Temas de relações internacionais, de política externa e de diplomacia brasileira, com ênfase em políticas econômicas, em viagens, livros e cultura em geral. Um quilombo de resistência intelectual em defesa da racionalidade, da inteligência e das liberdades democráticas.
O que é este blog?
Este blog trata basicamente de ideias, se possível inteligentes, para pessoas inteligentes. Ele também se ocupa de ideias aplicadas à política, em especial à política econômica. Ele constitui uma tentativa de manter um pensamento crítico e independente sobre livros, sobre questões culturais em geral, focando numa discussão bem informada sobre temas de relações internacionais e de política externa do Brasil. Para meus livros e ensaios ver o website: www.pralmeida.org. Para a maior parte de meus textos, ver minha página na plataforma Academia.edu, link: https://itamaraty.academia.edu/PauloRobertodeAlmeida;
Uau! O venerando jornal reacionário está perdendo a paciência com os "larápios governistas", ao chamá-los exatamente desse nome para indicar os que roubam no poder.
Mais um pouco o Estadão sobe nas tamancas...
Paulo Roberto de Almeida
Cheiro de queimado Editorial OESP, 16 de Novembro de 2015
Ao som do tango Volver, que Gardel canta cada vez melhor, o ex-presidente Lula foi a estrela da abertura da 7.ª Conferência Latino-Americana e Caribenha de Ciências Sociais, em Medellín (Colômbia). Ovacionado por uma claque de jovens estudantes colombianos - plateia simpática a slogans terceiro-mundistas que o chefão do PT usa como ninguém e decerto desinformada a respeito da extensão do desastre lulopetista que se abateu sobre o Brasil -, Lula alertou que o projeto populista que ele tão bem encarna está sob sério risco de ser desalojado do poder na América Latina.
Em tom de advertência, ao final de uma hora de discurso em que fez um histórico das alegadas conquistas sociais das quais ainda se jactam vários governantes irresponsáveis no continente, Lula disse que está sentindo um “cheiro de retrocesso” na América Latina. “Retrocesso”, nesse caso, é o desmonte do circo que encantou os incautos nos últimos dez anos, fazendo-os crer que, pela mágica do voluntarismo estatista, as desigualdades seriam superadas, inaugurando-se um período de desenvolvimento igualitário sem precedentes.
Mas a prestidigitação populista, um embuste por natureza, não tinha lastro na realidade - como sabem hoje muito bem as classes desfavorecidas no Brasil, na Argentina, na Venezuela e em outros países que tiveram a infelicidade de ser governados por esse esquerdismo corrupto e inconsequente.
Como resultado, os eleitores - antes meros clientes de políticas assistencialistas em larga escala e, portanto, vistos apenas como referendários do modelo dito “progressista” - passaram a indicar rejeição a esses governos, pois ficou claro que as promessas que lhes foram feitas não apenas eram falsas, como também foram usadas como pretexto para um assalto ao Estado. Assim, os pobres perceberam que não havia nenhum coelho na cartola estatal - ou porque o animal nunca existiu ou porque fora surrupiado por algum larápio governista.
Na Argentina, ao fim do tresloucado governo de Cristina Kirchner, o kirchnerismo parece fadado a sair como o grande derrotado na eleição presidencial do próximo dia 25. Mesmo o candidato de Cristina, Daniel Scioli, não se esforça para ser visto como herdeiro da desgastada presidente, que passará à história como aquela que, enquanto maquiava dados para inflar conquistas sociais e econômicas, convocava redes de rádio e de TV até para falar das fraldas de seu filho.
Já na Venezuela, berço do “bolivarianismo”, são conhecidos os apuros pelos quais passa o autocrata Nicolás Maduro. A eleição parlamentar do mês que vem, se não houver uma fraude monumental, deverá decretar o fim da hegemonia chavista. Maduro já mandou avisar, sem meias-palavras, que não aceitará outro resultado que não seja a vitória de seus correligionários. Ou seja, não lhe restou alternativa senão ameaçar o país com um banho de sangue.
Finalmente, no Brasil de Lula, tem-se uma chefe de governo que nem governa mais, refém que é dos arranjos de seu padrinho para sobreviver à tormenta que açoita o Planalto. Sem dinheiro para continuar a fazer redistribuição de renda por decreto e com seu partido afogado em corrupção, a presidente Dilma Rousseff talvez seja hoje o principal símbolo do fiasco que ameaça o projeto de poder de Lula et caterva na América Latina.
Lula, que não é bobo, já percebeu o risco. Se fosse um democrata de verdade, o petista aceitaria a derrota como parte do jogo político. Mas não - ele prefere insistir na ladainha segundo a qual as agruras dos governos “progressistas” resultam da campanha dos inimigos. Lula repetiu em Medellín que “a grande oposição” quem faz é a imprensa - quando esta critica governos que, na concepção do petista, só pensam no bem do povo. Para ele, a “elite” não aceita “que a gente frequente as mesmas praças que ela frequenta, ou que a gente frequente o mesmo teatro” - logo Lula, que se aliou ao que há de pior na oligarquia nacional e que se tornou milionário como lobista de empreiteiras. Mas Lula tem razão: hoje, ele e seus companheiros não podem mesmo ir a praças e teatros - mas porque serão estrepitosamente vaiados.
Aprofundando as desigualdades José Matias-Pereira
Estadão Noite – Segunda-feira, 16 de novembro de 2015
Os indicadores divulgados pelo Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), por meio da Pesquisa Nacional por Amostra de Domicílios (Pnad), mostram um Brasil menos desigual em 2014. Esses dados, no entanto, foram recebidos com ceticismo pelos economistas e especialistas do mercado. Essa postura contraditória me leva a formular a seguinte pergunta: O Brasil revelado pela pesquisa ainda existe?
Para responder essa questão se faz necessário, preliminarmente, analisar os indicadores mais significativos da pesquisa, com vista a melhor explicar o que eles representam em termos de avanços socioeconômicos do país. A população brasileira foi estimada pela Pnad em 203,2 milhões, sendo que desse total, 85,3 milhões estavam no Sudeste. As pessoas com mais de 60 anos eram 13,7%, outros 25% tinham de 40 a 59 anos e 23,3%, de 25 a 39 anos. Isso confirma a tendência de aumento proporcional da população de faixas etárias mais elevadas e redução entre jovens. O desemprego, por sua vez, cresceu em 2014, mas o país manteve tendência de redução da desigualdade. A taxa média de desemprego subiu de 8,5%, no ano anterior, para 8,8%. O índice de Gini do rendimento do trabalho, que mede a concentração de renda (quanto mais próximo de zero, menor a desigualdade), caiu de 0,495, em 2013, para 0,490, em 2014. O índice varia, de 0,442 (região Sul) a 0,501 (Nordeste). O Sudeste registrou aumento, de 0,475 para 0,478, naquele ano.
O número de desempregados foi estimado em 7,2 milhões, crescimento de 9,3% em relação ao ano anterior. A maior alta, de 15,8%, foi na região Sudeste, onde o total foi calculado em 3,3 milhões. O desemprego cresceu pelo maior número de pessoas no mercado, já que o número de vagas também aumentou, embora em ritmo insuficiente para absorver a mão de obra. Dos 98,6 milhões de ocupados (crescimento de 2,9% no ano), 45,3% estavam no setor de serviços e 39,5% eram empregados com carteira assinada. O total de contribuintes para a Previdência aumentou para 61,7% do total. Dez anos antes, eram 47,4%. A Pnad também detectou crescimento do trabalho infantil (o que ocorre pela primeira desde 2005), que mostrou que a população ocupada de 5 a 17 anos de idade aumentou 4,5%, para 3,3 milhões, no período de 2013 e 2014.
