http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/28/what-to-do-in-syria.html

What to do in Syria

As many of us have long been saying they eventually inevitably would, the United States and several of its allies, after a recent meeting in the Gulf, announced a major initiative to increase material support, including weapons, to rebel forces in Syria. This decision came in the wake of a major shift in the balance of power on the ground in favor of the regime of Bashar al-Assad, in large part due to an influx of massive support from Hezbollah, Iran and, to a lesser but vital extent, Russia. This constitutes something of a repetition of the scenario that unfolded in Libya. The United States has decided to act now, in a limited way, less to achieve something specific and identifiable, and more to avoid something unacceptable (in both cases, the outright victory of the existing regimes).

Both the long-term goals and specific content of US policy in Syria are therefore somewhat mysterious. According to the administration it continues to seek a negotiated agreement between the government and the opposition to end the conflict at the soonest possible date. Unfortunately, as things stand, this goal is unachievable given the lack of incentives on any side currently fighting on the ground in Syria to enter into a negotiated agreement. In particular, the regime believes that it has turned a corner and is winning the war. It is convinced that its strengths are multiplying while the opposition’s weaknesses are growing more pronounced.

The dramatic reversal of fortunes on the ground in Syria is inextricably linked to the fact that for the regime and its immediate supporters (Hezbollah and Iran in particular) the war is viewed as an existential, life or death struggle, whereas for the external opponents of the regime (the US, Europe, Turkey, the Gulf states, and most of the Arab world), it is not. This view may be shifting somewhat, particularly in Saudi Arabia, which appears to be ready to act with a new urgency; but not, apparently, in Washington.

Current thinking on Syria in Washington

In the past, I’ve argued for increased American involvement, and even advocated that the new policy be accompanied by a certain degree of “mission creep.” It’s incumbent on me, and other supporters of more robust engagement, to explain exactly what we want the United States to do, why and, in so far as possible, how. For that, it is essential to situate this perspective within the broader spectrum of American policy analysis on Syria. Because of its inherently opaque nature and apparently unachievable stated goals, current US policy is interpreted in very different ways by commentators with divergent analytical frameworks and points of view. There appear to be six basic positions. I will identify each with one of their more vocal proponents.

1) The United States is now doing the wrong thing for the wrong reasons; it shouldn’t be involved in Syria at all, or as little as possible (Marc Lynch)

2) There are no good policy options in Syria and involvement is folly, but also unavoidable for both political and humanitarian reasons (Aaron David Miller).

3) The United States wants a rebel victory, but very slowly, so as to avoid state disintegration and preserve as much of the national institutions as can be salvaged (David Ignatius).

4) The United States actually does seek an agreement in the long run, but not the one that is usually imagined. The Obama administration mainly sees the Syrian war as a subset of the Iran question. The confrontation with Iran over nuclear weapons and other ongoing disputes is the only conflict the administration is fully comfortable pursuing, and therefore it’s seeking to change the balance of power on the ground in Syria for yet-to-be-fully-clarified goals that will be more dependent on the way US-Iran policy proceeds than any Syria-specific aims (this author).

5) The United States is engaging in a crude, unspoken, brutally realpolitik policy that sees Syria as merely a proxy battlefield to weaken Iran, and drain Hezbollah or even create its own Vietnam (Daniel Drezner, although he states he does not approve of this policy, he believes it is obviously the actual one in place).

6) The Syrian civil war has become nothing more than a sectarian conflict between two enemies: the Shiite Jihadists of Hezbollah and the Sunni Jihadists of Al Qaeda. Therefore the United States should constantly fund the losing side, and keep the war going as long as possible (Daniel Pipes, who advocates arming the Assad regime).

What can be drawn from these analyses?

The immoral and unscrupulous last two options (the first of which is denounced even by its identifier, and the second promoted mainly, at least in public, by a noteworthy crank), are readily dismissible. Deliberately promoting the worst possible violence in Syria cannot possibly have a happy ending for the United States if we seek a stable, manageable regional order in the Middle East. The first key question in any policy conversation regarding Syria is this: how much does the United States really care about the strategic regional landscape in the Middle East in the coming decades? This is crucial because the outcome of the war in Syria will do more to affect that landscape than any other dynamic currently at play. For example, the loss of Syria as a key strategic ally for Iran and Hezbollah would almost certainly crush the prospects for the emergence of a long-term, stable Iranian-led alliance that challenges the regional status quo into the foreseeable future, and seeks to extend its influence into ever new areas. This is only the most dramatic of the profound strategic implications the outcome of the conflict in Syria will have for the Middle Eastern strategic order. It’s extremely difficult to overstate what is at stake. The question is how much do we really care?

The first option, do nothing, or as little as possible, has been tried for the past two years and everything the United States said it wish to avoid — an intensification of the conflict, a refugee and humanitarian crisis, increasing sectarian hatred, atrocities on both sides, a spread of the war into bordering countries, and the rise of extremist Al Qaeda style groups among the rebels — have all been not only not prevented by relative American inaction. They have been promoted by it. The pre-existing policy of telling everyone who was fighting on the ground to stop what they were doing was a non-policy of the first order. It simply wasn’t going to work.

Taking a hands-off approach for fear of making things worse simply allowed others to define the conflict, its nature, main participants and probable outcomes. Indeed, the neglect for both patriotic Syrian and less extreme Islamist groups is precisely what has allowed Al Qaeda-style rebels to become disproportionately prominent, even though their numbers are small. The key has been a constant stream of funding to such groups by wealthy extremists in the Gulf, funneled largely through Kuwait with its strong privacy laws and traditions, while more moderate groups have been relatively ignored. This has left the United States with very little influence over rebel groups in general, and almost no ability to influence the nature or the outcome of the conflict. And it has created an even more complex situation than existed a year and half ago or so, where the United States faces two grave enemies in Syria: the Damascus regime and the Salafist-Jihadist ultra-extremist rebels. Meanwhile, regime supporters, particularly Hezbollah, Iran and Russia, stop at nothing in all out support. They are playing to win.

The three potentially acceptable outcomes in Syria for the US

Assuming the answer to the question of how much we care about the future of the Middle Eastern strategic landscape is the traditional one — a very great deal indeed — there are three potential policy outcomes the United States could plausibly find acceptable in Syria.

1) The outright defeat of the regime and the victory of an acceptable coalition of rebel forces (understanding this would mean an intensification of the “war within the war” between acceptable and unacceptable insurgent groups).

2) A negotiated agreement between an acceptable coalition of rebel forces and remnants of the current power structure without the leading figures of the present regime (because no negotiation between Assad himself and the rebels is possible, either now or, almost certainly, at any future date).

3) A non-negotiated de facto end to the conflict involving the effective fragmentation of Syria into zones of autonomy loosely held together, at best, by a weak central government. Such state fragmentation could result in at least quasi-autonomous Alawite, Kurdish and possibly Druze areas — with greater or lesser degrees of practical independence and mini-statehood — and a currently unpredictable arrangement between Sunnis and Christians in the rest of the country or in different parts of it. This would be, in effect, a Lebanon scenario. There is precedent for the United States accepting such a de facto solution, even when it involves violence and “cleansing.” The West accepted the rapid and massive ethnic cleansing of Serbs from the Krajina region of Croatia in 1995 because it viewed the atrocity as a decisive and final resolution to the Serbian-Croatian conflict. In effect, such an outcome can often answer the age-old question, “tell me how this ends,” even if the answer is an ugly one.

This third option is the least palatable for several reasons. First, it means the, probably irreversible, fragmentation of the modern Syrian state. Second, it would almost certainly involve a great deal of violence, and even population “cleansing,” to achieve the kind of stalemate and equilibrium required for such a de facto arrangement, agreed to by no one but accepted grudgingly by all, to emerge. Third, it involves acquiescing to far more of a minimalist “victory” for the regime supporters, both internal and external, then ought to be otherwise tolerable. Fourth, the long-term stability of such a de facto end of conflict based on stalemate is highly questionable. The extent to which the Sunni majority and other Syrians, and most of the rest of the Arab world, might be inclined to accept this over the long run is uncertain to say the least.

However, such a scenario might be acceptable from an American point of view because it could end the carnage, stabilize the situation at least for the time being, and impose a degree of at least temporary order in which a more thought-out long-term policy for Syria can be developed. It also may be the only actually achievable way of ending the conflict in the medium run, because a clear victory for either side may prove unattainable for years to come. The pendulum has recently swung in the direction of the regime in large part thanks to external intervention, but with a new wave of external intervention on behalf of rebel forces, the war is likely to drag on for a considerable period. If a clear victory for either side is unattainable, and a negotiated agreement unachievable, a de facto order based on a stalemate on the ground that achieves the minimum existential interests of all the different Syrian and, to some extent, external players might emerge whether or not anyone wants it. Given the present administration attitude, such an outcome might be considered distasteful but (one hopes barely) acceptable to the United States.

All three outcomes require playing to win

However, the most important policy and strategic point is that the emergence of any of these three scenarios all require, at least at this stage, the same fundamental US policy shift: playing to win. As long as the Assad regime and its external supporters regard the situation as existential and winnable, they will not negotiate or be defeated. They must either be defeated, or become fully and decisively convinced that defeat is at least plausible if not imminent, for either a negotiated or a de facto settlement to emerge. Halfhearted efforts, partial support and limited means just to ensure that the regime does not triumph completely will not achieve such outcomes. To realize any of them, the United States must begin to adopt a similar policy towards certain of the rebels that the supporters of the regime do: real commitment to their victory. Otherwise, they will have little or no faith in the United States. We will have little or no influence over them. And the regime will never believe that it has to negotiate or accept a de facto outcome as described above, or anything else short of total victory or unending war (which are both unacceptable outcomes for the United States for obvious reasons).

Changing the equation on the ground requires the following policy initiatives:

1) Identify and empower the most acceptable rebel forces.

It is exceptionally unconvincing that this is impossible or perennially elusive. Clearly the Supreme Military Command of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), as led by General Salim Idriss, constitute precisely such plausible allies. The United States now faces two dangerous enemies in Syria: the regime and the Salafist-Jihadists led by Jabhat al-Nusra. This leaves the myriad collection of other Salafist groups operating under the general rubric of the Syrian Islamic Front (SIF) as an important hinge or wedge between the FSA and al-Nusra. The SIF, as it is presently constituted, is an unacceptable grouping in so far as it insists on an “Islamic” Syria under the rule of “sharia law” (whatever, in practice, anyone might think that means).

