Rough Transcript

Drew Griffin  
Welcome to the ProvCast, the regular podcast at Providence, a journal of Christianity and American foreign policy. I’m managing editor, Drew Griffin. My guest today is Faysal Itani. He’s a senior fellow at the Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council, adjunct professor of Middle East politics at George Washington University. He’s a frequent guest here on the ProvCast who specializes in Middle East studies, specifically in Syria and Lebanon and Jordan and Iraq. His counsel is always enjoyed and illuminating. So Faysal, welcome back. 

Faysal Itani  
Thank you for having me. 

Drew Griffin  
I wanted to have you on to have a conversation, basically, we could almost entitle, “Remember Syria?” Let’s talk a little bit about the ongoing crisis that I think still exists in the country of Syria. Much of the United States has moved on. Syria doesn’t really take much prominence in headlines, what with the Iranian crisis, which we’ll talk about a little bit later. But, tell us a little bit from your vantage point where we stand at this moment in Syria. The war is largely declared over except there are still areas of intense fighting. And there is still the fomenting danger of these radicalist groups that have gone underground now, and are still, I think, a threat to Middle East peace, a threat to Israel, a threat to Syrian stability. So, talk a little bit about, you know, reminding people where we’re at and what is still at stake in Syria.

Faysal Itani  
We’ve definitely entered a new chapter of the conflict, but the conflict is not finished. This started as a conflict between Bashar al-Assad and his regime and mainstream, widespread, broad-based insurgency. That insurgency which sought to remove him and essentially sought regime change has failed to do that. We can say that Bashar al-Assad for the foreseeable future is militarily secure, thanks largely to help from Russia and Iran. So, that phase is done, or at least for now done. But other things are going on in the country, which is still pretty extreme upheaval. There’s a significant chunk of it, first of all, that’s held by a variety of pro-Turkish or Turkish-influenced militias. There are also al-Qaeda-linked extremists in this province called Idlib. That’s where most of major combat now is. Assad and his sponsors are trying to take it back. They’re taking a lot of casualties. It’s not clear whether or not they can take it at an acceptable cost for now. And again, Turkey’s mired in that as well, so it complicates the geopolitical situation. Second of all, a third of the country is still occupied by American troops who, together with a largely Kurdish-led local coalition, are in control of those resources, that territory, and using it as leverage against the regime and its allies—or denying it, rather, the resources and land and legitimacy that would come with reconquering it. The third dimension, now that ISIS is out of the way, is a very serious socioeconomic problem in the parts of Syria that are controlled by the Assad regime. That’s partly a result of destruction in the war and casualties, but also international isolation—or should I say Western and Arab isolation—because of the regime’s behavior and refusal to make political concessions to the opposition. And that’s something the United States is still very much pushing for. As long as that goes on, Syria will not be able to rebuild and resettle its millions of displaced people, even if the regime wanted to do that. So, it is a situation of decay in some places and stalemate in others. I wouldn’t say the conflict is over. I would say that as far as we’re concerned, ISIS is over, as far as we’re concerned, assuming it can’t reemerge in these circumstances. And therefore, it’s dropped off our radar a bit. And that’s understandable from kind of public interest point of view. But in terms of raw security implications, they’re very real.

Drew Griffin  
Talk a little bit about one of the arguments that we continually… one of the points, I guess, I should say, that we want to emphasize is just the interconnectedness of the Middle East and oftentimes… and I think the Trump foreign policy has a tendency to reward this type of thinking as more and more we see a transactional kind of methodology of foreign policy. We’re going to tackle one little problem at a time. You know, let’s tackle the ISIS problem. Let’s tackle the Iranian problem. Let’s tackle, you know, the Saudi Arabian problem, but each one of these, and especially in the Middle East, it’s this web; it’s this tapestry. When you pull on one string, other strings begin to move, and so relate a little bit and show the way in which Syria has landed with Bashar al-Assad still in power, the country arguably still failing. Relate that to the bigger picture of the Middle East. Are they able to find security partners? Are they able to find economic partners among their neighbors? What is Iran’s influence in Syria right now vis-à-vis Hamas and other actors? Talk a little bit about where Syria is landing in relation to its neighbors.

