Transcripts For CSPAN2 Michael Rubin Brian Katulis Seven Pi

CSPAN2 Michael Rubin Brian Katulis Seven Pillars July 13, 2024

Welcome. The scheduling of this book and panel is certainly timely given the rising crisis with iran. We will get to that subject eventually, but the book entitled seven pillars and the discussion is to look more broadly and deeply at the drivers of instability of the middle east. From yemen to syria to iraq and now with iran, the region more than ever seems in a permanent state of turmoil if we cant become a land of before and tragically despite decades of intense and often wellmeaning intentions into the expenditure of billions of dollars, u. S. Policy has more often than not been a failure. Maybe the caveat more often than not is too kind. Its been an absolute failure if one accepts it was a better life for the people of the region. Of course the ones ultimately responsible for the success or failure are the people who live there. But the catastrophe of todays middle east raises a lot of questions about whether the United States should continue to be engaged in the region and if so, how. In this regard, the editors of seven pillars, Michael Rubin and Brian Katulis and their co contributors have given a gift. They identify seven factors that affect stability or not and examine what they mean and the role they play. The pillars that they identify art is long gone era ideology by the military, education, economy and governance. Ive found many of the authors perspectives to be unique and to begin looking at al old problemn new ways whether it serves as the basis for a bipartisan approach into the current political environment here is anyones guess but at least the authors are trying to provide factbased reality and analysis to encourage the debate is with us today is Michael Rubin who is a resident scholar and has a phd in iranian history and contributes to the chapter on legitimacy in the region. Next is Brian Katulis, a Clinton Administration veteran now at the center for american progre progress. Prior to joining, he moved to egypt and palestine where he worked on the issues for the National Democratic institute. He contributed the chapter on governance and then we have the fellow for the middle east at the Baker Institute at rice university. He researches both liberalism and the middle east into the interplay between religious authorities and foreign policy. He contributed a chapter on islam. We are going to try to keep the conversation lively and i will try to keep everybody from going on and on. We will talk for a while and then open to question from the audience. To start, im going to start with michael and ask you what is special about this book and what was lacking in the scholarship or the analysis that required this kind of approach . If we look at the last halfcentury of interaction by any metric like you said in the introduction, the u. S. Hasnt been successful and it isnt a democrat or republican thing. We want to get away from the analysis based on the political calendar. It is toif it is too easy and it work but more broadly some of the issues and drivers in the region in terms of legitimacy this common core assumptions that are all about Good Governance and that is what builds legitimacy but people are willing to forgo so they can have a Kurdish National flag over a certain building and its things we hardly talk about in the United States were in the region, the disruptive technology. How is that going to change things, how is foreign aid impacting the legitimacy and one of the broad issues that was most surprising to me personally when brian and i traveled across the region as many people we asked the question of what represents the most legitimate government in the middle east, people tend to Say Something like lebanon and its often thought about in the United States and many parts of the middle east as an adjunct disaster so we try to grapple with these from a more academic and less political or partisan approach. So, what is legitimacy and why is lebanon seen as more legitimate than other places . We need to abandon the notion that onesizefitsall and that isnt easy for the policymakers to do but ultimately, people wanted legitimacy for whatever, they wanted representation for whatever their identity was. What was clear however is people were increasingly finding themselves disenfranchised. It isnt just an issue with the antiiranian protest, but there just seems to be a failure of the traditional middle east which is why they wrote the chapter reimagine or reconsidering all of the ideology that is a play because take for example iraq. 40 were born after the 2003 war. War. More than 60 after the 1991 war which means no one had a functional memory of what life was like under Saddam Hussein among this swath of youth therefore they are no longer willing to accept h we might hae a problem from some of these sport of table but at least we are not Saddam Hussein. People are looking at this generation and succeeded many of these other ideologues in the region and saying they dont represent us. As much as we complain about politics, usually 90 to 95 and in places like iraq at around 12 or 16 and the fact of the matter is people are drifting and that makes it a dangerous moment. So, you wrote about governance. The form of governance that have been imposed on iraq since it was overthrown, do you see it working, maybe they have to come up with Something Else since they had to help iraq come up with Something Else . I first want to highlight the subtitle of the book what causes instability in the middle east, and they are warmongering. Thats a joke. To the question on iraq before this episode, if you see what has happened in the last week and then what was happening just a few months before that, people in the streets of baghdad and major cities in iraq questioned the political order that is in iraq protesting corruption for services and a bunch of things but quite frankly ithat quite fo around the region like we do