Talking Turki

In an op/ed column in last Friday's Financial Times, Turki al-Faisal (photo above), former Saudi intelligence director and ambassador to the U.S., the U.K., and Ireland, warns of jihad if the Obama Administration doesn't support the Saudi proposed solution to the Mideast conflict:

Mr Obama should strongly promote the Abdullah peace initiative, which calls on Israel to pursue the course laid out in various international resolutions and laws: to withdraw completely from the lands occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem, returning to the lines of June 4 1967; to accept a mutually agreed just solution to the refugee problem according to UN resolution 194; and to recognise the independent state of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital. In return, there would be an end to hostilities between Israel and all Arab countries, and Israel would get full diplomatic and normal relations.

Last week, President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad of Iran wrote a letter to King Abdullah, explicitly recognising Saudi Arabia as the leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds and calling on him to take a more confrontational role over "this obvious atrocity and killing of your own children" in Gaza. The communiqué is significant because the de facto recognition of the kingdom's primacy from one of its most ardent foes reveals the extent that the war has united an entire region, both Shia and Sunni. Further, Mr Ahmadi-Nejad's call for Saudi Arabia to lead a jihad against Israel would, if pursued, create unprecedented chaos and bloodshed.

So far, the kingdom has resisted these calls, but every day this restraint becomes more difficult to maintain. As the world laments once again the suffering of the Palestinians, people of conscience from every corner of the world are clamouring for action. Eventually, the kingdom will not be able to prevent its citizens from joining the worldwide revolt against Israel.

One problem with the Abdullah peace initiative seems to be that Israel already is, de facto, at peace with Saudi Arabia and the other Arab countries. Mr. al-Faisal's threats of jihad notwithstanding, I doubt Israelis lay awake at night worrying about waves of Saudi jihadis infiltrating Israel's borders¹. What the Israelis probably do worry about are rocket attacks from Hamas or Hezbollah, and the prospect of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons. Since the Abdullah initiative doesn't include Hamas, Hezbollah, or Iran, it's not apparent how it would address those Israeli concerns. It's true that there would be other benefits to Israel from a peace treaty with Saudi Arabia and other Arab states, e.g., trade and tourism. But the two Arab countries with which Israel already has peace treaties, Egypt and Jordan, aren't major trade partners of Israel, according to the CIA World Factbook.

It's also not readily apparent how the Arab states would benefit from a peace treaty with Israel, or, for that matter, from peace between Israel and the Palestinians. As an article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine ("Revolution, Facebook Style"):

From Amman to Riyadh, governments have long viewed protests against Israel as a useful safety valve to allow citizens to let off steam without addressing grievances closer to home.

Wouldn't a peace treaty remove that safety valve?

The photo above of Turki al-Faisal comes from BYU's website.

¹Significant numbers of Saudi jihadis have, in fact, infiltrated Iraq's borders in the past few years, but Iraq shares a large land border with Saudi Arabia.

Stratfor's Predictions for the Next Hundred Years, Part II

Again via John Mauldin, George Friedman of Stratfor offers some of his predictions for the rest of this century, "The Next 100 Years". Below are a couple more excerpts.

Poland hasn't been a great power since the sixteenth century. But it once was—and, I think, will be again. Two factors make this possible. First will be the decline of Germany. Its economy is large and still growing, but it has lost the dynamism it has had for two centuries. In addition, its population is going to fall dramatically in the next fifty years, further undermining its economic power. Second, as the Russians press on the Poles from the east, the Germans won't have an appetite for a third war with Russia. The United States, however, will back Poland, providing it with massive economic and technical support. Wars—when your country isn't destroyed—stimulate economic growth, and Poland will become the leading power in a coalition of states facing the Russians.

This next excerpt seems a little less plausible:

Today, developed countries see the problem as keeping immigrants out. Later in the first half of the twenty-first century [after the population bust Friedman predicts, as birthrates drop in the developing world], the problem will be persuading them to come. Countries will go so far as to pay people to move there. This will include the United States, which will be competing for increasingly scarce immigrants and will be doing everything it can to induce Mexicans to come to the United States—an ironic but inevitable shift.