O rendimento da parcela dos 10% mais pobres da população foi de R$ 256 na média mensal em 2014, aumento de 4,1% na comparação com o ano anterior. Este foi o maior avanço entre todas as faixas de renda. No outro extremo da pirâmide, a renda dos 10% mais ricos foi de R$ 7.154, 0,4% menor do que no ano anterior. No extrato 1% mais rico, a queda foi maior, de 3,4%, para R$ 20.364. Todas faixas intermediárias também tiveram aumento da renda no ano passado, especialmente as que estão próximas do valor do salário mínimo (de R$ 724 em 2014), o que significa que estava havendo redução da desigualdade no país.
Os dados da pesquisa se referem a setembro de 2014, comparados com o mesmo mês de 2013, ou seja, um pouco antes do primeiro turno das eleições presidenciais, quando ainda se mantinha, de forma artificial, por motivações eleitoreiras, o equivocado ciclo econômico de incentivo ao consumo das famílias e de gastos do governo. Nesse contexto, funcionava um mercado que absorvia pessoas com menos qualificação, e a inflação ainda se encontrava estacionada em 6,5%. A queda de 3% no PIB deste ano, e que deverá se repetir em 2016, indica que a desigualdade deve se manter estagnada em 2015 e vai se aprofundar em 2016, efeito do menor aumento do salário mínimo, avanço da inflação, da informalidade e do desemprego. Os resultados positivos mostrados pela Pnad de 2014, se dissiparam como fumaça, em decorrência da incompetência, populismo, demagogia e corrupção dos governos petistas Lula e Dilma, engolidos pela recessão, aumento do desemprego, queda na renda, taxas de juros altas, aumento da inflação. O cenário existente no Brasil atual mostra que o país retratado na Pnad não mais existe. Pode-se concluir, assim, que a próxima Pnad, que vai comparar os dados de 2014 e 2015, vai revelar um Brasil vivenciando uma profunda crise social. José Matias-Pereira. Economista e advogado. Doutor em ciência política (área de governo e administração pública) pela Universidade Complutense de Madri, Espanha, e Pós-doutor em administração pela Universidade de São Paulo. Professor de administração pública e pesquisador associado do programa de pós-graduação em contabilidade da Universidade de Brasília. Autor, entre outras obras, do Curso de economia política (2015), publicado pela Atlas.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali at the Goldwater Institute, Phoenix, Arizona, December 2007
Ayaan Hirsi Ali bluntly declares her intention in the introduction to her new book: “To make many people—not only Muslims but also Western apologists for Islam—uncomfortable.” Discomfort, alas, comes easily when the subject, as in the Somali-born author’s three previous books, happens to be the sorry state of Islam. It takes little effort to raise alarm when Muslim terrorists terrify so effectively, and when scarcely a day now passes without some horror committed in the name of their faith. Bombs and hijackings are passé; today’s jihadists prefer studio-quality, slow-motion bloodletting, or atavistic barbarities such as rape, idol-smashing, mass beheading, and the carting off of virgin sex slaves.
The opening device of Heretic underlines just how conditioned we have become to such depravities. Hirsi Ali presents a news flash describing a murderous terror attack, but strips it of such details as time and place and number of victims, leaving only the clues that the killers wore black and shouted “Allahu Akbar!” It takes little imagination to fill in the blanks. It is all too familiar, too believable: what she describes could happen in the office of a satirical magazine in Paris, or a boys’ school in Peshawar, or a village in northern Nigeria.
The device is effective, and Hirsi Ali quickly moves to score more points. For too long, she says, Muslims and Western liberals have argued that such atrocities, as well as the ideas and organizations behind them, are aberrations; that they represent a travesty of “true” Islam. Nonsense, she writes:
They are driven by a political ideology, an ideology embedded in Islam itself, in the holy book of the Qur’an as well as the life and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad…. Islam is not a religion of peace.
Hirsi Ali has made similar and often stronger declarations before, receiving death threats from religious fanatics in response, as well as hostility from many secular critics:
I have been deemed to be a heretic, not just by Muslims—for whom I am already an apostate—but by some Western liberals as well, whose multicultural sensibilities are offended by such “insensitive” pronouncements.
Despite the familiar mix of provocative rhetoric and airbrushed autobiography, Heretic differs from her previous books. It is neither a retelling of Hirsi Ali’s own hejira into Western freedom nor another lengthy blast against the religion that she was raised in and that she abandoned. Hirsi Ali’s attitudes have shifted. Before, she had assumed there was no hope of moderating Islam; it was a creed that needed to be “crushed,” as she once declared. Now, inspired as she says by the evident ferment among Muslims that gave rise to the Arab Spring, and by indications of a growing wave of dissent within the faith, she has come to believe that Islam can and indeed must be reformed.
To many Western readers, this is an attractive and seemingly obvious idea. After all, the other two Abrahamic faiths long ago undertook reformation, glossing away contrary bits of scripture, retiring inconvenient heavenly commands and punishments, and erecting a practical partition between religion and politics. Yes, the process was long and painful. But it has paid off pretty well for modern-day Christians and Jews, and indeed for the larger part of humanity that, knowingly or not, lives under the umbrella of Enlightenment.
With her newly mellowed perspective, Hirsi Ali discerns a Muslim constituency that may be coaxed in a similarly benign direction. This involves a bit of amateur exegesis. As she notes, scholars of the Koran have long distinguished between the eighty-six chapters, or suras, revealed at the Prophet Muhammad’s hometown of Mecca and the twenty-eight suras revealed later, during his exile at Medina. The Koran of the Mecca period dwells on themes such as the oneness of God, the wonders of creation, the wisdom of earlier prophets, and the perils of hellfire.
At Medina, where Muhammad took on new roles as the lawgiver, supreme judge, and military commander of a growing flock facing stronger hostile forces, the revelation takes on a more militant, legalistic, and exclusive form. Earlier verses declare that there is “no compulsion in religion” as well as the tolerant principle, “to them their religion, to me my own.” By contrast a later sura, which appears to address soldiers shirking their duty, enjoins the faithful to “fight and slay wherever you find them” those unbelievers who have broken treaties with the Prophet.
Not altogether convincingly, Hirsi Ali makes use of this contrast in tone and intent to categorize the Muslims of today. In one camp, she says, stand the “Medina Muslims.” Ignoring the more universal and inclusive message of the Koran, these fanatics focus instead on the holy book’s fighting words, and selectively pick from later Islamic tradition those parts calling for harsh punishments and unending jihad. Hirsi Ali suggests that something like 3 percent of Muslims, or around 48 million people, adhere to this form of Islam. Although she does not say so, this number is necessarily inexact since it includes not only the hyperviolent members of ISIS, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and sister gangs but others who may hold similarly dim and blinkered views far from the front lines of jihad.
The vast majority of Muslims belong instead to Hirsi Ali’s “Mecca” category, a group she defines as devout worshipers who remain “loyal to the core creed” yet are “not inclined to practice violence.” Lastly there is a small category of what she terms “Modifying Muslims,” people who have come, like herself, “to realize that their religion must change if its followers are not to be condemned to an interminable cycle of political violence.” Hirsi Ali believes that Modifying Muslims can influence the Mecca majority and wean them from the temptations of the literalist, bigoted, and violent Medina creed. To help matters along she proposes a simple plan, picking five tenets of the faith that must be “reformed or discarded”:
• The infallible status of Muhammad and the literal understanding of the Koran
• Giving priority to the afterlife over the present day
• Sharia law “and the rest of Islamic jurisprudence”
• The empowerment of individuals to enforce such laws and customs
• Jihad.
It will be obvious, even to a layman unfamiliar with the intricacies of Islamic doctrine and practice, that this list represents a tall order. Hirsi Ali herself admits this, as well as the fact that hers is hardly the first voice to call for reform. Her more modest hope is to stimulate debate:
The biggest obstacle to change within the Muslim world is precisely its suppression of the sort of critical thinking I am attempting here…. I will consider this book a success if it helps to spark a serious discussion of these issues among Muslims themselves.
Perhaps it will, and that would be a good thing. The passion that Hirsi Ali brings to the argument is healthy, too. But there are several problems with her approach. These include such troubling aspects as her use of unsound terminology, a surprisingly shaky grasp of how Muslims actually practice their faith, and a questionable understanding of the history and political background not only of Islam, but of the world at large.
