The Aug 11, 2008 Russ Roberts Econtalk interview with Bruce Bueno de Mesquita was fascinating. You can directly download the MP3 audio of the interview here. Better, subscribe to the Econtalk series at iTunes.
Russ has a short and very terse set of notes from the interview, including a couple of paragraphs on the threat profile of Iran, and of particular interest, how important is Pres. Ahmadinejad in the Iranian hierarchy? We knew he was effectively a figurehead or “front man” for the Supreme Council. But, typically, de Mesquita’s research puts Ahmadinejad at 18th in the ranking:
Intro. Danger, threats to the United States. Are Iran Ahmadinejad a threat to the U.S.? Threat to our friends. No missiles with sufficient range to reach the U.S. Can it smuggle a bomb into the U.S.? That’s more a matter of movies. Ahmadinejad is the President of Iran, but virtually all power there is held by the Supreme Council. Has veto power, can remove people from office; all people elected including Ahmadinejad serve at the pleasure of the Supreme Council. Interviews, Ahmadinejad ranked 18th in terms of power. At odds with most people’s public perception. Maybe he’s 17th or 19th; but he’s not 3rd or 4th. He is a very outspoken man, says many outrageous things, so he gets a lot of news coverage. Came to power by election from being mayor of Teheran by carving out a constituency of not-very-well educated who saw in him someone who would advance Iranian nationalist sentiment. His power has faded and his party keeps losing by elections. Media attention also because American media has poor or no access to Ali Khamenei, head of the Supreme Council, most powerful person in Iran. Putin had audience with Khamenei; Western leaders only get to see Ahmadinejad. Why would Khamenei want Ahmadinejad in power? Good for floating trial balloons, has a salutary effect in terms of foreign policy; has convinced some people that the Iranian leadership is irrational, and in doing so have attained a certain amount of deterrent clout. Very Schellingesque (Thomas Schelling, Nobel Prize winner), soft application of game theory to national security problems, brinksmanship. Strategy that if you convince the other guy that you’ll drive off the cliff, the other guy gets pretty nervous about it.
At 7:43 in the audio:
Do the 17 people ranked in front of Ahmadinejad have similar views? Do they want to build a nuclear weapon? Ahmadinejad would like to. Ali Khamenei would probably like the capacity to make weapons’ grade fuel, bargaining chip, but a weapon itself could lead to a pre-emptive attack by the Israelis. Others in power much more pragmatic, likely to advocate no more than a fuel cycle at the research level, not to produce enough actually to make a bomb. As a social scientist it makes sense to treat these people as if they are rational. Track record of predictions, last 24 years: 1984 predicted in print who would succeed Ayatollah Khomeini, designed someone; predicted instead shared leadership between Ali Khamenei and Rafsanjani. Khomeini died 5 years later. Based prediction on rationality assumption. Rationality doesn’t mean doing good things. It means doing things based on their own best interest. Logic of Political Survival, previous podcast, leaders want to keep their jobs. Data are consistent with Ali Khamenei’s wanting to stay in power. What would their motivations be to building a nuclear bomb? If they could get far enough without Israel’s attacking, they have a deterrent. India and Pakistan: since they both detonated nuclear weapons they have made an effort to get along. Argument is that deterrence claim is false because Israelis will move beforehand. Iran, Shiite force, is in competition with Al Qaeda, Sunni force to be the dominant leader in the Islamic world. They hate each other. Bomb would be a way of achieving nationalist pride, which keeps the party in power while the economy goes to hell. Rational reasons for wanting to build a nuclear weapon. They say want to develop nuclear power for peaceful energy uses, which is their right.
From other reading we have learned that de Mesquita has done repeated consulting assignments for the CIA. In this interview he said his work on Iran was for “confidential sources”.
Readers not familiar with de Mesquita’s work may conclude from this interview that he is an “Iran expert”. In fact the “Iran experts” called him a quack when in 1984, in “Forecasting Policy Decisions: An Expected Utility Approach to Post-Khomeini Iran,” Political Science (Spring, 1984), pp. 226-236, five years before the eventual succession, he correctly predicted that the successors to Khomeni would be the unknown clerics Rafsanjani and Khameini. His forecasting record has been built entirely upon the application of game theory to the politicians’ incentives — in the setting of their political structure.
Highly recommended.