These changes will lead to the final crisis of the twenty-first century. Mexico currently is the fifteenth-largest economy in the world. As the Europeans slip out, the Mexicans, like the Turks, will rise in the rankings until by the late twenty-first century they will be one of the major economic powers in the world.

A population bust is certainly plausible, and so might competition for skilled immigrants at that point, but I am skeptical that the U.S. will be paying to import unskilled immigrants from Mexico by the end of the century. Also, the idea of Mexico developing as an economic power is at odds with the recent report by the U.S. Military's Joint Forces Command that Mexico (along with Pakistan) is in danger of becoming a failed state (see "Among top U.S. fears: A failed Mexican state" in the January 9th edition of the International Herald Tribune). It also doesn't take into account the negative effects of Mexico's declining oil production.

The photo of the U.S.-Mexico border above comes from the IHT article mentioned parenthetically in the preceding paragraph.

Gaza versus Somalia

On his Atlantic blog, Jeffrey Goldberg notes a similarity between the Israeli operation in Gaza and the American one, years ago, in Somalia ("Does 'Black Hawk Down' Portray an American War Crime"):

At least nine hundred people, maybe half of them civilians, have been killed in Gaza so far, the overwhelming majority presumably killed by Israel

[...]

This number, nine hundred, is large, and it brought to mind another conflict between a Western army and a Muslim insurgency, the one portrayed in the book and movie "Black Hawk Down." Roughly one thousand Somalis were killed by American forces over the twenty hours or so of the First Battle of Mogadishu (eighteen American soldiers, of course, were also killed).

I couldn't get an accurate read on how many of those Somalis were civilians, so I called my colleague, Mark Bowden, who wrote the book ["Black Hawk Down"¹, ²]. He said that eighty percent of the Somali deaths were of civilians.

Goldberg goes on to quote Bowden directly. Here's an excerpt of Bowden on the nature of the sort of asymmetric warfare conducted in Somalia in the early 1990s and in Gaza now:

"If you feel the need to go to war against an enemy that is not as powerful as you are, one of the tactics of the weaker party is to hide among civilians, and use the global media to advertise the horror of the onslaught. People on the receiving end of the bombs greatly exaggerate the casualties and get photographers to take the most gruesome of pictures, and at the same time, the people in charge of the stronger power try to minimize the number of casualties. If you live in a democracy, then public opinion really matters, and reports of dead children swells the criticism of the war. If you live in a dictatorship, then you don't care what the people think."

[...]

"The parallel with Mogadishu is that gunmen in that battle hid behind walls of civilians and were aware of the restraint of the (Army) Rangers. These gunmen literally shot over the heads of civilians, or between their legs. They used women and children for this. It's mind-boggling. Some of the Rangers shot civilians, some of them inadvertently and some of them advertently. They made the choice to shoot at crowds. When a ten-year-old is running at your vehicle with an AK-47, do you shoot the kid? Yes, you shoot the kid. You have to survive. When push comes to shove, faced with the horrible dilemma with a gunman facing you, yes, you shoot. It's not just a choice about your own life. If you don't shoot, you're saying that your mission isn't important, and the lives of your fellow soldiers aren't important."

One might point out that the U.S. involvement in Somalia started out as a humanitarian one, but, as Bowden noted in his book, the mission evolved into a war against one of Somalia's main clans.


¹Mark Bowden's book "Blackhawk Down" was masterly. He gathered information from essentially every available source (e.g., transcripts of U.S. military radio traffic, interviews with local Somalis, etc.) and reconstructed the battle, the events leading up to it, its aftermath. Bowden also placed the events in their larger context, all the while making "Blackhawk Down" a page-turner. He's a first rate journalist.

²Ridley Scott's 2001 movie adapted from Bowden's book, "Blackhawk Down", featured a number of actors who went on to become much more prominent over the next several years: Ewan McGregor, Josh Hartnett, Eric Bana, Jeremy Piven, Jason Isaacs, and Orlando Bloom.