Take her three categories of Muslims, for instance. Hirsi Ali is probably quite correct to assert that while it is particularly noisy and violent, the jihadist “Medina” end of the Islamic spectrum is narrow and thinly populated compared to the much larger “Mecca” group. She is also right that the outspokenly critical Muslims are even less numerous. But surely the 1.5 billion “Mecca” Muslims do not all fit into a single hapless category. Like the members of any great religion, one might imagine they instead have a diversity of views, as designations that Muslims use for one another, such as, for example, Salafist, Sufi, Ismaili, Zaidi, Wahhabist, Gulenist, Jaafari, and Ibadi, would suggest.
Hirsi Ali herself seems a bit unsure of where all those middle Muslims belong. “Must all who question Islam end up either leaving the faith, as I did, or embracing violent jihad?” she asks.
I believe there is a third option. But it begins with the recognition that Islamic extremism is rooted in Islam itself. Understanding why that is so is the key to finding a third way: a way that allows for some other option between apostasy and atrocity.
I think it is fair to assume that quite a few Muslims, not only today but throughout the history of Islam, have found some “other option” without Hirsi Ali’s guidance. Rather than by abolishing or radically modifying the particular points of doctrine she so dislikes, they have done so just as believers in other religions have, by creatively reinterpreting their founding texts, or by quietly ignoring contentious parts. Others, such as Egypt’s Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Abdolkarim Soroush of Iran, or Abdelmajid Charfi of Tunisia, have critiqued more rigid interpretations of Islam in work based on a thorough knowledge of traditional Islamic scholarship and arguments that, unlike Hirsi Ali’s, seek to place the problems of modern Islam in a historical setting.
Just as Hirsi Ali casually misrepresents Muslims, she misrepresents Islam. Falling into a trap that is sadly common among Western commentators, she repeatedly presents what in her own terms is the “Medina” version of the faith as somehow more authentic or valid than other interpretations. She takes, for example, the long-lapsed and historically rare practice of forced conversion—a practice jarringly revived only recently by ultra-extremist groups such as Boko Haram in Nigeria or ISIS in Iraq—to be the norm rather than the exception. Yet historians now largely accept that far from being “extremely brutal,” as Hirsi Ali asserts, the extraordinarily swift and sweeping early Muslim conquests were assisted by large numbers of willing “infidel” allies, who may have viewed Muslim rule as a relief from the warring Byzantine and Persian empires. Just seven years before the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in 637, Byzantine rulers had slaughtered all its Jewish inhabitants. Persian invaders had massacred all its Christians in 614. By contrast the Muslims permitted freedom of worship for everyone.
If Muslims had indeed made systematic the practice of forced conversion, as Hirsi Ali seems to think, how is it that they failed to convert the majority populations of countries they ruled for hundreds of years, such as India or Greece or Bulgaria? The contrast with, say, the expulsion of Muslims and Jews during the Spanish Reconquista is striking.
Hirsi Ali’s mischaracterization extends from history to matters of belief and practice. “In its very name ‘Islam’ means submission,” she writes. “You subsume yourself to an entire set of beliefs. The rules as set down are precise and exacting.” Perhaps so, but the word “Islam,” coming from the same root as the Arabic for “peace,” also means “acceptance,” “reconciliation,” or “resignation” to the will of God. Hirsi Ali seems unaware, moreover, that the general uses of the terms “Islam” and “Islamic” are relatively modern, and indeed are to an extent adaptations of Western usages. As in the text of the Koran itself, for most of the faith’s fifteen centuries its followers have far more often referred to themselves as mu’mineen—believers—than muslimeen.
A screen shot from a video released by ISIS in July 2015 showing young ISIS executioners parading past condemned Syrian government soldiers before killing them in front of a crowd of spectators in the amphitheater at Palmyra
Those rules that she describes, too, are neither as precise or exacting as Hirsi Ali would have us believe. She portrays Islamic law or sharia—which literally means the “way” or “path”—as “codifying” not only points of ritual but the organization of daily life, economics, and governance. In another passage we are told that sharia “states that women are considered naked if any part of their body is showing except for their face and hands.”
Sharia cannot “state” or “codify” anything. Far from being a rigid set of rules, Islamic law is an immense amalgam of texts and interpretations that has evolved along parallel paths within five major and numerous minor schools of law, all of them equally valid to their followers. Some parts of this body, such as laws regarding inheritance, vary little between rival schools. But in the absence of any universally accepted ruling authority and with political winds and exigencies constantly changing, legal opinions on most matters have tended to be fluid rather than fixed. So it is that while some clerics will agree with Hirsi Ali’s definition of nakedness, others may insist on a full face veil, or perhaps—although this is unlikely—argue instead that the bikini is a practical garment for swimming. At times clerics have banned the drinking of coffee or the wearing of long sleeves, only to relent.
Hirsi Ali is similarly misguided regarding Islamic traditions. One of these that is “unique to Islam,” she declares, “is a tradition of murderous martyrdom, in which the individual martyr simultaneously commits suicide and kills others for religious reasons.” Despite the recent ghastly record that includes September 11 and ISIS’s use of suicide fighters in its assaults on Iraqi cities, there is no such “tradition.” Hirsi Ali herself notes that the first example of a Muslim suicide attack dates not to the distant past but to 1980, when desperate Iranian leaders adopted this tactic against the Muslim army of neighboring Iraq. As that example shows, most “martyrdom operations” have been carried out for political, not religious reasons or, as was the case with Japan’s kamikazes and the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka’s 1983–2009 civil war, as a last-ditch weapon of the weak against the strong.
In fact the four main schools of Sunni jurisprudence—including arch-conservative Saudi clerics—all concur that suicide is a serious sin. Some individual clerics have condoned its use in war by invoking arguments of necessity, not “tradition.” More than an enactment of anything Islamic, the resort to suicide by groups such as al-Qaeda or ISIS represents a deliberate challenge to traditional, patriarchal authority. It is a statement of zeal and determination, a form of advertising or propaganda designed not only to kill and frighten enemies, but to inspire new recruits into what are, in effect, as much death cults as religious movements.
Another peculiar contention of Hirsi Ali’s is that “all over the Muslim world” women are stoned to death for adultery. In fact this hideously cruel punishment has rarely been recorded throughout Muslim history and never in most Muslim countries for at least the past several generations. In almost all cases where it has been applied in recent years, stoning has taken place in tribal or rebel areas beyond the control of central governments—the Taliban in Afghanistan, ISIS in Iraq, and Boko Haram in Nigeria being cases in point. Out of the world’s forty-nine Muslim-majority states, six retain the punishment in deference to Islamic legal tradition, despite the fact that the Koran, unlike the Bible (Deuteronomy 22:24), does not mention it. Of these countries only Iran, which officially placed a moratorium on stoning in 2002 but still gives leeway to individual judges, has actually carried it out.
Perhaps one reason for Hirsi Ali’s propensity for taking the actions and beliefs of Islam’s outliers and misfits as somehow exemplary of the religion’s true essence is her unwillingness to suggest any external motivations for their particular madness. These are not hard to find. The many forms of Islamism—a more accurate term than simply “Islam” for the often violent and angry version of the faith that is sadly fashionable today—emerged largely in response to European imperialism. This is not surprising when we consider that between 1800 and 1950 some nine out of ten Muslims happened to fall under aggressively imposed “infidel” rule. Small wonder that most modern Islamist political movements, from the Muslim Brotherhood founded in Egypt in 1928, to Lebanon’s Shia militia-cum-party Hezbollah, to the Salafi-jihadist State of the Islamic Caliphate that is now beheading people in Syria and Iraq, have portrayed themselves as “resistance” movements against dastardly Western domination.