Faysal Itani  
Yeah, you know, as if the Syrian conflict itself is not complicated enough at the domestic level, it gets very complicated once you start looking at the networks and the webs of interest. There’s a few converging fault lines that run through this geography. The first is competition between Iran and the Arab states, especially Saudi Arabia. That was especially strong in the middle of a kind of peak of fighting—2014, 2015. It has faded now because I think the Saudis have realized this is a losing game for them. However, they are still very much on board with—for now—isolating the regime and definitely isolating the Iranians. And they’re happy the Americans are doing that in Syria. But that led to a great deal of escalation of the conflict. I think the Saudis sort of conceded that ground to them. They’re now busy fighting in Yemen against another group of Iranian proxies. The reason Iran figures into this at all is that Bashar al-Assad is Iran’s only Arab ally, and has been for… I mean, that regime has been allied with Iran since the early 80s, and that’s a long time for many reasons. One of those reasons is that the supply line for and strategic depth of the militia Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon, essentially runs through Syria. Hezbollah, in order to survive and continue the fight against Israel, needs for there to be at least a non-hostile regime in Damascus, which is the reason Iran intervened in this conflict to begin with. Through that intervention, Iran has built up local alliances, local security and cultural interests, [and] economic ones as well. They’re therefore present in significant numbers on the ground—them and their militia network. And that’s how the Iranians operate in the region through these proxy groups, so that’s the first one. The second one is a US-Russian competition, which borders between hesitant cooperation or deconfliction, rather, and then the split is over Russian support for Bashar al-Assad—very strong, robust military support. Of course, we are not opposing that militarily. As far as I understand, getting Russia out of Syria is not a US objective. But nonetheless, you know, there’s this kind of cold competition between the two, with the United States pushing for political change in Syria, and Russia essentially saying no—not in those words, but opposing it. Those are two big geopolitical fault lines. There is another one, which is more complicated still, which is the role of Turkey. Turkey has very important interests in Syria. On the one hand, Turkey has been fighting a Kurdish insurgency in its own borders for decades. Now, an offshoot of that insurgency has basically set up a home base in Syria under US military protection. So that’s not good for the Turks. The second thing is that Turkey has interests in the Arab areas along its border with Syria, starting with the fact that they host a couple of million refugees, but also because of historic and just geopolitical and security ties. So the Turks have an interest in derailing that Kurdish project in Syria, and an interest in making sure they control some territory and population in northern Syria, which puts it at odds with the regime that wants to take it back and its Russian and Iranian sponsors. Now Turkey has to maintain this delicate balance between opposing the United States strategy in Syria without overly antagonizing the United States, and opposing regime gains in Syria without coming into conflict with Russia and Bashar al-Assad and Iran. There are probably some sub-fault lines, but these are the main ones. 

Drew Griffin  
Right, well, there’s only so much time we have to unpack some of them. One of the interesting things that you said that I’d like to unpack a little bit is the role of Hezbollah and how Iran, via proxies, infiltrates Middle Eastern countries. When you see… I think you saw this in Lebanon where, if you have a central government that’s weak, if you have an area of the country over which maybe it has marginal control—like for in Lebanon, you can look at the Beqaa Valley—you know Hezbollah successfully during the 2000s became not just some sort of terrorist element, a political force, and was funded by Iran, but also began to occupy seats in parliament and offer social services. It’s almost like a de facto government in a region in Lebanon. So, you see, Iran’s influence is not just… has a practical impact that really gets to the basic needs of governance, of having some sort of rule of law, if you can even call it that, providing basic services like, you know, electricity and food supplies, and that kind of thing, some amount of justice. So, if you look into Syria, and can break that down, to what extent is the central government and Bashar al-Assad actually in control of Syria? What areas of it are ripe for the taking for groups like Hezbollah and Iran-backed efforts to slowly dice and carve it up [like] Swiss cheese where there are little pockets of Iranian control, where, you know, they […] are almost a de facto state within a state? What does that look like for Syria?

