What does last night's victory on health care reform say about President Obama's Middle East strategy? A lot of people have already pointed out how it could strengthen his hand abroad by showing domestic strength, free up bandwidth to engage more vigorously on foreign policy, or reduce his need to cater to Congress on key issues.  All of those may be true, but I had a slightly different reaction.  For most of the last year, I've been torn between two general views of Obama's Middle East policy. One says that he's got no strategy, that his team is making things up as it goes, reacting to events, and has no clear idea of how to achieve his lofty goals. The other says that he's been playing a long game, keeping his eye on the long-term objective while others get lost in the tactics and the public theatrics.  I've gone back and forth, hoping it's the latter while seeing way too many signs of the former.  I still don't know which is right, but last night's  passage of health care reform suggests that maybe, just maybe, his administration really does know how to play a long game... in the Middle East as well as on domestic priorities. 

Read on

All Iraq-watching eyes are quite naturally focused on the election results which continue to dribble in, with some hope of final results soon.   There's plenty to watch: Ayad Allawi's Iraqiyya list edging ahead of Nuri al-Maliki's State of  Law, a six vote difference between the Kurdistan Alliance and Iraqiyya in Kirkuk, escalating complaints of fraud, the taunting of prominent individuals who performed badly in the open list voting system.  We'll have to wait even longer for the final results to be processed through the complex reallocation of votes from losing lists to those over the threshold.  But in the meantime, I've been mulling over an interesting document which I just found on the forums:  A Strategic Plan to Improve the Political Position of the Islamic State of Iraq.   Call it the jihadist version of David Petraeus's FM 3-24, a counter-counterinsurgency manual and a frank lessons-learned analysis by an adaptive and resilient organization which has not given up in the face of setbacks.   How does al-Qaeda in Iraq's umbrella organization hope to rekindle the spark of jihad?

Read on

With Iraqi electoral results finally beginning to be released, with over 60% reporting for many provinces, expect to see a lot of analysis of the results in the coming days on the Middle East Channel and elsewhere.  Reider Visser has already been doing some great work identifying how the Sadrists are catapulting over ISCI candidates thanks to the open list voting system in Baghdad and other provinces.   I was struck this morning by the results in Anbar, where Shaykh Ahmed Abu Risha's Awakenings List (part of Interior Minister Jawad al-Bolani's Unity of Iraq List), seems headed for a near epic wipe-out.   That is quite a comedown for the heir to Abd al-Sattar Abu Risha's Anbar Awakening, whose decision to align with the U.S. against al-Qaeda in Iraq's Islamic State of Iraq in the months before the "Surge" proved so pivotal, and a sign that the leaders of the Awakening may not have found a path to national political power through the ballot box after all.   Is this a cause for concern? 

Read on

My FP colleague Tom Ricks has been arguing for quite some time not only that the U.S. should keep significant numbers of combat forces in Iraq well beyond Obama's timeline, but that U.S. commanders have actually asked for this. Today, he posts what he takes as a vindication of his reporting:

Here's the story in which Maj. Gen. Tony Cucolo, the U.S. commander for northern Iraq, discusses the need to keep a combat brigade up there beyond President Obama's August deadline to get all combat troops out of Iraq. As reported here about two weeks ago, I might add.

Uh oh! So, let's click the link and see what it says. The headline does indeed say "U.S. commander might need troops beyond August." What about the actual article? Let me just quote:

General Cucolo says he is only talking about maybe 800 troops in 26 small units spread along the Arab-Kurd regional border, and they could be redesignated as advisory units, the U.S. network said.

And the general says even that may not be necessary. He says the Kurdish and Arab forces that nearly went to war last year, before the three-way security system was established, are now working together quite well. In the interview, he predicted they might be able to work without U.S. help by the time the American combat role is to end six months from now, but later he backed off from that a little bit.

Eight hundred troops in 26 small advisory units, which may not be necessary? OK. If the "unravelling of Iraq" which Ricks has been predicting for the last year is of the same magnitude as this possible extension of 800 troops in small advisory units which may not be necessary, then I think we could probably all live with it.

It's hard to avoid the subject of corruption when you talk to people in Jordan. During my last few visits there, no matter how much I tried to talk about the Muslim Brotherhood or the Parliament or constitutional reform, talk would always eventually come around to dark whispers about the rising tide of corruption at the highest levels. When King Abdullah disbanded Parliament, his new Prime Minister Samir Rifa'i had made battling corruption a top priority, though there was skepticism given that he had himself been reportedly forced out as Minister of Court for abusing his position. So most everyone was stunned last week by the arrest of four high-level officials at the heart of the regime over allegations of corruption in the contracting of Jordan's petroleum refinery. What's going on?