Brookings scholar Kenneth M. Pollack on the Middle East windfall — how it could lead to even more instability.
You might think that $140 per barrel oil would be good for at least one part of the world, the Middle East. It’s too soon to tell for certain, but the region may well turn out to be the part of the world that suffers the most.
An Indian labourer stands under futuristic Dubai skyline buildings
As painful as the current (or coming) oil-driven recession will be for Americans, it does seem to be convincing us to make the sacrifices necessary to diminish our reliance on oil. Over the long term, that could prove a huge boon for our economy, our environment and our national security.
In the Middle East, the situation may be reversed. Right now, the region is experiencing an economic boom, creating the opportunity to address the deep-seated political, economic and social problems that have spawned terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. That’s certainly what the people of the region hope.
The danger is that the way that the rising revenues are being spent will more likely worsen the region’s instability over time.
And that’s a problem, because problems in the Middle East have a bad habit of becoming big problems for the rest of the world. The Middle East isn’t Las Vegas: what happens there doesn’t stay there.
For those who don’t follow the Middle East closely, Pollack is a former Clinton National Security Council staffer, and the author of The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq. The book was highly influential among the policy community and remains today the best modern history of Saddam and the available policy options circa 2003. Pollack concluded that invasion was “the least worst choice” amongst a list of very unpleasant options.
Just as Israel was attempting to draw Syria into this “circle of peace,” Syrian client Hezbollah was sinking its claws deeper into the government of Lebanon. Earlier this month, Hezbollah set off the worst round of killing in Lebanon since the end of the civil war in 1990. Now Lebanon’s weak government has given the Hezbollah-controlled opposition enough cabinet seats to veto any policy it opposes.
More of the ongoing bad news in the Middle East. Now in contrast with the continuing progress in Iraq:
Meanwhile, the “failure” in Iraq makes steady, substantive progress. In remarks yesterday to the Senate Armed Services Committee, General Petraeus noted that much of the reduction in violence in Iraq is due to “recent operations” in Basra, Mosul and Sadr City. Those operations have succeeded in no small part from the increasingly positive performance of the Iraqi army. In Baghdad’s Sadr City this week, the Iraqi troops deployed through its neighborhoods without direct support from U.S. forces. Residents living in the grip of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army militias openly welcomed the Iraqi troops, as long-closed businesses reopened.
Earlier this month, a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation moved into Mosul. This isn’t just another village but a city of some two million residents. Located in northern Iraq (close to Syria), it has long been a stronghold of al Qaeda in Iraq. Virtually the entire city has been brought under control by the coalition forces, and violent incidents are down dramatically the past month.
The significance of these countervailing trends should be apparent. In Iraq since the onset of the surge, U.S. policy has been clear and consistent. By contrast, U.S. policy toward Syria has been impossible to discern. Obviously the two examples are not alike. Iraq is a U.S. military operation, while the rest of the region falls under the portfolio of State’s diplomats. But absent the will to make Syria pay a price for its destructive mischief, a U.S. policy vacuum exists. It’s no surprise the Syrians are taking advantage of it.
More from the WSJ Editorial Board…
A quite excellent true history of the Middle East’s last sixty years by Professor Efraim Karsh, head of Mediterranean Studies at King’s College, University of London, and the author most recently of “Islamic Imperialism: A History” (Yale). Much of this is based upon recently declassified documents from the British Mandate. Excerpt:
Sixty years after its establishment by an internationally recognized act of self-determination, Israel remains the only state in the world that is subjected to a constant outpouring of the most outlandish conspiracy theories and blood libels; whose policies and actions are obsessively condemned by the international community; and whose right to exist is constantly debated and challenged not only by its Arab enemies but by segments of advanced opinion in the West.
During the past decade or so, the actual elimination of the Jewish state has become a cause célèbre among many of these educated Westerners. The “one-state solution,” as it is called, is a euphemistic formula proposing the replacement of Israel by a state, theoretically comprising the whole of historic Palestine, in which Jews will be reduced to the status of a permanent minority. Only this, it is said, can expiate the “original sin” of Israel’s founding, an act built (in the words of one critic) “on the ruins of Arab Palestine” and achieved through the deliberate and aggressive dispossession of its native population.