Faysal Itani  
That’s an excellent question. The Lebanon example is probably—not probably, definitely—the most successful example of Iran’s attempts to export the revolutionary ideology and build up local proxies. But it’s a bit… It’s actually quite different from the Syria case. First of all, in Lebanon, about a third of the country is Shia Muslim, which is one of the two major factions of Islam. Iran is Shia Muslim, and, in fact, the same kind of Shia Muslim as the Lebanese Shia population. The combination of that religious identity with the Shia population’s collision with the Israeli military over decades in southern Lebanon gave the Iranians a golden opportunity, essentially, to build up an enormous amount of goodwill within the population in an area where the state of Lebanon itself was weak and divided, etc., not just because there had been a civil war and it had been weakened like the regime in Syria, but that’s because it’s just the nature of Lebanon. It’s fragmented, and it’s very hard to put together a strong central government. So the Iranians were able to build a really sophisticated presence and a very capable proxy group in Hezbollah in the Lebanese context. Syria is a bit different. For one, there are barely any Shia in Syria. The sectarian identity of the leadership is Alawite. It’s another… an offshoot of Shia Islam, but not Shia Islam. It’s certainly not the Shia Islam that pertains to the Iranian Revolution. That’s ideologically incompatible with the Iranian ideology. The rest of the country is mostly Sunni Muslim, which, obviously, [is] problematic for the Iranians in terms of spreading that particular ideology. That is a major handicap. The second major handicap is that there is still a Syrian state in the sense that it still controls a lot of the territory of the country. It has intelligence and security forces, and it is not prone to or weakened by the political compromises that Lebanon imposes on political factions. The regime is limited by economic and military capacity. It has that problem. I believe it is their intention to retake the entire country. Having said that, what the Iranians have done is, rather than what Hezbollah eventually did in the 90s and 2000s, which is infiltrate [the] Lebanese state and set up allies within it so that it protects itself militarily and economically and politically, the Iranians are just doing a parallel thing. So, it’s like a state beside a state, not a state within a state. They are not building that complicated or sophisticated infrastructure. What they’ve decided to do is build up local militias and prioritize certain geographies, especially along the border with Lebanon near the Damascus area and south near Israel to the extent they can get away with it. And they’ve basically said, this is our area; this is what we control, and as far as that is concerned, we do whatever we want. We don’t listen to the regime. The regime, on the other hand, has the backing of Russia as well. Lebanon did not have a Russia and the Russians are not about to cede control of Syria or influence over the Syrian government to the Iranians. That’s not going to happen. The old, major superpower ally of Syria has been the Soviet Union and then Russia. And that’s where the real institutional connections come in. So it’s a bit different and not, I think, not as promising for the Iranians as Lebanon was.

Drew Griffin  
So do you see… I mean, let’s pivot a little bit to Iran and the current Iranian crisis. Often the whole rationale behind the United States withdrawing from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, the Iran Deal […] is the idea of basically limiting Iran’s ability not only to engage in the larger economic community, but to experience any kind of major economic development that could then, you know… those dollars could get in the hands of terrorists, or could fund their efforts in Syria or wherever else in the Middle East. Do you… I mean, even just to the extent to what you just said, is that the threat that the United States and that the president and others within his administration are constantly, you know, ringing the bell about it—is that threat a reality? Is there a threat that Iran poses through its proxies in Syria? Obviously, we have in Yemen, obviously, we have in Lebanon and other places, but what is it? Is there a threat there in Syria that it poses in terms of a proxy state?

Faysal Itani  
We are in a zero-sum competition with Iran in the Middle East, given that it’s a hostile power. Whatever they take, we perceive as having lost, or at least our allies perceive of having lost it. I don’t think that their presence in Syria seriously changes their capabilities. But what it means is that, as far as the rest of the region is concerned, there’s a kind of arc that runs from the eastern Mediterranean through Lebanon through Syria through Iraq to Iran that is now within Iran’s geopolitical space. If you want to be dramatic, you could call it the Iranian Empire, as it has always been in that area, but under this particular ideological configuration. Yemen is a bit different. Yemen is a way for them to make life difficult for the Saudis at a low cost. But it’s not a core territory for them. These are the core territories.

Drew Griffin  
A low cost to them, but a high cost to the Yemenese. […]

Faysal Itani  
Yemen and Saudi Arabia, but not to Iran. So you know, it’s definitely problematic. There are obviously organic limits on what they can do. You know, Turkey is a major—it’s not a rival, but it’s a competitor and alternative. They’re probably not too upset that Turkish-US relations are poor at the moment. The Persian Gulf is still under an American military umbrella, and […] off-limits to the Iranians. Israel remains a powerful adversary. We can see the degree to which they are able to act with impunity against Iranian military assets in Syria. They’ve launched hundreds of attacks on them over the past few years. Iran has essentially not retaliated, and they haven’t done that because they don’t want that costly conflict. So yes, they’re problematic. They are a much weaker power than the United States. So that remains the case. And that ultimately comes down to a question of how much of a cost and risk is the United States willing to bear in that confrontation with the Iranians?