But there is every reason to think that many of the groups in the SIF, and certainly many of the fighters that have gravitated to those groups, are winnable to the Syrian nationalistic cause. Pluralism runs deep in Syrian national culture. Traditions of tolerance are far more ingrained in that country than in much of the rest of the Arab world. The fact that so many rebels have drifted towards a Salafist line or grouping can be attributed to a number of factors, including foreign funding, the relative disorganization of the nationalistic military and political opposition, and the fact that “Islam” serves as a non-Ba’athist organizing principle. Many of these groups, and especially their fighters, do not have a clear ideology, in contrast to al-Nusra. What they know for sure is they want to get rid of the dictatorship. And they know that Islam and local imams have a certain traditional authority and are capable of adjudicating matters of dispute in the absence of any other governing system. Hence the proliferation of sharia “courts” in areas where the government’s writ does not run, but are in the hands of SIF groups rather than al-Nusra.

Many of these groups and their fighters may stick with Salafism, but many may be interested in real alternatives if they are presented with them as practical, functional alternatives. And there is an insurmountable barrier between all of the SIF groups and al-Nusra. The Syrian Salafists are, at heart, nationalists, whereas al-Nusra adheres to the Al Qaeda ideology that denies the legitimacy and seek the abolition of all Arab and Muslim states and wishes to replace them with a transnational “caliphate” of some kind. In the final analysis, most of the organizations, and certainly most of the armed young men, fighting under the banner of the SIF forces have more in common, at least in terms of their paramount Syrian national identity, with the FSA then they do with al-Nusra, whose core ideology evinces no particular fealty to Syria at all. Therefore not only does the wholehearted and enthusiastic cultivation and the promotion of the FSA make eminent sense from an American point of view, there is also the real possibility of winning over significant chunks of what are presently “unacceptable” SIF forces to the FSA side, as and when it becomes more empowered, coherent, effective and coordinated.

2) Assist acceptable rebels with both light and heavy arms

One of the most important battlefield advantages of the regime forces is the ability to use its heavy weaponry against lightly armed insurgents and, frequently, civilian targets. Changing the balance of power on the ground requires supplying rebels not only with light arms but with serious and effective anti-tank and anti-aircraft capabilities. Yes, I’m referring here, among other things, to the dreaded man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS), which are shoulder-launched surface-to-air antiaircraft missiles. Of course these could pose a real threat to civilian aviation if they fall into the wrong hands. But they are necessary if any of the three acceptable outcomes are to be achieved. There is ample evidence that such weapons have, in fact, already been delivered to certain rebel groups. It is strongly in the American interest that acceptable, vetted rebel forces have the ability to confront and neutralize the regime’s ample supplies of heavy weaponry.

3) Additional crucial assistance to rebel forces

Acceptable and vetted rebel groups also require significant support in terms of general funding, command and control capabilities, logistics, and intelligence. The project must be to turn Gen. Idriss and his colleagues into real battlefield and integrated military commanders rather than figureheads or political spokespeople for an umbrella of loosely-coordinated, disparate local armed entities. This will not only help turn the tide of the conflict away from the regime and its foreign supporters, it will be crucial in drawing SIF groups and/or fighters away from their current unacceptable and unworkable commitment to “an Islamic Syria under sharia law,” and towards a political position that is closer to that of the FSA, more workable, and more consistent with traditional Syrian culture and social structures.

4) Neutralize the Syrian Air Force, in whole or in part

As long as the regime retains significant and unchallenged airpower, it will be impossible for the rebels to secure a sustained victory not only throughout the country, but in any given area in which the regime decides to make a concerted push to crush opposition or at least render the entire area a demolished battleground. There has been increasing discussion of limited no-fly zones in the north or, especially, the south of the country (beginning with small, 25-mile radius areas), and heavy disputes about the viability and military and financial costs of such an operation. All military experts concur that Syria has significant air defense systems, which Libya did not. Therefore there would be a risk to any such operation, particularly if it were directly challenged militarily. How great a risk there is, however, is heavily disputed, including among experts.

There are reasons, though, to believe that Syrian airpower and air defenses are overrated. Some may be old and in disrepair. The quality and commitment of the personnel manning these defenses has not been tested. Though they had the advantage of the element of surprise, Israeli airstrikes on Syrian targets proved impervious to such defenses. And the performance of the Syrian Air Force, which has often ended up bombing its own resources as well as those of the opposition, not to mention civilians, has been less than stellar to say the least. Nonetheless, it is to be stipulated that the establishment of any no-fly zone, however small, in Syria, does carry risks that the aerial intervention in Libya did not.

The United States and its allies, however, have confronted more serious air defenses in the past and sustained acceptable losses to achieve a necessary result. Again, we return to the fundamental question: how much do we care about the strategic landscape of the Middle East in the coming decades? If we can live with a hyper-empowered Iran, possibly nuclear-armed, with a crescent of clients and proxies stretching from southern Lebanon into Afghanistan and beginning to expand its influence, potentially even in parts of the Gulf, then such risks may not be worth taking. If, however, this is an unacceptable scenario from an American point of view, an arm’s-length engagement — not terribly dissimilar in its substance from the one in Libya, although with greater risks — is probably advisable if not unavoidable. At any rate, as long as the regime and its allies command the airspace throughout Syria largely unchallenged, and can enforce their will in any given limited area if they choose to focus their resources on it, they will continue to feel that the war is winnable or at least that decisive loss is not foreseeable. Under such circumstances, the current power structure, or elements within it, will neither negotiate seriously nor accept a de facto end of conflict.

The logical conclusion, which may or may not be avoidable, is an all-out effort to ground and/or disable the Syrian Air Force throughout the country. Hopefully this will not be necessary, but it may prove essential. If the other measures to curtail the extreme advantage that command of the skies has presently given the regime and its allies fail, including antiaircraft weaponry for rebels and the establishment of limited, small no-fly zones, then to achieve any of the three acceptable American aims may well require an all-out campaign, although from the air only, to destroy much or most of the Syrian Air Force and air defenses. This would undoubtedly prove a turning point in the conflict, and should be seriously considered, particularly once an effective and acceptable rebel coalition begins to dominate the insurgency, and can ensure that the influence of Al Qaeda-inspired extremists is either limited or eliminated.

5) Address the issue of chemical weapons

One of the most legitimate reasons for trepidation regarding a more robust engagement in the Syrian conflict is the possession by the regime of one of the largest stockpiles of chemical weapons in the Middle East. There are several dangers associated with such weapons. First, that the regime might use them against rebels or civilians in a last-ditch act of desperation. This is the kind of dreadful scenario that makes the otherwise unpalatable third option of a de facto, non-negotiated state fragmentation potentially defensible. Second, that the weapons might be used against American allies or interests outside of Syria. This seems extremely unlikely, as Israel, in particular, has made it clear that it will act to prevent the transfer of any such weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Beyond this, there are few logical scenarios that explain how such weapons would be used outside of Syria and by whom. Third, except, of course, if such weapon should fall into the hands of Al Qaeda-inspired groups like al-Nusra, which seems a very remote possibility indeed.

In fact, there appears to be a heavy concentration of Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces around the chemical weapons stockpiles. There is reason to believe that Iran and Russia understand the particular significance of a major use of chemical weapons in the Syrian war and its ramifications. The regime itself has clearly dipped into its stockpile in very limited ways on numerous occasions, undoubtedly in order to test the international reaction. The international community has failed that test miserably by taking no action at all. But the particular Iranian interest in Syria’s chemical weapons suggests, yet again, that the most fundamental elements of the conflict in Syria from both an Iranian and American point of view have to do with their own bilateral relations.

It’s impossible for any analyst without access to highly classified intelligence, and with no experience in special forces or other similar military operations, to comment seriously on the plausibility of any limited military interventions designed to seize and secure these stockpiles. Even if they are possible, such actions would surely be even more risky than a confrontation with Syria’s Air Force and air defenses. Yet it is one of the contingencies that needs to be strongly considered, if it is plausible at all. But it is quite irrational to allow the presence of such weapons to inform an American policy which boils down to relative apathy about the outcome of the conflict in Syria. Even if Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles are, as I suspect, the closest thing on the ground to a bilateral Iranian-American issue, that’s no reason to view the Syrian war and its outcome entirely through the lens of this relationship. The strategic implications are far broader, although of course the future role of Iran is Exhibit A in why Syria really does matter to the United States. But it’s only the tip of a very large iceberg of concerns.

The limits of “mission creep”

Having bitten the bullet recently and openly called for “some good, old-fashioned American ‘mission creep'” in Syria, because I find the current policy insufficient for the reasons explained above, it’s also incumbent on me to be clear about the limitations I would set for such a policy.

1) Nothing should be done that invokes the accurate “Pottery Barn” rule for interventions made famous by Secretary of State Colin Powell in the run-up to the Iraq war: “you break it, you own it.” Under no circumstances should the United States become directly responsible for Syria or its future. The model for a more robust engagement, or, if you prefer, intervention, in Syria should be the one pursued in Libya: arm’s-length, limited in scope and scale, and designed to prevent certain outcomes and promote but not absolutely ensure other ones. Outcomes cannot be ensured at arm’s length or from the air. Wars are never won except on the ground: they are inevitably decided by seizing and holding territory or, in the case of insurgencies or guerilla campaigns, by making the cost of continuing for the other side (assuming they have the option to quit) too costly. These limitations do not contradict my earlier prescription that the United States must be absolutely committed to the defeat of the regime in order to achieve any of the three potential goals outlined. Russia, after all, is not going to be invading Syria either. It simply means doing everything we can, at every level, to exert maximum pressure on the regime to either fall, capitulate or come to agreed or de facto terms. This can be done without an invasion that absolutely nobody at all advocates or requests.

