Dispatches

You don’t need me to tell you who won the presidential election. But did you know Puerto Rico just voted for statehood?

The referendum is non-binding. Congress still has to approve it. But Congress probably will.

Get out and vote. I’m not going to tell you who to vote for. That’s not my job. But I am going to tell you to vote if you haven’t already. It’s your duty.  

In March of 2001, the Taliban used anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank missiles, artillery cannons, and dynamite to obliterate enormous ancient Buddha statues carved into the cliffsides at Bamiyan. The statues were monuments to heresy, the Taliban said, and therefore must be destroyed.

I’ll never forget how a friend of mine in Oregon reacted. “We have to invade,” he said.

I thought he was nuts. Invade a country in the ass-end of nowhere over cultural vandalism?

“If they’ll destroy harmless statues,” he said, “they’ll destroy anything and anyone. So they’re a threat to everything and everyone. Just wait. You’ll see.”

He’s not a foreign policy professional nor a military historian. He’s just a concerned American citizen who had a very bad feeling about Afghanistan’s tyrannical overlords. 

Six months later, the worst attack against the United States in American history came out of Afghanistan. The longest war in American history followed.

Now Mali, a West African country that straddles the Sahara and the transitionary Sahel region, is shaping up to be the next Afghanistan. Earlier this year, shortly after a military coup toppled the feckless civilian government in Bamako, an Al Qaeda-affiliated organization called Ansar al-Dine seized power in Timbuktu and lopped off the northern part of the country.

The harshest form of Islamic law in the world is now being imposed at gunpoint. Ancient tombs and shrines are being bulldozed for the exact same reason the Buddha statues were destroyed in Afghanistan. And the place has turned into a rat’s nest of the who’s-who of terrorist organizations operating in North Africa.

This time around, we aren’t waiting for a devastating attack against an American city to do something about it, and not only because Al Qaeda is already a clearly identified enemy of the United States. Northern Mali may already be the return address for an attack against the United States. Some of the leaders of Al Qaeda in the Maghreb, which was presumably behind the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens, are believed to be based there.

The United Nations Security Council authorized ECOWAS, the Economic Union of West African States—a regional bloc to which Mali belongs—to hatch a plan to retake the area. “We must take action to root out the Al-Qaeda, drug traffickers, kidnappers and other criminal elements who are turning northern Mali into a home for terrorists,” says Nigeria’s president Goodluck Jonathan. But African soldiers will need some serious help. “We know that ECOWAS can't do it by itself, and they know it, too,” says Anouar Boukhars from the Carnegie Endowment. “There has to be logistical support and air support.”

The European Union is sending hundreds of military officers to train anti-Islamist militias while the United States is considering the use of Predator drones and Hellfire missiles.

Ansar al-Dine deserves everything coming its way. Mali was a political success story before the Islamists took hold of the north. The country had what appeared to be a stable democratic government despite being one of the poorest on earth. Now it’s Afghanistan. Or Somalia. At least parts of it are.

The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates Mali now has more than 200,000 internally displaced persons. Der Spiegel’s Mali correspondent Paul Hyacinthe Mben says the number may be above 400,000. He quotes a mechanic in the emptied city of Gao who says the economy has collapsed, that it’s down by 85 percent.

The Islamists are going on a Taliban-like rampage of destruction, destroying ancient Muslim religious tombs and shrines because they’re “idolatrous.” Bulgarian diplomat Irina Bokova minces no words. “This attack is led by a tiny armed minority, who violently imposes its interpretation of a faith on a distraught local community, spoiling centuries of tolerance and exchange,” she says. “The attack on Timbuktu's cultural heritage is an attack against this history and the values it carries—values of tolerance, exchange and living together… It is an attack against the physical evidence that peace and dialogue is possible.”

Music—all music—is banned. The Guardian reports a chilling recent story. Thugs armed with AK-47s drove up to the home of a local musician. He wasn’t there when they arrived, so they left a message with his sister. “If you speak to him, tell him that if he ever shows his face in this town again, we’ll cut off all the fingers he uses to play his guitar with.”

The paper also quotes Manny Ansar, the director of Timbuktu’s now-vanquished music festival in the desert. “People think that the problem is new. But the menace of al-Qaida started to have an effect on us in 2007. That's when al-Qaida people started to appear in the desert. They came to the nomad camps near Essakane [the beautiful dunes to the west of Timbuktu where the Festival in the Desert used to be held] and at first they were pleasant and said, 'Don't worry, we're Muslims like you.' Then they began to say, 'We have a common enemy, which is the west.' That's when I understood that things were going to get difficult.”

Medieval-era Islamic laws have been imposed. Thieves have their hands cut off. Islamist policemen are everywhere. The “government” even whipped a 15-year old girl for speaking to men on the street.

Most of Africa is like Las Vegas at least in one way. What happens there tends to stay there. Hardly any African wars affect anybody off-continent. But Mali isn’t the Congo or Sierra Leone. It matters for the same reason Afghanistan mattered in early 2001 even though most of us couldn't see it yet.

We might get lucky and have just a small proxy war, with moderate Tuaregs doing most of the fighting against Ansar al-Dine. But no one can say for sure where this thing is heading. All we know now is that it’s almost certainly the next war the U.S. will be involved in.

Ron Radosh managed to see Oliver Stone’s new documentary before it premieres on Showtime later this month, and it doesn’t look pretty. I haven’t seen it yet. And I’m pretty sure after reading this review that I am not going to bother.

Two years ago, Oliver Stone announced that he was preparing to make a documentary about recent American history. It premieres on the CBS-owned cable network Showtime on November 12. Titled Oliver Stone’s Untold History of the United States, it is written by Stone and historian Peter Kuznick and narrated and directed by Stone. The series reflects the view Stone expressed in 2010 that the Soviet Union’s leader in the 1930s and ’40s, Joseph Stalin, has “been vilified pretty thoroughly by history,” so what is needed is a program allowing viewers to walk in both his and Hitler’s shoes “to understand their point of view.”

