On January 30, I made this presentation to a Herzliya Conference panel entitled “Short-Term Scenarios for the Middle East” (short-term being defined as the next three years). I didn’t actually present any scenarios, for the reason explained in my very first sentence. But I did ask what I think will be the most salient questions (except for Iran, which I’m not touching). Among the panelists was Ed Djerejian, former United States ambassador to Syria and Israel. I’ve always found him to be a feisty good sport, and he stood by the quote of him that I brought. But the session was run by Chatham House rules, so you only get my side of the story. (Other panelists: Sir Mark Allen, Riad al Khouri, and David F. Gordon. Moderator: Shmuel Bar.)

Short-term scenarios are obviously more dangerous than long-term ones—dangerous, that is, to whoever formulates them. Consider that a year ago at this conference, Husni Mubarak was under siege but clinging to power. Bashar Assad was claiming that he had nothing to worry about, and the London School of Economics was still proud to have Saif al-Islam Qadhafi as an alumnus.

It’s been a humbling year for prognosticators, and in this age of the internet, it’s easy to go back and retrieve embarrassing predictions. I allude to those that exaggerated the power of the Facebook youth, downplayed the appeal of the Muslim Brotherhood, or described the Salafis in Egypt as a “tiny minority.” Some people have been so stung by their own predictions that they’ve vowed to abstain from making them again. Tom Friedman of the New York Times did that three weeks ago: “The Egyptian uprising is the equivalent of elephants flying…. If you didn’t see it coming, what makes you think you know where it’s going? That’s why the smartest thing now is to just shut up and take notes.” Whether Tom will keep his New Year’s resolution remains to be seen. But it’s now commonplace for chastened analysts just to admit that “no one knows” what will be in the Middle East.

That’s actually preferable to another approach: discounting the short-term altogether, especially as it looks so messy, and taking comfort in the long term. Ambassador Djerejian and I go back a long way, so he won’t mind if I quote something he said last September (at min. 4:30) to make my point. (You see, Ed, you’re not in office any more, but I’m still stalking you.)

I think in the long arc of history, what’s happening in the Arab world is akin to what we, the United States, stand for, both in terms of our values and our national security interests. But in the short term, there are going to be some detours, some bad actors are probably going to come to power in some of these countries, extremists will try to hijack this popular uprising. But I think in the long term, the fact that they are going to have broader political participation, more viable uncorrupt economies, is a good thing, and we have to support these movements.

Now I’m not going to pick on Ed. What he said reflects the Washington consensus: while the short-term is unpredictable and full of bumps, things will stabilize in the long term, and to our advantage. In this approach, short-term scenarios full of detours and bad actors can be disregarded, since long-term trends will correct for them—and these trends smile upon us. The most irresistable one is the spread of freedom, conceived in the American way.

I happen to believe that if things go awry in the short term, there will be hell to pay later, and I’m not alone. I respect the long-term scenario-building of the National Intelligence Council. But there’s a reason they redo their 15-year projections every five years. Still, I’m not going to burden you with short-term scenarios. That’s partly because, as long as I’ve been studying, following, and living in the Middle East, the crucial events have been flying elephants or, if you will, “black swans”—developments beyond all but the most far-fetched scenarios. Instead, I’ll pose a few questions about the future. Your answers are the scenarios.

1. Is the “wave of revolutions” over? We’re now a year into events, and there seems to be a pattern. The wave hit the presidents-for-life in the so-called “republics” hardest. It swept some of them away. But the monarchies seem to have weathered the storm. When I was at The Washington Institute in November, I attended a session with the Tunisian Islamist guru Rashid Ghannouchi, and he said this: “Today, the Arab world is witnessing revolutions, some of which have succeeded and some of which are about to succeed. The republics have almost completed [this process], and next year it will be the turn of the monarchies…. The young people in Saudi Arabia do not feel they have fewer rights than those in Tunisia or Syria.” When the Institute published this, the Saudis went ballistic, and Ghannouchi claimed his remarks had been distorted. But he said it, and presumably people are thinking it. The answer to this question is especially important to everyone who depends on Persian Gulf oil.
2. Is there an alternative to Islamism? Islamists are taking every ballot box by storm, usually by a margin twice that predicted by the “experts.” There are those who believe this advantage won’t last. Elliot Abrams last week wrote that “time is part of the antidote to extremism,” and anticipated that Islamists would mellow during that time and do worse in the second and third free elections. But if so, someone else will have to do better, so who might that someone else be? Who has the formula for beating the Islamists at what is becoming their game? The answer to this is especially important to Israel: Islamists may be prepared to play with the West, but to them Israel is forever unclean.
3. Is the map of the Middle East going to change? We’ve already seen some map changes result from the ballot box: the split between the West Bank and Gaza was prompted by an election, and the split of Sudan into two, by a referendum. What about Libya and Syria? And Iraq? In 2016, the Sykes-Picot agreement, which drew the map of the Middle East according to British and French interests, will be a century old. It survived decolonization. Can it survive democratization? (For those who like the 1989 analogy to the “Arab Spring,” I remind them that 1989 changed the map of Europe.) The world wants to see democracy in the Middle East, but it doesn’t want the map to change. There may be a contradiction between these two desires.

So instead of the customary three scenarios, I’ve asked three questions. Your answers are your scenarios—short-term ones, because we’ll have answers to all three questions within the next three years.

And that brings me to my last point. President Obama has often mentioned the imperative of being on the “right side of history.” He’s said that on Egypt, “we were on the right side of history.” Qadhafi, he said, was on the “wrong side of history.” And the Middle East, he said, “will be watching carefully to make sure we’re on the right side of history.” The danger here is the assumption that events unfold in accordance with certain laws, and the most we need to do is position ourselves. This thinking provides an excuse for inaction—the belief that there is a predestined path to history, from which there are, at most, “detours.”

But there is no “long arc,” because people have choices they’ve yet to make, and those choices will affect outcomes. On the three questions I’ve asked, there may be policies that the United States, Europe, and even Israel can implement, to tilt the odds in favor of certain scenarios and against others. And since we too have to live with the consequences, why not? Let’s hope that, despite having plotted the ‘long arc” of the “right side” of history, we haven’t entirely given up on making it.

His target was a report from Cairo by the Israeli journalist Eldad Beck, written for the Israeli daily Yedi’ot Aharonot (Ynet). The English-language version of Beck’s report, referenced by Cole, carried this headline: “Cairo rally: One day we’ll kill all Jews.” It described a rally held on November 25 and organized in cooperation with the Muslim Brotherhood at Al Azhar Mosque in Cairo. The report included this line: “Time and again, a Koran quote vowing that ‘one day we shall kill all the Jews’ was uttered at the site.” Some newspapers and many blogs recycled Beck’s report.