Read on

Iraq's election day went off remarkably well. Despite some scattered and tragic violence, there was nothing like the kind of devastating violence threatened by a few insurgent groups and only scattered reports of problems in the electoral process. The de-Baathification shenanigans of Chalabi and al-Lami did some long-lasting damage to the credibility of state institutions and the rule of law, but not enough to cripple the elections. The relatively calm election day was overseen, it's worth emphasizing, by Iraqi security forces and not by U.S. troops -- something which I was often informed, over the last year, couldn't possibly happen. It did. This is simply excellent news, and a credit to the emerging capability of the Iraqi state. So now that election day is past, what now?

Read on

Welcome to the Middle East Channel! 

Some of you may have wondered why I haven't been posting much lately.  Part of the reason is that I've been working hard on putting together the Middle East Channel at ForeignPolicy.com.  Creating this site has been my dream for a long time.  With today's launch, it's finally come true, after half a year of hard work, with the enthusiastic support of the leadership at Foreign Policy  and a vibrant partnership with Daniel Levy and Amjad Atallah's Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation.  It's also sponsored by the Project on Middle East Political Science, a new network of political scientists specializing in the Middle East which I have been putting together with the support of a generous grant from the Carnegie Corporation -- much more on that soon! 

I can't think of a better way to explain what we're trying to than to quote in full the "Welcome" post which we've put up to announce the Middle East Channel:

The world is hardly lacking for opinions about the Middle East. But quantity should not be mistaken for quality: Too much of the public debate about the issues of the Middle East is dominated by partisan bickering and poorly informed punditry.

Foreign Policy's Middle East Channel is something different: a vibrant and decidedly non-partisan new site where real expertise and experience take priority over shouting, where the daily debate is informed by dispassionate analysis and original reporting all too often lacking from the stale and talking-point-laden commentary that sadly dominates most coverage of the region today. Its contributors range from academics to former policymakers, from journalists on the ground to established analysts -- with an emphasis on introducing voices from Middle East itself. Most importantly, the Middle East Channel comes to you doctrine-free, open to political viewpoints of all kinds -- but demanding honesty, civility, and genuine expertise.

Our scope is broad: Israel and its neighbors, Iran's nuclear program and domestic politics, Iraq, Islamist movements, the Gulf, Turkey, and North Africa, and the struggle for reform and democracy. The Middle East Channel will highlight links between issues and areas of this diverse region of 400 million -- as well as provide a unique perspective on America's challenges there. We'll have regular interviews with Middle East and Washington players, sharp commentary on the news of the day, and original analysis of new ideas and trends in the region.

The Middle East Channel is edited by Marc Lynch of George Washington University and the Project on Middle East Political Science and Amjad Atallah and Daniel Levy, co-directors of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation. Lynch, who writes the Abu Aardvark Middle East blog on ForeignPolicy.com, is an expert on Arab media and politics and is the author most recently of Voices of the New Arab Public: Al-Jazeera, Iraq, and Middle East Politics Today. Atallah is an expert in the law of conflict and post-conflict situations and a former advisor to the Palestinian negotiating team. Levy was an advisor to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and is a leading commentator on Israeli politics and Middle East peace.

You can follow the site on Twitter, sign up for our RSS feed, and subscribe to our twice-weekly email updates to get the latest on what's happening on the Middle East Channel and beyond.

I'll still be blogging here under my own name, while co-directing and co-editing the Middle East Channel.  Feel free to send me your ideas for stories or feedback.   Here we go!  

This afternoon at the Elliott School of International Affairs I moderated a really interesting panel on war reporting, co-sponsored by my Institute for Middle East Studies, Sean Aday's Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communications, and Jim Lebovic's Security Policy Forum. The panel featured three major American print war journalists: Michael Gordon (of the New York Times) and Ann Scott Tyson and Rajiv Chandrasekaran (of the Washington Post). What emerged was a fascinating picture of strengths and weaknesses, of what war reporters could and could not accomplish --- especially the difficult of getting unfiltered access to local Afghan or Iraqi voices. And the panel brought out some thought-provoking points about how significantly Afghanistan differs from Iraq for the press corps... and not for the better.