An examination of the first four episodes and the accompanying 750-page book—The Untold History of the United States (Gallery Books), obviously written by Kuznick, although Stone’s name appears first—reveals them to offer not an untold story, but the all-too-familiar Communist and Soviet line on America’s past as it developed in the early years of the Cold War. 

Interviewed in 2010, Kuznick said candidly that his goal was not to offer nuance, but rather to show that after World War II the United States moved “to the dark side,” so that by the time the country was engaged in the Vietnam war, “We were not on the wrong side. We were the wrong side.” 

At the beginning of the first episode, Stone appears on-screen, explaining that Americans learned in school that “we were the good guys.” But he wants his children and America’s young generally to learn the real truth, the neglected and forgotten story of our country’s true heroes, and that has led him to tell the American story “in a way that it has never been told before.” 

But half a century ago, when I was in high school, the late Carl Marzani told this very story in We Can Be Friends. A secret member of the American Communist party who had worked during the war in the OSS, Marzani later was proved by evidence from Soviet archives and Venona decryptions to have been a KGB (then the NKVD) operative. His book was published privately by his own Soviet-subsidized firm. It was the first example of what came to be called “Cold War revisionism.” Quoting the memoirs of figures from the Roosevelt and Truman administrations, as well as newspaper stories and magazine articles, Marzani aimed to show that the Cold War had been started by the Truman administration with the intent of destroying a peaceful alliance with the Soviet Union and gaining American hegemony throughout the world.

As it happens, Marzani could have provided Stone’s interpretation of how the Cold War began. Over and over, Stone uses the same quotations, the same arrangements of material, and the same arguments as Marzani. This is not to accuse Stone of plagiarism, only to point out that the case he now offers as new was argued in exactly the same terms by an American Communist and Soviet agent in 1952. 

Read the whole thing.

Nobody in my hometown of Portland, Oregon wants to put a Romney/Ryan sign in their yard. But I haven’t seen a single Obama/Biden sign either. One holdout in my neighborhood has an old Obama sign without Biden’s name, but that’s it. Granted, I'm not driving around looking for them, I'm just going about my regular life.

This one, however, was just spotted in Portland.

It’s hard to say how much the Benghazi incident will affect the outcome of the election, or if it will even affect the election at all. It has been more than a decade since foreign affairs have been so low on voters’ priority lists. And one yard sign in a metropolitan area of more than two million people doesn’t mean much.

But four years ago this city was drowning in Obama signs—and in my neighborhood they were particularly overwhelming—and he carried the state by 16 points. This time around the president is only expected to carry the state by 6.

What strikes me more than the polls, though, is the signs. So far I’ve only seen two. One says “Obama.” The other one says “Benghazi.”

Paul Hyacinthe Mben is a brave man. He’s a journalist who lives in Bamako, Mali’s capital, and ventured north into the portion of the country recently lopped off by Al Qaeda fighters who lord over it like fanatical dungeon wardens. Der Spiegel sent him. His first-person narrative dispatch is your required reading today.

Here is but a taste:

Gao, a city of 100,000 people, has become a lifeless place since the Islamists took over. It was once a stopping point for tourists traveling to Timbuktu, but now the roadside stands have disappeared, bars and restaurants are boarded up and music is banned. The new strongmen proclaim their creed on signs posted at street corners, written in white Arabic lettering on a black background, that read: "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his messenger."

To make matters worse, garbage collection has been suspended, leaving waste to rot in the streets at temperatures of 40 degrees Celsius (104 degrees Fahrenheit). Around 400,000 people have already fled the Islamists. Most who have left represent the better-educated parts of the work force, like the engineers who kept the power plant and waterworks in operation. Foreign aid organizations are gone, as are government officials who were in the process of implementing a new road construction program.

"Gao is a dead city," says Allassane Amadou Touré, a mechanic, as he drinks tea in the shade. He is unemployed, like many in the city, and says that Gao's economic output has "declined by 85 percent" since the spring.

[…]

Until recently, the Sharia courts' sentences were also carried out on Washington Street, but now the Islamic police have become more cautious. Since an angry crowd managed to rescue people who had been convicted of crimes from the executioner, hands and feet are now being severed in secret.

The Sharia court uses a former military base outside the city to carry out its grisly punishments. One of its victims is Alhassane Boncana Maiga, who was found guilty of stealing cattle. Four guards drag Maiga, wearing a white robe, into a dark room and tie him to a chair, leaving only one hand free. A doctor gives the victim an injection for the pain.

Then Omar Ben Saïd, the senior executioner, pulls a knife out of its sheath. "In the name of God, Most Gracious, Most Merciful," he calls out, takes the convicted man's hand and begins to slice into it, as blood squirts out. It becomes more difficult when Saïd reaches the bone, and it's a full three minutes before the hand drops into a bucket. The executioner reaches for his mobile phone, calls his superior and says: "The man has been punished."

Maiga had kept his eyes shut the entire time, not even screaming. The men lead him into another room, where his arm is bandaged, and after 15 minutes he is released and stumbles into the street. "I'm innocent," he says. "What am I supposed to do now? I can't work anymore."

A few days later, Maiga is dead, probably as a result of blood loss or an infection.

I don’t have to tell you that the big story this week is Hurricane Sandy blowing and flooding the hell out of the East Coast. I have a lot of friends on the East Coast—and this magazine is based on the East Coast—but I’m on the West Coast and have nothing to say aside from the fact that I hope everyone is okay and the damage is not too extensive.

The best source of information I’ve found anywhere is Brendan Loy’s Weather Nerd blog at PJ Media. Even if you live far away like I do, and even if you’re only slightly interested in this frankenstorm, as some are now calling it, Weather Nerd should be your first online stop.

