seeing” played out that Italian phrase that describes the people (Arabs, Greeks, Italians, etc.) who populate the Mediterranean, “una faccia, una razza” (one face, one race), a far too simple expression but meant to capture a similar set of values, religions, customs, food, etc. across the region. I have spend much of my time in and around the Med but had not spent enough in the core of the Middle East and that was my intent.
But my travels have also been bracketed by technology conferences in Tel Aviv and Amman. And that is why the angle of my Middle East book is technology and how it has upended all notions of statecraft and “how things are supposed to work”. As Henry Kissinger points out in his recent book World Order in a comment on cyber war:
“Before the cyber age, nations’ capabilities could still be assessed through an amalgam of manpower, equipment, geography, economics, and morale. There was a clear distinction between periods of peace and war. Hostilities were triggered by defined events and carried out with strategies for which some intelligible doctrine had been formulated. Intelligence services played a role mainly in assessing, and occasionally in disrupting, adversaries’ capabilities; their activities were limited by implicit common standards of conduct or, at a minimum, by common experiences evolved over decades.
Internet technology has outstripped strategy or doctrine-—at least for the time being. in the new era, capabilities exist for which there is as yet no common interpretation — or even understanding. Few if any limits exist among those wielding them to define either explicit or tacit restraints. When individuals of ambiguous affiliation are capable of undertaking actions of increasing ambition and intrusiveness, the very definition of state authority may turn ambiguous.
But not just cyber war. All sorts other technology. In conflict situations, such simple systems as social networking have created a platform to reinforce traditional social fissures. Look at the Reuters study of social media used in the Middle East. The widespread sharing of videotaped atrocities in the Syrian civil war appears to have done more to harden the resolve of the warring parties than to stop the killing. And ISIL has used social media to declare a caliphate and exhort holy war.
And let’s face it: what has social media done in the West, especially America? Participants in the public (read: social media) debate are driven less by reasoned arguments than by what catches the mood of the moment. The immediate focus is pounded daily into the public consciousness by advocates whose status is generated by the ability to dramatize.
In America, an ambivalent superpower
At its most simplistic, America’s involvement can be described as “moral aspirations” of freedom and liberty (espoused by George Bush) with the central premise that “rebuilding” such countries as Afghanistan” and Iraq by means of a democratic, pluralistic system would bring stability. We heard the mantra of this being “comparable to the construction of democracy in Germany and Japan after World War II”.
It failed because no institutions in the history of Afghanistan or Iraq or any part of the Arab Middle East provided a precedent for such a broad-based effort.
Barack Obama came along and campaigned on the proposition that he would restore to the “necessary” war in Afghanistan the forces drained by the “dumb” war in Iraq, which he intended to end. But once in office .. alas … he fell into a focus on transformational domestic priorities.
And now we have the consolidation of a jihadist entity at the heart of the Arab world, equipped with substantial captured weaponry and a transnational fighting force, engaged in a religious war with radical Iranian and Iraqi Shia groups and the West. Guerrilla forces, which defend no territory, can concentrate on inflicting casualties and eroding the public’s political will to continue the conflict. This we have learned time and time again. But this new jihadist entity has learned technology (social media being just one element) to declare a caliphate and exhort holy war, and turn the West’s alleged military and technological supremacy turned into geopolitical impotence.
The American public? Alas, brought up with a consumer culture almost too good at giving them what they want, when they want it … NOW!! … the American public doesn’t do “complex” and have no patience to support a lengthy process.
Benghazi
Which brings me (finally) to Benghazi. Hillary Clinton’s command performance this past week was pretty much a dress rehearsal of sorts. A rehearsal for facing a Republican opponent in a presidential debate.
But in this 11-hour marathon hearing (I watched 5 hours of it in between prepping for LawTech Brussels starting this Monday, and that was the “highlight” tape!) the true legacy of the attack was not even hinted. A shout out to Tim Fernholz of Quartz and Jack Phelps at Reuters for assembling some talking points:
- The legacy is that the attack caused the US — which had been a key part of the 2011 coalition that ousted Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi — to suddenly lose its appetite for reconstruction.
- Libya became radioactive. Just training a Libyan security force — never mind other aid — will cost $600 million, but the US spent only $6 million in Libya last year.
- The country is still locked in a complex civil war. Fighting has driven refugees from their homes, offered ISIL a North African foothold, and undercut oil production for European markets.
- And the legacy of Benghazi goes even beyond Libya. It is found in the U.S.’s current indecision about Syria’s civil war and the rise of ISIL. It is found in president Obama’s move to delay troop withdrawals from Afghanistan — for fear of further collapse.
- Oh, and it is found in Moscow, where Putin has learned not to allow his brutish clients to fall so easily.
Yes, perhaps too simplified. But I am not looking for “great statesmen” in the Internet age to solve this. We face a combination of chronic insecurity and an insistent “we must insert ourselves”. Leaders, because they are less and less the originators of their programs and less and less instigators of events, seek to dominate by willpower or charisma. It is easier. And the pubic? Eh. Participants at public demonstrations are rarely assembled around a specific program. Rather, they seek an uplift of a moment of exaltation, treating their role in the event primarily as participation in an emotional experience. And then quickly forgotten. We have become a society ruled by impulse, by the reflexive reach for quick rewards. We are an “Impulse Society” to borrow from Paul Roberts.
I am not optimistic. Look at the region over the past 13 years, and it’s pretty much the same themes. It’s extremists vs. pro-democracy/pro-Western; or it’s Shias against Sunnis; it’s pro-Iran against pro-Saudi; it’s pro-Americans versus anti-Americans. The same forces seem to be going in cycles all the way from Afghanistan to now, Yemen and Iraq.
At this point, I really don’t know what anybody can do. I think America’s involvement is always a double-edged sword. If you don’t go in, people blame you and say you’re letting extremists win and you’re looking the other way. But if you do go in, then you’re also giving an excuse to groups like ISIS, and another reason for them to radicalize.
Will the U.S. ever get out of reactive mode, lurching from crisis to crisis? No. It would take an enormous bipartisan agreement and I do not see that happening.
I will conclude with a quote from Noah Feldman who writes for Foreign Affairs among other publications:
“It would be lovely to imagine a pluralistic, democratic set of states in the region they could substitute for the autocratic nation-state or for a congeries of unpleasant, self-protecting, and violent militias. But that’s a pipe dream right now relative to the reality on the ground. You can’t get pluralistic democracy unless you first have states that are functioning, and we don’t have functioning states. So the first step has to be to produce functioning states, and only then would it be even conceivable, though by no means guaranteed, to start talking about generating functioning democratic governments. But we cannot do it. They must drive it themselves. And the opposition is overpowering.”