This claim of premeditated dispossession and the consequent creation of the longstanding Palestinian “refugee problem” forms, indeed, the central plank in the bill of particulars pressed by Israel’s alleged victims and their Western supporters. It is a charge that has hardly gone undisputed. As early as the mid-1950s, the eminent American historian J.C. Hurewitz undertook a systematic refutation, and his findings were abundantly confirmed by later generations of scholars and writers. Even Benny Morris, the most influential of Israel’s revisionist “new historians,” and one who went out of his way to establish the case for Israel’s “original sin,” grudgingly stipulated that there was no “design” to displace the Palestinian Arabs.
The recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of the British Mandate (1920-48) and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier generations of writers and ignored or distorted by the “new historians,” paints a much more definitive picture of the historical record. These documents reveal that the claim of dispossession is not only completely unfounded but the inverse of the truth. What follows is based on fresh research into these documents, which contain many facts and data hitherto unreported.
Highly recommended. I have archived the Karsh essay for future reference.
Karsh has authored several other books on the Middle East, including Fabricating Israeli History: The ‘New Historians’ (2000).
• There is growing awareness in the Arab world that reforms are necessary to create a viable, competitive economy. Oil is no longer seen as an inexhaustible source of revenue that gives governments an infinite capacity to manipulate their citizens.
• Pressure from the United States. and Europe to introduce reforms has been inconsistent and has favored managed reforms, sending signals that external expectations are not very high, and that external actors can be easily appeased.
• Further political stagnation is the likely scenario for most Arab regimes, characterized by limited change rather than an uncontrolled slide into an uncertain future. The power of reformists remains limited in most countries, as they have generally failed to convince the population that they are serious about change, resulting in tarnished reputations.
• To be successful, regime reformers need to find allies in civil societies or moderate parties. Some reformers could decide that a competitive political environment would benefit their political future—yet a more participatory reform process could prove unpredictable.
“The evidence so far is that the top-down process is having very little effect, making at best a marginal difference on specific issues but not leading to the redistribution of power that a true process of democratization and even liberalization would entail. For domestic advocates of managed reform and for outsiders seeking to promote change alike, the lesson appears to be that political reform can never be risk free: Too much close management perpetuates authoritarianism, and unmanaged processes have unpredictable outcomes.”
Not much encouragement in this Dec 2007 Carnegie Endowment paper.
There is no clearer indicator of a “clash of civilizations” than the prevalence of honor killings in the Arab world. With all due respect to pluralism, universalism, and respect for the Other, here is a piece of intolerance that can unite all of us, left and right, liberal and conservative. The idea that one’s relationships are one’s own business is a cornerstone of liberal thinking. That a disapproved-of relationship justifies murder — that one should take pride in killing one’s own sister because of it — well, that’s just way, way outside the pale of anything we Westerners can handle. Honor killings are so shocking to even the most tolerant among us, that one wonders why the West has failed to express its moral outrage.
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Al Qaeda, the reason for being involved in the region in the first place, is essentially dead. The various Sunni Arab powers that made al Qaeda possible have lined up behind Washington.
Tigerhawk quotes from the latest Stratfor bulletin — the Bush 2008 goal is a deal with Iran:
Many see Bush as constrained by his lame duck status, his unpopularity and a Democratic majority in Congress. Stratfor disagrees. We see these factors as empowering the White House.
Bush is not running for reelection, so he need not cater to the polls. He has no clear successor to support, so he need not spare the lash for fear of harming an ally. A Democratic Congress combined with a general election in November means that all of his initiatives are dead on arrival on the House and Senate floor, so he need not even spare a glance in the direction of domestic policy.
All the pieces are in place for a no-holds-barred executive with very few institutional restrictions on his ability to act. Foreign affairs require neither popular support nor Congressional approval.
…Iran and the United States may still wish to quibble over details, but the strategic picture is clearing: a U.S.-led coalition is going to shape the Middle East, and it is up to Iran whether it wants to play the role of that coalition’s spear or its target. And the Bush administration has the full power of the United States — and one long year — to drive that point home.
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The Israelis do not aim at civilians and would stop all military action tomorrow if the terrorism stopped.
Greg Sheridan is back from Israel.
AND so international donors have pledged $8.6 billion in aid to the Palestinian Authority. This eye-popping amount of money will continue the Palestinians’ status as the highest per capita aid recipients in the world. Not that I’m suggesting Palestinians don’t have it tough, even if most of their suffering is caused by the appalling decisions of their corrupt, incompetent and extremist leadership.
