Book Review of Avi Shlaim's "War and Peace in the Middle East"

Avi Shlaim’s book, “War and Peace in the Middle East” is a short historical analysis of crucial international political relations that shaped the Middle East from the end of the Ottoman empire to the immediate aftermath of Operation Desert Storm. He roughly divides these relations into four parts: the Ottoman, the European, the superpower and the American. There are two central points to this book: 1) that the international politics of the Middle East are best understood by looking at the relations between local powers and the larger global powers of the time; and 2) that despite the change in external powers, nothing fundamental has actually changed regarding the Middle East’s political relationship to dominant external powers, despite the changes in dominant powers. While Shlaim’s historical analysis conveys the progression of the dominant external powers in the Middle East accurately, his conclusion about what should be done, while it is valid, is unrealistic.

The post-Ottoman syndrome, the structuring of arbitrary nation-states in European fashion, is a crucial action that produces so much hostility in the Middle East still today. This is taken up in the first chapter. In 1916, Britain and France agreed to the Skyes-Picot agreement, which determined how they would split up the region from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf between each other. Shlaim notes how this agreement was a disaster for people living in all different areas of the Middle East. One of Shlaim’s examples illustrates the poor border choices for Iraq that were unscrupulously decided in the Skyes-Picot agreement. Shlaim quotes two journalists who understood Churchill’s goals for establishing Iraq: “ Iraq was created by Churchill, who had the mad idea of joining two widely separated oil wells, Kirkuk and Mosul, by uniting three widely separated peoples: the Kurds, the Sunnis, and the Shiites.” The merging of oil wells was of primary concern, while reconciling very different peoples was secondary at best.

The Belfour Declaration, which in 1917 pledged a national Jewish homeland in Palestine, was intended to gain support for the war from European and American Jews. The longer term consequences, however, did not anticipate the clash between Arab and Israeli nationalism. Shlaim aptly points out that Britain obliged themselves to aid the new Jewish state, while simultaneously setting themselves up for Palestinian refusal in recognizing their authority. Shlaim states that one of the few honest things that were ever said about the situation for Palestinians came from Beflour himself: “In short, so far as Palestine is concerned, the Powers have made no statement of fact which is not admittedly wrong, and no declaration of policy which, at least in the letter, they have not always intended to violate.” Clearly, from the beginning of their dominance, Britain had no intention to accommodate Palestinians.

Shlaim also shows how, during the Cold War years, the influence of the Soviet threat determined the majority of American foreign policy in the Middle East. This happened to be a relatively quieter period for the Middle East with less explicit imperialism due to the fear that Arab states would side with the Soviets if the United States pushed them too far. This new superpower struggle marked the end of Britain’s dominance in the Middle East and ushered in new global tension between the United States and the Soviet Union superpowers.

During this time the U.S. had differing perspectives on how to deal with the Arabs and the Israelis. Shlaim describes two types of perspective: 1) the regionalist approach, where concern focused on the problems that occurred in the middle east and how to solve them; and 2) the globalist approach, which focused on the the Cold War issues, i.e., pursuing interesting that would better suite the West in the global battle of East versus West. Israel was always considered be an important player on the globalist view, since it was thought, apparently based on xenophobia, that they are more trustworthy then the hostile Arabs. Shlaim notes that proponents of taking an Israel-first policy stemmed largely from “psychological hang-ups” about Arab hostility and backwardness.

The regionalist approach was quick to point out that unbalanced consideration to Israel only intensifies the hostility of Arabs toward the U.S. By siding with Israeli, they offered more incentive from radical regimes and others to side with Moscow, which for the U.S. was the ultimate danger.

Now, jumping ahead to the phase in Middle East history after the Cold War ended and U.S. became the sole global superpower. Shlaim points out when Saddam was preparing to invade Kuwait, he explicitly described his taking-back of Kuwait as analogous to the Palestinians taking back their land from Israel. This was a clever move because it made Saddam appear like, as Shlaim puts it, “the champion of Palestinian rights.” This gained Saddam support from the Arab masses. Saddam also attacked Israel with two objectives in mind. The first, attempted to turn an Arab-Arab conflict into an Arab-Israeli conflict. The second objective was to divide Arabs from America by showcasing America’s commitments to Israel.