Drew Griffin  
So that sets up an interesting question, and I think an interesting conversation in that, you know, we see the United States through the presidency of Donald Trump changing the policy towards Iran, becoming far more aggressive, withdrawing from the JCPOA, and instituting rounds of sanctions that get exponentially worse about every six months, the goal to not only sanction Iran in regards to their development, nourishing of uranium, but also to prevent them from engaging in the global economic community, to close off and penalize central banks and other countries that do business with Iran, companies that would invest in anything that even tangentially gets close to being involved with Iran. So, what we see, I think, increasingly is Iran is feeling this. It’s finally… Some of these sanctions that have been happening over the last year basically have begun to set in and what we’re seeing is they’re kind of beginning to act out, right? They’re beginning to act out in the Strait of Hormuz; they are becoming more and more bucolic in their statements and their threats. If you are looking at Middle East policy, Iran—you’ve studied Iraq specifically—are our… You know, we look at Iraq and we say—there was a time in which we would look at the Middle East and say—let’s just go and wipe the slate clean; let’s just provide pressure. If we can remove whatever regime is in place, be it, you know, Bashar al-Assad or Saddam Hussein or anyone else that, you know, somehow the country will bend its way towards some kind of democratic system and we could potentially have an ally or a trading partner or whatnot. I think Iran—Iraq, rather—disabused us of that, hopefully. So, when you look at US policy vis-à-vis Iran, where do you see the endgame? Where do you see it going? What do you think the administration’s ultimate goal is? If it’s not some sort of regime change, is it just the general frustration, the general isolation of Iran, retarding their ability to develop nuclear weapons? At what point does this reach a boiling-over point where Iran has nothing to lose?

Faysal Itani  
Good questions. So with any administration, or, well, certainly with the last one and this one, there are several national security personnel and the president, obviously, and they fall on a spectrum of opinion about the Iranians. We can definitely say that with the Obama administration, that spectrum basically ran from, we need a nuclear agreement with the Iranians so we can avoid major military conflict, and therefore let’s sanction them and then negotiate with them, and that’s ultimately what happened, to the kind of more optimistic people who felt that maybe an opening with Iran was possible because there are elements of the Iranian political system that are open to a better relationship with the United States, less belligerent regionally, etc. There were people who believed this, and it was not an insignificant current. It didn’t happen for many, many reasons. I don’t think it was possible. But, you know, smart people disagree. Now, you also have a spectrum. And that spectrum runs from extremely belligerent Secretary of State, some people in National Security Council, people in the State Department, to the president, who I believe is kind of contemptuous of the Iranians and sees no reason to give them anything they don’t deserve, in his point of view, but I’m not quite as focused on breaking them as others are, particularly because doing that would increase the risk of real military conflict, which he does not want. And we’ve seen him back down from Iranian provocations, such as a shootdown of the US drone over either international or Iranian waters, depending who you ask. So what that means is that the rest of his team has to navigate this space where their agenda, I believe, is essentially to bring the Iranian economy to its knees, and at least maybe force a change in Iranian regime behavior. But, if not, well then whatever. At least we didn’t do what the Obama administration did, which is give them a ton of money and let them do what they want. Iran is an enemy, and therefore, hurting it and containing it is also an end in itself, and doesn’t need to be justified, just like with the Soviet Union, for example, because it’s an ideological rival. And I think this strain of thinking believes that time is very much on America’s side here. America’s vastly more powerful. America has unparalleled influence over the global economy. And, you know what, if the Iranians want to pick a fight with the United States, then that’s their problem. We can hurt them very much if they do that. So they’re happy to see the Iranians in this position. And I think they see these provocations that the Iranians are doing as an indication that their strategy is working. Now, what happens if there was a major provocation, and then things come to a head and the president has to make a decision? I personally think that if you fast forward, and you project from where we are on our current track a few years into the future, yes, that gets us into conflict with Iran, one way or the other, whether conventional or proxy, etc., because, you know, the Iranians cannot sit back and let the economy collapse around them and do nothing about it. That’s a bad place for them to be in. I’m sure they don’t want a conflict with the United States either. But, you know, that’s where we’re going, I think.