Veteran Canadian journo Terry Glavin pens an epic essay for the Ottawa Citizen about the rupturing violence from Tunis to Kabul and everywhere in between that doubles as a book review of Is This Your First War? by Michael Petrou, Arab Spring Dreams by Sohrab Ahmari and Nasser Weddady, and my own new book, Where the West Ends.

Here is what he said about Where the West Ends:

There is such a thing as “the West,” and Michael Totten explores its frontiers and the confounding landscapes beyond in Where The West Ends. If there is one place where that event occurs as sharply as it did during the Cold War days, in the vicinity of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, Totten reckons it’s the six-metre-high separation wall at the edge of Jerusalem, at the boundary with the West Bank. But the rest of the frontier is almost always ambiguous. It’s vast and nebulous and disorienting, in the same way that Byzantine Christendom bleeds away into Ottoman Islam, in time and space, the farther one travels east across Turkey.

If Petrou is a bit of Ernest Hemingway with a touch of George Orwell, Totten is part Paul Theroux with a dose of Hunter S. Thompson. He all but throws himself into the creepy post-Soviet expanses and the mountainous nooks and crannies of the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East, with glimpses of the Black Sea and the Sea of Azov. But Totten’s terrain isn’t Thompson’s bat country in the desert just outside Barstow on the road to Las Vegas, or the countryside Theroux sees through bloodshot eyes from a train in India. The stuff of Where the West Ends is more interesting and strange.

It’s also as good as “travel writing” gets, and it is a bit of a departure for Totten because it isn’t the war reporting that takes up so much of his two previous books. The Road to Fatima Gate chronicles Totten’s observations from Lebanon, where he lived and reported on the Cedar Revolution, the Israeli-Hezbollah war and Hezbollah’s subsequent and slow suffocation of Lebanese democracy. In the Wake of the Surge is a synthesis of Totten’s seven extended visits to Iraq during the command of U.S. general David Petraeus. Unlike most books that interrogate or “problematize” the idea of the West, whenever Where the West Ends is funny, it’s on purpose. The parts where you find yourself laughing are the parts where you’re supposed to. Another thing: there are real people in this book, and they’re carefully introduced and allowed to say what they think. They’re not just caricatures of their gender or cultural or religious identities, and when it’s the “Muslim World” Totten is traversing, the laws of gravity actually don’t work any differently than they do in the “West.”

My latest column appeared in the Wall Street Journal. It's behind the pay wall and is reprinted here with permission.

President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney wrapped up their trilogy of presidential debates on Monday this week and spent most of the evening arguing foreign policy. Each demonstrated a reasonable grasp of how the world works and only sharply disagreed with his opponent on the margins and in the details. But they both seem to think, 11 years after 9/11, that calibrating just the right policy recipe will reduce Islamist extremism and anti-Americanism in the Middle East. They're wrong.

Mr. Romney said it first, early in the debate: "We're going to have to put in place a very comprehensive and robust strategy to help the world of Islam . . . reject this violent extremism." Later Mr. Obama spoke as though this objective is already on its way to being accomplished: "When Tunisians began to protest," he said, "this nation, me, my administration, stood with them earlier than just about any other country. In Egypt, we stood on the side of democracy. In Libya, we stood on the side of the people. And as a consequence, there is no doubt that attitudes about Americans have changed."

The Middle East desperately needs economic development, better education, the rule of law and gender equality, as Mr. Romney says. And Mr. Obama was right to take the side of citizens against dictators—especially in Libya, where Moammar Gadhafi ran one of the most thoroughly repressive police states in the world, and in Syria, where Bashar Assad has turned the country he inherited into a prison spattered with blood. But both presidential candidates are kidding themselves if they think anti-Americanism and the appeal of radical Islam will vanish any time soon.

First, it's simply not true that attitudes toward Americans have changed in the region. I've spent a lot of time in Tunisia and Egypt, both before and after the revolutions, and have yet to meet or interview a single person whose opinion of Americans has changed an iota.

Second, pace Mr. Romney, promoting better education, the rule of law and gender equality won't reduce the appeal of radical Islam. Egyptians voted for Islamist parties by a two-to-one margin. Two-thirds of those votes went to the Muslim Brotherhood, and the other third went to the totalitarian Salafists, the ideological brethren of Osama bin Laden. These people are not even remotely interested in the rule of law, better education or gender equality. They want Islamic law, Islamic education and gender apartheid. They will resist Mr. Romney's pressure for a more liberal alternative and denounce him as a meddling imperialist just for bringing it up.

Anti-Americanism has been a default political position in the Arab world for decades. Radical Islam is the principal vehicle through which it's expressed at the moment, but anti-Americanism specifically, and anti-Western "imperialism" generally, likewise lie at the molten core of secular Arab nationalism of every variety. The Islamists hate the U.S. because it's liberal and decadent. (The riots in September over a ludicrous Internet video ought to make that abundantly clear.) And both Islamists and secularists hate the U.S. because it's a superpower.

Everything the United States does is viewed with suspicion across the political spectrum. Gamal Abdel Gawad Soltan, the director of Egypt's Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, admitted as much to me in Cairo last summer when I asked him about NATO's war against Gadhafi in Libya. "There is a general sympathy with the Libyan people," he said, "but also concern about the NATO intervention. The fact that the rebels in Libya are supported by NATO is why many people here are somewhat restrained from voicing support for the rebels." When I asked him what Egyptians would think if the U.S. sat the war out, he said, "They would criticize NATO for not helping. It's a lose-lose situation for you."

So we're damned if we do and we're damned if we don't. And not just on Libya. An enormous swath of the Arab world supported the Iraqi insurgency after an American-led coalition overthrew Saddam Hussein. Thousands of non-Iraqi Arabs even showed up to fight. Yet today the U.S. is roundly criticized all over the region for not taking Assad out in Syria.