Cole sprang into action. First, he unearthed a short Arabic press report of the same event, “clearly written by a reporter on the scene,” and announced this discovery: “It does not say anything about the speakers or the crowd threatening to kill all Jews, and I don’t believe any such threat was made.” Cole then added that no Qur’anic verse speaks of killing the Jews: “The Qur’an doesn’t call for all Jews to be killed, and neither did the Muslim Brotherhood last Friday.” Beck, he declared, “clearly does not know what he is talking about”; his reporting of the rally was “shoddy and wholly inaccurate.” Cole capped his reprimand with an accusation: “If Beck had simply said that the Muslim Brotherhood crowds want Jerusalem back for Islamdom and evinced hostility toward Israelis, he would have been right. But his breathless exaggeration slides over into Islamophobia.”

Cole thought he’d exposed a case of journalistic incompetence, but I wondered. Eldad Beck is a serious correspondent. He did a degree in Arabic and Islamic studies at the Sorbonne, and is renowned for traveling to Arab and Muslim countries on a European passport to report from places Israeli journalists dare not tread (e.g., Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan). Cole referenced Beck’s report in English, but it originally appeared in Hebrew, and I suspected the Hebrew original might be more precise. So I consulted it.

It’s a more detailed report than the English translation of it. In the key passage, Beck wrote the following (my own translation from the Hebrew):

Brotherhood speakers and their guests from “Palestine” called explicitly for a jihad to liberate all of Palestine. Again and again, the quote was referenced, according to which “the day will come and we will kill all the Jews until even the stones and trees will say to us: ‘a Jew hides behind us, kill him!’”

So that’s it. Beck had heard speakers recite a well-known canonical hadith (a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad), about an event that will signal the imminence of Judgement Day. It goes like this (with only the slightest variations depending on the hadith collection):

The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “The Hour will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews and kill them. When a Jew hides behind a rock or a tree, it will say, ‘O Muslim, O servant of Allah! There is a Jew behind me, come and kill him!’”

Note that Beck didn’t attribute this “quote” to the Qur’an. That (erroneous) attribution was apparently introduced into the English translation by a Ynet translator. And Beck did label it a “quote.” Precisely.

In the comments section of Cole’s post, someone actually did speculate that perhaps the “hiding Jew” hadith was recited at the rally. Cole dismissed this: “The Arabic accounts don’t report that one [hadith] chanted at al-Husayn [Square, i.e., Al Azhar].” Well, those accounts (actually, Cole linked to only one) are incomplete. At least two speakers at the Azhar rally recited the hadith.

One was Abd al-Rahman al-Barr, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood Guidance Bureau. If you know Arabic, you can watch him recite it, at minute 8:10 of this clip filmed inside the mosque. (Clicking will take you right to the moment.)

And he wasn’t the only one: Shaykh Muhammad Mukhtar al-Mahdi, professor at Al Azhar and head of the Islamic Law Society, did so too at minute 8:05 of this clip, also filmed inside the mosque. (Clicking will take you directly to that moment.)

So Beck did hear the hadith recited at least twice, and he reported that fact.

In response to that same reader who guessed at the “hiding Jew” hadith, Cole made another off-base rejoinder. “There are thousands of hadith,” he huffed in a comment on the comment. “Most Muslims don’t accept the weak or obscure ones.” Well, it’s true that there are thousands of hadiths, but Islamic scholarship has a methodology for determining the weak ones. The “hiding Jew” hadith is included in the most canonical hadith collections (Bukhari and Muslim) as sahih, “authentic,” and is classified as marfu’, “elevated”—a hadith traceable in an unbroken line back to the Prophet Muhammad. It’s rated triple-A. Nor is it obscure. In fact, it’s one of the most quoted Jew-related passages in the Islamic canon. It figures most notably in the Hamas covenant (art. 7), and you can watch the late Osama Bin Laden recite it too (min. 6:20).

As to the substance, I suppose there is some difference between Muslim extremists vowing to “one day kill all Jews,” and their quoting an end-of-times prophecy that Muslims will one day kill the Jews with the help of rocks and trees that will betray the stragglers. I’m just not sure how much of a difference it is. In any case, though, the hadith predates the State of Israel by well over a millennium, so it certainly can’t be attributed to Israeli provocation. Those who invoke it—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Bin Laden—root their hatred of Israel in a much deeper stratum of Islamic animosity toward the Jews. Those who downplay that sort of Judeophobia just help to perpetuate it.

It’s often said that the myth of the October “victory” made accommodation with Israel thinkable, by erasing the stigma of the 1967 defeat from Egyptian and Syrian consciousness. But a much more persuasive case can be made that Israel’s turning the tide of the 1973 war finally compelled Arab acceptance of Israel. Israeli forces overwhelmed Arab armies on two fronts, even from the most disadvantaged opening position. The lesson was not lost on the leaderships of Egypt and Syria, and it underpins their avoidance of war with Israel in the decades since.

In teaching the young only part of the story of 1973, these “panoramas” show much less than 360 degrees of the truth—and in some small way, erode the foundations of such peace as the Middle East enjoys. (They are also monuments to blind leader-worship, now challenged by the revolution in Egypt and the uprising in Syria.)

I’ve selected the most interesting photographs of these two attractions, put them in my preferred order, given them my own introduction, and put each image in its context. Again, to visit the gallery, click here. (Download pdf to print here.)

On September 7, I addressed a group of visiting Chinese international relations and Middle East experts, who had come to Israel under the auspices of SIGNAL (Sino-Israel Global Network and Academic Leadership). The topic: Israel’s national interests in the Middle East. It’s a challenge to explain the dilemmas of a small state to an audience accustomed to thinking big. Here is the text of my remarks.

I don’t intend to give you my own personal view of Israel’s national interests. My view is not especially important. I do want to suggest what I think most Israelis believe about Israel’s core national interests. These are basic things—I would call them the lowest common denominators. But they define the political center in Israel. Over time, Israeli policy doesn’t drift too far away from them.

In the Israeli national anthem, there is a phrase that expresses the purpose of Zionism and the Jewish state: our hope is “to be a free people in our land, the Land of Zion and Jerusalem.” “Free people” here isn’t a reference to democracy. It refers to the collective freedom of sovereignty. The Jews, through their state, and on their ancestral land, will gain the freedom to determine their own destiny, and not have it determined by others; to act in history, and not only be acted upon; to defend their lives, and not rely on the mercy of others.

The core national interest of the state of Israel is to preserve and enhance this freedom to act independently. How much freedom is enough? If Israel were a vast country with a large population like China, this freedom could be in rough proportion to Israel’s size. But because Israel is small in size and population, because its borders are very narrow and its population is that of one Chinese city, this is not enough. To be free, Israel must have capabilities that are disproportionate to its size and population. Otherwise it would be vulnerable to large neighbors, some of which have ten times its population and even more times its size.

A key national interest, then, is building Israel’s disproportionate power, so that Israel can remain the dominant actor in its own neighborhood—not the only actor, of course, but the dominant actor. This power is military, political, economic, and social. And Israel does have such power—partly due to the weaknesses of its neighbors, but mostly by virtue of its own ingenuity.