Needless to say, the era of European colonization is long past. However much Islamists may still rail against “cultural invasion,” or against the “artificial” Middle Eastern borders imposed by France and Britain, or against American military incursions and so on, the West cannot be blamed for many of the excesses of such groups. Hirsi Ali is quite correct that the jihadists have dredged the darker parts of Islam’s own traditions to justify what are by any standard simply abominable crimes. She is also right that unthinking literalism blinds all too many Islamists to ethics, reason, and common sense.
It is a fact, too, that such strains of modern Islamism as Saudi Arabia’s rigid Wahhabism developed autonomously and not in response to the West. They are manifestations of a cycle that has repeated throughout Islamic history, whereby puritan sects have periodically erupted from the hinterlands to purge and purify Muslim cities of supposed corruption.
Lost on Hirsi Ali, however, is the irony that such eruptions—and ISIS represents a new and particularly virulent one—are themselves products of a deeply felt need among Muslims for “reform.” The fact is, as I have written in these pages, that Islam is now already, and indeed has been for some time, deep in the throes of a painful, multifaceted reformation.* The current tribulations of the faith represent not a sudden new departure but a continuation of decades of churning controversy, of debate and strife.
This anguished process shares parallels with the experience of other Abrahamic religions. But there are important distinctions. One of them is the matter of timing: whereas Christian and Jewish reform evolved over centuries, in relatively organic and self-generated—albeit often bloody—fashion, the challenge to Islam of such concepts as empirical reasoning, the nation-state, the theory of evolution, and individualism arrived all in a heap and all too often at the point of a gun. Muslims have had less time to grapple with the revolutionary ideas of the Enlightenment, and have done so from a position of weakness rather than strength.
Another central difference from the Christian experience was that Islam has had to face the crucial question of what to do with religious law. Until the nineteenth century Muslims dominated virtually every society they lived in, with sharia acting as the backbone of legal systems from the East Indies to Morocco. Add to this the difference that there is no “church” in Islam—no fixed and widely recognized religious hierarchy to explain doctrinal changes or to enforce them—and we begin to understand the difficulty of progressive reform.
All too often, “reform” movements in Islam have taken the guise of fundamentalist purges, with efforts to reimpose some ostensibly purer form of religious law tempting their propagators to violence. Yet most ordinary Muslims have found subtler paths, accommodating modern ways by diluting to one degree or another their adherence to doctrine, by creatively interpreting sharia, or by regarding the intent of the law as more important than the letter. Plenty of proud Muslims do not pray five times daily, or worry much about what “proper” Islamic dress is, or base their political opinions on what is good for the faith. They pick and choose what form of Islam to follow from across a very broad range of options.
Most Muslim countries, for their part, long ago recognized the utility of secular laws to supplement or even supersede sharia. To governments seeking to build states in a fast-paced, competitive, and increasingly complex world, traditional Islamic law came to be seen not as too rigid—as Hirsi Ali would have it—but rather as too unpredictable, too open to the vagaries of individual interpretation by judges with little knowledge of the world outside scripture.
Keen to “catch up” with Europe, the Ottoman Empire sharply restricted the role of sharia courts in the mid-nineteenth century, ending in the process most legal distinctions between Muslims and other subjects. Tossing out reams of accumulated Islamic jurisprudence in the matter, the Bey of Tunis summarily abolished slavery in 1846, two decades before the United States. In the early twentieth century Egypt adopted largely French and Turkey largely Swiss law codes. Among the few modern countries that continue to declare sharia the sole law of the land, Saudi Arabia nevertheless has since the 1960s used civil law to regulate commerce, as a matter of pragmatism.
Such evolutions remain tentative, incomplete, and contested. Turkey in recent decades has seen a backlash against the secularization imposed nearly a century ago by Kemal Atatürk. Egypt, for its part, has struggled repeatedly to arrive at a constitution that appears to give primacy to sharia while effectively confining religious law within the bounds of civil codes; its laws are today a messy tangle of sharia-based and secular rules. In an appeal to populism in Pakistan in the 1980s, the dictator Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq pursued a radical program to revive application of sharia, including severe punishments for such crimes as blasphemy; Pakistani governments in the decades since have tried to back away from some of its more controversial aspects.
Where courts are crowded and corrupt, which is all too often the case in poorer Muslim countries, sharia retains a strong pull as an imagined panacea, a fact reflected in opinion polls. And in places such as Somalia or Afghanistan where the central government has collapsed or lost legitimacy, Muslim societies have often reverted to laws based more explicitly on scripture, including extreme punishments such as cutting off the hand of a thief. Some Muslims in minority communities, meanwhile, have turned in on themselves, creating what some describe as Islamic ghettoes in places such as the suburbs of Paris, or Bradford and Birmingham in England.
The call by radicals and fundamentalists to create, geographically, a larger sacred space for Islam, where the sound application of God’s law ensures a sweeter afterlife for the faithful, remains potent. This was an important impetus for the 1947 partition of India and creation of Pakistan, an “Islamic” state that, like the Jewish state founded less than a year later, may have been conceived by secularists but carried a strong imaginative appeal for the religious. The notion of an exclusive sacred space also underlies the darker fantasies of a resurrected pan-Islamic Caliphate currently causing mayhem in the Fertile Crescent. To one degree or another the civil wars, insurrections, and bitterly polarized politics that afflict many Muslim countries today reflect the struggle between such essentially utopian Islamist visions and a contrary trend toward disenchantment and the desacralization of public space.
As Hirsi Ali points out, such utopian visions are reinforced by the traditional Muslim view of history as a prolonged fall from the brief moment of grace that prevailed in the earliest years of Islam. It is strengthened, too, by the Muslim tradition of viewing the Koran as the literal word of God, and of exalting the Prophet’s reported words and deeds as a fixed template for correct behavior. Hirsi Ali’s conclusion: “In those terms, it is only the Medina Muslims who can represent themselves as the agents of a Muslim Reformation.”
But here again she is not quite right. The argument for a purge or a return to basic principles represents, as we have seen, only one kind of reformation out of many that Muslims have proposed and continue to seek. One might argue that enlightened reform is as much a part of Islam as violent radicalism, if not more so. In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Mu’tazilite movement tried to introduce ideas of free will, reason, and a historical understanding of the Koran into Islam.
Their efforts were ultimately rejected. But later Muslim philosophers such as Avicenna and Averroës applied Aristotelian and Neoplatonic methods to Koranic exegesis, just as numerous contemporary Muslim scholars quietly apply modern forms of scholarship. Hirsi Ali presents such efforts as doomed projects, but it may be fairer to say that they have simply not yet borne full fruit.
The very shrillness of today’s zealots may reflect an underlying fear that conservative orthodoxies are under threat as never before, facing a growing backlash not so much from the outside world as from within the faith. It is noteworthy that thirty-five years of self-declared “Islamic” rule in Iran have fostered not greater religiosity but creeping secularization, with ever fewer people observing religious rites. The more recent excesses of Islamist terrorism and sectarian rivalry have accelerated a far wider wave of doubt. Muslims with such doubts will not need Hirsi Ali’s hectoring to feel “uncomfortable,” and to consider new approaches to their faith.
No primeiro artigo desta
série, “Adam Smith vai ao cerrado”, eu me dediquei a comprovar a existência e o
funcionamento perfeito da chamada “mão invisível” de Adam Smith – que não é uma
“teoria”, como muitos acreditam e afirmam, mas se trata de uma simples
constatação de bom senso – por meio de um trecho do romance-macondiano de
Arnaldo Barbosa Brandão, Encaixotando
Brasília, (Brasília: Verbena, 2012), que descreve, em linguagem colorida e
totalmente apropriada ao assunto, como os mercados são capazes de contornar
qualquer restrição imposta por governos incautos, criando, a partir do tino
empresarial de microempresários improvisados, as mais surpreendentes respostas
a essas “falhas de governo”, por meio do oferecimento dos mais insólitos
produtos, mas que respondem a uma demanda perfeitamente configurada. Quem não
teve a oportunidade de ler esse primeiro artigo, pode fazê-lo aqui: Diplomatizzando (link: http://diplomatizzando.blogspot.com.br/2015/11/nao-existem-falhas-de-mercado-se-falhas.html).