The U.S. has decent relations with Tunisia's elected coalition government, yet nearly every liberal Tunisian I interviewed a few months ago looks at that and sees a big conspiracy between Americans and Islamists. The Islamists, of course, see U.S. plots against them. We can't win.

We can't even win when we stand against Israel. President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried that during the Suez Crisis in 1956. He backed Egypt, not Israel, and not Britain or France. How did Egypt and its ruler Gamal Abdel Nasser pay back the U.S.? By forging an alliance with Moscow and making Egypt a Soviet client state for two decades.

Libyans are the big exception. They're more pro-American than their neighbors, and they're less prone to extremism. American flags are a common sight there—absolutely unheard of everywhere else in the Arab world. The Islamists lost the post-Gadhafi elections. The only demonstrations there recently were against the terrorist cell that assassinated U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others at the American consulate in Benghazi. Just a few weeks later, another group of demonstrators forced an Islamist militia to flee town by overrunning their headquarters.

Here Mr. Obama deserves credit. After all, he helped get rid of Gadhafi. But Libyans were already something of an exception. They were force-fed anti-American propaganda daily for decades, but it came from a lunatic and malevolent tyrant they hated. Libyans and Americans were quietly on the same side longer than most people there have been alive. Libya has at least that much in common with Eastern Europe during the communist period. Unfortunately, that just isn't true of anywhere else.

When he was elected president in 2008, Mr. Obama thought he could improve America's relations with the Arab world by not being George W. Bush, by creating some distance between himself and Israel, and by delivering a friendly speech in Cairo. He was naïve. He should know better by now, especially after the unpleasantness last month in the countries where he thinks we're popular.

It's not his fault that the Middle East is immature and unhinged politically. Nobody can change that right now. This should be equally obvious to Mr. Romney even though he isn't president. No American president since Eisenhower could change it, nor can Mr. Romney. We may be able to help out here and there, and I wholeheartedly agree with him that we should. But Arab countries will mostly have to work this out on their own.

It will take a long time.

Mr. Totten is a contributing editor at World Affairs and City Journal, and is the prize-winning author of Where the West Ends (Belmont Estate, 2012) and The Road to Fatima Gate (Encounter, 2011).

Reuters claims to be in possession of three emails that, if authentic, should put to rest once and for all how long it took for the White House and State Department to learn that the terrorist attack in the Libyan city of Benghazi last month was, in fact, a terrorist attack.

No one else in America found that one a head-scratcher, but we’ll leave that aside for the time being.

Officials at the White House and State Department were advised two hours after attackers assaulted the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 that an Islamic militant group had claimed credit for the attack, official emails show.

The emails, obtained by Reuters from government sources not connected with U.S. spy agencies or the State Department and who requested anonymity, specifically mention that the Libyan group called Ansar al-Sharia had asserted responsibility for the attacks.

The brief emails also show how U.S. diplomats described the attack, even as it was still under way, to Washington.

[…]

The records obtained by Reuters consist of three emails dispatched by the State Department's Operations Center to multiple government offices, including addresses at the White House, Pentagon, intelligence community and FBI, on the afternoon of September 11.

The first email, timed at 4:05 p.m. Washington time - or 10:05 p.m. Benghazi time, 20-30 minutes after the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission allegedly began - carried the subject line "U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi Under Attack" and the notation "SBU", meaning "Sensitive But Unclassified."

The text said the State Department's regional security office had reported that the diplomatic mission in Benghazi was "under attack. Embassy in Tripoli reports approximately 20 armed people fired shots; explosions have been heard as well."

The message continued: "Ambassador Stevens, who is currently in Benghazi, and four ... personnel are in the compound safe haven. The 17th of February militia is providing security support."

A second email, headed "Update 1: U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi" and timed 4:54 p.m. Washington time, said that the Embassy in Tripoli had reported that "the firing at the U.S. Diplomatic Mission in Benghazi had stopped and the compound had been cleared." It said a "response team" was at the site attempting to locate missing personnel.

A third email, also marked SBU and sent at 6:07 p.m. Washington time, carried the subject line: "Update 2: Ansar al-Sharia Claims Responsibility for Benghazi Attack."

The message reported: "Embassy Tripoli reports the group claimed responsibility on Facebook and Twitter and has called for an attack on Embassy Tripoli."

While some information identifying recipients of this message was redacted from copies of the messages obtained by Reuters, a government source said that one of the addresses to which the message was sent was the White House Situation Room, the president's secure command post.

Since I have a blog and write about foreign policy, and since Barack Obama and Mitt Romney just had a debate about foreign policy, I feel like I should post a more or less instant snap analysis. Forgive me, but I’m not going to do that. Instead, I’m working on something that will take a little bit longer and needs to be written carefully.

I will say, though, that both did a bit better than I expected. I groaned a few times, but I never felt the urge to yell at the TV.

Here are some links to stories around the world. Cross-posted at Instapundit.

THE REAL HOUSEWIVES of the Middle East. Also starring Hillary Clinton and Ri Sol Ju of North Korea.

QADDAFI'S SON KILLED in Libya fighting.

SYRIA'S BASHAR AL-ASSAD BANS GENETICALLY MODIFIED FOODS: “The law is meant ‘to preserve the health of human beings, animals, vegetables and the environment.’” He used to do a good job mimicking the prejudices of silly Westerners and saying exactly what they wanted to hear, but no one’s buying this crap anymore.

JONATHAN FREEDLAND AT THE GUARDIAN: “When Israelis kill Arabs there is outrage. But Assad's brutal campaign has cost 30,000 lives and there've been no protests.”