Another key Israeli national interest is an alliance with the most effective power of the day. Again, this is a function of Israel’s smallness in size and population. In the period before the creation of the state, this power was Great Britain, which provided the shelter in which the Jews built up their strength prior to 1948. Eventually, with Britain’s decline, Israel’s key ally became the United States. This was facilitated greatly by the fact that the United States is home to the largest number of Jews outside Israel, and the fact that Jews in America have flourished.

The U.S.-Israel relationship is complex, because no two states have identical interests. Neither is it exclusive, on either side. But Israel seeks, and will always seek, a primary relationship with the greatest power in a unipolar world, or one of the great powers in a multi-polar world. Since power ebbs and flows, even at the top level, and because great powers rise and decline, a key interest of Israel, like Zionism before it, is to anticipate such changes in advance.

Another key Israeli national interest is to prevent Israel’s enemies from forming effective coalitions against it. Israel is located in a fragmented part of the world. Although it is surrounding by hundreds of millions of people who speak Arabic and even more who profess Islam, they are divided into numerous states, sects, and tribes, many of them in conflict with one another. Israel is not the cause of these divisions—many of them are quite ancient—but it benefits from them, since these conflicts drain the power of Israel’s enemies.

The most dangerous threats lie in those ideologies that have united Israel’s enemies despite their differences. The two prime examples are Arab nationalism in its golden era of the 1950s and 1960s, and Islamism since the 1980s. The coalitions based on these ideas work to make war with Israel thinkable, despite Israel’s preponderance of power. Israel’s interest is to undermine them and highlight their internal contradictions. Israel can bring these contradictions to the surface by military operations, peace processes and treaties, and many other strategies. But the objective is the same: never to face a large number of adversaries at one time.

The same objective applies to the Palestinians, who constitute Israel’s nearest adversary. History has divided the Palestinians into many fragments—West Bank, Gaza, Israel, Jordan, refugee camps, diaspora. Were they unified, they could impinge on Israel’s own freedom to act. However, each fragment has its own interests, which prevents the Palestinians from forming a unified front. Historical circumstances have worked against Palestinian unity, as have certain weaknesses in Palestinian identity formation. Israel’s interest is to accommodate these divisions, by engaging separately with each Palestinian formation on the basis of its own distinct interests. In some instances, this engagement might be military, in others diplomatic.

Finally, a key national interest is the maintenance of a high degree of internal cohesion. Israel’s Jews constitute a very diverse population, with a large immigrant component, drawn from Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. There are other divisions as well, in approaches to modernity and religion.

It is remarkable how effective Jewish identity has been, in binding very different people to the new Israeli nation. Of course, there are many subcultures in Israel, from secular modernists to religious traditionalists, from Arabs to settlers, from the European-descended to the Ethiopian-born. It is one of the miracles of Israel—and a prime proof for the existence of the Jews as a people—that these subcultures not only coexist in peace, but cooperate at moments of war. The army itself is one of the chief mechanisms for building this solidarity, as is the democratic system.

So how has Israel performed of late in upholding its core national interests? As far as its dominance, Israel’s military and economic power has continued to grow relative to its neighbors, especially in the aftermath of the so-called Arab Spring. Arab peoples are largely turned inward, as struggles for power and resources unfold within each country. Since these revolutions are incomplete, these internal struggles will continue, with all their economic and political costs.

Iran seems to have suffered a setback in its nuclear program, which may be at least partly Israel-induced. Turkey has become more assertive, but it isn’t clear that there is an overriding Turkish national interest in playing that role. Israel, by building its strength, by its self-reliance, probably has as much freedom to act as ever.

As for Israel’s relationship with the United States, while there is no chemistry between Israel’s prime minister and America’s president, and there is some friction on strategy, the relationship remains solid, and has an expanding base in large sectors of American society. The question for Israel is whether the United States will remain the greatest power, both in absolute and relative terms. No one knows whether the present difficulties of the United States, exemplified by the debt crisis, are transitory or the beginning of a gradual decline. In any event, Israel continues to diversify its ties with rising powers (of which China is one).

The neighbors around Israel remain divided. The Arab Spring has particular potential for aggravating the Shiite-Sunni schism along an arc reaching from Lebanon through Syria and into the Persian and Arab Gulf. This would be to Israel’s advantage. But in the past, revolution has set the stage for the rise of charismatic leaders and unifying ideologies. Nasser in his day, and Khomeini in his, created ideological coalitions poised against Israel. The possibility of a populist leader emerging from the present turmoil to forge a coalition against Israel is not unthinkable. There are rising elements in each of the Arab Spring countries, including Egypt and Syria, which are hostile to Israel and linked to one another by transnational Islamism. (The Turkish leadership also has some links to them.) Israel will have to work especially hard to find the fissures in these still-weak formations and expand them.

As for the Palestinians, they remain thoroughly divided. The Palestinians have not joined the Arab Spring, and Israel has succeeded in preserving the status quo vis-à-vis each Palestinian formation Israel faces. So far, challenges to that status quo—most recently, the cross-border attacks from Egypt—have not undermined it. The statehood maneuver by the Palestinians at the UN will be another test. How that will end, one cannot predict, but so far Israel has been very agile in preventing Palestinians from coalescing in a way that would produce, for example, another intifada.

The internal cohesion of Israel has come under some stress, as a result of distortions that have accompanied Israel’s rapid economic growth. The protest movement under the slogan of “social justice” has had much momentum. But this hasn’t been as polarizing as past protest movements, because of its diffuse character. There have been much more polarized moments, from the Lebanon invasion to the Oslo Accords to the Gaza disengagement. Absent a serious peace process, it is unlikely that Israel’s internal cohesion will be tested anytime soon.

During your visit, you will hear many different views. You should understand that it is our habit to express strong opinions and debate loudly. But beneath this, there is a broad consensus on what Israel needs to survive and flourish, and a long-term record of success in creating the conditions that have made Israel the strong state you see today. I hope I have given you some understanding of those deeper considerations at play.

Martin Kramer's bio in Chinese, from the conference program.

Last fall, Rashid Khalidi, the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University, offered his audiences an account of how Leon Uris came to write the book. In a speech at Brooklyn Law School, Khalidi made this claim:

This carefully crafted propaganda was the work of seasoned professionals. People like someone you probably never heard of, a man named Edward Gottlieb, for example. He’s one of the founders of the modern public relations industry. There are books about him as a great advertiser.

In order to sell the great Israeli state to the American public many, many decades ago, Gottlieb commissioned a successful, young novelist. A man who was a committed Zionist, a fellow with the name of Leon Uris. He funded him and sent him off to Israel to write a book. This book was Exodus: A Novel of Israel. Gottlieb’s gambit succeeded brilliantly. Exodus sold as many copies as Gone With the Wind, which up to that point was the greatest best-seller in U.S. history. Exodus was as good a melodrama and sold just as many copies.