But in truth even if the United States took the steps outlined above, it would not dictate the outcome of the conflict in Syria, only influence it. It would not be responsible for Syria or its future, just as we have not been responsible, practically or morally, for Libya and what has happened there, good and bad, since the fall of Moammar Qaddafi. Nobody wants American boots on the ground, except perhaps in very small numbers and under very limited and brief circumstances, and it’s vital that this doesn’t materialize. This will not and cannot be a rerun of the wars in Afghanistan or Iraq. There will be no American “Governor General” of Syria, in the manner of Paul Bremer’s disastrous role in Iraq. I have explained elsewhere exactly why, and how, Syria is not Iraq, this engagement will not be like the Iraq war, and the strategic and political circumstances are radically different.

2) As best as possible, we must make aid conditional on respect for the laws of war and fundamental humanitarian practices. The United States cannot be associated with, responsible for or directly attached to atrocities, ethnic cleansing, massacres or anything of the kind. Moreover, any groups receiving assistance from the United States or its allies must break with Al Qaeda-inspired extremists and, indeed, confront them. Aid will have to be given on a trial-and-error basis. There is no way around that highly uncomfortable reality. There never is. But clear red lines, as outlined above and more, can and should be made absolutely understood to any rebel or insurgent group receiving American aid or funding.

3) The whole point of a more robust engagement is to promote the best possible outcome. I listed the acceptable outcomes as three, in order of desirability. None can be achieved without an all-out push for a rebel victory. But a rebel victory will only be desirable if the rebels in question meet minimal standards of respect for human rights, pluralism, rule of law and other basic international standards. Otherwise, the second or even the third (highly unpalatable) outcome might actually be not only more achievable but also, sadly, preferable.

Finally, having called for more robust engagement and, indeed, for “mission creep,” and having stipulated that there is an element of risk and trial and error involved, if, in the long run, no acceptable allies can be found in Syria, then assisting unacceptable allies is a foolish policy. This is an extremely remote contingency, but should it prove the case, then a thorough reevaluation of the entire chain of logic laid out here will be urgently required and a very different set of policy considerations and actions necessitated.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/drowning-in-sectarianism

Reports from the small village of Zawyat Abu Musalam in Egypt this Sunday were, in equal measure, horrifying and unsurprising. A mob attack by enraged Sunni extremists on the Shiite minority, left four dead and at least 30 badly injured. The lynching was prompted by months of relentless anti-Shiite incitement by Salafist preachers, with virtually no repudiation from the Muslim Brotherhood or President Mohammed Morsi.

From the early days of the Arab uprisings, I was concerned that sectarian tensions were now going to define both local and regional relations far more than any other factor. For well over a year, I had an ongoing dispute about this with George Washington University Professor Marc Lynch, who argued that sectarianism had been more palpable and damaging in the previous decade.

I’ve never had a long-standing disagreement with anyone in which I wished more fervently to have been wrong.

But I wasn’t.

Back in April, I noted the attack on the main Coptic Cathedral in Egypt, and warned, “If ancient, large Christian communities find the Arab world fundamentally inhospitable, Muslims will turn on each other just as readily.”

Throughout the Middle East they have, with increasing ferocity. Even in Egypt, the tiny Shiite minority has found itself assaulted and lynched after cynical hate-mongers targeted them in the media.

Throughout the Middle East, Sunni-Shiite tensions are boiling over, prompted (but certainly not created) by the war in Syria, the conflict in Bahrain, and Arab rivalry with Iran and so forth.

Indeed, the problem has become so acute that the Associated Press last week published a kind of “beginner’s guide” for Westerners to the explosion of Sunni-Shiite hatred throughout the region. It drew on the work of no less than 10 of its regional correspondents, and yet it barely scratched the surface. And, of course, beneath Sunni-Shiite tensions bubble dozens of other fault lines in the shuddering Middle Eastern landscape.

Obviously we’re not really seeing the revival of religious and political arguments more than 1,000 years old. If the hatreds were really this deep, endemic and theological, no amount of dictatorship could have suppressed them in the past.

No. This is power-politics pure and simple, in its most savage and bestial form.

The proof lies in Libya.

Libya, which has virtually no religious heterogeneity, is as unstable and wracked with violence, power struggles, and brutality as any Arab country (with the exception of Syria). So, this isn’t to do with sectarian differences, because in Libya that’s not a significant factor. Yet the post-dictatorship power struggle rages ferociously.

It’s about authority, and the battle for social and political dominance in the context and opportunity of a sudden and yawning vacuum.

The formula is simple enough. People are most powerfully motivated by fear and hatred, which relentlessly feed off of each other. So, political legitimacy and the development of a constituency for power is most quickly and easily acquired and consolidated by promoting fear and hatred of the other. And it doesn’t matter whom.

‘They are out to get us, so we had better get them first. Follow me, to victory,’ is probably the most ancient and crudest expression of political demagoguery. Under the right conditions, it’s virtually infallible. And it’s exactly what’s motivating so much of the sectarian and ethnic paranoia and chauvinism that is engulfing the region.

It’s easy to point to the Salafists, because they are often the most obnoxious and vicious in their rhetoric and well-funded by their official and private Gulf backers.

But there are no clean hands.

The Muslim Brothers agree with them on many matters of intolerance, especially against Shiites.

Some Iranian and other Shiite leaders in the region return the affection in full, with catalogues of anti-Sunni calumnies. Many backers of Bashar al-Assad, often themselves sectarians, paint all Syrian rebels as flesh-eating al-Qaeda Sunni monsters.

Disaffected Christian communities, particularly in exile, seethe with undisguised and irrational rage. Israel is seeing a rapid rise to prominence of racist, annexationist Jewish chauvinists, unabashed backers of a separate and distinctly unequal “Greater Israel,” and practitioners of “price tag” violence.

In the absence of local, national and regional order, hate-mongers deliberately set in motion the process of demonization in their own narrow, parochial interests.

And then, like monstrous fishes of the deepest sea where no plant life grows, people devour each other up ravenously in order, they believe, to survive.

In the long run, perhaps, the real division will prove to be between Islamists and other chauvinists versus pluralists with a more tolerant, inclusive vision. There is strong evidence of that pattern emerging as well. But sectarian tensions are so dominating the landscape that a Sunni-Shiite broader regional conflict, either directly and/or by proxy, now seems entirely plausible.

This is going to get a whole lot worse before it starts to get better.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/syria-is-not-iraq1

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/06/17/of-course-it-s-not-too-late-in-syria.html

Of Course It’s Not ‘Too Late’ in Syria

Whenever someone says it’s “too late” to deal with a policy crisis, it’s a sure indication that they are fundamentally comfortable with the status quo. Now that the United States has finally announced that it is going to get involved in directly aiding rebel groups in Syria, the siren song of “too late” is being heard loudly and clearly. “Too little”—or even “don’t do anything at all”—might be a fair criticism, but “it’s too late” is almost never true of any ongoing policy challenge.

Many Americans have opposed direct involvement in Syria from the outset. A new strand of neo-isolationism, uniting factions on the left and the right, has become very fashionable in Washington, post-Afghanistan, Iraq and the fiscal crisis. There are others who genuinely can’t see any major interests at stake or reasonable outcomes available. And there are some who are essentially comfortable with the Damascus regime anyway.

On cue, many of these voices—none of which ever wanted any direct American engagement in Syria at all—are repeating their conviction that this is a bad idea and, above all, that it is “too late.”

Of course there’s some truth to these complaints. Relative American inaction has helped to promote all the things the United States said it wanted to avoid in Syria from the outset. And, had it acted sooner, it probably could have helped avoid the situation deteriorating as badly as it has, and in such an uncontrolled manner.

It’s been almost two years since many of us began pointing out that there is an armed conflict in Syria, that its outcome is very important to American foreign policy, and that in order to influence its nature and outcome some kind of direct engagement is required. So it’s certainly “too late” to prevent a parade of horribles from having emerged: the country is in flames,100,000 people dead, millions displaced, and sectarian barbarism raging on both sides of the battlefield. But it’s not too late to reverse the trends or start to have a positive impact.

The “too late” argument rests on a series of bizarre counterfactuals. True, Syria might not have fallen into the grip of a gangster regime run by a criminal family and associated mafia. True, there might not have been an uprising. True, the government might not have crushed the peaceful uprising with overwhelming violence. True, the opposition might have been more united politically and militarily, internally and externally, more effective and more wise. And, true, had patriotic rebel groups been provided with sufficient material and political support, the extreme Salafist-Jihadists funded by wealthy fanatics in the Gulf would not have become as powerful and dangerous as they are. But all of this, and so much more, did indeed happen.

Let us concede, therefore, that if things were not the way they are, they would be different. But history moves on regardless. The war is not decided and the outcome totally unresolved. There has already been a massive external intervention on behalf of the regime involving thousands of elite fighters from Hezbollah and, increasingly, Iran, and intense military, diplomatic and political support from Russia. The only thing we can really conclude from the way the Syrian war has developed so far is that the external supporters of the Damascus regime care more about the outcome of the conflict than its external opponents and the supporters of the rebels.

Unfortunately, it seems that’s still the case, at least as far as the United States is concerned. Even though the U.S. is crossing a Rubicon by agreeing to become directly involved in the Syrian conflict, administration officials are not coy that the intention is not to promote a rebel victory. It is rather intended to change the strategic equation on the ground, which has recently shifted in favor of the government, especially following a series of Hezbollah-supported victories. According to the Washington Post, “An outright rebel win is seen [by Washington] as both unlikely and less desirable than a negotiated settlement that leaves Syrian institutions intact.”

We can be sure that Hezbollah and Iran, for whom this is an existential battle, and indeed Russia, which has decided to stake its international reputation on the preservation of the Damascus dictatorship, take the opposite perspective. They are throwing everything they possibly can into this battle and fully intend their side to win. For all their talk about the importance of negotiations, the Syrian dictatorship and its supporters are clearly fully committed to a decisive military victory, and changing that is going to require a full-fledged effort.

So, even if it is a halfhearted and belated effort to change the strategic equation on the ground, and even though the original intention may be something as presently fanciful as “setting the stage for successful negotiations,” it is by no means “too late.” But it may be “too little.” The stated aim of creating conditions for a deal is de minimis. It will be difficult to prove effective because the other side is all in for the big victory. As long as they think they can win, or even hope they can, they’ll never be interested in a serious conversation about any real conflict-ending agreement. And the United States needs to begin to take seriously the prospect that a negotiated agreement may actually never prove to be the way this war ends.