EGYPTIAN MOB VIOLENCE: Yet another Western woman—Sonia Dridi, a journalist for France 24 TV—was seized and assaulted by a mob in Cairo. Fortunately she wasn’t harmed as badly as Lara Logan was last year. She credits someone named Ashraf Khalil, whom I presume is her fixer, for getting her out of there.

ISRAELIS AND LEBANESE are both angry—for very different reasons—that an episode of Showtime’s Homeland that took place in Beirut was filmed in Israel.

A MASSIVE CAR BOMB just exploded in Beirut near an anti-Hezbollah organization’s office. Lebanese police say the head of police intelligence was the target.

FRANCE IS GEARING UP to intervene in Mali to oust the Al Qaeda controlled "government" in the north. The defense minister says the intervention will begin "in a matter of weeks."

JACKSON DIEHL on the coming collapse: Authoritarians in China and Russia Face an Endgame.

WE KNEW THAT ALREADY: Pakistan’s president admits his country created terrorist organizations.

THE FOREIGN POLICY INITIATIVE published a report on the foreign policy of independent voters. Among its findings:

Nearly 60 percent believe the United States is headed down the wrong track

Roughly 57 percent favor preventing Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons even if that means taking U.S. military action against Tehran -- placing independents between Democrats (49 percent) and Republicans (79 percent)

Around 65 percent feel the United States should work with its allies to establish a no-fly zone in Syria

72 percent have a favorable view of Israel

Roughly 87 percent believe America is a force for good in the world and more than 90 percent say it is important for the United States to play a significant role in world affairs

I am pleased and astonished to announce that I reached my fundraising goal for my upcoming trip to Libya with my Kickstarter project in less than 24 hours. Kickstarter is a much more effective fundraising tool than PayPal. I never raised as much for a trip abroad the old way. Never.

I owe every donor a personal thank-you, I owe some of you a public thank-you, and I owe one of you recognition as the official sponsor of my trip for donating a gobsmacking 2,000 dollars, but if it’s okay with everyone I’d like to hold off on all that until the project officially closes.

Because I’m not asking for donations this time—I’m giving something back in return for travel expenses—you might want to consider kicking some cash in even though my goal has been met. I’m not even in the same time zone as a rich person (there’s hardly any money in journalism anymore), so I can always use a little more revenue. But consider it optional. I have enough to travel now either way.

Thanks again, everybody. Your regularly scheduled programming will resume again shortly.

I just launched a Kickstarter project to raise money for a trip to Libya in December. I’m not asking for donations this time. This time I’m asking for funding and will give something back in return. Check out the project page for all the details.

With Kickstarter, you can see how much money I need and how much I’ve raised. I won’t get any money at all unless the entire project is funded, so please make sure I don’t come up short. You and I both need me back in the field, but alas traveling—especially to a country like Libya—costs money.

There’s a promo video on the Kickstarter page you can watch, but here’s the text.

The Middle East is passing through a great gate in its history. Not for decades has the region experienced so much turmoil and upheaval. Four dictators have fallen since the Arab Spring kicked off in 2010—Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Moammar Qaddafi in Libya, and Ali Abdullah Saleh in Yemen. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad may well be next.

I’ve been working in and writing about that region for almost ten years now. And I’ve published three books, about Lebanon, Iraq, and the former communist bloc. My first book, The Road to Fatima Gate, won the Washington Institute Book Prize in 2011.

I started in Libya, in 2004, when Qaddafi still ruled the country like a blood-soaked Stalinist tyrant. His total surveillance police state was the most terrifying regime I’ve ever seen. The only countries in the entire world more oppressive at the time were Turkmenistan under Turkmenbashi and North Korea under the Orwellian Kim family dynasty.

I was one of the first Americans to legally visit Libya in 2004 when the travel ban was first lifted, and I saw first-hand what it looks like when the political equivalent of a mad scientist runs a country like it’s his own private laboratory for deranged social experiments.

Qaddafi’s regime was completely demolished last year. Libyans now face the grim task of building new institutions—including the army—from scratch with little or no hands-on experience. Libya used to have far too much government, but today it does not have nearly enough. The state doesn’t yet have sovereignty over all of its territory. Militias run wild, including the terrorist organization that assassinated U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three others in Benghazi in mid-September.

Will the country disintegrate into a failed militia state like Somalia with terrorists controlling some of the fragments? Will it lapse again into authoritarian or even totalitarian rule, the only kind of government it has ever known? Or will it beat the odds and cohere into something that looks like democracy?

Nobody knows, but I’m going over there to take a look and report on what’s happening now. My first-person narrative dispatches from Middle Eastern countries at war and in the throes of revolution garnered me three blogging awards and a book prize, but I still work as a freelancer. I don’t have a salary, let alone a travel expense account.

That’s where you come in. Fund my next trip—to Libya near the end of this year—so I can produce a brand-new batch of first-person narrative dispatches. You can follow along as I publish them on my blog. And at the end of the project, I’ll publish all my material as a dispatch pack—including full-color photographs—that you can read on your iPad, your Kindle, or any other tablet or reading device. And if you don’t have a tablet or reading device, you can just read them on your computer. Generous donors will receive public thank-yous from me, on my blog and in the dispatch pack when it’s published.

I’m not asking you for donations. I’m asking you to participate and will give you something back in return. Let’s go to Libya.

I need 7,500 dollars and I’ve got 30 days to raise it. The money will cover plane tickets, hotels, food, fixers, ground transportation, translators, travel insurace, and will even leave me a slight bit of padding in case of emergency—which in a country like Libya in 2012 is a real possibility. Click through to my Kickstarter project, pledge a bit of money, and let’s make this happen. There’s no way I can do this without your support.

Many thanks in advance to you all.

My friend and colleague Jonathan Spyer sneaked over the border with the Free Syrian Army to cover the war against Assad from the front lines. He did it twice. And he’s an Israeli.