Khalidi made a similar assertion in another speech a few weeks later, this time at the Palestine Center in Washington:

Now, I think it’s worth noting that this book was not the unaided fruit of the loins as it were, the intellectual loins of Leon Uris. He wrote it, of course, but the book was commissioned by a renowned public relations professional, a man who was in fact considered by many to be the founder of public relations in the United States, a fellow by the name of Edward Gottlieb, who desired to improve Israel’s image, and who chose Uris to write the novel after his successful first novel on World War II, and who secured the funding which paid for Uris’ research and trip to Israel. Given that many of the basic ideas about Palestine and Israel held by generations of Americans find their origin either in this trite novel or the equally clichéd movie, Gottlieb’s inspiration to send Leon Uris to Israel may have constituted one of the greatest advertising triumphs of the twentieth century. The man deserves his place in the public relations pantheon.

You can see Khalidi make this claim, with his customary self-confidence and much gesticulation, in the embedded clip. (If you don’t see it, go here.)

A myth unravels

Khalidi warned his Brooklyn audience that Gottlieb would be “someone you probably never heard of.” Quite right: I regard myself as reasonably informed about the history of American Zionism, and I had never heard of Edward Gottlieb. Khalidi claimed there were “books about him as a great advertiser,” so I did a search, but I couldn’t find one. When Gottlieb died in 1998, at the age of 88, no major newspaper ran an obituary. That seemed to me a rather scant trail for “the father of the American iteration of Zionism” and “the founder of public relations in the United States.”

One reason for the thin record, I discovered, is that Edward Gottlieb wasn’t the founder or even one of the founders of American public relations. He had been a journalist in the 1930s, and in 1940 joined the long-established public relations firm of a true founder, Carl Byoir. After Pearl Harbor, Gottlieb did radio and informational work for the war effort in the European theater of operations. In 1948 he opened his own shop, Edward Gottlieb and Associates, which grew into a respected mid-size firm, focused primarily on products. Most notably, Gottlieb popularized French champagne and cognac in the United States. When he sold his company in 1976 to a bigger competitor, it ranked sixteenth in size among PR firms in America. He seems to have been well-regarded, but he was not dominant in the business. If the Encyclopedia of Public Relations constitutes “the public relations pantheon,” then Gottlieb is noticeable only by his absence.

Gottlieb is likewise completely absent from works on American Zionism—there isn’t a single reference. Moreover, his name doesn’t appear in the two scholarly studies of Leon Uris: Matt Silver’s Our Exodus: Leon Uris and the Americanization of Israel’s Founding Story and Ira Nadel’s Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller. I wrote to both scholars, asking them whether they had encountered the name of Edward Gottlieb in Uris’s personal papers, housed at the University of Texas and cited extensively in both studies. Silver wrote back that “I didn’t see anything about Edward Gottlieb” and Nadel answered that “I never came across G[ottlieb]‘s name.”

Both biographers are in agreement that the idea for a novel on Israel originated with Uris (encouraged by Dore Schary, a Jewishly-active Hollywood executive); that Uris’s agent Malcolm Stuart pushed him to realize his plan; that Uris successfully shopped the idea in Hollywood studios and New York publishing houses; and that his research trip to Israel in 1956 was financed by advances on the film rights and book from MGM and Random House. (United Artists and Doubleday subsequently acquired the rights.) The contracts and correspondence are preserved in Uris’s papers. And the Gottlieb “commission”? Silver wrote me that “my feeling is that this reference could be a complete canard.” Nadel wrote me that “the story is a complete fabrication.”

Khalidi always presents himself as a historian, so I figured he wouldn’t have concocted the Gottlieb story out of whole cloth. He must have had a source. As it happens, the Gottlieb claim figures in three books that are classics in the Israel-bashing canon. In Deliberate Deceptions (1995), Paul Findley wrote that Exodus “was actually commissioned by the New York public relations firm of Edward Gottlieb.” In Fifty Years of Israel (1998), Donald Neff wrote that Gottlieb “hit upon the idea of hiring a writer to go to Israel and write an heroic novel about the new country. The writer was Leon Uris.” And in Perceptions of Palestine (1999), Kathleen Christison wrote that Gottlieb “selected Uris, and sent him to Israel” in an “astute public-relations scheme.”

And on what source did Findley, Neff, and Christison rely? All of them referenced a 1985 how-to book on public relations, The Persuasion Explosion: Your Guide to the Power and Influence of Contemporary Public Relations by Arthur Stevens, a public relations professional. This is a breezy advice book full of PR do’s and don’t's, which no one would mistake for a history of the business. (A typical chapter title: “Success DOES Smell Sweet.”) Stevens in his book relates the Gottlieb story to illustrate a point:

The cleverest public relations in the world cannot successfully promote, for any length of time, a poor cause or a poor product. By contrast, skillful public relations can speed up the acceptance of a concept whose time has come. A striking example of this involved eminent public relations consultant Edward Gottlieb. In the early 1950s, when the newly formed State of Israel was struggling for recognition in the court of world opinion, America was largely apathetic. Gottlieb, who at the time headed his own public relations firm, suddenly had a hunch about how to create a more sympathetic attitude toward Israel. He chose a writer and sent him to Israel with instructions to soak in the atmosphere of the country and create a novel about it. The book turned out to be Exodus, by Leon Uris.

So this is the origin of the Gottlieb story: an example in a how-to book. Even so, I wondered how Stevens came to write this paragraph. Did he have a published source or documentary evidence? Was this part of the folklore of the business? So I tracked Stevens down and asked him. In an e-mailed reply, he told me that he had interviewed Gottlieb, “whom I knew well at the time,” around 1984:

The comments he made to me during my interview of him were those that went into the book. It wasn’t hearsay I made use of or the reporting of prevailing folklore floating through the public relations world at the time. What I reported is what he actually told me during my interview. Obviously, I cannot vouch for the accuracy or reliability of what he said.

So this wasn’t a claim based on any document or even part of PR lore. It was Gottlieb himself who told Stevens the story of how he supposedly chose Uris and sent him to Israel. “I didn’t get that information from any other source,” Stevens wrote me, “but directly from the horse’s mouth.” Ultimately, Gottlieb is the sole source of the Gottlieb story—told by him 28 years after Uris set off for Israel.

Gottlieb and Israel

But this still left a question. Since Gottlieb doesn’t appear in any account of American Zionism, why would he expect such a claim to be credible? “Only Edward Gottlieb would know if what he told me was true,” Stevens wrote me. But that isn’t so, because there is a living witness to Gottlieb’s own operations. She is Charlotte Klein, one of the first women to reach the top rungs of a public relations firm. Klein worked for Edward Gottlieb and Associates from 1951 to 1962, making vice president in 1955.