Drew Griffin  
So, this seems to be a, I find, dual utopian kind of conflict. You have people who are idealist on the right and people who are idealist on the left that, you know, you could argue that Barack Obama and the architects of the JCPOA and John Kerry and others were kind of idealists on the left. Well, if we can just smooth things over, bad actors will not act like bad actors. Let’s give them hundreds of millions of dollars; certainly, they won’t give it to Hezbollah or their proxy agents. Maybe we can just get them into the world economic system, and they’ll choose to make the right decisions and everything will be okay. That, to me is overly idealistic, as was proven by history. I think you have an idealism—almost an opposite idealism—on the right, which kind of sees where, well, if we take away all benefit, if we take away all, any kind of ingratiating, any kind of entering into the world system, if we basically isolate them and kind of beat them down, that they’re just going to break down and say, you know what, this revolution that we’ve been doing for the last 40 years just isn’t working, and, you know, we should just, we should choose democracy, or we should choose some other kind of, you know… Let’s overthrow the Ayatollah and hold elections. I mean, it seems to me, both of those are idealistic and unrealistic, that there is nothing that says, I think, in Iran’s history, that they would be predisposed to just buckle under and just say, you know, what we’ve been doing is incorrect. Let’s give the American system a try. Likewise, I don’t think what if you just give them whatever you want and treat them like nothing’s wrong that they’ll act in a way that’s helpful for the world community. So, is there a “middle-ist,” realist kind of track, something that’s realistic that looks like containment, but also looks like something that doesn’t push us towards active armed conflict?

Faysal Itani  
Whether you’re on the left or on the right, as a Westerner, you’re both kind of supporters of economic orthodoxy of liberal economics and internationalism to different degrees, and maybe different flavors, but that’s our truth, right? The left and right share this belief about Iran, insofar as they share the belief that economics is transcendent and trumps everything, and that if you offer an economic carrot, or you hold an economic stick, then that is a very powerful source of leverage. I do think that that’s sometimes the case. But, I believe that is only the case when you’re asking for something specific and bounded. So, if we ask them to stop enriching uranium past three percent or whatever, fine, you know, are they going to let their economy be destroyed or are they going to swallow that bitter pill and just stop the enrichment? And that’s fine; Iran can survive without nuclear weapons, so it’s okay. But then if we give them a list of things like Secretary Pompeo did, which essentially means that they have to dismantle their entire national security strategy and change the nature of the way they govern, that becomes more difficult. I can say for sure, definitely the Obama approach was going to fail. There was no way… I could not see any scenario in which that would succeed because it would require a change of behavior from the Iranian regime. The current administration’s bet is that that would be nice, but that ultimately isn’t required for the policy to be successful. What is required is for the regime to fail. Then the onus for what happens then is on the Iranians, whether it’s the Iranian people or the regime. I don’t think the regime is going to change its behavior no matter how much economic damage you impose on it. I don’t even remember any regime that fundamentally changed its behavior because of economic pain. I’ve seen regimes collapse because of economic pain, but I don’t remember off the top of my head that ever happening. But regimes do get overthrown because of economic pain, and that ultimately depends on how Iranians are processing their problem. Are they blaming the United States or are they blaming the regime? I’m not Iranian, nor am I an expert on Iranian domestic political opinion. When I do ask people who are they tell me they blame both. So I don’t know what is that kind of tipping point in which a population decides enough is enough, and things need to change? I don’t know that. And no one knows really. We can do retroactive historical analysis, but we don’t really know. Their bet is either way we win. That’s how they see it, that time is on their side.