He has the chops for it. His magnificent first book, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, is partly about his experience in South Lebanon, first as a tank operator with the Israel Defense Forces during the war against Hezbollah in 2006, and then again as a journalist the following year. I won’t tell you exactly how he manages to get around in these dangerous parts of the world on an Israeli passport, but he does, and we should be grateful because he produces outstanding work.

I recently spoke with him about what he has seen in Syria recently, what the West ought to do about it, and about the even greater threat from Iran and what the West ought to do about that.

MJT: You’re a brave man, Jonathan Spyer, for sneaking into Syria twice as an Israeli. Tell us what it’s like there right now and how things have changed since you were there nine months ago.

Jonathan Spyer: Well, the most immediately notable change between my first visit in February and the most recent trip was the extent to which the rebels have consolidated their control on the ground in the Idlib and Aleppo Governates. In February, the regime’s army was still patrolling the border. The rebels were entrenched in a number of villages and rural areas, but they ventured onto the main highway only by night and for short periods. Assad’s army was the ruling force, and it could enter even the areas flying the flag of the rebellion if and when it chose to.

This situation has changed. Today, the Assad regime hardly exists on the ground in the area between the Syria-Turkey border and Aleppo city, for example. The Free Syrian Army has joint control of a border crossing – Bab al-Salaam – in cooperation with the Turkish army. I took the main highway after crossing the border, heading for Aleppo city in the company of two opposition activists. The highway is policed by FSA checkpoints every few miles.

So the contraction of the Assad regime is very notable, and new. But this does not mean rebel victory is imminent. Rather, each side has advantages and disadvantages. With the pool of loyal manpower available to it depleted, the regime prefers to rely increasingly on its overwhelming technological superiority – above all in the field of air power. The rebels may largely hold the ground in Aleppo Governate, but they have no adequate response to the regime’s jet fighters and helicopters, which carry out attacks at will on the civilian population in the rebel controlled areas. The regime’s possession of artillery lends it a similar advantage. Similarly its armored capacity affords it a notable, though less significant, advantage over the lightly armed rebel forces.

An additional notable, though not new, element was the disparate and still not united nature of the rebel forces. In Aleppo city, in which I spent a few days, there are a number of different groups fighting the regime. In addition to the various battalions operating under the banner of the Free Syrian Army, there is the powerful Islamist Tawhid Brigade, also the Saudi supported Ahrar al-Sham group and a number of other groups. In interviews, rebel commanders did their best to put an optimistic slant on the absence of unity, but none sought to deny it.

MJT: What should the US do about Syria? Stay out of it? Arm the rebels? What?

Jonathan Spyer: My own view remains that the United States and its allies should engage closely with the rebels, identify deserving clients and begin to arm and support them. This has not yet happened to a significant degree and the result is the current stalemate. It’s understandable that many Westerners feel that given the rise of Sunni Islamism as a result of the downfall of secular Arab dictatorships over the last 18 months, the US interest is to stay out. Understandable, but wrong.

The US can either engage in the Middle East or disengage from it. The Obama administration appears to prefer the latter option. But disengagement doesn’t leave a vacuum. Rather, it leaves a space which is rapidly filled by advancing hostile interests – in the Syrian case Iran and Russia, with China as the silent additional partner.

These forces are currently backing the Assad dictatorship all the way. The Iranians, in particular, see the survival of the dictatorship as a cardinal interest. Should Assad or his regime survive in some form, this would represent a major strategic victory for the Iranians and their backers. It would keep alive the Iranian ambition of establishing a contiguous pro-Iran space from western Afghanistan to the Mediterranean Sea.

It would also convince regional elites that the Iranians are the people to align with if you want to stay in power. They will have backed their friends and been seen to prevail. This will be good for the enemies of the US, and therefore bad for the US.

US strategic capital has already suffered in the last 18 months because of the perception that Washington rapidly ditched long time allies as soon as they got in trouble. Egypt is the case in point here, of course. Syria should be the arena in which the US rebuilds that strategic capital, in the heart of the Middle East.

I understand well the argument that Sunni Islamists dominate the rebellion. My own view is that the organized, tight, Iran-led bloc remains by far the most pressing and dangerous enemy of the West in the region right now. Reality and history rarely give us the luxury of having only allies that are our ideological blood brothers. The 1939-45 period offers an example. The possibly dubious nature of our ‘allies’ should not be an excuse for paralysis in the face of an active enemy who has plainly declared his intention of replacing the US-led regional dispensation that has pertained in the region since 1991. It’s also important to note that there are significant secular elements in the FSA and the opposition. Still, these elements are nationalist rather than liberal-democratic in outlook.

Regarding the type of help, the list is a familiar one: arms, most importantly anti-aircraft weapons for the rebels, and a no-fly and no heavy armor zone in the north would be the most urgent first moves.

In other words, I think the Syrian situation presents an opportunity to deal the Iran-led regional bloc and its backers a very telling defeat. I think this opportunity should be taken, though I acknowledge the concerns regarding the people in the rebel movements and the ideas they support.

MJT: You say the secular elements of the Free Syrian Army are nationalist rather than liberal-democratic. Do you mean they’re Syrian nationalists, Arab nationalists, or a mixture of both?

Jonathan Spyer: An interesting question. Well, this rebellion is overwhelmingly Sunni-Arab in character, so while the secular rebels would certainly characterize themselves as Syrian nationalists first and foremost, the particular Syrian nationalism they espouse has a Sunni-Arab flavor. I don’t mean Pan-Arab nationalism of the old Baathist/Nasserite type, of course. Anyone still professing loyalty to that in Syria is firmly on the government side. The rebels fly the flag of the pre-Baathist Syrian republic. But the armed rebellion has an unmistakable Sunni Arab and rural nature to it, which makes it correspondingly difficult for it to win the trust of non-Arab communities such as the Kurds, and non-Sunni communities such as the Christians, Druze, and of course Alawis.