Klein was recently the subject of a short academic study, and there I finally found evidence for some connection between Gottlieb and Israel. The Government of Israel became a Gottlieb client in 1955; Charlotte Klein managed the account, and even traveled to Israel that year. This was about the time Uris began to take his book and film proposal around New York and Hollywood. Could the Gottlieb story still contain a grain of truth?

The study of Klein noted that she was still active at age 88 and living in Manhattan. So I wrote to Klein informing her of Khalidi’s claim that Gottlieb had commissioned Uris to write Exodus. I received this reply:

I was in charge of the Israel account at Edward Gottlieb and Associates and if Ed had ever talked to Uris about Israel I would have known it. As a matter of fact, Ed sought the Israel account because of me. I was one of his top employees and I told him that I was going to leave because I wanted to do work that was socially significant and would seek a job at the United Nations. He didn’t want me to leave and called me from outside the office soon after and said “Is the Government of Israel socially significant enough?” I stayed with him and handled the account which we kept for several years. There was never a discussion about Uris or regarding a possible book about Israel.

When I told her that Stevens said he had heard the story from Gottlieb, she added this:

1984, of course, is a long time from 1955 and Ed may have met Uris and felt he influenced him. However, there never was money enough on the account for Ed to “commission” anyone to write a book. I am also pretty sure that Ed would have bragged about meeting and talking to Uris if this happened. He would have asked me to come up with some ideas of what Uris ought to cover. I would have had a meeting of my staff on the Israel account and would have drawn up a plan to include people in Israel for Uris to contact. As part of our work for Israel we did suggest mainly to media people to go to Israel to write about any special events going on there or to cover specific news that was happening there.

So Charlotte Klein, who handled the Israel account for Gottlieb, was unequivocal: Gottlieb didn’t commission Exodus, and the name of Leon Uris never came up in the Israel work of the firm.

I could have stopped my pursuit here, but I decided to go one more lap. Perhaps there was some record of the Gottlieb-Israel relationship in official Israeli records? So I paid a visit to the Israel State Archives in Jerusalem, and found the Israeli foreign ministry files related to Gottlieb. These include contracts, reports, budgets, invoices, and press clippings, all awaiting a future historian.

The documents explain the relationship in detail. Gottlieb’s firm had a sub-entity, Intercontinental Public Relations, Inc. (ICPR), with offices in Washington and New York. The sub-entity did work that required foreign agent registration. Israel’s contracts with ICPR ran for two years (an initial year and one renewal), from February 1, 1955 thru January 31, 1957. The relationship was handled on Israel’s end by Harry (Yehuda) Levin, counselor at the Israeli embassy in Washington. The PR firm’s biggest coups involved Life magazine. This included arranging a meeting between visiting Prime Minister Moshe Sharett and the top executives of Life, resulting in a Life editorial strongly critical of Arab refusal to accept Israel. This was the firm’s biggest score, but Klein also worked to place Israel-related stories in magazines, newspapers, and trade journals.

The record shows that Israeli officials saw such outsourcing of PR as a (pricey) stopgap, until these tasks could be assumed by professionally-trained Israelis (and soon enough they were). The files make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the early history of Israeli hasbara in America—but they don’t contain a single mention of Leon Uris.

The purpose of myth

In sum, the Gottlieb “commission” never happened. Uris’s biographers dismiss it, Gottlieb’s most knowledgeable associate denies it, and no documents in Uris’s papers or Israeli archives testify to it. It originated as a boast by Gottlieb to another PR man, made almost thirty years after the (non-)fact. And given its origin, it’s precisely the sort of story a serious professional historian would never repeat as fact without first vetting it (as I did).

Yet it persists in the echo chamber of anti-Israel literature, where it has been copied over and over. In Kathleen Christison’s book, it finally appeared under the imprimatur of a university press (California). In Khalidi’s lectures last fall, it acquired a baroque elaboration, in which Edward Gottlieb emerges as “the father of the American iteration of Zionism” and architect of “one of the greatest advertising triumphs of the twentieth century.” What is the myth’s appeal? Why is the truth about the genesis of Exodus so difficult to grasp? Why should Khalidi think the Gottlieb story is, in his coy phrase, “worth noting”?

Because if you believe in Zionist mind-control, you must always assume the existence of a secret mover who (as Khalidi said) “you probably never heard of” and who must be a professional expert in deception. This “seasoned” salesman conceives of Exodus as a “gambit” (Khalidi) or a “scheme” (Christison). There is no studio or publisher’s advance, only a “commission,” which qualifies the book as “propaganda”—an “advertising triumph.” In Khalidi’s Brooklyn Law School talk, he added that “the process of selling Israel didn’t stop with Gottlieb…. It has continued unabated since then.” It is Khalidi’s purpose to cast Exodus, like the case for Israel itself, as a “carefully crafted” sales job by Madison Avenue mad men. Through their mediation, Israel has hoodwinked America.

In fact, the deception lies elsewhere. Exodus, novel and book, were universally understood to be works of fiction. In contrast, Rashid Khalidi claims to speak in the name of history—that is, carefully validated truth. “I’m a historian,” he has said. “What I can do best for the reader or audience is provide a background for which to see the present, not tell them about the present.” Again: “I’m a historian and I try not to speculate about the future.” And this: “I’m a historian, and I look at the way idealism has tended to operate, and it’s not a pretty picture.” And this one (which truly beggars belief): “I’m a historian, it’s not my job to attack or defend anybody.”

Forget that Khalidi interprets the present, speculates about the future, poses as an idealist, and attacks and defends people with vigor. (If he didn’t, he wouldn’t be a regular on NPR, Charlie Rose and the lecture circuit.) The point is that he proclaims over and again that he is a historian—that his opinions rest on facts about the past that he has subjected to his professional investigation. As I have shown, this is simply untrue. Khalidi will repeat and embellish a story simply because of its utility, without even a cursory check of its veracity. That’s literary license in a novelist. It’s malpractice in a historian.

I have been remiss in not posting my remarks on a panel held on May 12, at the annual Soref Conference of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. I shared the podium with Robert Kagan and Robin Wright, and the assignment was to envision the Middle East five years hence, in 2016. The Institute has published a précis of the entire conference, including my panel. Below, my remarks as delivered (or you can watch me say the same thing here).

When I received the assignment for today, it reminded me of that 1999 book, Dow 36,000. At the time the authors wrote it, the Dow stood at 10,300, and the book became a bestseller. But today the Dow is only 20 percent higher than it was then—it’s only at 12,700. Last February, one of the co-authors wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled “Why I Was Wrong About ‘Dow 36,000′.” “What happened?” he wrote. “The world changed.” Well, what a surprise.

Now there was a lot of talk that sounded like “Middle East 36,000″ just a couple of months ago. This is a new Middle East, everything you thought you knew is wrong, bet on revolution and you’ll be rewarded handsomely with democracy. Let’s face it: Americans like optimistic scenarios that end with all of us rich and the the rest of the world democratic. There’s much in the American century since World War Two to foster such optimism. But while you enjoy reading your copy of “Middle East 36,000,” I’m going to quickly tell you what’s in the small print in the prospectus—the part that’s in Arabic.

