06/09/09 – Juan Cole – The Scott Horton Show

Welcome back to the show, it's Antiwar Radio on Chaos 95.9 FM in Austin, Texas, streaming live worldwide on the internet at ChaosRadioAustin.org and at Antiwar.com slash radio.
And it's my pleasure to welcome back to the show, Professor Juan Cole from the University of Michigan, where he is a professor of history, and also I will go ahead and mention he is the author of the new book, Engaging, well it's not so new anymore, it's new to me because I haven't read it yet, it's still on the pile, Engaging the Muslim World.
Welcome back to the show Juan, how are you sir?
Hi, just fine Scott, thank you for having me on.
I really want to read the book, it's just I got a giant pile and the internet has killed my ability to read books, it's just made it impossible.
You know, I sympathize with that, of course, it does exist in Kindle and other electronic versions.
Ah, there you go, very slick of you to think ahead like that.
Alright, so talk to me about Lebanon, what's going on?
Well, Hezbollah lost.
Hezbollah lost, that's good.
Right?
Sure, well I mean, it's better than the alternative.
Which would be them winning.
Yeah, I mean, you know, Americans tend to interpret Middle East politics through an American lens, and that's natural, but Lebanon's a very complex place.
So, you know, some pretty bad guys got elected, and it's not necessarily a cause for joy, but what would have happened if Hezbollah and its coalition partner, which is a Christian party by the way, had come out on top?
That's the Michael Aoun?
Michel, Michel Aoun.
That's right, he's a former general who came to notoriety because he tried to force the Syrians out militarily in 1989 and failed, and was for many years in exile, then came back and was popular with the Christians, and he's kind of a rabble rouser.
And he made his coalition with Hezbollah after the Israeli war of 2006, right?
Well, he was already, I think, going in that direction before that war, but yeah, he threw in with Hezbollah and came close to Syria, even though he'd been an enemy of Syria's earlier on.
And I think that hurt his popularity with the Christians, who see Syria as kind of having aspirations to dominate Lebanon.
And you know, the Christians in Lebanon, who I think are probably about 30% of the population, but 40% of the electorate, you know, they're entrepreneurs, a lot of them.
They're small business people.
They're the kind of people that are the backbone of the Republican Party.
And Syria is a one-party socialist state, so you can only imagine what they think about being dominated by Syria.
Right.
Well, and you know, I saw a headline that said that Nasrallah, the head of Hezbollah, said that he thought that the election results were fraudulent, but he was going to go ahead and accept his defeat with good sportsmanship in the democratic way, he said.
Is that right?
That's right.
Well, you know, what could he do?
He and Aoun had kept claiming that the popular support for them was far beyond what is reflected in Parliament.
It is true.
Lebanon's districts are gerrymandered.
So, you know, about 100 of the 128 seats are almost predetermined by the districting.
So the margins are where the action was.
But what was interesting in this election was that people were expecting that it was the Christians who would be the swing boat and would make the determination.
And that happened to some extent.
But the Sunnis also came in in a big way and actually outvoted Aoun in some places.
So the Sunnis rallied to the Sunni leader, Saad Hariri, who's backed by Saudi Arabia.
You see why I'm saying that this is not an unmixed picture.
Right.
Well, it's called the confessional system, is that it?
Yeah, well, that's the French word for religion.
They've anglicized it to confessional.
But it just means it's a sectarian system.
You tend to vote within your own religious group.
But then you have choices of parties that want to represent your religious group.
And then there are mixed lists.
So sometimes your religious group will make an alliance with another one, which is what happened with Hezbollah and Aoun's Christians.
Oh, yeah.
If anybody wants to learn anything just about how complicated Lebanon is, just look up their confessional constitutional system on Wikipedia or whatever.
You'll understand what a complicated place that must be.
Yeah, the president by a national pact is always a Christian.
Michel Suleiman is the current president, who is, I think, a pragmatist.
He's willing to live with Syria.
He doesn't get along with Aoun at all.
In fact, Aoun picked a big fight with him.
And then the prime minister is always a Sunni.
And Saad Hariri, who had been a kind of power behind the throne in the past, is now probably going to become the prime minister.
So there's going to be an overlap of power and prestige.
Hariri is a multi-billionaire.
His father had built up a fortune of $4 billion in Saudi Arabia.
They're very close to the royal family.
So he's kind of a Berlusconi figure in Italy, so far without the scandals.