But I mean also that in a country which has been under Baath rule for nearly fifty years, we would be naïve if we thought the opponents of the regime hadn’t imbibed to some extent the style of thinking favoured and spread by the regime. The familiar cocktail of paranoia, the feeling that Israel is behind everything, the hostility and paranoia toward the West, one finds manifestations of these in the rebel ranks, too. This fact shouldn’t be concealed.

MJT: The relatively “moderate” Muslim Brotherhood used to be quietly popular there back in the 80s before Hafez al-Assad beat them to death in the city of Hama. Are they still popular? Or are they a marginal force like they are next-door in Lebanon?

Jonathan Spyer: Well, after the Muslim Brothers were crushed by the regime in 1982, Assad took extreme measures to make sure that they wouldn’t rise again. Muslim Brotherhood membership is an offense punishable by death in Assad’s Syria. So unlike in, say, Egypt, the Brotherhood didn’t have a ready-made infrastructure on the ground when the uprising began. But they have by all accounts been busy, and working in close cooperation with Qatar they are said to have built up direct links to various rebel battalions active in the country. I would imagine, without knowing for sure, that the Tawhid Brigade of Aleppo is one of those. The powerful Farouq Brigade in the Homs area may well be another.

The Brothers have money and are well organized. They think, as you know, that they are now having their moment in the region after many long years of waiting. Hence their representatives are there in southern Turkey making deals, establishing supply lines, providing money, and building their structures on the ground. 

MJT: Do have any idea how many Syrians are supporting and/or working with the Salafist elements of the Free Syrian Army because there’s no other option compared with how many are supporting the Salafists because they genuinely sympathize with the Salafists?

Jonathan Spyer: Don’t know how many in terms of numbers. I saw a number of checkpoints of the Saudi-supported Ahrar al-Sham group at prominent places in Aleppo city, complete with Salafi banners. They’re certainly there. My sense was that they weren’t the most serious factor. I don’t think Salafiya as such has a particularly large constituency in Syria and I don’t think it will succeed in becoming a central political faction. Much more notable and important, I think, is the growth of Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamism as a powerful element in the armed insurgency.

The Tawhid Brigade, for example, is the most powerful single armed unit in Aleppo. I interviewed one of the commanders of the brigade, and I would characterize its outlook a Muslim Brotherhood-style Islamist. Its members are critical of extreme, Al Qaeda-style Islamism, but they are also open about their own desire for an ‘Islamic state.’

I also met members of a hastily assembled Sharia Council in Azaz town. The council consists of religious former FSA commanders and religious notables. I was told that it currently constitutes the highest legal authority in the town, working in cooperation with the armed rebels. Again, I’d stress that the heartland of the rebellion is a very conservative, devout, Sunni Arab space. This rebellion has a religious coloration. At the same time, this does not imply the victory of Al Qaeda types.

MJT: You and I have both spent some quality time in Lebanon, me as a journalist and you as a journalist and as an Israeli soldier. So let me ask you this: what do you think about the Free Syrian Army’s threat to take the fight to Hezbollah in its stronghold south of Beirut?

Jonathan Spyer: I would take this quite seriously. From the FSA point of view, Hezbollah is a combat arm of the Syrian regime. Hezbollah has been advising and apparently participating in combat alongside the Syrian army and in cooperation with the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps since the start of the Syrian uprising. The FSA has noted this.

The death of senior Hezbollah commander Ali Hussein Nassif earlier this month was only the latest evidence of Hezbollah’s deep involvement with the Assad regime. The Syrian civil war has already begun to spill across the borders of Lebanon and Turkey. Hezbollah has been engaged for many months in the harassment of Syrian oppositionists who found refuge in Lebanon. The FSA understands itself to be in a fight not only with Assad’s army but also with the regional alliance standing behind him, of which Hezbollah forms a part.

So it is quite possible that the Syrian insurgents may choose to strike back at Hezbollah in Lebanon itself at some stage. In many ways, the killing of Nassif (and reportedly other Hezbollah fighters) in fighting in Syria suggests that they have already begun to do so. The decision as to where to strike is ultimately tactical. But Hezbollah and the FSA are already at war.

Let me add a bit of anecdotal evidence regarding this from my own time in Syria. The hatred felt by FSA and other Syrian insurgent fighters toward Hezbollah is very intense. It of course also has a sectarian element. I have seen Hezbollah flags burned at opposition demonstrations in Idlib Province. In Aleppo last month, I interviewed a Tawhid Brigade fighter who referred constantly to the party as ‘Hizb a Shaytan’ (party of Satan.) It created a weird dynamic in our conversation because I would keep asking about ‘Hezbollah’ (party of God) and he would keep replying by referring to ‘Hizb a Shaytan’ until in the end I started feeling like I was acting as some kind of apologist for Hezbollah. Which I’m not. As you know.

In general, I think Hezbollah knows it has a great deal to fear from the rise of the Sunnis in Syria. If Assad falls and the rebels win, this will almost certainly mean a ‘renegotiation’ of the sectarian balance of power in Lebanon, too, to Hezbollah’s severe disadvantage. At that point, the organization will have to decide whether to accommodate itself to a new balance of power, or to fight to retain its dominance against a new, Sunni-dominated Syria and its Lebanese allies. Neither prospect is attractive to Hezbollah, so it is doing its utmost to preserve the rule of the Assad dictatorship.

MJT: Do you think Hezbollah will unleash its missile arsenal if Iranian nuclear weapons facilities are attacked? And if so, how much damage are we talking about here?

Jonathan Spyer: I think it is very likely that there will be action of some kind by Hezbollah against Israel in the event of any attack on Iranian nuclear facilities. Hezbollah, after all, is entirely the product of a thirty year investment by the Islamic Republic of Iran. To a great extent, this investment was intended for precisely such a moment.

