Greg Gause, a guest poster at Abu Aardvark’s blog provides a somewhat different perspective from what we’ve been hearing on the intra-Muslim tensions in the Middle East. He thinks the shifting alliances and chaos reflect balance-of-power issues more than a sectarian (i.e., Sunni vs. Shia) rift. Nevertheless, Gause says, Arab leaders in Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia have their own reasons for stoking sectarian sentiment:

I think that these leaders are worried about Iran for classic balance of power reasons, perhaps with a little bit of worry about domestic Shia discontent in the Gulf states (and more than a little in Bahrain). This emphasis on an Iran-centered threat rather than a sectarian Shia threat has been manifested in establishment Saudi editorial writers’ takes on recent events. They have gone to great lengths to say that it is Iran, not the Shia, that are the problem.

However, the leaders of all of these states are willing to play to the baser instincts of their own constituencies in allowing anti-Shia rhetoric to develop, and even encouraging it in a number of cases. From our own experience in the US, we know that mobilizing public support for a foreign policy based on cold, realist, balance of power considerations is a tough sell. Just ask Henry Kissinger about détente. It would be an even harder sell for these Arab leaders, whose populations basically like the idea of Iran getting the bomb and cheered Hizballah in its confrontation with Israel this summer. You cannot sell the policy on the basis of balancing Iran, so you sell it on a sectarian basis. Thus, we hear these outlandish stories about Shia proselytization efforts in Egypt, Sudan, Jordan, wherever. Maybe there is some truth to them, but very little real results that I have seen. It is scare tactics to sell a policy that is based on classic balance of power considerations.

Interesting that even these authoritarian (to put it mildly) governments feel compelled to gain public acceptance of their policies.

Gause continues:

What is somewhat surprising to me is how readily this line has been bought. I am not surprised that Wahhabi clerics in Saudi Arabia have bought it. It fits exactly into their ideological frameworks. I am much more surprised about more mainstream Sunni figures like Yusif al-Qaradawi playing this card. We are even seeing some liberal and Islamist public intellectuals playing the anti-Shia card. This is interesting, disturbing and deserves more analysis than I can give it.

I’ll look forward to reading what he has to say, but I’m wondering why a political scientiest would be surprised that an appeal to people’s “baser instincts” is very effective in “mobilizing” them.

Triumph of the Will (1935)

…is love, sweet love.

Livni and Abbas in Davos Photo: AP

For what it’s worth, and I fear it isn’t worth much, because this story is getting barely any play while the horrid rape charges against Israel’s loony president, Katsav, grab the headlines [one of the cardinal rules of infotainment is that the "better story" always wins: sex---even violent sex---is always a "better" story than almost anything, even when the stakes are war or peace]:

Livni says Palestinian state is achievable

Foreign minister tells World Economic Forum negotiations between Israel, Palestinians must be based on idea of two states living side by side in peace. Palestinian President Abbas says agreement will help strengthen moderates in region

Peres and Abbas (Photo: Reuters)

The NYT’s Steven Erlanger says, however, that there has never been a less propitious moment to try to reignite the peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians. I can’t say I disagree.

It would be hard to imagine a less promising moment for the United States to restart serious Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations.

Six years after the last such talks, the Palestinian government is controlled by Hamas, which preaches Israel’s destruction. Approval ratings for the Israeli prime minister are barely in double digits. Gaza and neighboring Lebanon are in turmoil. President Bush is weak.

Yet the administration is holding a meeting on Feb. 2 of the so-called quartet, whose other members are the European Union, Russia and the United Nations, to be followed by “informal talks” between Israeli and Palestinian leaders, with help from Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, about the shape of a final peace treaty and the nature of a Palestinian state beside Israel.

The Americans are responding to pleas for re-engagement from the European Union, the Palestinian president and moderate Arab nations.

Well, yes. But wasn’t this also the recommendation of the ISG, the so-called Baker-Hamilton and a long list of others?