Drew Griffin  
My guest is Faysal Itani. He’s a senior fellow at the Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council. We’ll return right after this break. Welcome back to the ProvCast. My guest is Faysal Itani. He’s the senior fellow of the Middle East programs at the Atlantic Council. He’s a Middle East politics professor at George Washington University. We’ve been talking about Syria, and have, as the conflict grows, gone out from Syria into Iraq and into Iran and the broader Middle East and US policy there. Faysal, I want to talk a little bit about the culture in the Middle East and talk a little bit about relating it back here to the culture in the United States. The United States has this desire, at least ostensibly, to see the type of democratic, classical liberal kind of pluralism proliferate out into the world in one way or another. We’ve seen times in which, when you have the George W. Bush administration, that become[s] kind of militarized. You know, we’re going to do this by force. Barack Obama was far more indirect and using soft power to see that proliferate out. But one of the things that we talked about during the break that was kind of interesting to me is just the idea of… We’ve been talking a lot over the last 30 minutes or so about economics and about politics. The foreign policy establishment in the United States, and really, I would say, the international relations establishment abroad is, I would argue, highly secularized and oftentimes treats culture and religion as just a semantic distinction that really is, you know, subservient to the bigger realities of economics. Whether it’s a free market system or a capitalist or socialist, that’s where the real debate is; that’s where the real pressure needs to be applied, and then we’re really just trying to affect political change. But the Middle East is different in that not only is the vast majority of the world religious, in the Middle East, you have a theonomic kind of religion that predominates in Iran specifically. That is a country that is founded as an lslamic Republic. So religion is the higher calling that I think supersedes economic discussions for the Iranians and even political distinctions. The chief political leader is the supreme leader, is the Ayatollah, is the religious leader there. So, talk a little bit about, if you can, the role that you see religion and maybe the United States in […] their incapacity, perhaps, to address the realities that exists there. Is that a problem? Is it something that you think that we’re addressing? And to what extent should the existence of religion and realities there influence our foreign policy on Iran?

Faysal Itani  
I think this is a shortcoming of the American foreign policy establishment. Having said that, I understand why this is the case, partly because to do foreign policy, certain things need to be held a bit constant, and you need to be able to explain things and generate consensus. The second part is that this is a really complicated issue, and one that even for Middle Easterners is very hard to pick apart and understand. What is the role of religion in politics? The truth of the matter is in the Middle East—I mean, most of the world, as you said, is religious. The Middle East is not statistically any more religious than most of the world. But when it comes to the relationship between their religion and their politics, that’s something that is different across different places, but also changes all the time. In a sense, for example, in the late 19th century and early 20th, there was a social and political and literary movement to essentially push religion out of politics completely, much like there was in much of the world, but a bit later when those ideas reached the Middle East. And, in the post-, or the early independence eras after World War One and World War Two, these were the dominant political ideas. They competed with the Islamic idea, but they completely overwhelmed it. And these regimes mostly failed. They failed to deliver economic prosperity, political freedom, social stability, all the things that a regime needs to do. And therefore, these ideas got delegitimized, and they also got delegitimized because at the same time as these states were formed, these people and countries […] collided with the West, whether it was the colonial powers, the European ones, or the United States and Israel, which is seen as a kind of offshoot, or junior ally, of the West, which further contaminated these ideas. Now, if we want to ask, is the religion in the Middle East completely incompatible with them? I don’t want to answer that question. I think it’s too complicated. I don’t know. Maybe somewhere in some places it is; other places it’s not. Again, the Middle East is not a monolith. But we do need to take these beliefs into account. Another thing we need to take into account is when we talk about religion, we think about doctrine and dogma and articles of faith. But there’s other things too going on that complicate this equation from the US point of view. One is the way people identify with one another and identify themselves in the Middle East, whether it’s allegiance to clan, or sect, or sub-geography, I think this is actually also very politically relevant. We found this out in Iraq, where our issue was not oh, they’re Muslims and this is not working; our issue was with how they related to one another and what their own political identity was. And those things are there, and they’re there in a very tangible way. But you have to have a little bit of nuance and understand the context of the areas you’re dealing with. That is something we’re not very good at for some reason. I don’t know why. Our attention spans are low. Our election cycles are too short. People don’t spend enough time in the areas they’re deployed. I have no idea why that’s the case, but no other imperial powers in the past have done it better than the United States has. I don’t know why we don’t do it well, but we need to if we are to exercise this kind of clout and influence that we want to.