So, for once, “mission creep” provides the hope of a successful outcome rather than a terrifying threat to a major foreign policy initiative. Typically, American hubris has meant overreaching, and “mission creep” has historically been synonymous with disaster. In this case, a new and uncharacteristic American risk-aversion has been crippling. And, with the utmost historical irony, only some good old-fashioned American “mission creep” holds out much hope for ultimate success for the evolving Syria policy.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/libyas-revolution-part-ii

Any political narrative centering on the phrase “the people” is automatically suspect because there’s no such thing as a homogenous society. Particularly during times of turmoil, societies tend to be deeply divided. Last weekend’s events in Benghazi tempts one, however, to throw caution to the wind and acknowledge that something like “the Libyan people” once again rose up and demanded their liberty. It was a confrontation not with a dictator, but abusive, thuggish militias.

The Libyan people in general already rose up against the dictator Moammar Qaddafi. Qaddafi obviously had some support, particularly from within his own Qaddafa tribe, but the overwhelming bulk of Libyan society turned against him. The National Transitional Council, which led the political side of the revolution, took an eminently pragmatic approach to building a military coalition: anyone willing to take up arms against Qaddafi was welcome to join the revolution.

What this meant, however, in the aftermath was that post-dictatorship Libya was left with a very weak and barely functional central government that inherited virtually no effective institutions. It had, and still has, no real national army to speak of and few ministries that function in a genuinely effective manner.

Instead, practical power in the country has been wielded by armed gangs representing different regions, cities, tribes, clans, and ideological orientations. The men with guns have power, and they don’t want to give it up in the national interest. They want to use it.

They proved this recently by besieging government buildings in Tripoli and forcing through an abominable “political isolation law” – literally at gunpoint.

But time and again ordinary Libyan people have taken to the streets to confront the militias, demand proper governance, and insist on the need for law and order. They did this after the isolation law was passed, chasing militias away from government buildings at considerable personal risk.

Over the last weekend, the people in Benghazi staged a virtual uprising against a kind of umbrella “militia of militias,” the so-called “Libya Shield.” This nefarious organization has run parallel the fledgling national military and in de facto opposition to efforts to form legitimate security forces.

Cowed by the strength of the militias in general and the Shield in particular, much of the national government treated this pack of thugs as if they were a quasi-official security force. Lacking both courage and options, post-dictatorship governments have used the Shield to put down various rebellions and uprisings, giving it unwarranted and indefensible prestige, leverage, and authority.

But with the crude display of brute force in ramming through the “isolation law” – and obviously attempting to bring down the non-Islamist Prime Minister by creating a breakdown in order – the militias went too far. It became clear the public in general turned against them after the siege of government buildings, taking to the streets and chasing them away. Meanwhile, the leader of the Shield, Wissam bin Hamid, was appointed leader of a militia council with an ill-defined government “advisory” role.

Politicians, including the prime minister reacted in a craven, cowardly manner. The public has not.

This weekend’s incident began with a dispute over the property rights to what the Shield regards as its Benghazi “headquarters,” and it quickly boiled over into violent confrontations between the gangsters and swelling masses of enraged protesters. At least 31 people were killed, only two of them militia members. In short, it was a massacre.

In Libya, or at least in its major cities, the tide is slowly turning against the gangs.

Reports from Benghazi suggest the Shield has virtually vanished from sight, its compound abandoned and its leader to be found only on the radio blustering ludicrous accusations about the protesters being traitors, separatists, and Qaddafi loyalists. The depth of harm done to the militias political standing was demonstrated when their closest ally, military Chief of Staff Yousef al-Mangoush, was forced to resign in disgrace.

The historic and heroic Benghazi uprising is unlikely to spell the immediate end of the militia crisis in Libya, or even perhaps the Shield itself. But it does mean that armed thugs will no longer be able claim to be the vanguard of the revolution. The honeymoon is over. Now naked, raw gangster violence will be seen for what it is with no window dressing.

None of this means Libya is on the brink of political unity, law, order, or a coherent military or security apparatus with a monopoly on the use of force. That’s obviously going to take time and compromise – and, unfortunately, some additional confrontations. In the countryside (particularly in the south) it could take many decades.

But there’s every chance the Benghazi popular uprising against the “Libya Shield” will be remembered as the beginning of the end of militia rule in Libya’s major cities. And, once again, “the people” must get the credit.

عندما اتّخذ “حزب الله” قراره المصيري بالتدخّل عسكرياً في الحرب الأهلية السورية، كانت مسألة وقت فقط قبل أن تطارده الحرب إلى الداخل وتشعل ناراً في لبنان. فخلال هذا الشهر [شهر آب الماضي] انفجرت ثلاث سيارات مفخّخة في لبنان، ما أدّى إلى مقتل العشرات وإصابة المئات بجروح.