Hezbollah has re-armed since the 2006 war and possesses, we are told, around 60,000 short range missiles as well as a medium and long range missile capability, including the M-600 missile system. This would give them the ability to hit targets in central Israel. However, Israel’s aerial and artillery capacity is in an entirely different league, and in such an instance there would be few political constraints against a swift Israeli response. So the result of Hezbollah’s taking such action would be the devastation of Hezbollah.

MJT: Is Israel going to pre-emptively strike Iran’s nuclear facilities?

Jonathan Spyer: An Israeli attack of this kind, we can now say with some confidence, will almost certainly not take place before next spring. There are strong voices within the Israeli defense establishment who argue against an Israeli pre-emptive strike at any stage because of what they consider to be the limited damage that Israel could inflict and the very negative diplomatic fall-out (if you’ll pardon the expression) that would result from such a move.

Generally, I think that a nuclear Iran is not only, or mainly, Israel’s problem.

The Iranians want above all to replace the United States as the guarantor of security in the Persian Gulf region. This is because they understand the power that comes from having the last word in an area so vital to the global economy. A nuclear Iran is a step toward the Iranian domination of the region, of which domination over the Gulf would form the vital centrepiece. This isn’t only, or mainly, Israel’s problem, and I personally see no reason why Israel should act as the gendarme of the oil-rich Arab monarchies of that area, enabling them of course to hysterically criticize it in public and thank it from the bottom of their hearts in private. The Iranians may single out Israel for rhetorical purposes, but their ambitions are not focused only, or mainly, on Israel. I hope this point is being forcefully made in the discussions behind the scenes between Israeli officials and their Western counterparts. The opposition to Iranian nuclear ambitions should be Western, which of course means US-led or nothing.

Of course, if the Obama Administration decides it doesn’t want that responsibility, and the Iranians decide to push on and come close to the point of achieving a nuclear capacity, then Israel may have no choice but to carry out an attack which might only set the process back for a relatively short period. I hope it doesn’t come to this, and that rather a more determined, Western-led campaign, including crippling sanctions and clear red lines beyond which the use of force would be a certainty, can convince the Iranians not to move further ahead.

If force must be used to stop the Iranian advance, I don’t think it is either strategically wise or ethical for that force to be Israel’s alone. 

MJT: President Barack Obama repeatedly says he will not allow Iran to acquire nuclear weapons. Do you believe him? How many Israelis believe him? He’s letting Assad get away with murder, but he did go after Qaddafi and bin Laden.

Jonathan Spyer: I don’t want to interfere in the internal American discussion, but your question is nicely phrased so I can comment without doing that. Confidence in President Obama is very low in Israel. That is because his performance so far seems to suggest that he has little understanding of the Hobbesian world of Middle Eastern politics and the aspects required in order to build firm alliances and proxies here. From his Cairo speech and the abandonment of Mubarak to the vacillating and paralysis on Syria, he just seems to be singing from a different and wholly unsuitable songbook.

So I think very few Israelis have confidence that he will act effectively to prevent a nuclear Iran. No coherent red lines, including an outlining of the consequences of crossing them, means the Iranians will keep on moving ahead.

Obama wants out of the Middle East, as he himself has made clear. He’ll do counter-terrorism from the air against small, extreme jihadi groups. In Libya, I think it was the Europeans and specifically the French who got that rolling, with the US following on, though of course inevitably doing most of the heavy lifting in the end.

And frankly I think many Israelis also have the feeling, which we haven’t had for quite a few years, that the man in the White House right now isn’t a deep friend of our country, that he doesn’t understand or isn’t really interested in the story of Israel and the Jewish People, and consequently lacks a grasp of the deeper moorings which I think should underlie, and have in recent years underlain, the alliance between the US and Israel.

MJT: What is it specifically that President Obama does not understand? Surely he knows the Middle East is a much rougher neighborhood than Europe and North America. What else does he still need to grasp besides the obvious? What would you explain to him if you had his ear for a couple of minutes?

Jonathan Spyer: I would try to explain to him the dynamic of patron-client relationships in our neighborhood. I would explain to him that your clients don’t need to love you, don’t want you to bow to them, and don’t even really need to know that you respect them and empathize with them (though they will need you to at least go through the motions in this regard.)

What they need to know is that if they get into trouble (and they will) you will back them and help them to your utmost. If they think you won’t or can’t do that, they won’t want to be your client. They will prefer to be the client of another patron (probably your enemy or rival) who will be willing to do this. As a result, the value of your strategic coin will rapidly decline.

Right now, the net result of Obama’s losing Egypt/Tunisia/Yemen, and Iran/Russia/China’s non-losing of Syria, is that US credibility as a patron is low. Obama seems mainly dangerous to his friends, less so to his enemies, the killing of Bin-Laden notwithstanding. This is making allies nervous and enemies happy. This is not good. In particular, the most vulnerable allies (the Gulf monarchies) are very nervous indeed, and are seeking to organize themselves independently because of their impression that the US right now is not there. The trouble is that these countries are too weak for the job. As we see now in Syria, for example, they can’t deliver against Assad.

So the end result of Obama’s conceptual error is that the Iran-led alliance, which remains by far the most potent and dangerous enemy in the region, is holding up well, while what used to look like a US-led regional alliance no longer really exists. This, in my view, derives directly from the American President’s failure to grasp the basic rules for behavior as a patron in the Hobbesian space of the Middle East. So if I had a few minutes that’s what I’d tell him. But I’d tell him this without a great deal of enthusiasm, because I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t get it.

Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center and is a columnist at the Jerusalem Post. You can purchase his first book, The Transforming Fire: The Rise of the Israel-Islamist Conflict, at Amazon.com.

Post-script: I’m raising money for my next trip to the Arab world. Unless Assad falls in Syria, most likely I’m heading to Libya.

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