Self-Inflicted Wounds: Debates and Divisions Within Al-Qa'ida and its Periphery, a new report from the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, was released publicly yesterday at an event at the New America Foundation (I couldn't make it, but you can already see video here). By digging deep into al Qaeda's internal ideological and strategic division and its contentious relationship with most other Islamist factions, Self-Inflicted Wounds offers an essential corrective to popular narratives of a single, undifferentiated Islamist menace. It fleshes out a broad trend towards more differentiated analysis of al Qaeda and policies which divide rather than unite the disparate strands of Islamism.

Self-Inflicted Wounds gives a realistic sense of where al Qaeda really fits within the map of Islamism, neither minimizing nor exaggerating its threat. It demonstrates powerfully the value of disaggregating the challenge posed by various Islamist movements rather than lumping them together into a single, undifferentiated menace. It's slightly dated now, since most of the chapters were completed more than a year ago, and it doesn't quite capture the rise of the franchises such as AQAP or the new trend of small-scale attempted attacks. But despite that inevitable limitation, I believe it makes a very significant contribution to our understanding of al Qaeda and its milieu. It demonstrates how essential it is to understand these movements from within and on their own terms, and how counterproductive it is to ignore those distinctions.

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The Atlantic asked me to name an outstanding book from 2010 in Middle East Studies. I chose John Calvert's Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism. In honor of that choice, I'm delighted to publish today Calvert's essay "The Afterlife of Sayyid Qutb" on the Middle East Channel, an essay which fills in one of the only real gaps in the book. Choosing only one book was difficult, but fortunately I have a blog of my own to offer a longer list of the best books published this year on the Middle East -- or at least the best books published this year which I actually had time to read, which means that it's far from exhaustive. Without further ado, the list:

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The great debates about Iraq policy which consumed much of the past decade have largely faded from the public arena. The Obama administration has withdrawn more than 100,000 troops from Iraq, while the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in 2008 commits the U.S. to withdrawing the balance of its troops by the end of next year. Iraqi politics muddle along, while the security situation remains roughly stable with periodic spikes of spectacular violence but no signs of a resurgent civil war. But while the U.S. political debate about Iraq has faded, the importance of Iraq to American interests has not. It's therefore rather extraordinary that Congress has moved to cut $500 million from funding for the U.S. civilian mission in Iraq, leaving a shortfall of more than $1 billion.

Yesterday a wide array of Iraq policy analysts of wildly different perspectives converged on an appeal for the United States to remain committed to Iraq politically in order to deliver on a long-term strategic relationship beyond the military mission. I authored an op-ed with John Nagl, my colleague at the Center for a New American Security, arguing for a continued political engagement. Meanwhile, Brookings released a report entitled Unfinished Business, co-authored by Ken Pollack, Raad AlKadiri, Scott Carpenter, Fred Kagan and Sean Kane. There's a striking degree of analytical and policy convergence among people who used to be at sharp odds over Iraq. Nagl and I are colleagues at the Center for a New American Security but we sharply disagreed back in 2007-08 about the appropriate strategy for Iraq, as did many of the people involved in yesterday's Brookings Report. Nagl and I had not read the Brookings report at the time when we wrote the Christian Science Monitor op-ed. That we all converge on a roughly similar position today is significant - a "harmonic convergence" which the authors of the Brookings report nicely recount: "members of our group who had once been ready to do great violence to one another over their differences found themselves in violent agreement over what needed to be done." The conclusion of my piece with Nagl nicely captures this, I hope:

Today, those who backed the 2007 "surge" should be keen to see its gains consolidated, while those who called for withdrawal should be keen to make sure that as it happens, disaster does not follow. And while Iraq certainly needs to step up its political game, the United States must also muster the bipartisan political strength and will to help build a stable Iraq that can be a partner to the United States in a vital -- and deeply troubled -- part of the world. Those who gave their lives for this fight deserve nothing less.