First, the competition. For years, the structure was defined by what I’ll call, for short, the circle and the crescent. The circle was comprised of Turkey, Israel, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf states, wrapping around the region. It was an informal alliance of unnatural allies. American credibility and the willingness to use its power kept the circle intact. Opposite it was the crescent, beginning in Iran and stretching westward through Iraq, Syria, and into Lebanon’s Hezbollah and the Palestinian Islamists. Iran’s skill in using its leverage has kept the crescent in alignment. The crescent is smaller but more cohesive and integrated than the circle—largely because it’s mostly Shiite.

These two formations are being transformed. In fact, the circle is pretty much broken, a scene of elbowing and shoving. The deterioration between Turkey and Israel started it, now the scuffling has commenced between Egypt and Israel, and this is only the beginning. In contrast, the crescent is still intact. As Syria wobbles, the Western end of the crescent could come undone. But the crescent is a more natural formation than the circle. Some of those in it happen to be cousins, so it’s more resilient. And even as Iran represses its own people, it’s been able to build bridges to Erdogan’s Turkey and post-Mubarak Egypt, capitalizing on disarray in the circle.

Now, what the competition might look like in 2016 is anyone’s guess. Alliances will have shifted; some states may flip alliances. But the key variable, I think, is whether the United States can or can’t resurrect a stable coalition of unnatural allies. If it can’t, a few cohesive middle powers are going to emerge as rivals for dominance, and they will be testing one another as they jostle to fill the void left behind by the United States.

There are four middle powers: Turkey, Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia. They are already operating beyond their borders, with flotillas to Gaza, and rockets to Lebanon, and secret bombings of Syria, and troops into Bahrain. By 2016, the middle powers will have developed more capabilities to do these sorts of things, from long-range missiles to surveillance satellites, and nuclear weapons will be next. And their competition will have intensified. In this respect, the Middle East in 2011 bears a certain resemblance to Europe in 1911. Looking five years out, that’s not an analogy we would want to see fulfilled.

Now you notice I didn’t include Egypt as a middle power. There has been much talk of Egypt returning to its Arab vocation, to its past role as a regional leader. It’s unlikely. Egypt is going to have to recover from the revolution, which will depress the economy as long as uncertainty lasts. Is Egypt too big to fail? That’s going to be the Egyptian question in Washington between now and 2016. Egypt desperately needs to raise the rent others pay for its good will, so while we’ll hear the sound of the rattling sabre, more insistent will be the sound of the rattling cup.

What about the other countries that aren’t middle powers? Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, the Palestinians? The defining character of these states is that they are highly segmented. Under a ruthless dictator, they have played larger roles—think of Iraq under Saddam, Syria under Hafez Asad, even the Palestinians under Arafat. But as the era of the dictators winds down, the likely outcome will be a mix of quasi-democratic practices with regionalism, sectarianism, and even tribalism. Violence will be endemic, and disaffected groups on the margins will seek to break away from ineffectual central governments. In some places, the very map may be redrawn. Some of these states are little empires, preserving in amber the interests of the long-defunct empires of Europe circa 1916. By 2016, some of these mini-empires could fracture. And in this volatile situation, Israel is unlikely to part from its own best lines of defense, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.

Finally, a warning label on Islamism. Those who were mesmerized by images from Tahrir Square, and thought that Islamism was passé, saw only what they wanted to see. Today Islamists call the shots in Lebanon, they’ve survived a serious challenge in Iran, they dominate the scene in Turkey, they’re busy planning their creeping takeover in Egypt, and they’re poised to set the agenda for the Palestinians. Democracy, such as it is in these places, is usually a mechanism of Islamist empowerment. No one knows how this will play out by 2016. It does mean that Islamism’s opponents will have to be much more agile than they were when the dictators were doing the work.

So I’ve read you the small print. But this is just a caveat, not a prediction, and the story can be changed. It can be changed by what used to be called a “wild card,” but is now called a “black swan”—something unpredictable yet decisive. There could be an Iranian spring. There could be a breakthrough on energy. China could propel itself into the Middle East. Who knows? No one does.

More to the point, though, the United States could do something to help improve the story. Earlier I said that the key variable is whether the United States can or can’t resurrect a stable coalition of unnatural allies. The way to do this isn’t to resolve their age-old differences—you can’t, and you end up looking weaker for failing. The way to do it is to be consistent in rewarding your friends and punishing your enemies. Then people will want to be your friends, even if they don’t like the company. In other words, to resurrect the circle, you have to clip the crescent. You might not get to “Middle East 36,000.” But you might just prevent a crash.

After bin Laden, his cohort, and the Taliban were expelled from Afghanistan, al-Qaeda was effectively decapitated. The leadership was on the run or captured. Dispersed haphazardly into various countries, most of which were unwelcoming, bin Laden’s men were rounded up by vigilant local security services competing to show Americans how cooperative they were.

Al Qaeda’s numbers have also plummeted: “At the height of its power in the late 1990s, al Qaeda marshaled 3,000–4,000 armed fighters. Today its ranks have dwindled to around 300, if not fewer.” For years now, it has faced “a serious shortage of skilled recruits in the Muslim heartland.” Gerges has written a book—more an extended essay—devoted to this proposition, entitled The Rise and Fall of Al-Qaeda. There he complains that “America’s political culture remains obsessed with al-Qaeda and the terrorism narrative continues to resonate both with ordinary Americans and with top military commanders.”

Maybe, maybe not. The problem is that I remember having heard the same thing from Gerges sometime in the past—to be precise, just one year before 9/11. Here is Gerges, fall 2000:

Despite Washington’s exaggerated rhetoric about the threat to Western interests still represented by Bin Ladin—US officials term Bin Ladin “the pre-eminent organizer and financier of international terrorism” and have placed him on the FBI’s “10 most wanted” list—his organization, Al-Qa’ida, is by now a shadow of its former self. Shunned by the vast majority of Middle Eastern governments, with a $5 million US bounty on his head, Bin Ladin has in practice been confined to Afghanistan, constantly on the run from US, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian intelligence services. Furthermore, consumed by internecine rivalry on the one hand, and hemmed in by the United States, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt on the other, Bin Ladin’s resources are depleting rapidly. Washington plays into his hands by inflating his importance. Bin Ladin is exceptionally isolated, and is preoccupied mainly with survival, not attacking American targets. Since the blasts in Africa [in 1998], not a single American life has been lost to al-Qa’ida.

Not a single one! And here was Gerges, only six months before 9/11:

Should not observers and academics keep skeptical about the U.S. government’s assessment of the terrorist threat? To what extent do terrorist “experts” indirectly perpetuate this irrational fear of terrorism by focusing too much on farfetched horrible scenarios? Does the terrorist industry, consciously or unconsciously, exaggerate the nature and degree of the terrorist threat to American citizens?

