Anchor Lisa Mullins speaks with Rashid Khalidi, professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University, about his new book, "Sowing Crisis - The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East."
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LISA MULLINS: I'm Lisa Mullins, and this is The World. US foreign policy has gone through several phases over the decades. There was, for instance, the Cold War and the battle against Communism. And then there was 9-11, followed by the fight against terrorism. We tend to think of those two eras as distinct from one another, but Rashid Khalidi disagrees. He's a professor at Columbia University and his new book is called, “Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East.†As the title implies, he says there's a connection between the two.
RASHID KHALIDI: We've somehow moved from a conflict with what President Reagan called “evil empire†to what President Bush called an “axis of evilâ€. And Communism has been replaced by terrorism as something that's supposed to scare us and is supposed to justify defense expenditures and so on and so forth. So we haven't really had a peace dividend. We haven't really had a new world order where the United States is able to behave almost normally in this world.
MULLINS: Factor into this equation September 11, 2001. Factor in terrorist attacks around the world. I mean, there are many people who would say, “Look. We have a new enemy. It exists in the face of terrorists.â€
KHALIDI: The Soviet Union posed an existential danger to the United States. The Soviet Union and the United States have the potential to destroy one another. Terrorism is a terrible threat to individuals. It's not a threat to our society. It's not a threat to American way of life. It's a danger that has to be met more with precise response, I think, than with the kind of global arms-guarding response that the Cold War called for. Something is awry here. Something is wrong that we have bases all over the Middle East to fight an amorphous, almost invisible terrorist threat, and I don't think people fully realize the degree to which we have been seduced by the logic of this global war on terror and this rivalry with Iran.
MULLINS: So if you're saying that the war on terror, as the Bush administration described it, has taken the place of fear of Communism.
KHALIDI: Right.
MULLINS: So fear of terrorism has now supplanted the fear of Communism. Is that for the expediency of it?
KHALIDI: To be frank, I'm not judging the motives of the people of the Bush administration who came up with these formulae. What I am suggesting is it involves the same kind of incredible reductionism whereby everything is boiled down to the same thing. I mean, to put Iran, Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and 15 other completely different groups in one pot and call them all “terrorists†and say they're indistinguishable and they're all enemies of the United States is a) false, b) ridiculous, and c) to put us on the path towards what we were almost engaged in at a certain point which is a war with a very large part of the Middle East.
MULLINS: Why would it be in the US interest, particularly if you're talking about during the Bush administration, to exaggerate claims of a war on terror to keep the population as you say in a permanent state of fear?
KHALIDI: Well, one of the things that that enabled the administration to do was to justify a huge defense budget. Another thing was to ram through a strengthening of an executive authority. One of the things that the war on terror enabled was an increase of power in the Executive, in keeping with Vice President Cheney's and others theories of how the United States should be organized to meet this threat. I'm not saying that they were insincere in seeing a threat. I'm suggesting that the effects were both nefarious and that the analysis of how this approach was based was completely faulty.
MULLINS: Professor Khalidi, there is of course a new administration in town, generally not using the term “war on terror†anymore. How does the new Obama administration fit into this reading that you have in the book on the United States fight against terrorism and the US motivation for it?
KHALIDI: Well, they seem to have a less simplistic and a little more sophisticated analysis of the realities in the Middle East.
MULLINS: How do you see that?
KHALIDI: Well, for one thing, the President when he was still a Presidential candidate, made it clear that he was willing in certain circumstances to talk to Iran. And I think that's a more adult, more intelligent approach to Iran, which is not say there may not be irreconcilable differences between the United States and Iran, but it might well be to the United States' interest to explore whether that may not be the case in regard to some issues of contention. And so whereas you had a knee-jerk ideological reaction on the part of the previous administration, here I think you're seeing a somewhat more nuanced reaction -- and that's in the case of Iran. I think in the case of Syria, they've also behaved in a more adult fashion. Let me be very blunt. It was sort of almost a pre-adolescent rage foreign policy that the Bush administration deployed in many respects in the Middle East, and I don't think it served the United States well at all.
MULLINS: So does this mean that the policy has changed – the ideology perhaps has changed because of the President himself, because of one man? I mean, presumably there are layers that have been entrenched since 1945 that are still there.
KHALIDI: That's true. And in the book I leave this open whether we're going to be able to deal with the toxic debris of the Cold War. There are covert methods that were developed to fight this enormously powerful Soviet enemy, which the United States is still employing vis a vis Iran right now, for example. The press has reported appropriation of hundreds of millions of dollars to subvert the Iranian regime, and the Iranians are playing the same kind of game. I don't know if it's possible to get over this mindset. It's not only the United States that has it --- I mean, we're involved with conflicts of interest with China or Russia, much more serious and more important powers than Iran. I'm sure they have the same mindset. I mean, they were involved in the Cold War, too, and their leaderships haven't changed all that much either in some respects. So I think this is a broader problem. I'm only talking about the Middle East here, but I think we should think of it in a broader context, too.
MULLINS: All right. So then where does this leave us now? You have described US policymakers, senior policymakers as operating in the Middle East “without a compass in a post-Cold War international system in a state of fluxâ€. Pretty dangerous.
KHALIDI: Well, I think it was dangerous. The Cold War was an awful episode in human history, but it provided a certain set of rules as it were. Unfortunately, I think the last administration assumed that there are no restraints; there are no limits on US power. And I hope that we will come back to some form of equilibrium. But I find it interesting that you almost cannot resolve an issue say like Gaza without dealing with America-Iranian relations, without dealing with America-Syria relations, without dealing with a whole set of issues around Iraq, and issues relating to international terrorism. So we now have a linked set of problems, not one of which is susceptible to easy treatment in isolation.
MULLINS: Professor Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University. His new book is called “Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and the American Dominance in the Middle East.†Thanks a lot, Professor.
transcript
Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East