Estou lendo agora o
excelente manual didático de José Matias-Pereira, Finanças Públicas: A Política Orçamentária no Brasil (3a.
ed.; São Paulo: Atlas, 2006), livro que me instruiu perfeitamente bem sobre os
arcanos, meandros, labirintos e procedimentos góticos, alguns até kafkianos, da
nossa estrutura burocrática que preside à confecção, administração e
operacionalização da política orçamentária no Brasil, que recomendo à atenção
de todos os interessados nesse árido capítulo de nossas políticas públicas da
área econômica, ao lado de um outro manual que também me parece excelente: Fabio
Giambigi e Ana Cláudia Alem, Finanças
Públicas: Teoria e Prática no Brasil (4a ed.; Rio de Janeiro:
Elsevier, 2011).
E o que leio, logo no
prefácio à 3a. edição de Matias Pereira? Esta frase que me parece
sintomática de toda uma escola de economia – aliás de várias, mas com ênfase
nas keynesianas – que me parece mais a invocação de um credo do que uma verdade
objetiva e cientificamente provada:
[A] preocupação da teoria das finanças
públicas (...) se articula em torno da existência das falhas de mercado que
tornam necessária a presença do governo, do estudo das funções do governo, da
teoria da tributação e do gasto público. (p. 16)
O autor reconhece
imediatamente, na sua Introdução, seu embasamento teórico, mais uma vez um
questão de adesão, mais do que de fundamentação lógica:
Destacamos neste livro a importância da
teoria keynesiana para o entendimento do estudo de Finanças Públicas... (p. 29)
Pergunto: por que
keynesiana? Por que não miseniana, que a precede, ou a da escola austríaca, à
qual Ludwig von Mises está ligado? Acredito que se trata, com todo o respeito
pelo autor, de um “defeito de fabricação”: nas faculdades brasileiras de
economia se estuda exclusivamente a teoria keynesiana, que não precisa disputar
com nenhuma outra qualquer espaço intelectual, ou fazer qualquer esforço de
fundamentação lógica ou provar sua validade por meio de algum tipo de
embasamento empírico.
Esse entendimento é
corroborado imediatamente após, ao enfatizar o autor as fontes de sua abordagem
das finanças públicas:
O referencial teórico deste livro está
apoiado, em grande parte, na teoria das finanças públicas (Musgrave, 1959;
Musgrave & Musgrave, 1989), que se articula em torno da existência das falhas de mercado que
torna necessária a presença do governo, do estudo das funções do governo, da
teoria da tributação e do gasto público, tendo como referência o objetivo-fim
do Estado, que é o bem comum. (p. 29; ênfase acrescida PRA; os livros citados
são os seguintes: Richard A. Musgrave: The
Theory of Public Finance. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959; R. A. M. e Peggy B.
Musgrave: Public Finance in Theory and
Practice. 5th. ed.; Singapore: McGraw-Hill, 1989)
Pode-se admitir
perfeitamente que as finanças públicas estejam inextricavelmente vinculadas a
ações e funções de governo, e a toda uma parafernália a isso inerente, qual
seja, a tributação (mais uma prática do que uma teoria, diga-se de passagem),
mas não se percebe como e por que as finanças públicas teriam de estar
centradas em torno de supostas “falhas de mercado”, que não são exatamente
caracterizadas. Pode-se inclusive admitir como razoável que a finalidade maior
do Estado é o bem comum, embora existam fundadas dúvidas de que isso seja
universal, ou essencialmente inerente ao Estado, ou a todo Estado que se
conhece. Mas, admitamos que possa ser verdade, o que não torna necessariamente
verdade o fato de as finanças públicas estarem articuladas em torno de supostas
falhas de mercado: pode tranquilamente admitir uma suposta ação benfeitora do
Estado mesmo na ausência completa de falhas de mercado – teoricamente possível,
pelo menos, tanto quanto sua existência, também teoricamente admissível – ou na
sua existência independente de qualquer necessidade de “teoria da tributação”.
Não se pode negar, a
priori, a inexistência de “falhas de mercado” – embora minha tese,
provavelmente principista e preconceituosa seja de que, precisamente, elas não
existem – mas por que não admitir, ao mesmo tempo a existência de “falhas de
governo”, que me parecem as mais factíveis, possíveis e passíveis de
acontecerem? Não existe, contudo, ao longo do livro, uma digressão ou
explicação paralela para a possível existência de “falhas de governo”, como
existe uma suposição que também me parece principista e preconceituosa de que
existem, sim, “falhas de mercado” que necessitam ser corrigidas pelo Estado.
Este ponto não é
investigado a fundo, mas simplesmente exposto como uma situação de fato
existente, sem que se investiguem as origens, as formas, os tipos e as
modalidades de tais “falhas”. Uma primeira suposição transparece através da
citação de uma autora brasileira em um livro sobre “planejamento no Brasil”:
... posiciona-se Lafer (1987: 15-16) no
sentido de que ‘o planejamento governamental se faz necessário, não para
substituir o sistema de preços (...) mas para corrigir-lhe as distorções...’
(p. 69; o livro citado é o Betty Mindlin Lafer, Planejamento no Brasil. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1987)
Não se sabe, porém, quais
seriam essas distorções do sistema de preços, pelo menos aquelas distorções que
derivam inteiramente desse “sistema” – o que já me parece uma incongruência em
si, pois não existe um sistema, e sim uma relação entre oferta e demanda, que
determina um determinado preço de mercado – e não de uma intervenção de
governos sobre esses preços de mercado. Parece-me existir aqui uma curiosa
tendência a provar a existência de certos desequilíbrios, disfunções, ou
“falhas” apenas pela afirmação de sua existência, justamente, não pela
comprovação empírica, factual, dessa existência. Para a autora, como para
Matias-Pereira, o equilíbrio estático de renda em um nível inferior do de pleno
emprego já seria um indicativo dessas “falhas de mercado”.
A fundamentação desse
entendimento do jogo econômico se baseia inteiramente na introdução de Keynes à
sua Teoria Geral do Emprego, dos Juros e
da Moeda (1936), quando este afirma que
‘...os postulados da teoria da teoria
clássica se aplicam apenas a um caso especial e não ao caso geral, pois a
situação que ela supõe acha-se no limite das possíveis situações de equilíbrio.
Ademais, as características desse caso especial não são as da sociedade
econômica em que realmente vivemos, de modo que os ensinamentos daquela teoria
seria ilusórios e desastrosos se tentássemos aplicar as suas conclusões aos
fatos da experiência.’ (Keynes, A teoria
geral do emprego, dos juros e da moeda. São Paulo: Atlas, 1982, p. 23; cf.
p. 71 de Matias-Pereira)
Registre-se que a maior
parte, senão a totalidade dos keynesianos ou dos economistas que lhe eram ou
são simpáticos, partem dessa simples afirmação para decretar que a teoria
clássica se aplicava apenas a um caso especial e que a teoria proposta por
Keynes se conforma numa teoria geral, digno de substituir a primeira. Mas com
base em quais evidências práticas Keynes poderia decretar isso? Apenas com base
nos desequilíbrios observados no funcionamento das economias capitalistas de
mercado a partir do entre guerras, e mais particularmente a partir de
1929-1931? Como poderia o economista britânico concluir que a sua “teoria” era
a que se ocuparia de casos “gerais”, ao passo que toda a teoria clássica e
neoclássica anterior havia simplesmente se ocupado de um caso “especial”?
Mistério dos mistérios...