ما إن اندلع النزاع السوري حتى انتشر بسرعة إلى الأجزاء الشمالية من لبنان، وتحديداً طرابلس، التي باتت تضمّ بصورة مستجدّة سنّة لبنانيين سلفيين ومحافظين، إلى جانب العلويين. وقد انجرفت هذه القوى، التي يخوض رفاقها وأبناء طائفتها القتال على جبهتَين متواجهتين في الجهة الأخرى من الحدود، إلى التقاتل في ما بينها في شمال لبنان.
لكن القوى السياسية الأساسية في البلاد قرّرت أن تحاول حصر التأثير الممتدّ للحرب السورية في تلك المنطقة الشمالية. تتّصف السياسة اللبنانية منذ أكثر من عقد بتوازنٍ بين عناصر غير مستقرّة. لا يريد أحد شنّ حرب شاملة في لبنان، لأنه ما من فريق يمكنه أن يكون على ثقة بالفوز، والجميع معرّضون بشدّة للخسارة أكثر منهم للانتصار.
فضلاً عن ذلك، نستنتج من التاريخ اللبناني الحديث أمراً واضحاً لا مفرّ منه: أيّ مجموعة – داخلية أم خارجية – تحاول فرض سيطرة مهيمِنة على البلاد بكاملها تواجه بسرعة معارَضة موحَّدة من جميع القوى الأخرى تقريباً، وتُضطرّ في نهاية المطاف إلى الانكفاء في قواعدها.
لكن “حزب الله”، وعلى الرغم من أنه يعرف جيداً مخاطر تدخّله في سوريا، يعتبر أن بقاء نظام بشار الأسد هو ببساطة ضرورة وجودية. تجسّد سوريا شريان الحياة المباشر بين “حزب الله” وطهران. فلولا ذلك الرابط المجاور، ولولا الدعم من التأثير الخارجي الأقوى في لبنان – أي سوريا – لكان وجود شبه الدويلة التي يقيمها “حزب الله” في شكلها الحالي، مع سياستها الخارجية والعسكرية المستقلة، في خطر شديد.
لن يزول “حزب الله”. فعلى غرار كل الأحزاب السياسية اللبنانية، يتّسم بالازدواجية كما الإله جانوس المعروف بأنه ذو وجهَين. فمن جهة، تمثّل هذه الأحزاب ناخبيها. وفي حالة “حزب الله”، تتألّف قاعدته الناخبة من الطائفة الأكبر في لبنان، أي الشيعة حيث الحزب هو القائد الأول بلا منازع (لا وجود لطائفة أكثرية في لبنان). لكن من جهة أخرى، وأسوةً بجميع الأحزاب اللبنانية، يمثّل “حزب الله” أيضاً قوّة خارجية راعية له، ألا وهي إيران.
انطلاقاً من هذا الولاء للجهة الراعية، “حزب الله” في هو شكل أساسي صنيعة الحرس الثوري الإيراني. وفي حين أمكن التكهّن خلال العقد المنصرم حول ما إذا كان الحزب قد طوّر شخصية سياسية مستقلّة، جاءت الحرب في سوريا لتضع حداً لهذه التساؤلات. فـ”حزب الله” يظلّ مرتبطاً بقوّة برعاته الإيرانيين، والطرفان ملتزمان، وجودياً، ببقاء ديكتاتورية الأسد مهما كان الثمن.
إذاً اتّخذ “حزب الله” خطوة متطرّفة ومتهوّرة وغير مسؤولة على الإطلاق – إنما أيضاً لا غنى عنها على الأرجح من وجهة نظره – عبر إرسال عدد كبير من وحدات النخبة التابعة له للقتال إلى جانب القوات السورية دفاعاً عن بعض المناطق الأكثر أهمّية على المستوى الاستراتيجي.
لقد وصلت تداعيات الحرب السورية، بصورة محتومة، إلى لبنان. فقد أحدثت شللاً في السياسة اللبنانية خلال الأشهر الخمسة الماضية منذ استقالة رئيس الوزراء نجيب ميقاتي، وكان السبب الظاهري الخلاف حول تنظيم انتخابات جديدة. لكن الواقع هو أن الانقسام داخل الحكومة يعكس الخلافات السياسية حول الحرب في سوريا، وتدخّل “حزب الله” هناك، والتنافس بين انصار السعودية وانصار إيران في السياسة اللبنانية. لكن مع ذلك، جرى حصر الارتدادات العنيفة في منطقة الشمال في شكل أساسي، نظراً إلى أن إحدى المسائل القليلة جداً التي يُجمع عليها معظم اللبنانيين هي أنه ليس من مصلحتهم اندلاع حرب أهلية جديدة.
مما لا شك فيه أن تنظيم “القاعدة” وسواه من التنظيمات السلفية الجهادية التي تتواجد في الشمال بأعداد صغيرة، لا تحظى بالشعبية في أوساط السنّة اللبنانيين. في الواقع، اسم “القاعدة” في ذاته ملعون جداً في المشرق إلى درجة أن التنظيم اضطُرّ إلى أن يُعيد تقديم نفسه باسم مختلف: “جبهة النصرة” في سوريا وسواها من الأسماء الأخرى التي تندرج في إطار الحيَل التسويقية في لبنان وفي صفوف الفلسطينيين.
تنهار الجهود الهادفة إلى حصر تداعيات الحرب الأهلية السورية في شمال لبنان، بطريقة دموية ودراماتيكية. فتدخُّل “حزب الله” في سوريا سيظلّ يطارده حتى العمق اللبناني، وبصورة متزايدة وأكثر حدّة من دون أدنى شك. لقد راهن الحزب بكل شيء، ويعرف ذلك. ومجدداً تصرّف بتهوّر على حساب ما تبقّى من لبنان، وبطلب من الإيرانيين. حقّق الاحتواء نجاحاً نسبياً حتى تاريخه، فلبنان لا يشبه بشيء الظروف التي تواجهها سوريا. لكن حتّام؟
الضرر كبير حتى الآن. أولاً، الالتزام الذي قطعه الأفرقاء اللبنانيون بعد عام 1989 بعدم استخدام لبنان ساحة لخوض حروب بالوكالة عن الآخرين، كما حصل في الماضي، في صدد الانهيار. ثانياً، بما أن “حزب الله” التزم بقوّة المساهمة في النزاع في سوريا – وبما أن سوريا هي القوّة الخارجية الأهم في لبنان – سيكون لنتائج الحرب السورية تأثير عميق على المعادلة السياسية اللبنانية. يبذل معظم الأفرقاء اللبنانيين محاولات صادقة لتجنّب وباء المذهبية، لكن في ظل الظروف الراهنة، يبدون عاجزين عن وقف انتشاره القوي.
مما لا شك فيه أن الدولة اللبنانية تتصدّع أكثر من أي وقت مضى، على صعيدَي مؤسّساتها وهيكلياتها السياسية، كما على مستوى التوازن الهش بين أفرقائها السياسيين. تدخُّل “حزب الله” في سوريا هو المحفّز الأساسي، لكنه ليس السبب الوحيد. ففيما تفشل الجهود الهادفة إلى ضبط العنف المتمدّد من الحرب السورية وحصره في الشمال اللبناني، تزداد أيضاً احتمالات توسُّع العنف المذهبي في مختلف أنحاء البلاد، وكذلك الاحتمال القاتم إنما المعقول باندلاع جولة جديدة من النزاع الأهلي.
المفارقة هي أن سوريا تتصدّع بطريقة تثير ذكريات مخيفة عن الحرب الأهلية المذهبية اللبنانية من 1975 إلى 1989. فمنذ انتهاء الحرب، ينعم لبنان إلى حد كبير بالسلام، لكنه مفكّك: إنه عبارة عن مجموعة من الجيوب المذهبية والإثنية (مع درجات أعلى أو أقل من الحكم الذاتي) التي تربطها معاً، بصورة فضفاضة، حكومةٌ ضعيفة جداً في بيروت وتعاني من اختلال وظيفي متزايد، حتى إنها باتت أعجز من التظاهر، في جوانب جوهرية كثيرة، بتأدية وظائفها الأساسية التي يُفترَض بالدولة النهوض بها.
ليس لبنان دولة فاشلة، لكنه جمهورية متصدِّعة ومفكّكة تعاني من اختلال وظيفي. منذ عام 1989، وفّرت التسوية درجة مقبولة من الاستقرار، لكنها تستند إلى توازن من العناصر غير المستقرّة. لطالما كانت قابلية هذه التسوية للاستمرار موضع شكوك في أفضل الأحوال، كما أنها تمرّ حالياً في امتحانها الأقوى منذ وضع اتفاق الطائف حداً للحرب الأهلية عام 1989.
يستحيل توقّع النتيجة في المدى الطويل في سوريا: ثمة عدد كبير من المتغيّرات والعوامل التي لا يمكن قياسها بدقّة. لكن الدولة الوطنية المتكاملة والحديثة والمركزية المحكومة من دمشق التي قامت عليها سوريا منذ استقلالها في أربعينات القرن الماضي، لا تملك حظوظاً فعلية بالخروج سليمة معافاة من الحرب الحالية.
قد تعتبر نظرةٌ يمكن وصفها بغير المتشاءمة أن السيناريو الأفضل (أو الأقل سوءاً) بالنسبة إلى سوريا في المدى المتوسط هو النموذج اللبناني: بلد يشكّل نظرياً كلاً متكاملاً، لكنه في الواقع منقسم بشدّة، ويحكمه على المستوى المحلي سماسرة سلطة ذوو انتماءات مذهبية وإثنية، مع درجات أكبر أو أقل من الاستقلال الذاتي في التحرّك، وتربطهم معاً حكومة مركزية ضعيفة جداً في دمشق وعاجزة عن فرض سلطتها في الجزء الأكبر من البلاد التي يمكن اعتبارها وطناً بالاسم فقط.
ولعل المفارقة الأكبر هي أن هذا السيناريو “الأقل سوءاً” في سوريا ربما يعكس ما يعيشه لبنان منذ عقدَين والذي يتعرّض الآن لتهديد شديد بسبب القوى نفسها التي تدفع جارته الشمالية، سوريا، في اتّجاه مشابه تماماً. إذاً السؤال المطروح هو الآتي: هل يستطيع لبنان أن يصمد في وجه “لبننة” سوريا من دون السقوط في جولة مروّعة أخرى من إراقة الدماء؟ هل يمكن أن تصبح سوريا “لبنانَ” آخر من دون تحطيم هذا النموذج الهش في لبنان نفسه؟
لا بد من التشديد على أن هذه الأسئلة تستند بالكامل إلى تفادي مزيد من السيناريوات البائسة. فحدوثها، لحسن الحظ، أقل احتمالاً من سيناريو الشلل اللبناني القاتم إنما المقبول نوعاً ما – وربما الشلل السوري الناشئ – وتوازن القوى غير المستقرّة في دول مجزّأة إنما غير فاشلة. شئنا أم أبينا، ليس هذا التقويم متشائماً. حاولوا أن تتكلّموا مع متشائم حقيقي.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/the-worst-islamophobes

If Islamophobia means anything, it must be the fear and hatred of Muslims that makes it harder for them to live in diverse societies and operate effectively in the globalized economy and culture. But by that standard, who really are the worst Islamophobes?

Counterintuitively, it isn’t those who make a career out of demonizing Islam and Muslims like the self-appointed Catholic holy warrior Robert Spencer. Nor is it those for whom raw hatred is some sort of demented hobby like Jewish extremist Pamela Geller. Nor is it even the softer bigotry of the liberal American agnostic comic Bill Maher, who doesn’t like any religion but singles out Islam for particular opprobrium. It isn’t even the politicians in the United States and other Western countries like Peter King or Michelle Bachmann who have tried to win votes by presenting themselves as defenders against a Muslim fifth column.

For all the harm purveyors of the standard Islamophobic narrative undoubtedly cause, the worst Islamophobes – indeed in many ways the real Islamophobes – are the violent Muslim extremists who seem bent on providing Islamophobic narratives with some basis in fact. It’s ridiculous to equate Islam with terrorism as if the two are synonymous. There are any number of other terrorists and practitioners of political murder. And, of course, the violent Muslim extremists are not only a fringe in the Islamic world, they are a fringe of a fringe.

Yet their own actions are uniquely damaging in threatening, and sometimes even succeeding, in exacerbating fear and hatred of Muslims in the West and around the world.

The ironies are almost endless. The New York Times reported, for example, that Boston Marathon bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev “was angry that the world pictures Islam as a violent religion.” So, he decided to try to help prove “the world” is right by murdering as many random people as possible at a sporting event. No amount of raving from bigots and propagandizing from hatemongers could possibly have done even a fraction of the harm he inflicted on the cause about which he was supposedly so concerned.

From their outset, the various forms of contemporary violent Sunni and Shiite political extremists saw themselves as defenders of the “downtrodden.” Chief in their bill of particulars has always been outrage about the way the West and other non-Muslim societies depict Islam and Muslims. By living up to the worst stereotypes of Muslims as violent fanatics, Tsarnaev was following in a tradition that essentially dates back to the late 1970s, where Salafist-Jihadists and Khomeinites have bizarrely sought to defend the integrity and reputation of Islam by using it as a rationalization for the mass murder of innocent civilians.

When Danish cartoons are understood as “insulting” the prophet Mohammed, and extremist organizations take the opportunity to organize violent riots with deadly results, who is the real purveyor of anti-Muslim sentiment? Some of the cartoons were racist, some clever, and some merely silly. If no one had reacted, surely no real harm would have been caused. If anyone associated with the cartoons was actually trying to promote fear and hatred of Muslims and Islam, their work was almost entirely done for them by the extremist groups and their cynical and vicious overreaction. That was the real Islamophobia, and infinitely more serious an insult to Islam and Muslims.

Probably the first incident of this kind of bizarre, self-inflicted Muslim promotion of Islamophobia was the Iranian death-threat fatwa against Salman Rushdie issued by Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. His novel The Satanic Verses is in no sense an Islamophobic or anti-Muslim book, even though it did contain a delicious caricature of Khomeini himself – which, along with the most cynical political ulterior motives, was probably the real reason for the death threat. But the book was already being condemned and burned by Muslim communities, especially in Britain and India, almost entirely by people who had never read a word of it on the grounds that it was “an insult to Islam.” Again, the real insult was the hysterical, bloodthirsty reaction, book burnings, death threats, riots, and all of the hideous manifestations of manufactured or misplaced rage.

Perhaps the most recent such incident is the brutal killing of a British soldier by two Nigerian men in Woolwich. In their ensuing diatribe, they cited the usual paranoid narrative about the Islamic world being under siege from the West. Naturally they also complained about being labeled “extremists.”

And thus it is that a tiny fraction of the world’s Muslims – who are probably sincerely outraged at negative depictions of Islam and genuinely believe they are acting in its interests – become the very thing they hate the most. They are the most reliable allies of Western Muslim-haters, who play them like fiddles with the simplest provocations. And they are, without a doubt, the world’s ultimate Islamophobes.

http://www.thebaffler.com/past/united_sades_of_america

Not long after I took refuge from the academy to work in the policy centers of Washington, I visited one of D.C.’s landmark bookstores, Politics and Prose—a literary venue known, as its name suggests, for furnishing customers with the conceit that they’re browsing and shopping in a vaguely subversive fashion. But as I walked up to join the store’s cultivated and edgy communitas, I committed a terrible error: I asked a clerk where I might find the works of the Marquis de Sade. My request made its way up through an increasingly consternated group of shop assistants; I had to repeat it several times before they fully registered what I was asking for. At that point, I was told to leave the store immediately. The scene concluded on a perfect grace note when I was sternly conducted to the store’s exit by a female employee who was obviously French. It was as if I had asked for a how-to manual for murder, kidnapping, or child abuse—or, at a minimum, the most objectionable form of pornography.