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"The Saudis always want to fight Iranians to the last American" and it is "time for them to get in the game," Secretary of Defense Robert Gates tells the French foreign minister in a newly released cable from February 2010. This captures perfectly the point I made yesterday about how to read the reporting in these cables about the private hawkishness of Arab leaders. The question of Arabs and Iran was never an information problem -- it's an analysis problem. The antipathy which many of these leaders feel for Iran has long been well known. But so has their reluctance to do anything about it. And so have the internal divisions within Arab governments and Gulf ruling families, and their deep fears of either Iranian retaliation or popular upheaval, and their bottomless hunger for U.S. weapons systems, and their hopes that the U.S. would magically solve their problems for them, and the disconnect between the palaces and the public.

Iran hawks have been gloating that the quotes from a few Arab leaders in the initial cable release vindicate their analysis and discredit skeptics of military action against Iran. It doesn't. Gates' comment about the Saudis needing to "get into the game" came almost two years after King Abdullah's now-famous "cut off the head of the snake" comment. And another cable from January 2008 shows Abdullah telling Sarkozy that Saudi Arabia "does not want to inflame the situation," recommends "continued international engagement" with Iran and "is not yet ready to take any action besides diplomacy." Maybe, just maybe, those private remarks weren't actually a very reliable guide to what the Saudis will really do in public?

The way the Iran hawks have been leaping at a few juicy quotes while ignoring the entire well-known context only shows the ongoing poverty of their analysis. I would expect better from the serious analysts on the hawkish side, but, well, there you are.

 (Note: updated to include the Sarkozy-Abdullah cable)

Almost all of the discussion about the WikiLeaks documents seems to have followed the lead of the New York Times in emphasizing a few of the cables showing inflammatory private anti-Iranian rants by Arab figures such as King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Hamed of Bahrain and Mohammed bin Zayed, Crown Prince of Abu Dhabi. A lot of Iran hawks are taking this as proof that the Arabs really do want war with Iran. I can understand why they are leaping at the framing, either to score points or to pave the way towards normalizing the idea of a military strike. But that's only one small part of what the cables which have been released show. So, in response to Jeffrey Goldberg, I've got to say that I think that the cables show that he got Israeli views mostly right, as I wrote at the time. But I also think that they show that I got the Arab views mostly right too.

The cables thus far released show that most Arab leaders deeply fear rising Iranian power and want the U.S. to solve their problems for them, and that in private Jordanian, Egyptian and Gulf leaders expound at length on Tehran's perfidy (as many of us have heard before, without the benefit of leaked cables). They are indeed "suspicious and hostile towards Iran." But they also fear retaliation by Iran and exposure before their own public opinion, are internally divided about how to respond, and insist on keeping their private views to themselves. And Arab public opinion is sharply against war with Iran, despite years of anti-Iranian propaganda in the Saudi-backed Arab media, and harshly critical of much of the foreign policy of these regimes. As Mossad Director Meir Dagan bluntly, and accurately, put it in one of the leaked cables, the Arab states "all fear Iran, but want someone else to do the job for them."

There's plenty of evidence throughout the cables of the well-known suspicions of Iran in Arab palaces -- with some of the wildest comments coming from Egyptian officials. But there's also plenty of evidence of their reluctance to get involved in military action. In February, for instance, the office director of Kuwait's Foreign Ministry is quoted as saying that "Kuwaitis are equally concerned about military pre-emption, which they believe would not prove decisive and would lead Iran to lash out at US interests in the Gulf." An Omani military official says " he advocated a non-military solution as the best option for the U.S." The Saudi Foreign Ministry "strongly advised against taking military action to neutralize Iran's program." In other words, "while Arab leaders would certainly like Iranian influence checked, they generally strongly oppose military action which could expose them to retaliation."