On January 4, I wrote:

And every day a new political wiseman solemnly intones that the key to peace is to solve the Israeli-Palestinian issue (one way or the other).*** It is to laugh!

[update: Check out the post. When I repreinted it here, it screwed up my code/theme/whatever.]

Well, guys and gals, it looks like there’s movement on that front, so it would be good to get some encouragement…—that is, if you all were really serious about solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict because it is the key to world peace an all.

Cory Doctorow  is addressing published authors who would like a more dynamic presence on the Web rather than standard static sites, but he also gets at the essential personal benefit of maintaining a blog.

The best part of all this is the agency. It sucks to be an information supplicant who has to get someone else to utter the incantations necessary to move your expressive thoughts from your head to the universal planetwide information resource. …

How many telegrams did you send when you had to dictate them over the phone to a Western Union operator? How many emails do you send now that you can clatter them off your WiFi laptop in your living room?

Yes. Agency—also known in some quarters as freedom—is what it’s all about.

She’s barely out of the gate and, as expected, Hillary Hatred is in full flower.*** Because I’m not a politico and therefore am not in the habit of obsessing about the (alleged) deep meaning behind each and every word that comes out of a potential candidate’s mouth, it is fascinating to see the thinking of someone who does do that kind of parsing.

For example, Matt Stoller,was a big fan of James Webb’s direct, uncomplicated “progressive populist message” in response to the State of the Union, is deeply unhappy with Hillary’s “mushy, untrustworthy glop.” +++

A progressive populist message would work in bringing us huge national majorities and a mandate for massive change. Still, if this is so obvious, why are we only hearing populism, or even a pale attempt at populism, from John Edwards (and Tom Vilsack)?

On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense. It’s a winning message, so why not use it? Well, it’s a winning message, alright, but only for the public. And right now, Presidential candidates are tailoring their messages for elite donors, and the rich don’t really care about inequality or Iraq. They care first and foremost about preserving the status quo, because in the status quo they are, well, rich. That’s a problem, because if your message is targeted towards the top 1% of the country, you’re leaving 99% of the country out of the conversation.

By far the worst example of this disturbing trend among 08ers is Hillary Clinton, who is rolling over donors and trying to prevent a primary from even happening by scooping up mindshare among elites before anyone else can organize. When you hear that you aren’t credible unless you can raise several hundred million dollars, realize that this is an idea planted by these elites to entrench their power, and not something that is falsifiable. It bears saying that it’s quite probable that don’t need $100M to run for President - Kerry didn’t lose the General because of a financial disadvantage, and he didn’t win in Iowa because of a financial advantage. The ‘only credible with $100M’ idea is another and more sophisticated version of the electable or inevitable meme that hurt us so badly in 2004. It’s something that Hillary Clinton wants us to believe is true. Whether it is true is a different story. [emphasis mine]

How do you “scoop up mindshare“?

How do you do it “before anyone else can organize“?

Can you teach it? Can you bottle it?

I hope so, because it sure would come in handy in the fight against global jihad, which David Kilcullen has talked and written about. The insight that struck me is that young Muslims increasingly choose the path of jihad because there are no compelling alternatives. And he says a big part of the West’s job is to create equally compelling, attractive alternatives for these young men. (At least that’s my takeaway—and I’m particularly interested in how the media helps make both jihad and its [future] compelling alternatives so attractive.)

Could some Democrats please give me an indication that they are starting to think about how to “scoop up” disaffected Muslims’ “mindshare before anyone else can organize”?

——————-

***I am not among her fans, but I am no longer among her detractors. The Eight-Year National Psychodrama drove me crazy, but time heals all wounds. Hillary has grown, and so have I. Life does that to you—or, rather, it should do that to you. If you haven’t examined your feelings about Hillary Rodham Clinton (or anything or anybody else) in the last 6-8 years or if you haven’t examined your opinions in the last 30 years, may I kindly suggest that it’s time to look inward.