Procurei no restante do
livro uma explicação para a existência das tais “falhas de mercado”, mas
confessado não ter encontrado nada que saciasse a minha curiosidade. Não que
não existissem afirmações auto-confirmadas desses desequilíbrios que teriam
sido “descobertos” por Keynes, como por exemplo esta frase emblemática do
pensamento do autor do livro:
É indiscutível
(eu sublinho, PRA) a importância da contribuição de Keynes em relação ao papel
dos gastos públicos como suplemento ao dispêndio privado. (...) Introduzindo o
conceito ex-ante, Keynes enfatizou a
diferença entre poupanças e investimento. (...) Dessa forma, quando ocorresse
insuficiência de demanda, o governo deveria assumir um papel ativo de
complementar os gastos privados... mesmo em obras aparentemente sem lógica
imediata, como abrir e fechar buracos... (p. 72)
Registre-se, mais uma vez,
que a tal “insuficiência de demanda” já seria, no conceito keynesiano (e no
entendimento de Matias-Pereira), uma “falha de mercado”, que o governo, sempre
no conceito de que o Estado só pode produzir o bem comum, procuraria corrigir
oferecendo sua própria “poupança”. Eu não sei como os keynesianos imaginam de
onde o governo vai retirar essa poupança, a menos que eles estejam entendendo
gastos inflacionários, derivados de emissões de puro papel, como o equivalente
de “perfeições de governo”, o que me parece inteiramente plausível.
O livro de Matias-Pereira
é uma preciosidade em termos de análise das finanças públicas e do seu
funcionamento no Brasil, não apenas teoricamente, mas de um ponto de vista
essencialmente prático. Mas o autor ficou nos devendo uma explicação cabal de
por que a teoria das finanças públicas deveria se articular em torno da
existência de “falhas de mercado”, se em nenhum momento ele fornece uma
descrição adequada da efetividade dessas “falhas” e, mais importante, de suas
formas de atuação. Permanece aliás um mistério para mim o fato de que essas
falhas, parcamente referidas e nunca explicitadas à exaustão, devam
necessariamente estar no centro de uma teoria e uma prática das finanças públicas.
Minha posição, tal como
exposta no título desta série, é a de que não existem as tais falhas de
mercado, mas isso requer uma explicação mais fundamentada que será feita no
terceiro artigo desta série.
The author has wide experience in the Middle East and was formerly an official of a NATO country. We respect the writer’s reasons for anonymity. —The Editors
ReutersA still from a video released by ISIS on April 19, which appears to show the execution of Ethiopian Christians by members of Wilayat Barqa, an affiliate of ISIS in eastern Libya
Ahmad Fadhil was eighteen when his father died in 1984. Photographs suggest that he was relatively short, chubby, and wore large glasses. He wasn’t a particularly poor student—he received a B grade in junior high—but he decided to leave school. There was work in the garment and leather factories in his home city of Zarqa, Jordan, but he chose instead to work in a video store, and earned enough money to pay for some tattoos. He also drank alcohol, took drugs, and got into trouble with the police. So his mother sent him to an Islamic self-help class. This sobered him up and put him on a different path. By the time Ahmad Fadhil died in 2006 he had laid the foundations of an independent Islamic state of eight million people that controlled a territory larger than Jordan itself.
The rise of Ahmad Fadhil—or as he was later known in the jihad, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—and ISIS, the movement of which he was the founder, remains almost inexplicable. The year 2003, in which he began his operations in Iraq, seemed to many part of a mundane and unheroic age of Internet start-ups and a slowly expanding system of global trade. Despite the US-led invasion of Iraq that year, the borders of Syria and Iraq were stable. Secular Arab nationalism appeared to have triumphed over the older forces of tribe and religion. Different religious communities—Yezidis, Shabaks, Christians, Kaka’is, Shias, and Sunnis—continued to live alongside one another, as they had for a millennium or more. Iraqis and Syrians had better incomes, education, health systems, and infrastructure, and an apparently more positive future, than most citizens of the developing world. Who then could have imagined that a movement founded by a man from a video store in provincial Jordan would tear off a third of the territory of Syria and Iraq, shatter all these historical institutions, and—defeating the combined militaries of a dozen of the wealthiest countries on earth—create a mini empire?
The story is relatively easy to narrate, but much more difficult to understand. It begins in 1989, when Zarqawi, inspired by his Islamic self-help class, traveled from Jordan to “do jihad” in Afghanistan. Over the next decade he fought in the Afghan civil war, organized terrorist attacks in Jordan, spent years in a Jordanian jail, and returned—with al-Qaeda help—to set up a training camp in Herat in western Afghanistan. He was driven out of Afghanistan by the US-led invasion of 2001, but helped back onto his feet by the Iranian government. Then, in 2003—with the assistance of Saddam loyalists—he set up an insurgency network in Iraq. By targeting Shias and their most holy sites, he was able to turn an insurgency against US troops into a Shia–Sunni civil war.
Zarqawi was killed by a US air strike in 2006. But his movement improbably survived the full force of the 170,000-strong, $100 billion a year US troop surge. In 2011, after the US withdrawal, the new leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, expanded into Syria and reestablished a presence in northwest Iraq. In June 2014 the movement took Mosul—Iraq’s second-largest city—and in May 2015 the Iraqi city of Ramadi and the Syrian city of Palmyra, and its affiliates took the airport in Sirte, Libya. Today, thirty countries, including Nigeria, Libya, and the Philippines, have groups that claim to be part of the movement.
Although the movement has changed its name seven times and has had four leaders, it continues to treat Zarqawi as its founder, and to propagate most of his original beliefs and techniques of terror. The New York Times refers to it as “the Islamic State, also known as ISISor ISIL.” Zarqawi also called it “Army of the Levant,” “Monotheism and Jihad,” “al-Qaeda in Iraq,” and “Mujihadeen Shura Council.” (A movement known for its marketing has rarely cared about consistent branding.) I will simplify the many changes of name and leadership by referring to it throughout as “ISIS,” although it has of course evolved during its fifteen years of existence.
The problem, however, lies not in chronicling the successes of the movement, but in explaining how something so improbable became possible. The explanations so often given for its rise—the anger of Sunni communities, the logistical support provided by other states and groups, the movement’s social media campaigns, its leadership, its tactics, its governance, its revenue streams, and its ability to attract tens of thousands of foreign fighters—fall far short of a convincing theory of the movement’s success.
Emma Sky’s book The Unraveling: High Hopes and Missed Opportunities in Iraq,1 for example, a deft, nuanced, and often funny account of her years as a civilian official in Iraq between 2003 and 2010, illustrates the mounting Sunni anger in Iraq. She shows how US policies such as de-Baathification in 2003 began the alienation of Sunnis, and how this was exacerbated by the atrocities committed by Shia militias in 2006 (fifty bodies a day were left on the streets of Baghdad, killed by power drills inserted in their skulls). She explains the often imaginative steps that were taken to regain the trust of the Sunni communities during the surge of 2007, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s alienation of those communities again after the US withdrawal in 2011 through his imprisonment of Sunni leaders, his discrimination and brutality, and the disbanding of Sunni militias.
But many other insurgent groups, quite different from ISIS, often seemed to have been in a much stronger position to have become the dominant vehicles of “Sunni anger.” Sunnis in Iraq initially had minimal sympathy with Zarqawi’s death cult and with his movement’s imposition of early medieval social codes. Most were horrified when Zarqawi blew up the UN headquarters in Baghdad; when he released a film in which he personally sawed off the head of an American civilian; when he blew up the great Shia shrine at Samarra and killed hundreds of Iraqi children. After he mounted three simultaneous bomb attacks against Jordanian hotels—killing sixty civilians at a wedding party—the senior leaders of his Jordanian tribe and his own brother signed a public letter disowning him. The Guardian was only echoing the conventional wisdom when it concluded in Zarqawi’s obituary: “Ultimately, his brutality tarnished any aura, offered little but nihilism and repelled Muslims worldwide.”
Other insurgent groups also often seemed more effective. In 2003, for example, secular Baathists were more numerous, better equipped, better organized, and more experienced military commanders; in 2009, the militia of the “Sunni Awakening” had much better resources and its armed movement was more deeply rooted locally. In 2011, the Free Syrian Army, including former officers of the Assad regime, was a much more plausible leader of resistance in Syria; and so in 2013 was the more extremist militia Jabhat-al-Nusra. Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss show in ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, for example, that al-Nusra formed far closer links to tribal groups in East Syria—even marrying its fighters to tribal women.