And there's even more examples in the cables of their desire to avoid taking a public stance. Hosni Mubarak rails about Iranian support for terrorism in private, but then says that this is "well-known but I cannot say it publicly. It would create a dangerous situation." An Israeli official tells his American counterpart that "Emiratis are "not ready to do publicly what they say in private." The Kuwaitis "will welcome any proposals that can move Iran off its nuclear path… but will not expose itself to Iranian ire by getting out front to push for these." Or, in other words, "those who expect these regimes to take a leading, public role in an attack on Iran are likely to be disappointed."

The point here is not to say that the cautious views matter and the hawkish ones don't. Nor does it say that Arab leaders haven't been calling for tough measures against Iran, since they have been doing just that for years. It's to say that Arab leaders are divided and uncertain about how to deal with Iran, and fearful of taking a strong position in public. In other words, it would be a mistake to "make too much of the private remarks of selected Arab regime figures, without considering whether those remarks reflect an internal consensus within their regimes or whether they will be repeated in public in a moment of political crisis." That's pretty much still where we are today.

I expect to delve into the substance of the WikiLeaks cables over the next few days -- I've been flagging noteworthy ones on Twitter all afternoon, and will keep doing so as I go along, and I will blog at greater length about specific issues as they arise. But I wanted to just throw some quick thoughts out there now after reading through most of the first batch. My initial skepticism about the significance of this document leak, fueled by the lack of interesting revelations in the New York Times and Guardian reports, is changing as I see the first batch of cables posted on WikiLeaks itself.

I don't think that there's going to be much revision of the American foreign policy debate, because most policy analysts have already heard most of what's in the cables, albeit in sanitized form. The cables still generally confirm the broad contours of what we already knew: many Arab leaders are deeply suspicious of Iran and privately urged the U.S. to attack it, for instance, but are afraid to say so in public. I haven't seen anything yet which makes me change any of my views on things which I study -- the cables show Arab leaders in all their Realpolitik and anti-Iranian scheming. I never thought that Arab leaders didn't hate Iran, only that they wouldn't act on it because of domestic and regional political constraints and out of fear of being the target of retaliation, and that's what the cables show. I'll admit that I'm finding a wealth of fascinating details filling in gaps and adding information at the margins. Nobody who follows regional politics can not be intrigued to hear Hosni Mubarak calling Iranians "big fat liars" or hearing reports of the astoundingly poor policy analysis of certain UAE royals. This will be a bonanza to academics studying international relations and U.S. foreign policy comparable to the capture of Iraqi documents in 2003 (I wonder what norms will evolve about citations to these documents, which the U.S. government considers illegally released?).

But, as Issandr el-Amrani pointed out earlier today, the real impact may well be in the Arab world, where rulers go to great lengths to keep such things secret. The Arab media thus far is clearly struggling to figure out how to report them, something I'll be following over the next week. One of the points which I've made over and over again is that Arab leaders routinely say different things in private and in public, but that their public rhetoric is often a better guide to what they will actually do since that reflects their calculation of what they can get away with politically. Arab leaders urged the U.S. to go after Saddam privately for years, but wouldn't back it publicly for fear of the public reaction. It's the same thing with Iran over the last few years, or with their views of the Palestinian factions and Israel. But now those private conversations are being made public, undeniably and with names attached.

So here's the million dollar question: were their fears of expressing these views in public justified? Let's assume that their efforts to keep the stories out of the mainstream Arab media will be only partially successful -- and watch al-Jazeera here, since it would traditionally relish this kind of story but may fear revelations about the Qatari royal family. Extremely important questions follow. Will Arab leaders pay any significant political price for these positions, as they clearly feared? Or will it turn out that in this era of authoritarian retrenchment they really can get away with whatever diplomatic heresies they like even if it outrages public opinion? Will the publication of their private views lead them to become less forthcoming in their behavior in order to prove their bona fides -- i.e. less supportive of containing or attacking Iran, or less willing to deal with Israel? Or will a limited public response to revelations about their private positions lead them to become bolder in acting on their true feelings? Will this great transgression of the private/public divide in Arab politics create a moment of reckoning in which the Arab public finally asserts itself... or will it be one in which Arab leaders finally stop deferring to Arab public opinion and start acting out on their private beliefs?