But he's a very rich candidate.
So I think people thought that maybe Hariri and his Saudi connections could bring money into Lebanon and help with prosperity.
You know, Hezbollah had dragged them into that war with Israel in some ways in 2006.
So they wanted to go in a different direction.
Well, although it seemed like all the backlash from that was pro-Hezbollah backlash after that war.
Rather than being blamed for picking the fight, they were credited with heroically resisting the invasion.
During the war, yes.
The Christians even rallied to Hezbollah.
That's worn off a bit now, huh?
Well, what happened was, last year this time, in 2008, there was a tiff between Hezbollah and the government over surveillance of the Beirut airport.
And Hezbollah was being cut off from some intelligence at the airport, which they felt would make them vulnerable, even to some Israeli plots.
So they came out into the streets and took over West Beirut just to show they could.
And the army and Sad Hariri had a small militia.
They were helpless before Hezbollah.
But it caused Hezbollah, for the first time, to train their weapons on other Lebanese.
And the Lebanese had put up with this Hezbollah militia because it was down there in the south fighting with the Israelis.
And the Lebanese thought, well, you know, the Israelis kind of have sticky fingers with regard to Lebanon's south and it's all for the good to have somebody down there fighting them.
But if they're going to be spreading out through West Beirut, some parts of which are very shishy with machine guns and you've got these seedy Shiite militiamen all over the place, that put people off.
And some people in the after-election polls cited that incident as one reason to turn against Hezbollah.
All right, now let's change gears here a little bit.
Barack Obama's speech in Cairo.
If George Bush had given this speech on September 15th instead of, you know, we won't distinguish between our enemies and anyone else we feel like killing, and if he had meant it, then this would have really been important.
But it seems to me to not be that big of a deal.
What do you think of this?
Oh, I think it's a very important speech.
In fact, some people are pointing out that some of the, you know, maybe at the margin, Obama's speech might have had an impact on the Lebanese elections because you had all those Sunnis who were willing to vote for a group that, you know, was depicted by Hezbollah as pro-American and all of a sudden being pro-American was not such a big liability.
So, I mean, I think that may be only the first of many benefits of that speech.
But so the whole day late and dollar short thing, you don't think is that powerful a factor in this?
No, I think, you know, in politics it's always possible to have a new beginning.
Okay.
You know, you look at the Democratic Party in 1980 and how much disarray it was and it was in the wilderness for 12 years.
Yeah.
And then it came back under Clinton and the same thing happened with Obama.
So, you know, in politics you can hit a reset button.
Well, you know, Michael Shoyer has a piece on antiwar.com today called, What If Osama Calls Obama's Bluff?
And what if Osama puts out a thing and says, all right, we'll give you a ceasefire as long as you do the things that you already voluntarily said that you were going to do.
Get out of Iraq.
Get out of Afghanistan.
Stop, you know, put pressure to give up, to have the Israelis give up the West Bank and Gaza for a Palestinian state.
And if you don't then, you know, it'll be on again or whatever.
If he does that, then Obama will either have to measure up to what he said or double down in his war effort.
Mike Shoyer is a smart cookie and knows bin Laden and his style better than almost anybody in the world since he was on the CIA bin Laden desk.
And what I would say in response, however, is that in essence bin Laden swims in the sea created by American policy or discontent with American policy and that it's irrelevant what bin Laden says now.
If Obama actually achieves those things you mentioned, then he would be pulling the plug on Al-Qaeda anyway because they can't recruit people to blow themselves up over minor grievances.
And if Obama fixes the major grievances, then the whole thing will go away.
Yeah, well and I guess that's really what I was getting at with the, I wish George Bush had given this speech right after September 11th and this had been the policy was hey, hey, hey, maybe we've overstepped but we're certainly not deserving of things like this and we're going to go after our few and that means we're going to leave everybody else alone and prove how magnanimous we are and all that stuff.
What was remarkable about the speech is how little it departed from stated Bush administration policy.
Because Bush called for a Palestinian state and went back to two-state solution.
Bush negotiated the SOFA that sets the timetable for U.S. withdrawal from Iraq.
You know, if you think about it, and Obama is as determined as Bush to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan, so there isn't, with regard to policy, there wasn't a whole lot of daylight.
Of course, there were important things like Obama's stop torture and wants to close Guantanamo and is against democratization by guns but what's really would be significant is that Bush didn't mean it.
That is to say he didn't do anything significant about establishing a Palestinian state and getting a two-state solution.