together and quite regularly, there are the sort of things that impact every country in the middle east. This sort of crushing demographic social economic pressure and to answer the question quite clearly despite multiple elections the system is not helping the people. If you go back to the Human Development report from 16 or 17 years ago, the structural factors that contribute to stability are quite and in those 15, 16 or 17 years in, theyve gotten weaker and i think any place that iraq, and this is something where we do have our differences. He was in favor of the iraq war and i wasnt. He was against the iran nuclear deal. The one thing that we agree upon is to dig deeper and why we want to do this book and the chapter on governance. I talk a bit about iraq but not the National Government. I talk about the experiment that actually emerged under the Islamic State and i spent a couple of pages on it and it shows you the response of governance into discontent with a government that is not responding plants the seed of the sort oforthis sort of stabie saw happen in iraq under the previous payment instead of groups like the Islamic State exploited and i think we should have learned by now many years after the United States cannot fix these factors but its important to factor in the fundamental Building Blocks on what we are going to do next. Isis is a new phenomenon, and there have been the failure of governance and failure of leaders in the middle east for a long time. Why cant this moment did a group like isis have the opportunity to rise and have a profound impact . Its the multiplicity factors tied to this transition where you have a bubble and if in places like iraq they are not responding to it, people will rise up in different forms. The isis model which was shortlived and i dont think it had much legitimacy was created in response to an ineffective government and that there were more tools now in places like iraq there wasnt much of an open space for people to produce change, and i think the theory that was behind the iraq war in 2003 coming and we dont want to go back to that, but the theory was flawed in that we topple regimes and eliminate or decapitate the top then somehow freedom will spread and we know that hasnt happened, and i think why it excavated in particular is that you have a multiple fight going on inside of iraq into civil war first and system of governance that wasnt responding and that is the main point is that those conditions are still there. Iraq hes are still looking at the National Government with a caregiver government. Theres any number of millennial movements whether it would be the grand mosque of 79 or centuries before the. Monarchy versus republican and so forth, but what does this mean for the diplomacy if we are still limiting ourselves to interactions with representatives of government who are under siege whether they know it or not, are we missing the broader picture both in terms of diplomacy and intelligence when it comes to the middle east. What is the remedy to that. The United States has to deal with the government that is in power. How much time do diplomats spend outside of the wall of embassies versus talking and interacting in the local market as opposed we dont want to bring in the u. S. Policy too much, but one of aftermaths of benghazi is the walk down upon which they find themselves. When you go to beirut and we went together, the u. S. Embassy is basically living under the same security parameters. Thats an important and tactical point which i think for u. S. Policies they are quite likely at the end of a 40 year period that began with these events in 1979, the Islamic Revolution irevolution in iran,t invasion in afghanistan and a number of things that led to the u. S. Having its engagements primarily be focused on what our military does and look at where we are today discussing and worrying about the next move and what our military is doing. And to me this point that is important is our diplomats and the Diplomatic Service as guest in the last couple of years they are our eyes and ears in understanding the societal trend and we are flying a little bit more wind. The last point is i think it opens up questions whether the United States should actually be spending a lot of aid and money and other countries that simply lack the capacity to do this but neither is a strategy for thinking more modestly about the engagement of thinking about the outpost or the relative progress in places like tunisia so maybe a dollar spent in tunisia may ultimately be a lot better than other parts of the middle east, but we dont even have that discussion because we are reacting to the military moves and not how we diversify the portfolio. I want to follow up on that and his religion more important in the middle east today than it was before . It is very much so. One of the fundamental miss misconceptions is that we tend to assume that this has been the case of time. But if you go back 40 or 50 years ago what we di see is the dominance of the secular ideology and how the parties and groups were smaller and much more influential in terms of policy making and being able to affect other groups as a society or how they were acting in the domestic policy. But over the course of the last 40 or 50 years, things have changed dramatically. The iranian revolution. But more importantly, something that was mentioned, the secular ideologies great throughout the middle east and the 1960s and 70s. Fundamental issues where economic and they were under promises and the people were expected. This is what precipitated the rising significance of the religious groups and grown more violent extremist groups throughout the region. It wasnt just her own popularity within the Muslim Brotherhood 2011, 2012, 30 to 40 but more importantly, i think that they were able to dictate the parameters of the discussion in terms of the policy issues that were ongoing. The rise and influence so much so that they felt the need to bring in religion to their own