Now those are interesting questions.

UPDATE: thus far, most of the mainstream Arab media seems to be either ignoring the Wikileaks revelations or else reporting it in generalities, i.e. reporting that it's happening but not the details in the cables. I imagine there are some pretty tense scenes in Arab newsrooms right now, as they try to figure out how to cover the news within their political constraints. Al-Jazeera may feel the heat the most, since not covering it (presumably to protect the Qatari royal family) could shatter its reputation for being independent and in tune with the "Arab street". So far, the only real story I've seen in the mainstream Arab media is in the populist Arab nationalist paper al-Quds al-Arabi, which covers the front page with a detailed expose focused on its bete noir Saudi Arabia. Meanwhile, the details are all over Arabic social media like Facebook and Twitter, blogs, forums, and online-only news sites like Jordan's Ammon News. This may be a critical test of the real impact of Arabic social media and the internet: can it break through a wall of silence and reach mass publics if the mass media doesn't pick up the story?

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is heading back to Israel with an offer from the Obama administration of a large basket of incentives in exchange for a 90-day extension of a settlement freeze. The reported contours of the administration's offer include 20 free advanced F-35 fighter jets and assorted promises to defend Israel at the U.N. and other international fora (which meets Israeli fears but in reality would almost certainly be forthcoming under any foreseeable circumstances). In exchange, Israel would renew its partial settlement freeze for 90 days. During that period, the Israelis and Palestinians are to go back to the bargaining table and (reportedly) concentrate on sketching out an agreement on borders, which would generate progress and reduce the risk of future battles over settlements.

It's easy to be skeptical. The United States seems to be giving a lot for a temporary fix which only kicks the can down the road another few months, while neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians seem to see this as a moment of opportunity. The deal only makes sense if serious progress on reaching agreement on borders can be made in three months. But the three months in question include Thanksgiving, the Eid al-Adha, Hanukkah, Christmas, New Years, and the seating of the new U.S. Congress. Even if the parties have already sketched out the contours of the deal -- and I sure hope they did that spadework before committing themselves to such a high-stakes deadline, though I'm kind of afraid that they didn't -- experience suggests that getting that deal through the Israeli and Palestinian systems won't be easy. Since the United States promises not to ask for another extension, the 90-day deadline gives all kinds of incentives for those who don't really want a deal to stall. Oh, all right… I'm skeptical.

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It's being widely reported that a deal has finally been reached among the major Iraqi political blocs on the outlines of a new power-sharing agreement which would produce -- finally -- a new Iraqi government. There's still plenty of ways for this to go off the tracks, of course, but if the deal holds then it looks an awful lot like the outcome will be pretty much exactly the government which I and most everyone else expected before the elections... and an awful lot like the old government. The deal as reported has Nuri al-Maliki staying on as Prime Minister, Jalal Talabani staying on as President, Tareq al-Hashemi and Rafi Issawi staying on as Deputy Prime Ministers, and Usama Nujaifi taking over as Speaker of the Parliament. Ayad Allawi would be offered the position of head of a new National Council for Strategic Policies. The name being circulated for Foreign Minister -- Saleh al-Mutlak -- is intriguing and sure to be controversial, but that's the exception. Try not to remember that the March 2010 election had been touted as a triumph for "change."

Despite the inevitable arguments here in Washington, this outcome really shouldn't be seen as a victory for either Iran or the U.S. It is hardly a show of strength for Tehran that it was unable to impose its will on Baghdad's politics for 8 long months, and that the final composition of the government reflects most of Washington's key interests. Both Iran and the U.S. were backing Maliki by the end, but he wasn't either's first choice -- Iran would have preferred a more pliable candidate from the Shia list rather than the pugnacious Maliki, while the U.S. probably would have originally preferred Allawi. Neither got their first choice, neither will be terribly disappointed. Washington had clearly signaled that it wanted a broadly inclusive government, and that's what it seems to have gotten.

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