These have to go down as the most embarrassing assessments of Al Qaeda and terrorism made by anyone prior to 9/11. But while Gerges obviously didn’t know much about Al Qaeda at the time, he did know something about America: everything you’ve said quickly gets forgotten if you keep talking, especially if you actively cover your tracks. This is how he tried to do it one week after the 9/11 attacks:

Sadly, I’m not surprised that the evidence for the most devastating terrorist attack in history points to a Middle East connection.

I have just returned from the area after almost two years there as a MacArthur fellow. I was conducting field research on how Islamic movements perceive and interact with the West, particularly the United States. The writing was all over the wall.

Not surprised! Writing all over the wall! Well, it would have been a total surprise to anyone who’d read Gerges before 9/11, and I’d wager it was a total surprise to him as well.

Gerges only knows one tune: Muslims hate the terrorists among them, so the terrorists are always losing popularity, struggling to survive, “on the run,” and so on. Just leave the Muslims alone, they’ll sort it out. The idea may look debatable to you, but it’s worked for him—professorships, book contracts, media gigs. How well it holds up in practice doesn’t really matter, given the public’s memory deficit. Still, it’s amazing (to me) that Gerges shows not a smidgeon of the humility usually imparted by a rough encounter with reality. Not him! He just repeats his same old arguments, made with the same measure of cocksure certitude.

I don’t know if Al Qaeda is up for another round or has gone down for the count, and experts disagree on it. I do know that Fawaz Gerges doesn’t know either. And if it were my day job to know, I’d be worried—should Gerges, by some strange aberration of nature, actually be some sort of negative oracle, whose assertions are reliably and consistently false.

Only publishers may submit books, so if you’re the author of an eligible book, get on the phone to your publisher now.

What you may not know is that I post a lot of pointers on Facebook, once a day and sometimes more. These are useful links accompanied by my own pithy commentary. Call it micro-blogging. During the latest events in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya (some call them “revolutions”), I posted links and comments nearly every day.

If you’re on Facebook, following my posts is easy: simply go here and click “Like.” But what if Facebook just isn’t your thing? No problem: now you can receive my Facebook posts by email. On any day, all new posts will come to you in one convenient email. Just subscribe here. (You can always unsubscribe at a click from within the email.) And here’s the RSS feed with the same posts, if that’s your preference.

Sadjadpour employs the rhetorical device of taking ten passages in Kennan’s famous essay and substituting “Iranian” for “Soviet,” “Tehran” for “Moscow,” “Khamene’i” for “Stalin,” and so on. Kennan is thus transformed into a full-blown prophet “anticipating today’s Iran.… Kennan’s wisdom does not call on the United States to shun dialogue with Tehran, but merely to temper its expectations. In the process, Kennan would caution, America should remain ‘at all times cool and collected’—and allow the march of history to run its course.” One is led to conclude that a resurrected Kennan would have the United States avoid military confrontation with Iran, preferring to “contain” it by other means.

Kennan died in 2005 at the age of 101, and just what he would say about Iran today is anybody’s guess. But if the exercise is valid at all, perhaps it is only fair to ask what Kennan did say about Iran. During two crises, in 1952 and 1980, he made policy recommendations—in 1952, to the State Department in private, and in 1980, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in public.

1952

In 1951, Iran’s new nationalist premier Mohamed Mossadegh challenged Britain over control of Iran’s oil. This prompted Kennan (by that time, January 1952, a private citizen awaiting confirmation as ambassador to the Soviet Union) to write a long, unsolicited memo intended for Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

“The thesis to which we acquiesced in Iran,” he wrote, “that such arrangements [i.e. Western concessions] can be cancelled or reversed abruptly, on the basis of somebody’s whim or mood, is preposterous and indefensible.” The West had every right to thwart Iran’s actions by force: “Had the British occupied Abadan [Iran's oil fields and refineries], I would personally have no great worry about what happened to the rest of the country.” The only possible concern, he added, was the Soviet response. But if the Soviets wanted war, “I doubt that Abadan would be the place they would choose to start it. Abadan is a long way from the Soviet frontier.”

Indeed, if any of the West’s vital strategic assets in the Middle East were jeopardized by “local hostility,” Kennan argued, they should be “militarily secured with the greatest possible despatch.” “To retain these facilities and positions we can use today only one thing: military strength, backed by the resolution and courage to employ it. There is nothing else that will avail us.” The least concession would invite disaster:

The idea that the appetites of local potentates can be satiated and their deep-seated resentments turned into devotion by piecemeal concessions and partial withdrawals is surely naïve to a degree that should make us blush to entertain it. If these people think they have us on the run, they will plainly not be satisfied until they have us completely out, lock, stock, and barrel, and then they will want to crow for decades to come about their triumph, in a way that will hardly be compatible with minimum requirements of western prestige. The only thing that will prevent them from achieving this end is the cold gleam of adequate and determined force. The day for other things, if it ever existed, has now passed.

Kennan was unconcerned that the “locals” might resist in any effective way: “If we do this quietly, with determination, and without being apologetic about it, there may be a great many flamboyant words and a certain amount of brandishing of weapons against us, but I doubt that there will be much more.” And he dismissed counter-arguments that forceful action might mire the West in conflict—estimates “often based on calculations relating to a major adversary, when it is actually a local adversary with which we would have immediately to contend.” In other words, the Persians weren’t Russians.

The argument for “containment” of Iran was made not by Kennan but against him. The push-back came from State Department’s Near Eastern Affairs bureau, which reacted with alacrity to his key proposal. “We cannot view with equanimity the suggestions about a possible British occupation of Abadan,” wrote the bureau head in response to Kennan, “with its conceivable attendant consequences in the rest of Iran. It appears to us that the moral disaster for us in the rest of Asia might well prove incalculable…. We still believe that patient, intelligent, constructive statesmanship offers the best prospect of basic solutions. There are still some indications that we may yet find solutions to the Iranian oil problem.”

Kennan had the last word in the exchange. If the United States persisted in its mistaken approach, he warned, it could lose “those specific facilities which are really vital and important and could probably quite successfully be held by force and determination.” The United States could only “rescue some of the most vital of the western positions” by “act[ing] rapidly, with determination, discarding our fatuous desire to be ‘liked’ and making it clear that the Russians are not the only serious people in this world.”

1980

By the time of Iran’s revolution, Kennan’s status as a revered wise man of foreign affairs had grown enormously. In February 1980, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee invited him to testify in the midst of a double crisis. Iranian militants had seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in November, and the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan in December. The committee sought Kennan’s insights on the best U.S. response.

The headline of the Washington Post on the morning after Kennan’s appearance told a surprising story: “George Kennan Urges Tougher Stance on Iran.” Just how tough? Here is the first paragraph of the report (by Don Oberdorfer, February 28, 1980):

Veteran diplomat and historian George F. Kennan yesterday advocated a declaration of war against Iran over the hostage issue and quiet diplomacy with the Soviets over Afghanistan as well as a range of other alternatives to current U.S. foreign policy.