At any rate, I will consider her on the merits when it comes time to cast my vote. Believe me, I had to grow (and the world had to change, too) in order to get to that point.

+++For those of you who, like me, are not politicos, Stoller elaborates on his anti-Hillary stance. It’s worth following along if you want to understand one split in the Democratic party:

In fact, everything that Hillary Clinton is doing is designed to make us think that she cannot be stopped, to pull the plug on money for others so she can get through the nomination without having to be clear on Iraq or populist in orientation. She is desperately fighting against having to do what Jim Webb did so well - spell out plainly the irresponsibility of political and economic elites. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s a strategy. Or maybe, and this is what I believe, she sympathizes with the elite class more than the public, believing that the public are sheep who can be easily manipulated. She herself hasn’t lived in anything close to the real world since 1991. …

Ironically, though she is popular among some base voters and most progressive elites, few activists, bloggers, or local politicians actually want Hillary as the nominee. Local politicians are desperately afraid she will hurt downticket candidates all over the country. Progressives know she hasn’t dealt with Iraq, and will cripple the Democratic Party badly as Iraq gets worse in 2007 and 2008. And political junkies know that she has done very little that is substantive in the Senate except grant Bush the power to go to war and pander on flag-burning and video games. Politically, Hillary has passed out enough favors and kept every group atomized and fearful enough to make her seem both unpalatable and inevitable. That is why her camp is claiming that they are in the netroots primary, when they are simply not.

I believe her tending to an elite audience and ignoring the concerns of various activists explains the loathing of Hillary Clinton within a certain piece of the progressive base. I’ve noted before how one slice of primary voters is pretty similar to the netroots. This loathing isn’t based on the right-wing slime machine, though often progressives unwittingly slip into discussions about things like ‘electability’. It’s a loathing that is more ‘gut’, more about conflicting identities. Chris has noted this with his excellent series of about a year ago on class stratification between the activist class and the elites. Hillary Clinton is an establishment elitist, and we are opposed to this institutional baggage.

Demographics aside, one way to theorize about our ideology is that we have seen and rejected the triangulating model of politics. It’s not that Clinton wasn’t a good President in the 1990s, it’s that he failed to enact anything that outlasted him. He got nothing done on, say, global warming, and failed to establish a firm post-Cold War framework that Bush didn’t detonate in five minutes. More relevantly, the Clintonistas performed horribly in the 2000s, acting as lobbyists and warhawks, and just generally working against progressives until they realized they couldn’t overtly beat us in the PR game.

So it’s not surprising that the Hillary Clinton campaign is working to convince the DLC that she’ll do the 1990s over again, only this time with an extra helpings of the strategies that failed. …

I asked anti-Clinton people if there were ways that Hillary Clinton could get your support. A few argued that if she apologized for her war vote they would consider her, but surprisingly, a number of people said, flat-out, no. I’m beginning to understand why. There is almost no common ground between progressive activists and elitists like Hillary Clinton. Either you are in the elite stream of discourse, the place where health care can be debated without anyone in the room fearing the risks of being uninsured but where the fear of your client losing his business model is real, or you are with the plebes who are worried about their personal health care. You are either angry about being lied to about Iraq, or you are one of the unapologetic liars. We’re on one side. The elites are on the other. We can’t handle someone who enabled the war and now won’t be straight with us on Iraq after four years of watching our America slowly die. It just isn’t possible anymore for us to be in the same conversation because there is nothing to discuss. I won’t be that surprised if Clinton wins the nomination, but what she needs to fear is if the various entities that loathe what Hillary Clinton stands for start talking to each other. Right now, there’s a reticence to criticize Senator Clinton because of the legacy of the right, and because we don’t like to go after Democrats. I doubt that reticence will continue as the candidates attack each other. Hillary Clinton is a tragic figure, …