That scene spoke volumes about the curious legacy of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade, the great and demented aristocratic theorist of unrestrained desire, in our own republic of consumer longing. Here, in the self-regarding intellectual center of a city justly famed for the free play of unleashed personal ambition and the basest kinds of instrumental manipulation of others, Sade was a four-letter word. Nor can I say that I was entirely taken aback by this reception; as I completed work on my doctorate, my professors took me aside to warn me that I should never attempt to teach any of Sade’s work until I was securely tenured—and even then, they stressed, I should proceed with enormous caution.

On one level, of course, it’s clear enough why Sade and his work make people squeamish: that was often his goal. To a degree not even rivaled by Sigmund Freud and other later explorers of the id (and its indispensible partner, the sadistic superego), Sade seemed to insist that the darkest, most destructive urges of humanity are core elements of our nature—that the drive to inflict pain, to dominate, even to murder, needs to be affirmed as part of the same complex of erotic and creative desires that keep human society viable and individuals “free.”

This is perhaps why, despite the careful strictures against uttering his name—let alone marketing his work—in polite consumer society, the shade of Sade is a markedly unquiet one in our America. Like other repressed ideas, Sade is everywhere and nowhere—indeed, there appears to be a strong inverse proportion between the popular reach of his name and image and actual familiarity with his writings and thought. (In an irony that Sade himself would likely have appreciated, the only European thinker with a similar universal-yet-unread profile in American intellectual life is probably the great Puritan theologian John Calvin.)

Sade is, indeed, enough of a household name among us that he functions as a sort of shorthand consumer brand for transgressive naughtiness, and the outright flouting of civilization’s taboos. He is commonly associated with sexual sadomasochism as a commodity, and pornography in general—including the mommy porn marketing phenomenon Fifty Shades of Grey. He’s popularly synonymous with cruelty and evil, much like the “murderous Machiavel” of the Renaissance English-speaking world. And he is also frequently, and reasonably, cast as the most extreme of misogynists. At the same time, Sade is also often represented as a proto-Romantic rebel—among the first, and certainly the most radical, protesters against the rational certainties of Enlightenment humanism (this was indeed the basis of the largely sympathetic portrait of Sade in Peter Weiss’s 1963 play Marat/Sade). A bowdlerized version of Sade has cropped up occasionally as a generic embodiment of artistic and intellectual freedom struggling against authority and restriction—a Larry Flynt of the eighteenth century, as it were. This was the Sade featured, for instance, in Philip Kaufman’s 2000 film Quills.

And this is all to say nothing, of course, about the sprawling popcult traffic in the graphically violent genre we might dub thanato-porn: the voyeuristic cult of invasively depicted death experiences as famously anticipated in the 1973 J. G. Ballard novel Crash. David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation of Ballard’s book reveled in the erotic allure of death while affecting to critique its exploitation, but by now we’ve dispensed entirely with the conceit of critique; thanato-porn now runs the gamut from the Saw movie series to Grand Theft Auto videogaming and the latest network TV spinoff of the CSI franchise. If the point of much of Sade’s work was to marry the most intense modes of sexual frustration and release to the practice of interpersonal violence, he could confidently gaze out on the landscape of our popular culture, and declare much of this project a fait accompli.

But there was always much more to Sade than the simple lionization of the urges to objectify and dominate—and Sade’s legacy assuredly doesn’t end here, in the overstimulated agoras of our media world. If we broaden the aperture a bit to take in the official scenes of governance—a procedure that Sade himself strongly encourages—we can also see that he haunts our political culture in all sorts of unacknowledged ways. While many on the intellectual left have sought to grapple with Sade more directly, Sade also exerts a suitably perverse influence on the present-day American right. To take just one example, elements of Sade’s thought—via an embarrassingly reductive caricature of Nietzsche—thrive in the robust American cult of Ayn Rand.

Mitt Romney’s running mate Paul Ryan frequently cited Rand as his most important inspiration, and Rand’s unabashed championing of economic elites was also echoed by Romney’s own notorious dismissal of the 47 percent of Americans who don’t earn enough money to pay income tax and therefore needn’t be bothered with. At least one of Sade’s fictional monsters, Roland, anticipated this Randian attack on all forms of socially conscious responsibility to others as pathologically self-indulgent. In Justine, Roland rebuffs Justine’s plea that she be spared since she saved his life. “What were you doing when you came to my rescue?” he demands. “Did you not choose [this] as an impulse dictated by your heart? You therefore gave yourself up to a pleasure? How in the devil’s name can you maintain I am obliged to recompense you for the joys in which you indulge yourself?”

Similarly, there are echoes of Sade’s celebrations of personal violence (as opposed to the state-sponsored variety) in National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre’s infamous response to the 2012 Sandy Hook school massacre. LaPierre suggested that the appropriate response to the epidemic of gun violence is increased gun ownership in a country already awash with firearms of every variety. One could easily imagine Sade also making the argument that the only rational or natural response to violence is additional and opposing violence—with the sole exception of the death penalty, which he opposed with all-encompassing passion.

Indeed, Sade’s deeply idiosyncratic views on the morality of personal violence are probably Exhibit A for why he cannot pass muster as any kind of guide for left-liberal cultural resistance. If we take his work at face value, he was not opposed to individual murders. He frequently had his characters argue that murder should not be punished by the state at all. Yet there probably has never been a more passionate opponent of capital punishment—the only form of premeditated homicide that normative “rational” thought typically considers potentially justifiable. This is Sade’s challenge to his readers in a nutshell: he specializes in justifying the conventionally unjustifiable while absolutely and passionately condemning what many would regard as, at least plausibly, defensible and rational.

There is, however, a much surer gauge of what might be called a vulgar Sadean legacy: the mainstreaming of American porn. Pornography is now so ubiquitous in contemporary American culture—so impossible to get away from—that the two things one may be assured of being offered in even the cheapest motel are pay-per-view porn on the television and a Gideon Bible in the bedside table, should you find yourself in sudden need of one form or the other of shameless mystification. I’m sure I’m not the only frequent traveler who has never availed himself of either of these kindly offerings, but they’re always there. One can’t help but imagine both Sade and Calvin bitterly grousing, in whatever mutually disappointing afterlife to which they’ve been jointly consigned, about how their intellectual legacies have been downgraded into all-but-interchangeable items of consumer convenience.

Can’t Touch This

There’s an especially bitter irony in Sade’s image as a cheap pornographer: he was not in any recognizable sense creating pornography at all—nor can he be neatly pigeonholed into any other literary tradition. Sade was an astonishingly prolific writer who produced an enormous oeuvre covering a huge variety of genres. Much of it is mediocre to the point of being unreadable, particularly his conventionally sentimental or comedic dramas and stories. There seems little doubt that without his notorious “libertine novels,” most notably Justine, Juliette, Philosophy in the Boudoir and, especially since its rediscovery in the early twentieth century, 120 Days of Sodom, Sade would have been quickly forgotten. Instead, these works, and a few others, have assured him of a profound—albeit highly contested and unstable—artistic and intellectual influence.

Because of the centrality of his erotic novels to his legacy, later critics have often caricatured Sade as not only a pornographer, but as the arch-pornographer, representing either the worst or the best of the genre. But this is deeply misleading. Insofar as pornography is a commodity of mass-marketed and stylized representations of sexual practices, Sade is better seen as an anti-pornographer. His work is unquestionably obscene, and transgressive in the extreme, but its impact is neither conventionally pornographic nor erotic. Although much of his fiction bears a great deal of similarity to the Gothic novel genre (of which he was a noted and serious critic), his best work, in the “libertine” series of fiction, is sui generis. It doesn’t correspond or submit to the stylistic or thematic patterns established by any previous writer—nor has it been successfully reproduced by any successor. Though stultifyingly repetitive in themselves, Sade’s most provocative works are simply not containable or assimilable by others. They subvert themselves in an infinite loop of contradiction, contortion, and, in many ways, ultimate incomprehensibility.

To see how completely Sade fails to permit even highbrow visual interpretations of his work, one need look no further than Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 film Salò, a loose adaptation of 120 Days. As any patient reader soon discovers, Sade’s project is an exercise in stretching, in certain very limited directions, language and imagination (and repetition) beyond all conceivable boundaries. His images of unimaginable, and physiologically impossible, cruelty, indulgence, and excess belong entirely to the medium of the wordsmith. Any graphic representation transforms Sade’s literary surplus into heavy, grounded imagery, unmoored from the fantastical lightness of prose. It inevitably literalizes, contains, and forestalls Sade’s overflow of deranged fantasies and rhetorical overkill.

In Salò, we see Sade’s scenes staged with graphically represented bodies—a process that makes the horrible more horrible, but also much more mundane, and empties Sade’s grotesque fantasies of all their dark humor. Salò tries very hard to be funny, but it just can’t. By contrast, no matter how horrible the images described by Sade’s unnamed narrator in the first part of 120 Days, he rarely fails to amuse. In his effete verbosity, one can almost smell the powdered wig, see the over-rouged cheeks, and feel the faint, exasperated swishing of the handkerchief before the face of the world-weary, jaded, and supremely haughty late eighteenth-century aristocratic storyteller (yet another of Sade’s outlandish fictional characters).

Because Sade can’t be successfully reproduced, he can’t be mass-marketed. Beyond simply being pornographic, erotic words and images require the fetishism of branding to become viable commodities. This means there must be a recognized set of styles of pornography—or of any commercial genre, for that matter—that are easily reproducible and that will at least promise the consumer some foreknowledge of the product in question. To be successfully mass-marketed, porn is best watered down or sprinkled into other well-established genres of fetishism, especially what’s now called romantic fiction. Fifty Shades of Grey, for example, boils down to an execrably written version of “Cinderella” for our time—a familiar and reassuring fairy tale, albeit larded with a supposedly edgy brand of erotica.