Such groups have sometimes blamed their collapse and lack of success, and ISIS’s rise, on lack of resources. The Free Syrian Army, for example has long insisted that it would have been able to supplant ISIS if its leaders had received more money and weapons from foreign states. And the Sunni Awakening leaders in Iraq argue that they lost control of their communities only because the Baghdad government ceased to pay their salaries. But there is no evidence that ISIS initially received more cash or guns than these groups; rather the reverse.
Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss’s account suggests that much of the early support for the ISIS movement was limited because it was inspired by ideologues who themselves despised Zarqawi and his followers. The al-Qaeda cash that launched Zarqawi in 1999, for example, was, in their words, “a pittance compared to what al-Qaeda was financially capable of disbursing.” The fact that it didn’t give him more reflected bin Laden’s horror at Zarqawi’s killing of Shias (bin Laden’s mother was Shia) and his distaste for Zarqawi’s tattoos.
Although the Iranians gave Zarqawi medical aid and safe haven when he was a fugitive in 2002, he soon lost their sympathy by sending his own father-in-law in a suicide vest to kill Ayatollah Mohammad Baqir al-Hakim, Iran’s senior political representative in Iraq, and by blowing up one of the most sacred Shia shrines. And although ISIS has relied for more than a decade on the technical skills of the Baathists and the Sufi Iraqi general Izzat al-Douri, who controlled an underground Baathist militia after the fall of Saddam, this relationship has been strained. (The movement makes no secret of its contempt for Sufism, its destruction of Sufi shrines, or its abhorrence of everything that Baathist secular Arab nationalists espouse.)
Nor has the leadership of ISIS been particularly attractive, high-minded, or competent—although some allowance should be made for the understandable revulsion of the biographers. Mary-Anne Weaver, in a 2006 Atlantic article, describes Zarqawi as “barely literate,” “a bully and a thug, a bootlegger and a heavy drinker, and even, allegedly, a pimp.” Weiss and Hassan call him an “intellectual lightweight.” Jessica Stern and J.M. Berger in ISIS: The State of Terrorsay this “thug-turned-terrorist” and “mediocre student…arrived in Afghanistan as a zero.” Weaver describes his “botched operation[s]” in Jordan and his use of a “hapless would-be bomber.” Stern and Berger explain that bin Laden and his followers did not like him because they “were mostly members of an intellectual educated elite, while Zarqawi was a barely educated ruffian with an attitude.”
If writers have much less to say about the current leader, al-Baghdadi, this is because his biography, as Weiss and Hassan concede, “still hovers not far above the level of rumor or speculation, some of it driven, in fact, by competing jihadist propagandists.”
Nor is ISIS’s distinctive approach to insurgency—from holding territory to fighting regular armies—an obvious advantage. Lawrence of Arabia advised that insurgents must be like a mist—everywhere and nowhere—never trying to hold ground or wasting lives in battles with regular armies. Chairman Mao insisted that guerrillas should be fish who swam in the sea of the local population. Such views are the logical corollaries of “asymmetric warfare” in which a smaller, apparently weaker group—like ISIS—confronts a powerful adversary such as the US and Iraqi militaries. This is confirmed by US Army studies of more than forty historical insurgencies, which suggest again and again that holding ground, fighting pitched battles, and alienating the cultural and religious sensibilities of the local population are fatal.
But such tactics are exactly part of ISIS’s explicit strategy. Zarqawi lost thousands of fighters trying to hold Fallujah in 2004. He wasted the lives of his suicide bombers in constant small attacks and—by imposing the most draconian punishments and obscurantist social codes—outraged the Sunni communities that he claimed to represent. ISIS fighters are now clearly attracted by the movement’s ability to control territory in such places as Mosul—as an interview in Yalda Hakim’s recent BBC documentary Mosul: Living with Islamic State confirms. But it is not clear that this tactic—although alluring, and at the moment associated with success—has become any less risky.
ReutersA still from the video released by ISIS on April 19, which appears to show the execution of Ethiopian Christians by members of Wilayat Fazzan, another affiliate of ISIS, in southern Libya
The movement’s behavior, however, has not become less reckless or tactically bizarre since Zarqawi’s death. One US estimate by Larry Schweikart suggested that 40,000 insurgents had been killed, about 200,000 wounded, and 20,000 captured before the US even launched the surge in 2006. By June 2010, General Ray Odierno claimed that 80 percent of the movement’s top forty-two leaders had been killed or captured, with only eight remaining at large. But after the US left in 2011, instead of rebuilding its networks in Iraq, the battered remnants chose to launch an invasion of Syria, and took on not just the regime, but also the well-established Free Syrian Army. It attacked the movement’s Syrian branch—Jabhat-al-Nusra—when it broke away. It enraged al-Qaeda in 2014 by killing al-Qaeda’s senior emissary in the region. It deliberately provoked tens of thousands of Shia militiamen to join the fight on the side of the Syrian regime, and then challenged the Iranian Quds force by advancing on Baghdad.
Next, already struggling against these new enemies, the movement opened another front in August 2014 by attacking Kurdistan, driving the Kurdish forces—who had hitherto stayed out of the battle—to retaliate. It beheaded the American journalist James Foley and the British aid worker David Haines, thereby bringing in the US and UK. It enraged Japan by demanding hundreds of millions of dollars for a hostage who was already dead. It finished 2014 by mounting a suicidal attack on Kobane in Syria, in the face of over six hundred US air strikes, losing many thousands of ISIS fighters and gaining no ground. When, as recently as April, the movement lost Tikrit and seemed to be declining, the explanation appeared obvious. Analysts were on the verge of concluding that ISIS had lost because it was reckless, abhorrent, over-extended, fighting on too many fronts, with no real local support, unable to translate terrorism into a popular program, inevitably outmatched by regular armies.
Some analysts have, therefore, focused their explanations not on the movement’s often apparently self-defeating military strategy, but on its governance and revenue, its support from the population, and its reliance on tens of thousands of foreign fighters. Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a fellow of the Middle East Forum, has explained in recent blog posts how in some occupied cities such as Raqqa in Syria, the movement has created complicated civil service structures, taking control even of municipal waste departments. He describes the revenue it derives from local income and property taxes, and by leasing out former Iraqi and Syrian state offices to businesses. He shows how this has given ISIS a broad and reliable income base, which is only supplemented by the oil smuggling and the antiquity looting so well described by Nicolas Pelham in these pages.2
ISIS’s power is now reinforced by the staggering arsenal that the movement has taken from the fleeing Iraqi and Syrian army—including tanks, Humvees, and major artillery pieces. Reports from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Vice News over the last twelve months have shown that many Sunnis in Iraq and Syria now feel that ISIS is the only plausible guarantor of order and security in the civil war, and their only defense against brutal retribution from the Damascus and Baghdad governments.
But here too the evidence is confusing and contradictory. Yalda Hakim’s BBC documentary on Mosul makes rough brutality the secret of ISIS’s domination. In his book The Digital Caliphate, Abdel Bari Atwan, however, describes (in Malise Ruthven’s words) “a well-run organization that combines bureaucratic efficiency and military expertise with a sophisticated use of information technology.”3 Zaid Al-Ali, in his excellent account of Tikrit, talks about ISIS’s “incapacity to govern” and the total collapse of water supply, electricity, and schools, and ultimately population under its rule.4 “Explanations” that refer to resources and power are ultimately circular. The fact that the movement has been able to attract the apparent support, or acquiescence, of the local population, and control territory, local government revenue, oil, historical sites, and military bases, has been a result of the movement’s success and its monopoly of the insurgency. It is not a cause of it.