Saddam was successful in exposing the double standard that president Bush held against Saddam but allowed for Israel. Bush could not insist that Saddam comply with U.N. orders to withdraw from Kuwait without also insisting, as Shlaim writes, that Israel comply “with the strikingly similar demands of security Council Resolution 248, on the table since 1967.” There is no doubt that Saddam had no trouble exposing America’s intimate relationship with Israel. Shlaim clearly notes the fact that “America had given Israel aid totaling $77 billion between 1948 and 1992,” and continuing even to this day. More recently, Obama has planned on funneling billions more to the Jewish state. But back then, the first Bush’s presidency recognized that all this aid to Israel was only getting him 5% of the Jewish vote. Naturally, he did not see why his administration should be so committed to Israel. This opened up the idea to place economic restraints on Israel and coerce them into peace negotiations.

Shlaim then describes the sorry attempt to negotiate peace in Madrid. The ridiculousness of negotiating was illustrated by the corridor diplomacy that took place. Israel absolutely would not negotiate with a Palestinian state, they considered Palestine to be a part of the Jordanian committee. Their refusal to negotiate led them to linger in the corridors, since they refused even to walk into the negotiation room under such conditions. The term “corridor diplomacy” derived from this behavior. Finally, negotiations began only because the two committees of Palestine and Jordan were labeled subcommittees; one with 9 Palestinians and 2 Jordanians that dealt with Palestinian issues, and the other subcommittee consisting of 9 Jordanians and 2 Palestinians that dealt with Jordanian issues.

When Clinton was admitted to office he took a stronger Israel-first stance than Bush had taken. Shlaim tells us that Clinton basically let peace discussions be decided by Israel while economically aiding them for large-scale housing projects on the West Bank.

Now that the Soviet threat had collapsed, Shlaim notes that it had become fashionable but simplistic to replace the great Soviet fear with a fear for Islamic fundamentalism. This replacement has a functional purpose in that it attempted to legitimize Israel as still remaining an American asset in the Middle East, despite how ties to Israel caused America more problems than help during the Gulf war.

Shlaim concludes by stating that America, being the sole super power, should not “bolster Israel as a strategic partner in an unwinnable war against an imaginary Islamic threat but to encourage Israel to contribute to stability, democracy, and economic development throughout the region.” Shlaim’s conclusion is a good idea, but how would this work out in practice? Throughout Shlaim’s book itself we have seen again and again that Israel is hungry for more land and power, not cooperation with it’s neighbors. A more reasonable solution, that also addresses the arbitrary border problems in the Middle East, is that a political movement based on working-class similarities throughout the states in the Middle East organize and take power for their own interests. This movement is not right around the corner, but it is much more of a real possibility than to depend on Israel’s cooperation. This is also the only political solution that can permanently rectify the problem of nationalism in the Middle East, which is the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict. And it is also crucial that such a movement develops in the more economically developed countries, especially America.

Speech on Racism and School Budget Cuts

The economic crisis today provides us with a clear view of the priorities that the state of California, America, or, more generally, any profit driven economy must take. Recessions are a common phenomenon within our economic system that occur roughly every 8 years and this one has been said to be the worst yet since the Great Depression. In our modern day production there's no organization of what's produced; the only driving force of production is profit. With this anarchy of production, inevitably in time, the economy produces far more than it needs and is forced to shrink the economy along with amount of jobs and public funding in what we casually call a recession. Recessions are not a natural phenomenon, but only an affect of implementing an economy that is ultimately driven by profit, not by need.

I would like to place our recent massive school budget cuts in perspective to our increase prison spending. This perspective is also relevant to the ever increasing spending of war. I want to focus on how the choices of this spending reveals that these priorities are not in favor of working people.

Since 1984 state spending for higher education has decreased while prison spending has increased by 126%. The prison population has increased about 75% in the last 20 years, which is 3 times faster than the adult population. This disproportional increase in the prison population is not due some increase in criminal activity, but rather because policies that determine what is prison worthy have changed. And how effective are these new rough and tough polices? The California prison system has a staggering 70% recidivism rate. Only 30% of those who go to prison are rehabilitated and do not go back again. What are we to think of a system that only manages to complete its function, rehabilitation, 30% percent of the time? It seems that rehabilitation may not be the central priority of imprisonment. The state contributes $4600 per student in the CSU system, while the cost of incarcerating any prisoner is $49,000 per year. If current policies continue prison spending will overtake higher education spending in the not-so-distant future.

The 170,000 people approximately that are locked up are overwhelmingly impoverished Blacks and Latinos. It's a remarkable fact that for every Latino in a 4-year university, there are three Latinos in prison; and for every black student you see on this campus or any other university, there are FIVE black people in prison. It is clear from the prison population that racism still plagues us. Many of the students who previously could marginally afford to go to a university and who now must drop out due to the 30% percent increase in tuition, it is predicted, will be disproportionately people of color. Racism is a concern to every working person no matter what color or sex, because racism is not in the interests of working people. Working people do not reap the benefits when women get paid less than men for equal work; nor do working people benefit when people of color are underpaid for the crucial jobs they fill, such as the California farm workers, for instance.

