In August 2005, Michael Doran, a highly regarded if controversial academic scholar on Middle Eastern politics, was appointed to the National Security Council as a senior director for Near East and North African Affairs, a post that, according to his White House biography, includes "all of the countries in the region except for Iraq." Doran replaced Elliott Abrams, one of the few core neoconservatives remaining in the Bush administration, who was promoted in February 2005 to the post of deputy assistant national security adviser.
Although an independent scholar whose previous jobs included stints as a professor at Princeton University and as a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Doran's appointment helped buttress the hardline faction in the administration, which in the National Security Council has been represented by Abrams, National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, and Hadley's deputy J.D. Crouch. Doran has supported administration arguments for widening intervention in the Middle East. According to investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, Doran and Abrams are among a coterie of Iran hawks in the administration who view U.S. attacks in Iran as having a potentially positive knock-on effect in Iraq. According to an unnamed Pentagon consultant interviewed by Hersh, the Iran hawks dismiss the argument that Iranian involvement in Iraq would jeopardize the lives of more U.S. servicemen, saying: "Yes, there will be Americans under attack, but they are under attack now" (The New Yorker, July 10, 2006).
Experts who have been supportive of President George W. Bush's war on terror championed Doran's appointment. Patrick Clawson, a vigorous proponent of military intervention in Iran who heads the neoconservative-aligned Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told the Daily Princetonian that Doran is "a careful scholar and he's been prepared to say things based on scholarship that make people in both parties uncomfortable. That actually garners you respect. It shows you have deep understanding of the subject and that you're prepared to share the truth even when it's unpleasant to those hearing it" (May 12, 2005).
Skeptics of Bush's foreign policy have also spoken approvingly of Doran, citing his academic achievements and innovative analyses of Middle Eastern issues. F. Gregory Gause, a scholar at Vermont University, told the Washington Post that Doran wrote "the best piece after 9/11," adding however that his "politics on the Middle East are pure neocon. He believes democracy has to come to the region and America should play a major role . He thinks Arab public expression for the Palestinians is really about anger at their own governments. I disagree" (November 17, 2005).
The piece Gause was referring to was "Somebody Else's Civil War," published in the January/February 2002 issue of Foreign Affairs. The piece, described in Doran's White House bio as "an influential article on Osama bin Laden," argued that "war with the United States was not a goal in and of itself but rather an instrument designed to help [bin Laden's] brand of extremist Islam survive and flourish among the believers." According to this theory, which runs counter to much of the administration and neoconservative rhetoric about "why they hate us," al-Qaida is much more interested in toppling governments allied with the United States than actually taking on the United States: "Americans, in short, have been drawn into somebody else's civil war." Reflecting the apparent influence of this argument, writes the Washington Post's Robin Wright, is Bush's second-term "emphasis on democracy as the salve to extremism" (Washington Post, November 17, 2005).
A slightly different argument could be made that Doran and his views represent an excellent foil for an administration that has been roiled by years of criticism because of its close association with controversial neoconservatives like Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz. Although many key neoconservative figures like Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith have left the administration, Doran promises to provide additional ammunition for continued U.S. intervention in the Middle East without the ideological baggage associated with the neoconservatives. An Irish Catholic from the Midwest who grew up in a staunchly pro-Republican Party family, Doran has never been associated with the now well-known neoconservative network of think tanks and pressure groups. Nor is Doran tainted by having a record of making misleading predictions about the impact of intervention in the region.
Though Doran's views on the Middle East contrast in important ways with those expressed by neoconservatives and foreign policy hawks, they have been broadly supportive of the administration's agenda in the region. For example, in the January/February 2003 Foreign Affairs, Doran struck a critical tone in arguing that the "there are many reasons why Washington should distance itself from misguided Israeli policies such as the building of settlements in the occupied territories," a position anathema to most neoconservatives. However, later in the article, he criticized observers who argued that the U.S. priority in the Middle East should be resolving the Israel-Palestinian conflict, not going after Saddam Hussein or al-Qaida. As "guarantor of the contemporary Middle Eastern order," wrote Doran, the United States "must indeed help address the festering wound of Arab-Israeli conflict, for so long as several million Arabs chafe under unwanted foreign rule the realities of Palestine-as-place will continue to help fuel the disruptive power of Palestine-as-symbol. But those who say that it should be tackled before or instead of Iraq and al-Qaida have their strategic priorities backward. The near enemies must be met first, both because the danger from them is more urgent and because countering them successfully will actually ease the drawn-out task of addressing the far enemies of occupation, tyranny, and social and economic malaise."
|
Affiliations
Council on Foreign Relations: Former Adjunct Senior Fellow
Princeton University: Former Professor of Near Eastern Studies
University of Central Florida: Former History Professor
Government Service
National Security Council: Director for Near East and North African Affairs
Education
Stanford: BA (1987)
Princeton: PhD (1997)
|