Porn is particularly prone to sub-generic classification, for the simple reason that it’s intended to reproduce a given set of symbolic fantasies, some of which are already psychically or socially fetishized before they become commodified. Hence pornographic novels or videos within a given subgenre are not merely allowed to repeat, in effect, the same book or film over and over again; instead they must be quite monotonously re-created. Endless, precise, and meticulous reproduction is required by the audience. This is, to some extent, true of any genre of popular fiction, but porn’s commercial impulse to be innovative is even more deeply suppressed than it is in other highly repetitive genres such as action thrillers or romantic comedies. And even the silliest, most repetitive genre can, under the right circumstances, open up the possibility for real subversion of its central tropes and motifs.

Porn, of whatever variety, seems to foreclose that prospect. It is designed to meet an audience’s expectations and satisfy its fantasies, certainly not to complicate them or subject them to critical examination. These fantasies are not meant to have any broader personal, social, or political significance, and their pornographic representations must never imply that they do. They are presented and used as if they really were merely ends in themselves.

In this context, it’s painfully evident that pornography that subverts or implicitly critiques the fantasies it reproduces—the sort of sexual writing, in other words, that Sade specialized in, to the ruthless exclusion of anything resembling standard-issue titillation—will fail in its overt mission by provoking reflection rather than arousal. This would have a self-defeating effect similar to that of an insomniac trying to remedy his or her condition by assiduously taking notes on the experience while trying to fall asleep. It’s difficult to imagine anyone, then or now, reading Sade and experiencing profound sexual excitement. A plethora of other affects are infinitely more plausible: fascination, boredom, amazement, amusement, disgust, horror, frustration, anger, admiration, or indifference are all more readily produced by his baroque narratives and verbose prose style than erotic arousal.

This effect turns up on nearly every page of the libertine novels. If we avoid the more ghastly passages—which, believe me, is not easy—we can see how deliberately counter-erotic Sade’s thought is by simply pointing to his persistent predilection for the foul, as exemplified by this passage from 120 Days: “Beauty, health never strike one save in a simple way; ugliness, degradation deal a far stouter blow, the commotion they create is much stronger, the resultant agitation must hence be more lively. . . . [A]n immense crowd of people prefer to take their pleasure with an aged, ugly, and even stinking crone and will refuse a fresh and pretty girl.” The description of the crone Fanchon that follows makes the point even more vividly. And the murder of Augustine in Part the Fourth is virtually unreadable, and unsurpassed in its unmitigated horror.

Sade not only invites the reader to reflect on the nature and origins of the sexual acts, deviations, and perversions that he so exhaustively catalogues, he demands it. And he insists that they have profound philosophical and political implications. Commercial porn, since at least the late nineteenth century, has been based on the most straightforward possible commodity fetishism, and is not only intended, but fully expected, to mask the power relations it represents. By contrast, Sade’s best work coldly and unflinchingly lays bare those relations—but only for sustained consideration, not in any neatly programmatic prescriptive or political schema.

Far from presenting any actionable or even coherent model for liberation, Sade’s work resists the reader’s effort to draw any stable conclusion at all. For good or ill, Sade cannot be appropriated politically, or even philosophically, because of the internal inconsistencies, incongruities, and contradictions that make up the core of his thinking and writing. He raises an infinite loop of questions, but neither offers nor allows any answers.

The Cunning of Unreason

If we cannot view Sade as an apostle of political deliverance or personal liberation, he nevertheless was far ahead of his time, in subject matter if nothing else. His writings anticipate a huge cross-section of twentieth-century Western art, scholarship, and politics. Indeed, we could reasonably posit that his work laid the cornerstone for the entire anti-humanist project. Surely Sade’s most important contribution, at its high point, lay in dragging Enlightenment reason to absurdist logical conclusions, spelling out the method of its implosion, and anticipating the backlash against it that culminated in the sixties and seventies. What he bequeathed us was nothing less than a slow-growing but highly malignant, if not terminal, cancer buried deep in the corpus of Enlightenment rationalism.

It’s impossible to know whether Sade—who was almost certainly mentally ill for much of his life, if not for all of it—deliberately sabotaged the Enlightenment by ruthlessly parodying it or really held the philosophical and political convictions his characters voice ad nauseam. They appear to champion reason, based on quasi-philosophical sophistry, but their arguments seem deeply arbitrary and profoundly irrational. Whether Sade intended to create a systematic satire of the philosophies of Rousseau and Kant or sought simply to take the logic of the laws of nature and the categorical imperative to their unsustainable conclusions in a mad trajectory of narcissism and self-gratification, his writings delved one yard below the mines of the Enlightenment’s humanist conceits, even though his own ordnance exploded more than a century later.

All of Sade’s major works pursue—and, indeed, relentlessly repeat—his anti-Enlightenment arguments. But he airs them most compellingly in the demented and appalling, but also absurd and hilarious, introduction to 120 Days, and, above all, in the claims made by its leading character, the Duc de Blangis. They are further elaborated in a lengthy polemical pamphlet, “Yet Another Effort, Frenchmen, If You Would Become Republicans,” that Sade shoves incongruously into the middle of Philosophy in the Boudoir by simply having its leading character, Dolmancé, read it aloud to the other characters. The pamphlet, he tells them, argues that “murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State.”

Insofar as they can be coherently summarized, Sade’s monstrous antiheroes’ ideas—constantly restated—are of a piece with such horrific broadsides. If one laid them side by side, their message would amount to this: individual liberty and autonomy are absolute; anything that interferes with the use of an object (including another human being) to satisfy one’s caprices, whatever they might be, is immoral; human impulses of all kinds, including theft, rape, and murder are the dictates of “nature,” and hence no law should forbid them; private property is an intolerable evil as it deprives others of that property’s use, thwarting their “natural inclinations”; religions, especially Christianity, are monstrous evils designed to justify the repression of individuals’ “natural rights”; atheism of the most iconoclastic variety is, therefore, the only defensible religious attitude; and the accumulation of power by elites should be constantly and violently resisted by bloodthirsty and “immoral” citizens eager to defend their individual prerogatives by smashing any social or political institution that might restrain them.

This logic explains Sade’s apparent defense of murder but passionate opposition to the death penalty. Individual murders are “natural,” because the blood-thirsty impulses behind them arise spontaneously from organic being. Therefore, it is tyranny to punish them. The state, however, is an artificial and inorganic structure that has no vital being in nature—and it therefore has no right to take a life, even under the most extreme circumstances. It is natural for individuals to objectify each other for whatever purpose, but it is intolerable for the state or any inorganic institution to do so. In short, Sade created a reductio ad absurdum of Enlightenment rationality that—as the limitations of reason became increasingly apparent toward the end of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth—became increasingly powerful.

It is, of course, extremely difficult to know to what extent Sade agreed with these precepts, though he goes to great lengths to encourage readers to assume that he does. In Philosophy in the Boudoir, some characters accuse Dolmancé of being the secret author of “Yet Another Effort,” a sly suggestion that identifies the author with the character, and both with the pamphlet’s arguments. In 120 Days, Sade uses similar feints with Blangis, who is often cast as an ironic self-portrait of the author. The novel even makes reference to “the brave Marquis de S*** who, when informed of the magistrates’ decision to burn him in effigy, pulled his prick from his breeches and exclaimed: ‘God be fucked, it has taken them years to do it, but it’s achieved at last; covered with opprobrium and infamy, am I? Oh, leave me, for I’ve got absolutely to discharge’; and he did so in less time than it takes to tell.”

Such self-distancing irony again raises the question of authorial intent: How seriously did Sade mean to be taken? Even if he was mad and dangerous, Sade was certainly no hypocrite. He paid for his chosen way of life, and dearly. Sade proved utterly unable to live in accordance with any of the social or political systems of his times. He was jailed under the ancien régime for eleven years, ten of them in the Bastille, for various forms of libertinage and criminal abuse. He was released after the Revolution and became a member of the extreme Left, but was imprisoned and sentenced to death by the Jacobins. After the Reign of Terror, he was again released, only to be ordered arrested in 1801 by Napoleon for his “immoral writings”; declared insane, he was held at the Charenton asylum for the remainder of his life. Sade spent at least twenty-six of his seventy-four years in incarceration of one kind or another. That he sacrificed such an exceptionally large swathe of his adult life to confinement by the state strongly suggests that although much of Sade’s work is based on a dark and twisted humor, he wasn’t simply kidding.

Likewise, even if we view him in earnest, doesn’t Sade simply end up reinforcing the kinds of cultural authority that he professes to attack head on? Don’t his arguments remain trapped in a binary from which he cannot escape—in which vice, in order to be praised, must remain clearly identified as vice and opposed to virtue? How can one transgress without acknowledging the moral authority of the forces that one is transgressing against? Don’t his extensive arguments in favor of blasphemy all, in effect, come full circle to make him, de facto, a defender of the spiritual legitimacy of the Church? Blasphemy requires some acknowledgment that what is being profaned is, at some level, actually sacred. Many of his fictional outrages, for instance, involve the abuse of a consecrated host. To everyone but the faithful, this “host” would appear to be some sort of damp wafer, the sexual use of which would be odd but inconsequential and hardly scandalous.

Sade must have seen this tension himself, since it appears in his novels time and again. After a lengthy diatribe in which Blangis defends theft and other crimes, Sade’s narrator in 120 Days dryly observes, “It was by means of arguments in this kind the Duc used to justify his transgressions, and as he was a man of greatest possible wit, his arguments had a decisive ring.” Sade’s antiheroes are often described in his narratives—sometimes even by themselves—as “criminal,” “sick,” “depraved,” and other adjectives obviously designed to appall the reader, but that are incompatible with any sincere philosophical defense. Are they good because they are evil? Or does that make them, in the end, simply “evil” after all? Or are they beyond good and evil—in which case, why the remorseless cat-and-mouse game with readers over his antiheroes’ moral nature and their endless depravities and crimes?