The aid pledged in Paris may nonetheless do some good. It may stabilise living standards on the West Bank. And by exacerbating the contrast between a more prosperous West Bank, controlled by the secular Fatah, and an increasingly poverty-stricken Gaza Strip, controlled by the religious extremists, Hamas, it may strengthen Fatah against Hamas.
Assuming all this works out perfectly, at the very best we might get a slightly improved status quo. The chances of a long-term peace agreement, I would say, are almost nil.
I have just returned from three weeks in Israel. I spent quite a bit of time on the West Bank. I would say the situation is on a hair trigger and we are as far from peace as ever.
…It seems that every two-term American president feels a desperate need in his last year to solve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. Bill Clinton was at it in his last 24 hours in office. Ronald Reagan had a plan in his last year. By trying so hard to get an agreement to bolster the legacy of a presidency in its dying days, the Americans often scramble and improvise, take foolish risks and by their own political desperation convince all parties that maximum results are possible. The result is frequently disastrous.
There are two short-term factors that will tend to keep a lid on the conflict, and one that will tend to make it explode, but all the long-term trends are unhelpful.
…Remove the Israelis and the estimates of how long Fatah would remain in power range from two weeks to two hours.
…The short-term trend that could cause a blow-up any day is the Qassam rockets being fired daily from Gaza at Israeli civilians in Sderot and increasingly near the sizeable Israeli city of Ashkelon, with its vital and vulnerable power station. Every day half a dozen of these rockets are fired. On one day when I was there recently 20 were fired. These are not fired at military targets. Their intent is to murder civilians.
Luckily, these rockets are crude, short-range and inaccurate. But they are becoming longer-range as outsiders, especially Iran, provide weaponry. Eventually one of these rockets will hit a school bus or a classroom and kill 20 Israeli children. When that happens the Israeli political process will demand a huge operation in Gaza to clean out the rocket factories. No Israeli wants to go back to Gaza. But they will if necessary and such an operation would be bloody and terrible. Many people would die. Amid all the criticism Israel would face, one question would be unanswerable: which democratic country would not respond if its civilians were being daily fired upon by rockets? There is no moral equivalence between Palestinian terrorism and Israeli military action. The Israelis do not aim at civilians and would stop all military action tomorrow if the terrorism stopped.
…The question is whether the PA can ever get to a stage where it can govern Palestinian society, and whether the PA has any genuine interest in peace. Until very recently PA school text books contained traditional anti-Semitic propaganda against the Jews. Due to international pressure that has largely been removed. But still the text books, and the Palestinian media, are full of incitement to terrorism and no suggestion that Israel will be a peace partner, or even a state Palestinians will have to live with. Instead maps of Palestine are routinely printed which simply erase Israel altogether.
This means the peace talks, and the media commentary around it, are rigged against Israel because they don’t discuss the one real obstacle to peace: the refusal of the Palestinian leadership, and much of the Middle East Islamic leadership, to genuinely accept Israel’s right to exist.
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We all know how little fuel there is right here to keep the Annapolis process going. At this point, Israelis and Palestinians are running on fumes. That’s why Martin Indyk said that most of the fuel for Annapolis would have to come from a grand anti-Iran coalition. But the reality is that the coalition never formed, and now even its premises have disintegrated. Assembling this coalition was bound to be difficult; after the NIE, it has become impossible.
We have been here before. Every few years, a prophet arises to proclaim a new Middle East, including Israel. In the 1990s, peace between Israel and the Palestinians was supposed to turn the Middle East into a zone of economic cooperation—including Israel. Then we were told that Iraq’s liberation would turn the Middle East into a zone of democracy—including Israel. A few months ago, we were told that the Iranian threat would turn the Middle East into a zone of political and military alliance—including Israel.
This latest new Middle East has had the shortest life of them all. Apparently, new Middle Easts just aren’t what they used to be.
Don’t miss this post by Martin Kramer [Middle East Strategy at Harvard (MESH) is a project of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.] Kramer made these remarks at the 8th Herzliya Conference on January 21.
Lately it has been said that the Arabs are in a panic over the growing power of Iran. We are told that Arab rulers so fear the rise of Iran that this fear has eclipsed all others—it’s the sum of all fears. And it’s making a new Middle East…
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