He just said that's what his goal was, and then he let things drift and basically handed policy over to the Israeli right.
What would be different is that if Obama actually follows through on these things, and then you begin to build a bank of credibility for the United States and the region, and that would be very important.
Personally, I know there are a lot of doubts out there, especially in the war group, about Obama's determination with regard to getting out of Iraq, pursuing peace in Israel, Palestine, and so forth.
I think he means it.
I think he and his group, Axelrod and Rahm Emanuel and so forth, have decided that this is what needs to be done for the benefit of the United States.
Moreover, that it would also be good for Israel and the region.
I think they're going to follow through on it more or less.
The time when there's no special ops forces in Iraq might be distant, but to have ordinary everyday army and jeeps patrolling neighborhoods in Iraq, I think those days are coming to a close.
Well, I wonder about that.
Patrick Coburn says that America really has done what Bush said about the whole they'll stand up, we'll stand down thing, and he's empowered Maliki so much that basically, if Maliki wants us out, we're in no position to stop him anymore.
That's exactly right.
First of all, he's got an elected parliament which conducted these negotiations and voted on the SOFA, the Status of Forces Agreement.
The United States, people criticize the U.S. as a hegemonic power and has bases all over the world and so forth.
But I don't know of an instance where a government has demanded that we leave.
Where we didn't have a lease had run out and the government says, okay, go.
Yeah, and it's too late to just shoot Maliki and replace him.
We got out, I can't tell you how much the Navy wanted Subic Bay in the Philippines.
But when the Filipino Senate said go, we went.
So I think that this withdrawal from Iraq it won't be complete in the sense that there will be special ops forces there, the U.S. Air Force will likely give Maliki's military some air support from time to time.
But to have this big troop contingent there, I think he really does mean to get out.
And if he does, then it would settle things down in the Arab world.
Other Arabs identify very deeply with Iraq.
They're not as invested in the Afghanistan issue.
So I think that will be a very important step.
Yeah, well, I got my vote, Mr. President.
Let me ask you about this.
Obama said in that speech, we will respect Iran's right to their civilian nuclear program as guaranteed in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, which they're signatory to, as long as they can continue, or not continue, he didn't admit that, as long as they can verify it's just for peaceful purposes.
And yet, we all know, anybody who's been paying attention knows that they have a safeguards agreement with the IAEA and that the IAEA has continued to verify the non-diversion of their nuclear material from anything other than their openly declared safeguarded civilian nuclear program.
And then Hillary Clinton goes on George Stephanopoulos and threatens a first strike against Iran if they don't give up their nuclear program, which he just said, he basically pretended, at least, in that speech to be stepping back from the Bush policy, which is, you're allowed to enrich uranium on your own soil, regardless of what it says in the NPT.
Right.
Well, I've got a chapter, as you know, in the book on the background of all this in Iran, and let me just say this.
The International Atomic Energy Agency, which inspects Iran's nuclear facilities and hasn't been able to find evidence of weapon-related research since early 2003, is, nevertheless, a little frustrated.
Because they would like to be able to come back to the world and say, we have 100% certainty that there's no weapon-related research being done here.
They can't find evidence of weapon-related research, but the program is a little bit opaque.
And they want more access.
They want more surprise inspections.
They haven't been allowed to interview the scientists who designed the centrifuges.
So, I would say, you know, Iran is 80% there.
But the 20% is very frustrating to the international community.
And that's what's got the Europeans worried, the British, the French, and the Germans who've been negotiating with Iran.
It's what raises these question marks in Washington that Hillary Clinton was pointing to.
What her statement really is is a form of power diplomacy.
She's putting pressure on Iran to give us the other 20%.
And I think the real significance of Obama's speech in Cairo about this was that if they'll be completely transparent, which they're not quite completely transparent, but if they will be, then we'll back off.
And so, this is twisting their arms.
So far, they're just things that raise question marks.
And the International Atomic Energy Commission just doesn't want to be in this position of doing inspections, of not being able to find anything wrong, but then not really having complete access.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We need to do this again soon, but we are all out of time right now.
I really appreciate your time on the show today, Juan.
It's my pleasure.
Anytime, Scott.
All right, y'all.
That's Juan Cole, professor of history at the University of Michigan.
The blog is called Informed Comment.
It's at JuanCole.com and the book is called Engaging the Muslim World.
We'll be right back with Howard Jones after this.