Drew Griffin  
So the culture that we, I think, in the United States would like to see proliferate out abroad is, I would argue, or hope would argue, is some kind of classical liberal, kind of democratic, pluralistic culture, but that in and of itself is complicated in the United States at the moment, right? We have a rising tide of, I would argue, illiberalism that is seeking to decry pluralism or redefine it in such a way that it’s becoming more tribal; it’s becoming less and less tolerant, whether it’s the left and the secular progressives that are less and less tolerant of people who would be religious, or if it’s the right that is less and less tolerant of secular progressives. I guess that there is a changing environment in America, that what we… It’s harder and harder, it seems, for us to model what we would like maybe the rest of the world to be. You, I think, have a unique position as an immigrant, as someone who is Muslim in America, and is, you know—there are Muslim members of Congress right now that have all [a] number of opinions, and those opinions are attracting the ire of President Trump. He’s saying why don’t you go back to where you came from if you don’t like this country, and it seems to be that there’s increasing tension in the United States. I’d love to know your own experience of how you’ve seen the beauty of American pluralism play out, and where you see the condition of American liberal culture at the moment.

Faysal Itani  
First, let me start by saying that my own personal experience, I’ve been quite fortunate. I’m in Washington, DC. I’m working in national security. There’s all sorts of people here and we all share quite a bit in common, which kind of makes all this a bit easier on everybody, but this is not a scalable thing. Washington, DC is not America. Having said that, I’ve never had personally bad experiences in the United States, but I do hear what’s going on, and I’m very aware of it. I think what’s striking about this level of polarization today is a couple of things. First of all, Arab Muslims used to—and I’m sure this is still the case, I don’t think so—used to vote overwhelmingly Republican in the United States, partly, I think, because Islam is very economically pro-market, conservative, and partly because of social conservatism, or partly because that’s also, in a sense, an immigrant thing. People came from difficult areas, got to the United States, they feel fortunate to be here, and Muslims in America have done actually disproportionately well economically and academically and professionally. So, they’ve had a subjectively good experience and the country has been good to them, at least on objective measures. On the other hand, what’s also interesting is these Muslim… the Muslim Congresswomen that are getting so much notoriety, when I listened to their discourse, despite the fact that one of them wears a hijab, they sound much more to me like the campus left I grew up with in Beirut than they sound like Muslim political figures. I know what Islamics sound like and that’s not it. This is a kind of strange overlap between the far left and what I would call actually “third-worldism,” not even Islamism, something a bit different. So, unfortunately, of course, I know what the optics are, which is that this is what Muslims think and that they’re all on the far left. That’s inaccurate. It’s troubling, of course, that the far-right has decided that they just don’t like Muslims full stop. So, doesn’t matter what you think, or what your beliefs are. No one’s going to… You don’t have a chance to explain it, and no one’s picking it apart. Having said that, I do think that pluralism can mean a lot of things. And I’ve experienced it in different places because I lived in the United Kingdom, I lived in Europe, I lived in several Middle East countries, including the most pluralistic one, Lebanon, and I lived here. Pluralism in Lebanon, where I come from, is simply the idea that you tolerate each other. That’s it. You’re a Christian; I’m a Muslim. I’m not going to convince you to be a Christian, forget it, or vice versa. And we’ve all been stuck here and we got nowhere else to go. So, life goes on. That’s what I understood about the parliaments when I was growing up. It’s not hostile, and it’s not not hostile. It’s just the understanding that there are different people, and that people are going to be different and stay out of their way when it comes to that stuff. When I lived in the United Kingdom, Europe, I found something a bit different. What happened in these places were you had differences with all the immigrant populations that I think were much more extreme than the difference between a Muslim and a Christian in Lebanon who both come from, at the end of the day, the same basic culture of the eastern Mediterranean and the Arab world. But there, the idea of tolerance was to just have many, many groups of people, each of them doing their own thing, and call that a kind of collective. I don’t want to get into, you know, European immigrant politics. That’s their problem. Let’s see what happens. I think there are problems with it. The United States is different, even if it doesn’t want to admit it is. What happens with the United States is, there’s a very big country, very bountiful, still under-populated, the economy is healthy. You come to the United States—with the exception of, you know, crazy people who buy a plot of land in the middle of nowhere and do whatever—you are being assimilated into the American system. Now, whether or not this is kind of a classical liberal—because it’s linked to Christianity—or not, yes, you could make that argument. It’s interesting. But when people do that, I always remember this story—maybe apocryphal is the name for it—it may be false, about Niels Bohr, the scientist, who’s sitting outside his patio with a horseshoe […] for good luck. And his friend shows up and he’s like, I thought you didn’t believe in this stuff. Why do you have a horseshoe? He says, well, I’ve been told that it works, even if you don’t believe in it, which, to me, if that’s where classical liberalism came from, fine, but being a Christian is not a necessity for understanding and respecting and absorbing that. And you have to absorb some of your society’s values in order to be able to function. There is such a thing as a place and people and beliefs, just like you can’t walk into a Sunni neighborhood in Beirut and start chanting Shia stuff while waving a Hezbollah flag. You’re going to get in trouble. You have to learn to live with other people and adapt to some common principles for it to be a country. I think the United States is great at that, actually, which is why I think all this churn and anxiety over immigration—particularly Muslim immigration which is not that big—is a bit strange, but it’s there. I don’t feel it stops me from being part of this place. I work in national security in Washington for God’s sake. I’m as American as anyone else, and the idea that I’m not I find to be rediculous. But, you know, we are going through this fit or seizure of some sort in global liberal thinking and it’s worrying.