discussions. Theyve come to power in 2002 and shes a massive petition that has been successful in terms of changing the political system in such a way that the secular parties are unable to determine the agenda and to discuss issues in a way outside of the parameters. If we think of this from the framework of religious competition that means you were political actors try to cater to this because people want more currency. But he has not been uniformly successful. But he has run into more trouble now and political pushback so do you see him using islam more as a Political Tool to advance his political career or do you think this is indigenous to the people of turkey. I cannot speak to his personal beliefs beyond my focus as a political scientist. What i can tell you is that religion is an important element of the political discourse and when we look at it over time it changes in terms of the intensity that he emphasizes in the political discourse is the period until 2001 when the party was first established. Religion doesnt play as significant a role that one is political prospects as a result of the Corruption Scandal and then gone losing elections to some degree that he started actually using religion because he wanted to bring in the more conservative elements. What we see dependent on the time it is possible. But its for other policies in the region. Going back to the issue that was mentioned about tunisia, i fully agree. What is underlying increase political groups once those issues are addressed first and foremost we are going to see a decreasdecrease that is more th. You used this phrase repeatedly and you talk about it in the domestic context of turkey which is spot on to understand that religion and islam and the point i wanted to make it isnt necessarily about the right interpretation of religion if there is such a thing but its about power and a second in addition to the domestic use of religion what i see right now is multifaceted and multidirectional competition for power and influence and say saudi arabia that has its own definition of my main point is the first point that this is about power and not the ancient hatred and interpretation of religion. It spills over into the media fights and all sorts of things and its something the book doesnt cover itself but we need to understand this is in addition to military moves and the terrorism and the competition in the struggle for power. Its how rapidly things are changing and if we look 40 years in the future and you have a complete new set of the majority that hasnt even been born yet, if it is the major is it going to be the mosque were social media and is it going to be for those leaders are populist leaders and if so how are traditional muslim scholars looking at this rise of populism and do you think that the way in which people are going to radically change come up with . Some of my research is trying to address this question for a couple of years ago we started a project to look into how the religious authority is distributed across the middle east and primarily Muslim Leaders and what they found is that there is a couple major findings. The. People still look up to them as religious leaders and they Say Something really important that has been rising and changing a lot in terms of social media or mosques, that is a change that was precipitated at the turn of the century. Its a little bit different it has a freemarket religion. It doesnt have the hierarchy. What it mean that means is evern be a religious leader if they willingly support or follow this with a group of collective scholars were up until the turn of the 20th century and they were the class as the religious authority but once they started dying off so to speak, there was a big war so this is when we see them early on in the modern world and this is a process for developing a. It emerge as a form of the hierarchy of authority. Is a force of stability or not in the region . It depends on what we mean by stability. It is an authoritarian way if we look at some other context it would be a force for instability because and push them to try to get more political space or change policies so it depends on the context. Its different than other religions and it depends on the political context and the factors and the circumstances in terms of what kind of role. In iraq and syria would say tanisha it is a seeming commitment for the democracy and in terms of the muslim democracy. One of the things we are witnessing now inside of iraq although it isnt being framed that way in the media is when we look at the most prominent is cognizant of what the opinion is convinced of thand instead of ld tis toworry about following it e if he goes out to far he risks being exposed to the young People Choose to not follow him and therefore we see a caution that hasnt been there since we lived under Saddam Hussein. That is the religious competition. These religious leaders are not blind to whats going on around them. They will cater to those because ultimately what it does for them they may be believers but religion is a tool to. Is that something that they should be encouraging . Ive been taking it as mostly government they said i think islam hates us but he used sort of interpretation that is quite dangerous catering to the public constituencies here im not making a comparison or parallel between the two but when the u. S. Did things like the point of irrelevance to slightly unhelpful because i dont think it should be u. S. Policy to encourage some sort of freeform it is a religion. Its going to have strands that are more extremist and reformist and its organic playing out. My friends who live here in america or europe they are different ideas of their own faith and religion and i would stay away from that as a use of engagement. There was an idea of muslim and engagement that a lot of my friends in the world sound a little bit offensive. One of the issues and experiments that is occurring in the

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