Those who reap the profits from the inequality of wages derived from racism are those who reap the benefits of racism. And those who reap all the profits, in a profit system, are those who get to call the tune. Racism will never go away within a profit system since it will always be profitable to implement it. Ethics must always takes second priority to profitability in a capitalist economy. If your competitor reaps the benefits of unethical practices, then you must also, if you hope to compete in capitalism. But profitability is not the central interest of working people. The schools cutbacks are also not in the interests of the working people. The same people who create all value in a society, working people, are the ones that these education cutbacks are not benefiting. Just as the incarceration policies and increase spending on prisons are not allocating our resources to benefit working people. And the wars that have no limit to how much money we spend on them are, again, not in the interests of working people. We should take the economic crisis as an opportunity to see clearly that the state's priorities are not in the interests of working people, and recognize that these policies for war, for prison and for education cutbacks are not in our common interest as a working class.

The Essential Similarity Between Slavery and Wage Labor

This post is meant to be a response to my buddy Nader, who disagrees with me about the essential similarity between slavery and wage labor.

Slavery is the laboring condition where your means of subsistence are provided to you by your master, provided that you labor for your master.

Wage labor is a system where your means of subsistence are provided to you by the capitalist, provided that you work for your capitalist.

There can be very nice slavery situations, maybe with healthcare benefits and reasonable hours. The government may have even enacted laws for how to exploit labor from slaves in a proper manner. The same is true for wage laborers. It may seem that wage labor is very advanced and pleasant in our modern day, at least to the minority of workers who get these boring office jobs with benefits ( this is not the majority of wage labor). But the extreme advancement of technology and productivity since only a 150 years ago is so tremendous that the capitalist can afford to increase his profits while at the same time slightly increasing the wages and bettering the working conditions of the workers. In fact, the capitalist has no choice but to better the working conditions since if he doesn’t he workers will mutiny against him because they know with such advancement of productivity there should come a better standard of living.

We should not compare the conditions of slavery and wage labor. This is a subjective aspect of the types of labor since there can be very pleasant slavery and wage labor and there can also be horrible slavery and wage labor. To be more objective we have to look at how the masters and the capitalists extract their value from the slaves and the workers. It’s here that we’ll understand how the slave and the worker are one in the same only with different outer shells. The master must work the slave more than is required for the slave to compensate for his means of subsistence. The slave’s means of subsistence may even include health bene’s and such in this modern day, but it is essential to this relationship that no matter how nice the slave is treated that he provides extra value above any of the expenses that the master spends to maintain his slave. This point about extracting labor from the slave over and above directly translates to the capitalist and worker relationship as well. The worker will absolutely never stay employed if he does not produce a profit, i.e., the extra work the worker expends for the capitalist over and above what the capitalist spends providing for the necessaries for his worker.

There is another superficial difference between slaves and workers, but it is only superficial. One might say that the slave is bound to his master and is not free to leave as he pleases. The worker on the other hand is thought to be in a much better situation because he is free to leave his capitalist whenever he wishes. Both of these points are true but miss the essential compulsion of capitalism. Within capitalism the worker is free to leave his capitalist, but then to do what? He must find another capitalist to work for, i.e., another boss that will only hire him on the condition that he will make a profit off his labor. One might say that the worker can become a self-employed person. But this self-proprietor is commanded by the market, he must compete with other capitalists that dominate the market. But this second situation is a little different because in this case you are attempting to become the exploiter and not the exploited. This shows how even if one tries to take the road of a capitalist, by having employees and exploiting their labor for oneself, that one cannot liberate themselves from the compulsion of capitalism. And it should be easy to see how not everyone could be a capitalist since to be a capitalist, by definition, requires that you exploit the labor of workers. If everyone was their own “capitalist” there would be no capitalism. So wage labor appears to be more free than slavery because on the one hand slaves are restricted to only their master, whereas on the other hand wage labor allows workers the freedom to be exploited by the capitalist of their choice, and capitalists themselves are compelled by the markets.

So the central point is both systems are essentially the same: they both rely on the forceful expropriation of extra labor from slaves and workers. The fashion is different but the clothes are the same. It does not matter whether there are very nice wage labor or slavery conditions or very horrible wage labor or slavery conditions.