There was a fairly sharp, and productive, divergence in the presentations of Gordon, on the one hand, and Tyson and Chandrasekaran on the other, about the ability of the media to cover Iraq, Afghanistan, and other such war zones. Gordon mounted a strong defense of the performance of the media in Iraq, arguing that it was the press which first noticed and drew attention to the chaos following the fall of Saddam and to the improvements following the "surge." He showed a striking slideshow of images from combat, and talked of his many embeds across Iraq as offering direct and systematic access to both the American and Iraqi sides of the conflict. All three journalists pointed to how much could be learned through embeds, from the body language and frank evaluations of the junior officers and soldiers and from the moods on the streets and bases -- and all had poignant vignettes demonstrating what a sensitive and determined journalist could do with such access.

At the same time, the Washington Post reporters both offered more guarded evaluations of what the press had been able to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chandrasekaran described a brief "golden age" after the fall of Saddam when journalists could get out into all parts of Iraq fairly freely, but as the violence mounted and journalists were targeted in the struggle access to many parts of Iraq or to many Iraqis became much more difficult. For years, journalists (even those not living in the Green Zone) were forced either to huddle down in offices and rely on stringers, or else go out into the field with the military as embeds. Both routes offered useful perspectives, but neither is perfect.

Tyson and Chandrasekaran were both frank about the limitations of trying to speak to Iraqis or Afghans from within a military embed (hopping out of a military vehicle and surrounded by large men with guns is not always the best way to strike up a conversation -- through a translator -- with locals). The U.S. military's decision to shift to a population-centric COIN strategy created more and better opportunities for such contacts, intriguingly. Both mentioned the great value of stringers, Iraqis who could get out into their communities, and who help constitute an effective overall team. Such use of stringers is essential but raises its own problems, of course - including, not least, their own safety. I pointed out my dismay at the number of books about Iraq written by even very good journalists which fail to quote or take heed of Iraqis themselves. Anthony Shadid was brought up several times as an exception, but what makes Shadid exceptional is that he is, in fact, exceptional in this regard both in terms of his Arabic language and his access (ditto Nir Rosen and a few others).

Both also acknowledged the reality of the Defense Department's control of access to embeds and of crucial information (a point Gordon disputed). Tyson mentioned at least one instance where she was not allowed to travel to a location in Iraq because it would have been a "bad news story", and the frustration of trying to get accurate and useful data from the military. Meanwhile, as I pointed out, the Pentagon's own media strategy must be taken into account -- the marketing of "good news" stories, the selection of embeds, the provision of the "right" shaykhs or former insurgents with a message to send, and so on.

Chandrasekaran -- just back from covering the Marja campaign -- noted some significant differences between Iraq and Afghanistan for war reporters. In Iraq, he argued, Baghdad was a central hub where a lot of the meaningful politics happened, while in Afghanistan Kabul is just a bubble and tells you virtually nothing about what's going on elsewhere. The infrastructure of stringers is far less developed in Afghanistan, curtailing that stream of vital information for reporters trying to make sense of the full range of voices and viewpoints. Tyson also pointed out differences in treatment of reporters by the British and other commands compared to the U.S. command. Both expressed concerns about journalists bringing their Iraq experiences and lessons learned to an Afghan context where they may not apply.

As usually happens when journalists come together, talk turned to the financial crisis of the press today and the resource constraints which this imposes. Both the Times and the Post have continued to devote significant resources to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even increasing the latter. But there's a lot fewer other papers able to do so, and to this point no clearly viable new media business model to fill the gap. Tyson pointed out how the Iraq focus had sucked attention away from Afghanistan for the crucial years of 2005-2008, a gap which the media was only now beginning to fill -- tellingly, following rather than leading the White House's decision about where to focus.

Finally, Gordon complained of the "lag time" between Washington-based analysts and reporters on the ground, and hit out against bloggers, pundits, politicians, and other analysts who weren't there on the ground. This struck me as something of a red herring -- war reporters and policy analysts do different things, have access to different streams of information, have different needs and make different contributions. Embedding with the military offers an unparalleled worms eye view, but it's only one part of a complex picture, and such experiences are only one of the multiple streams of information and context needed by serious analysis. One point which didn't come up in the discussion but perhaps should have is the significant difference in what can be learned between long-term war correspondents, present in the field for months and months and able to get out into the field and really learn their turf, and the "war tourists" coming in for a week's embed or a CODEL-style set of briefings and trip through a marketplace tour to be able to say they've "been in Iraq/Afghanistan." Those differences would make for a fascinating follow-on panel discussion -- which someone else should organize!