Drew Griffin
Do you see a big disconnect between the Twittersphere and the Beltway and inside the Beltway environment and the rest of America? Have you traveled around? This is difficult for me and for a lot of us who almost exist in this surreal space that floats above, the America where there are arguments and feuds and fights and massive discussions and rhetorical wars back and forth, but the rest of the country doesn’t even know it exists, and isn’t even following it if they’re not on social media or if they’re not plugged in or reading the New York Times or whatever they read. They’re completely unaware that it’s going on, and they’re just trying to get along with their neighbor or not get along with their neighbor, so as you live in the United States and as you travel around, what is your perception? Do you think that’s accurate? Do you think we make sometimes too much of these identity politics, that they’re really maybe not as pervasive as we would like to think if we’re just observing Twitter or watching the social media networks?

Faysal Itani
For sure, they’re not as pervasive as they are on social media […] That I have no doubt about from personal experience. The problem is, of course, that whenever you have a divided situation, the mass of people aren’t the most influential people. It’s the people who really care, [who] are pushing the boundaries on the edges of things. That pushes all—polarizes everybody, and that’s part of the point. That being said, I travel a lot in the United States with the explicit purpose of meeting people and spending time with them. As someone who looks maybe not conventionally Muslim but definitely Middle Eastern or “not from here” in certain places, here’s been my experience. I have never had a negative or hostile experience anywhere. I have been looked at, like what the hell is this guy doing here? But, you know what, fair enough. That’s how I would look at some White dude walking into my neighborhood in […] Village in Lebanon—I’m not going to say Beirut; Beirut is very cosmopolitan. There are a lot of places in the world where you’d be looked at like that—in fact, everywhere. I don’t expect that suddenly the differences between them and I are going to be erased. I don’t want that. In my opinion, and in my point of view, what’s interesting about being in conservative America is I don’t think anyone expects me to change my mind about anything. I think they have taken for granted—or more likely to take for granted than liberal America—that this guy is just not like us. And, of course, I’m like them enough to share this country with them, but otherwise, no. And that’s okay. It doesn’t have to be that everybody has to be the same, or that there has to be an assimilated culture where we all share the same beliefs. America is big enough for different people as long as certain basic things are agreed on. For the most part, I think the country has reached more social harmony than many other places in the world despite the fact that it’s all over the place and we’re terrified of it all the time. I’ve not had a bad experience. I’ve had plenty of good ones and plenty of no-one-cares. I’ve had interesting conversations about Islam. I’ve had interesting conversations about the Middle East, different than what I have in the East Coast or more liberal parts of the United States where there is a kind of orthodoxy and people see it as a universal orthodoxy that we can all participate in equally, and certainly, I can absorb or participate in a lot of it, of course, but not all of it because my lived experience and my history and my background are not the same. And I think that’s okay. It needs to be okay. Otherwise, life will be unbearable.

Drew Griffin
I agree. I hope we’re not reaching that unbearable point in our culture right now. We’re glad to have you here. Faysal Itani is a senior fellow at Middle East programs, Atlantic Council, a professor at George Washington University, and a frequent guest here on the ProvCast. Faysal, thanks for being with us.

Faysal Itani
Thank you, my pleasure.