In ISIS: The State of Terror, Stern and Berger provide a fascinating analysis of the movement’s use of video and social media. They have tracked individual Twitter accounts, showing how users kept changing their Twitter handles, piggybacked on the World Cup by inserting images of beheadings into the soccer chat, and created new apps and automated bots to boost their numbers. Stern and Berger show that at least 45,000 pro-movement accounts were online in late 2014, and describe how their users attempted to circumvent Twitter administrators by changing their profile pictures from the movement’s flags to kittens. But this simply raises the more fundamental question of why the movement’s ideology and actions—however slickly produced and communicated—have had popular appeal in the first place.
Nor have there been any more satisfying explanations of what draws the 20,000 foreign fighters who have joined the movement. At first, the large number who came from Britain were blamed on the British government having made insufficient effort to assimilate immigrant communities; then France’s were blamed on the government pushing too hard for assimilation. But in truth, these new foreign fighters seemed to sprout from every conceivable political or economic system. They came from very poor countries (Yemen and Afghanistan) and from the wealthiest countries in the world (Norway and Qatar). Analysts who have argued that foreign fighters are created by social exclusion, poverty, or inequality should acknowledge that they emerge as much from the social democracies of Scandinavia as from monarchies (a thousand from Morocco), military states (Egypt), authoritarian democracies (Turkey), and liberal democracies (Canada). It didn’t seem to matter whether a government had freed thousands of Islamists (Iraq), or locked them up (Egypt), whether it refused to allow an Islamist party to win an election (Algeria) or allowed an Islamist party to be elected. Tunisia, which had the most successful transition from the Arab Spring to an elected Islamist government, nevertheless produced more foreign fighters than any other country.
Nor was the surge in foreign fighters driven by some recent change in domestic politics or in Islam. Nothing fundamental had shifted in the background of culture or religious belief between 2012, when there were almost none of these foreign fighters in Iraq, and 2014, when there were 20,000. The only change is that there was suddenly a territory available to attract and house them. If the movement had not seized Raqqa and Mosul, many of these men might well have simply continued to live out their lives with varying degrees of strain—as Normandy dairy farmers or council employees in Cardiff. We are left again with tautology—ISIS exists because it can exist—they are there because they’re there.
Finally, a year ago, it seemed plausible to attach much of the blame for the rise of the movement to former Iraqi prime minister al-Maliki’s disastrous administration of Iraq. No longer. Over the last year, a new, more constructive, moderate, and inclusive leader, Haider al-Abadi, has been appointed prime minister; the Iraqi army has been restructured under a new Sunni minister of defense; the old generals have been removed; and foreign governments have competed to provide equipment and training. Some three thousand US advisers and trainers have appeared in Iraq. Formidable air strikes and detailed surveillance have been provided by the United States, the United Kingdom, and others. The Iranian Quds force, the Gulf states, and the Kurdish Peshmerga have joined the fight on the ground.
For all these reasons the movement was expected to be driven back and lose Mosul in 2015. Instead, in May, it captured Palmyra in Syria and—almost simultaneously—Ramadi, three hundred miles away in Iraq. In Ramadi, three hundred ISIS fighters drove out thousands of trained and heavily equipped Iraqi soldiers. The US Defense Secretary Ashton Carter observed:
The Iraqi forces just showed no will to fight. They were not outnumbered. In fact, they vastly outnumbered the opposing force, and yet they failed to fight.
The movement now controls a “terrorist state” far more extensive and far more developed than anything that George W. Bush evoked at the height of the “Global War on Terror.” Then, the possibility of Sunni extremists taking over the Iraqi province of Anbar was used to justify a surge of 170,000 US troops and the expenditure of over $100 billion a year. Now, years after the surge, ISIS controls not only Anbar, but also Mosul and half of the territory of Syria. Its affiliates control large swaths of northern Nigeria and significant areas of Libya. Hundreds of thousands have now been killed and millions displaced; horrors unimaginable even to the Taliban—among them the reintroduction of forcible rape of minors and slavery—have been legitimized. And this catastrophe has not only dissolved the borders between Syria and Iraq, but provoked the forces that now fight the proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran in Yemen.
The clearest evidence that we do not understand this phenomenon is our consistent inability to predict—still less control—these developments. Who predicted that Zarqawi would grow in strength after the US destroyed his training camps in 2001? It seemed unlikely to almost everyone that the movement would regroup so quickly after his death in 2006, or again after the surge in 2007. We now know more and more facts about the movement and its members, but this did not prevent most analysts from believing as recently as two months ago that the defeats in Kobane and Tikrit had tipped the scales against the movement, and that it was unlikely to take Ramadi. We are missing something.
Part of the problem may be that commentators still prefer to focus on political, financial, and physical explanations, such as anti-Sunni discrimination, corruption, lack of government services in captured territories, and ISIS’s use of violence. Western audiences are, therefore, rarely forced to focus on ISIS’s bewildering ideological appeal. I was surprised when I saw that even a Syrian opponent of ISIS was deeply moved by a video showing how ISIS destroyed the “Sykes-Picot border” between Iraq and Syria, established since 1916, and how it went on to reunite divided tribes. I was intrigued by the condemnation issued by Ahmed al-Tayeb, the grand imam of al-Azhar—one of the most revered Sunni clerics in the world: “This group is Satanic—they should have their limbs amputated or they should be crucified.” I was taken aback by bin Laden’s elegy for Zarqawi: his “story will live forever with the stories of the nobles…. Even if we lost one of our greatest knights and princes, we are happy that we have found a symbol….”
But the “ideology” of ISIS is also an insufficient explanation. Al-Qaeda understood better than anyone the peculiar blend of Koranic verses, Arab nationalism, crusader history, poetic reference, sentimentalism, and horror that can animate and sustain such movements. But even its leaders thought that Zarqawi’s particular approach was irrational, culturally inappropriate, and unappealing. In 2005, for example, al-Qaeda leaders sent messages advising Zarqawi to stop publicizing his horrors. They used modern strategy jargon—“more than half of this battle is taking place in the battlefield of the media”—and told him that the “lesson” of Afghanistan was that the Taliban had lost because they had relied—like Zarqawi—on too narrow a sectarian base. And the al-Qaeda leaders were not the only Salafi jihadists who assumed that their core supporters preferred serious religious teachings to snuff videos (just as al-Tayeb apparently assumed that an Islamist movement would not burn a Sunni Arab pilot alive in a cage).
Much of what ISIS has done clearly contradicts the moral intuitions and principles of many of its supporters. And we sense—through Hassan Hassan and Michael Weiss’s careful interviews—that its supporters are at least partially aware of this contradiction. Again, we can list the different external groups that have provided funding and support to ISIS. But there are no logical connections of ideology, identity, or interests that should link Iran, the Taliban, and the Baathists to one another or to ISIS. Rather, each case suggests that institutions that are starkly divided in theology, politics, and culture perpetually improvise lethal and even self-defeating partnerships of convenience.
The thinkers, tacticians, soldiers, and leaders of the movement we know as ISIS are not great strategists; their policies are often haphazard, reckless, even preposterous; regardless of whether their government is, as some argue, skillful, or as others imply, hapless, it is not delivering genuine economic growth or sustainable social justice. The theology, principles, and ethics of the ISIS leaders are neither robust nor defensible. Our analytical spade hits bedrock very fast.
I have often been tempted to argue that we simply need more and better information. But that is to underestimate the alien and bewildering nature of this phenomenon. To take only one example, five years ago not even the most austere Salafi theorists advocated the reintroduction of slavery; but ISIS has in fact imposed it. Nothing since the triumph of the Vandals in Roman North Africa has seemed so sudden, incomprehensible, and difficult to reverse as the rise of ISIS. None of our analysts, soldiers, diplomats, intelligence officers, politicians, or journalists has yet produced an explanation rich enough—even in hindsight—to have predicted the movement’s rise.
We hide this from ourselves with theories and concepts that do not bear deep examination. And we will not remedy this simply through the accumulation of more facts. It is not clear whether our culture can ever develop sufficient knowledge, rigor, imagination, and humility to grasp the phenomenon of ISIS. But for now, we should admit that we are not only horrified but baffled.