On reading this, all of Washington must have gasped, and it is worth repeating Kennan’s precise words to the committee, since he spoke some of them in prepared remarks and others in the course of an exchange. There was, he said in his prepared remarks,

a limit on the time we can afford to temporize with the problem [of the hostages]. If we temporize too long, our concern for their safety may be deprived of much of its meaning. I feel therefore that we should hold in readiness means of unilateral pressure on the Iranian regime, not excluding the military one, which, if the efforts of the Secretary General of the United Nations should fail, might be more effective in persuading the Iranian authorities that it would be to their interest to release these people.

The committee chair, California Senator S.I. Hayakawa, a conservative Republican, could hardly believe his ears, and he pressed Kennan on “military alternatives.” “What would it do to the fate of the hostages?” Sen. Hayakawa asked. “Would we have a confrontation with the U.S.S.R. if we took that path? At the same time I am not disavowing such a path, still I would like to ask some questions about the dangers and prospects involved.”

Kennan then dropped his bombshell:

A number of times, since these people were locked up and since we began to hear the series of unprecedented insults and expressions of contempt for this country that we have heard from the ayatollah [Khomeini], I have wondered why we and our Government did not simply acknowledge the existence of the state of hostility brought about by the behavior of the Iranian Government, and, having done that, then regard ourselves as at war with that country. Having taken that step, then we could do the normal thing, which would be to ask a third power to represent our interests in Iran, in which case the hostages would become their immediate responsibility, not ours. We would then also intern the Iranian official personnel in this country, I hope humanely, and not in the way that they have interned ours—because, after all, we have obligations to ourselves, too. But by doing this, we would put ourselves in a position, first of all, to offer the Iranians something to get them off the hook; namely, an exchange of their personnel, which might be helpful. But in any case, it would also put us in a position to make our own decisions about such military action that we might wish to take if it became necessary.

I don’t think that it would be useful for me to speculate on the sort of things we could do, because some of them might necessitate taking advantage of the element of surprise.

Kennan did allow that “any sort of harsher action against Iran to solve this problem” would have to be prefaced by “careful communication with the Soviet Government in an effort to explain to them exactly what we are doing and why.” As in 1952, the Soviet reaction mattered to Kennan—and other possible reactions didn’t.

This wasn’t the only hard line Kennan toed. Even if Iran did release the American hostages, Kennan urged that the United States regard Iran as a pariah until it admitted its error. From Kennan’s prepared remarks:

Even should the hostages be released, it would be wrong for us to attempt to establish at any early date normal official relations with the present Iranian regime. What the Iranian authorities have done has been a grievous affront to international law, to diplomatic practice, and to the entire international community. To offer to forget it before there has been evidence of a clear readiness on the official Iranian side to recognize their fault, accompanied by satisfactory and reliable assurances against the repetition of such conduct, would not offer a promising basis for future relations with that regime.

In the subsequent Q&A, Sen. Hayakawa pointed to “Khomeini’s approval of the terrorists and all them being totally intransigent and not admitting any fault whatsoever.” He asked Kennan “from whom can we expect this recognition of their fault without an overthrow of the present government?” Kennan did not think the regime was “very firmly” in power. “But if they do remain in power, and if they continue to take this present attitude, I would certainly not think that we should send any other official personnel there or have diplomatic relations with them at all.”

The Kennan testimony, and especially the call for a declaration of war, ricocheted through Washington, and it prompted a column by conservative journalist William F. Buckley, Jr. “I wasn’t there,” wrote Buckley,

but I can imagine that the Senators stared at [Kennan] as though he had been entered by an incubus. Dr. Strangelove. Professor Kennan continued with his characteristic calm. Yes, we should have declared war, and then instantly interned all Iranians living in this country, holding them hostage against the safe return of our own citizens. We should, moreover, have prepared to take such military measures as might seem advisable in the event our hostages were harmed.

Holy caterpillar! To declare war in this country would require a researcher to inform the president and Congress on just how to go about doing it.

Buckley waxed enthusiastic about the idea of a war declaration (he called it “a wonderful demystifier”) and praised Kennan for proposing it: “That such a recommendation should have been made by someone once dubbed one of the principal ambiguists among American intelligentsia reminds us that purposeful thought is still possible.”

But Kennan also drew flak. One contemporary critic, the columnist and former Democratic presidential adviser John P. Roche, wrote that “some have unkindly suggested that Kennan’s declaration of war was an indication he is senile.” Not so, opined Roche, pointing instead to Kennan’s archaic notions of diplomatic privilege. Kennan, he wrote derisively, “wants foreign service clubhouses to be shown the respect they merit. If not, send for a gunboat.” Roche’s preferred option on the hostages: “We just have to sit it out.” Once again, the case for restraint was made not by Kennan but against him.

In sum, when Kennan was asked for his wisdom on Iran in 1980—and in a prominent forum, too—he expressed views directly opposed to those Sadjadpour would attribute to him. Sadjadpour: “Kennan’s wisdom does not call on the United States to shun dialogue with Tehran, but merely to temper its expectations.” In reality, Kennan did call on the United States to shun dialogue with Iran until it admitted the error of its ways—hardly a tempered expectation. Sadjadpour: “In the process, Kennan would caution, America should remain ‘at all times cool and collected’—and allow the march of history to run its course.” In reality, Kennan called for the United States to declare war on Iran and contemplate military action, in view of the “limit on the time we can afford to temporize.”

In the very same testimony Kennan urged that the United States exercise supreme caution in challenging the Soviets over Afghanistan: “It is up to us to eliminate from our words or actions anything that might unnecessarily contribute to a heightening of the existing military-political tension.” Why the vast difference in approach? For Kennan, the Soviets were a “major adversary” while Iran was merely a “local adversary.” In Kennan’s eyes, Iran wasn’t on par with the Soviet Union—not even close—and deserved to be treated accordingly. Seizing and occupying Iran’s oil fields, declaring war against it, brandishing threats of military action—Kennan consistently advocated the toughest possible posture against Iran during the two great Iran crises he witnessed. He was ever respectful of Soviet Russia and always contemptuous of Iran.

So it isn’t difficult to imagine a resurrected Kennan shocking a Congressional committee by insisting that the United States bomb Natanz. That Kennan instead has been turned into a posthumous supporter of “containing” Iran is amusing—or would be, if it weren’t so misleading.

• Sources: Kennan’s memo of January 22, 1952 and the subsequent exchange with the Near Eastern Affairs bureau are preserved in Kennan’s papers in the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, Princeton, box 164, folder 28. Kennan’s Senate testimony of February 27, 1980 was published in Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Security Interests and Policies in Southwest Asia, pp. 87-123.
• Note: An abbreviated version of this post also appeared as a letter in the January 2011 issue of Foreign Policy, with a reply by Karim Sadjadpour. More on this to come.