This is precisely the kind of systematic self-subversion that makes Sade so slippery, difficult to systematize, and impossible to appropriate. Such incoherencies and contradictions in Sade’s work have led a number of scholars, including Laurence Bongie, the prominent historian of Counter-Enlightenment thought, to deny almost any value in his libertine fiction (although Bongie does highly praise his famed prison letters). But the temptation to dismiss Sade’s work, whatever its merits as literature, has to be tempered by a realistic assessment of the profound influence it has exerted on the Western world over the past century and a half.

Choosing Sades

Critical elements of Nietzsche’s attack on Enlightenment “reason” appear to be rooted in Sade, although scholarly opinion is divided over how direct this influence may have been. The imprint of Sadean precepts can be seen clearly in Nietzsche’s 1887 On the Genealogy of Morals and, above all, in his bitter denunciations of Christianity, which seem to mimic in both substance and language those of Sade’s antiheroes. And Nietzsche obviously originated almost all of Ayn Rand’s ideas, though she pompously claimed to have been influenced only by Aristotle. Rand essentially popularized a distorted version of Nietzsche and therefore some elements of Sade’s legacy. She notably claimed to have been the most implacable philosophical enemy of Kant, a title that surely belongs to Sade and not Nietzsche, let alone Rand.

Ironically, while Sade, Nietzsche, and Rand all champion the primacy of the individual will, Sade’s antipathy toward all forms of private property could not have been more absolute. Sade’s contempt for property and the rationalist philosophical system derived from its defense indeed places him well to the left of the Jacobins and most other French revolutionaries. For Sade, property is the essence of despotism. Conversely, Rand and her present-day followers on the American right (along with many others) cast private property as the essence of liberty.

Like so much else having to do with Sade, his historical descent into present-day influence doesn’t follow anything resembling a straight line. Sade is so subversive that all efforts to directly appropriate him politically have been entirely restricted to the Left, usually as a vehicle for attacking the Right.

Scholars began to systematically rediscover Sade’s work, after decades of censorship and obscurity, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This recovery took place in two related contexts. The first was the growth of interest in the full range of human sexual behavior, most notably through the work of Richard von Krafft-Ebing. His 1886 Psychopathia Sexualis popularized the term sadism (derived from Sade’s own name, of course). Soon thereafter, Freud famously began excavating the psychic origins of sexuality, often drawing on the same primal fantasies that inform the Sadean landscape. Here, modern interpreters have cast Sade’s writings, particularly 120 Days of Sodom, with its obsessive lists of and commentaries on paraphilia, as precursors to both Krafft-Ebing’s documentation of human sexual behavior and Freud’s investigations into its deeper psychological origins. Sade’s novels are also rightly regarded as neurotic symptoms, par excellence, in and of themselves.

Freud’s work exerted a strong ideological influence on the early twentieth century Left, which viewed his brand of psychoanalysis as fundamentally subversive of the dominant bourgeois social order (though Freud made it amply clear that his system offered little hope for a more democratic alternative). But Freud’s ideas also informed the strategies of corporate mass culture and advertising—particularly through their practical application in propaganda pioneered by his American nephew, Edward Bernays, the founder of the new twentieth-century discipline of public relations—as well as those of the fascist Right. With “mass society” increasingly subject to manipulation at the unconscious level, often through highly sexualized imagery, Sade—with his “eroticized” fantasies of harsh punishment and arbitrary, rigorous discipline—was to some degree rehabilitated as a writer who channeled a crucial subconscious dynamic. Sade eventually became identified in a good deal of psychoanalytic thought as the voice of the shadowy “obscene superego” that regulates the libidinal economy by prompting and structuring enjoyment while simultaneously enforcing the “law” that prohibits it.

Likewise, various artistic and intellectual movements, especially the Surrealists, rediscovered Sade’s shortcuts to the unconscious—and embraced them. Existentialist, structuralist, and poststructuralist critiques that expand on the anti-humanism pioneered by Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals all have roots in elements of Sade’s writings. Sartre and Camus, and even Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Dostoevsky, all expanded on themes originating in Sade—wittingly or unwittingly. In her 1955 essay “Must We Burn Sade?” Simone de Beauvoir wrestled with the fact that, in spite of existentialism’s obvious debt to Sade, as a feminist she found his writings deeply troubling. Somewhat grudgingly, Beauvoir concludes that Sade was indeed engaged in an existentialist project avant la lettre, and takes him seriously as a moralist, but ultimately she condemns his ethics and artistic values. The anti-humanist agenda, arguably initiated by Sade, culminated in French poststructuralism, and above all in the work of Michel Foucault (who reveled in homosexual sadomasochism in his personal life).

The Left has been drawn to Sade’s attack on Enlightenment reason from two perspectives. The first values Sade’s anticipation of the logic of various contemporary evils, including fascism and Nazism, Stalinism, or corporate-driven mass consumer culture. In their influential 1944 study of the limitations of the rationalist tradition in capitalist economies, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno were probably the first to draw a direct link between Kant and Sade. Sade and Nietzsche, they wrote, “both took science at its word,” and pursued “the implications of reason still more resolutely than the positivists.” Moreover, they added, “because they did not hush up the impossibility of deriving from reason a fundamental argument against murder, but proclaimed it from the rooftops,” they are “still vilified, above all by progressive thinkers.”

Horkheimer and Adorno argue that Kantian rationalism, taken to its logical conclusion, lends itself perfectly to totalitarian systems. They further note that Sade’s arbitrary but rigorous and ruthlessly imposed sadomasochistic orders prefigured the elaborate mechanisms of repression that flourished under totalitarianism, which (much like their Sadean predecessors) vacillate between utopian and dystopian impulses. They hold that Sade’s anti-heroine Juliette already explains and enacts the ruthless but logical consequences of a purely rational categorical imperative when such ideas are placed in the wrong hands. Horkheimer and Adorno see Sade’s protagonists as callous automatons of alienated, but rational, Kantian orders, as well-developed proto-fascists—or, indeed, as modern bureaucratic functionaries of any ideological persuasion.

A similar argument by the structuralist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan holds that Sade, in effect, “completes” Kant by monstrously closing the circle left gaping by the open-ended categorical imperative. Moreover, Lacan identified the categorical imperative as simply another term for the superego itself. Ever the surrealist of theory, Lacan argues that Sade can be presented as if he were Kant. If Sade’s arbitrary but rigorously enforced imaginary social systems are a parody of law, Sade himself can therefore be cast as a parody of Kant.

A different, though happily much less influential, strand of left-wing thought has identified in “Sadean” violence, if not a liberatory potential as such, at least a necessary revolutionary impulse. In 1930, Georges Bataille cited Sade as the exemplar of the “ecstasy and frenzy” that characterize “the urges that today require worldwide society’s fiery and bloody Revolution.” Michel Foucault, greatly influenced by Bataille, seemed to see in the 1978-79 Iranian revolution an eruption of the kind of spontaneous revolutionary violence envisioned by Sade in “Yet Another Effort,” and defended in the name of virtuous “immorality.” Sade appears to be arguing through Dolmancé that “insurrection . . . indispensable to a political system of perfect happiness . . . has got to be a republic’s permanent condition,” and that “the state of an immoral man is one of perpetual unrest that pushes into, and identifies him with, the necessary insurrection in which the republican must always keep the government.” Foucault’s woeful misreading of revolutionary violence in Iran as exemplifying these “virtues” has done lasting and significant harm to his reputation.

Assume the Position

While Sade cannot be successfully appropriated, let alone commercialized, he has slowly but surely managed to get his tentacles so deeply into our narcissistic, self- and other-devouring culture that traces of his influence are almost ubiquitous. These Sadean echoes are hardly restricted to—and probably not even mainly to be found in—commercial pornography. By linking Enlightenment and mythology at the hip in their pioneering and still relevant critique, Horkheimer and Adorno identified traces of Sade’s obscene, highly regimented social orders not just in the horrors of fascism and Stalinism, but also in the more mundane tyranny of industrialized mass culture. They repositioned for us the ongoing conundrum, apparently inherent to modernity, that people demand their own subjugation at least as much as they yearn for their own empowerment. And they found, at the core of this problem, Sade and Nietzsche’s critiques of reason.

The heavy tension between egalitarianism and egoism is common to both Sade’s thinking and contemporary American political culture. As Julie Hayes notes, after the French Revolution, Sade “was prey to conflicting notions of society, government, and class structure. He hated the abuse of power, particularly as it applied to him, but his sense of class consciousness was stronger than ever.” In a letter to his attorney at the end of 1791, he confronted the “mobility” of his perspectives, asking him, “What am I at present? Aristocrat or democrat? You tell me, if you please, lawyer, for I haven’t the slightest idea.” This irresolvable tension between radical egalitarianism and radical individualism in Sade is precisely what makes him and his work politically and philosophically “impossible.”

What could be a more resonant puzzle for the way we live now? Is anything, in this sense, more Sadean than self-negating Tea Party slogans such as “keep your dirty government hands off my Medicare?” Much of American culture is committed to egalitarianism, and demands and expects certain social and economic protections from government. But simultaneously, and often in the same breath, it venerates extreme wealth, individual privilege, and the prerogatives of the rich.

This dichotomy is driven, at least in part, by the classic American illusion of widespread social mobility and the idea that anyone can join our morally unrestrained power elite by hewing to the character-defining virtues of hard work, while also incongruously courting the favor of fortune. Meanwhile, a powerful strand of masochism in our political culture has pushed many toward the overtly avaricious and predatory, and indeed sadistic (though hardly Sadean), thought of Ayn Rand. Economic Darwinism is thus bizarrely repackaged as a corrective for corporate amorality—as well as the cure-all for absurd social injustices such as bailouts for financial institutions deemed “too big to fail.”

So to rephrase Sade’s quandary slightly, what are we, Americans, at present? Oligarchs or egalitarians? The normative response to the tension between individual rights, which protect the prerogatives of the powerful, and collective rights, which protect those of the general public, is that we seek to find a balance between the two. This is the consensus view of both the notional “center-right” and “center-left” in our punitive-minded political culture—and this may really be the only politically plausible or reasonable answer in this otherwise untenable standoff. But Sade, that shadowy doppelganger of the Enlightenment, still lurks in the dark corners and liminal spaces of our culture, whispering that reason often carries a very hefty price tag—and with ever more elaborate punishments to come.