In 1951, Columbia University’s Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) produced a series of assessments of Voice of America Broadcasts (VOA) in the Near and Middle East. These studies served as the baseline for Michael Lerner’s seminal book, The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East. Drawing on research at university and national archives, my paper examines the influence of the BASR reports on the development of modernization theory and its relationship to the U.S. national security establishment. I argue that Lerner's emphasis on mass media consumption offered an essentialized and derogatory view of Arab society during the early Cold War period. Modernization theory’s depiction of “traditional society,” I contend, was an ideational construct adopted by U.S. policy makers and academics as well as regional elites. I demonstrate how this construct was essential to furthering U.S. foreign policy goals in the Middle East as well as those of regional allies, who sought and received American technical expertise as well as foreign and military aid. I conclude that the works of Lerner and other modernization theorists continued to inform American foreign policy and the actions of the U.S. military in the region in the late and post-Cold War periods.

When the Baath party seized power in Iraq in February 1963, area experts in the U.S. State Department welcomed the development as a “net gain for our side.” The Baath’s 1963 coup unfolded during the height of modernization theory’s influence on American foreign policy. Drawing on the doctrines of modernization theory, the U.S. moved into a close alliance with the fledgling Baathist regime in Iraq. Despite robust political, economic, and military aid from the U.S., the Baath was unable to establish a stable government and was overthrown in November 1963. Five years later, the Baath party launched a second coup in Iraq. As the Baath party retook power, its leaders expected the U.S. to provide the same kind of assistance that it did in 1963. However, by 1968, the Baath party found the U.S. unwilling to accommodate its bid for power. What explains these differing responses to the Baath? In this paper, I argue that by 1968 the U.S. State Department had become disillusioned with the doctrines of modernization theory and was no longer interested in promoting economic development and gradual political reform in Iraq. Rather than managing process of political and economic change in Iraq, emphasis shifted to maintaining political order in the region. Rather than embracing Iraqi modernizers and steering their course in a direction compatible with US interests, the U.S. moved into an increasingly tight embrace with Iraq’s non-Arab rivals (Israel, Iran, and Kurdish nationalists) who sought to disrupt, destabilize, and otherwise suppress the Baath and its modernization efforts. This paper analyzes a reorganization of the State Department over the course of the 1960s to bring the institution in line with these new political priorities. It shows how the cadre of Arabists that that helped to devise and implement U.S. policies in Iraq and the region more generally were pushed aside in favor of new officials fully committed to a Manichean vision of the Cold War world in which Israel and Iran were friends, while Iraq was an enemy.

This paper contributes to the panel’s effort to trace the influence of Modernization Theory on US policy in the Middle East by focusing on the afterlife of its ideas and the mythmaking endemic in their deployment. I argue these ideas have been sustained more by America’s self-image and the nature of its contradictory interests in the Arab world than by observed changes in or better understandings of the region offered by these theories. In the 1950s and 1960s, most policymakers and academics influenced by Modernization Theory thought that America’s interests could be served by a long term commitment to promoting socio-economic change and modernization. At the time, the US had a limited military posture in the region and few critical strategic commitments allowing it to consider the logic of tradeoffs between short- and long- term interests and between accommodating and confronting regional states and rising social forces like Arab nationalism. This logic could justify policies promoting modernization, which might threaten pro-US conservative regimes in the short term or call for giving aid to modernizing nationalist leaders not tied to the US-camp. By the 1970’s, however, as the Arab-Israeli conflict, stability in oil states, the Palestinian national movement, and fear of Soviet in-roads became more pressing short-term concerns, US strategy began to rely more on the deployment of military force, strategic ties to Israel, and the backing of repressive regimes which could suppress rising social forces. In other words, US policy makers no longer could afford to consider the “long term” of Modernization Theory. In tracing the decline of modernization approaches after 1970, this paper notes how the discourse of modernization could still be used to recast repressive authoritarian and military-led regimes as modernizing or enlighten autocrats who balanced change with stability. The discourse of modernization, now detached from the discredited corpus of Modernization Theory, was easy to recast along a new logic in part because Modernization Theory, with its linear model of change, was always predicated on a refusal to recognize the autonomous agency of modernizing subjects. The paper concludes by noting how in the wake of 9/11, many American policy makers recognized the limits of US regional strategy and rediscovered the long term. They developed “neo-modernization” approaches suggesting that US interests in the long term could only be sustained by promoting the transformation of culture, economic, political institutions of the region.

On the eve of his country’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, Prime Minister Menachem Begin told his Cabinet: “Israel will not allow genocide to happen.” Elaborating to the US Ambassador at the time, Begin insisted “under no circumstances will Israel allow the Christians of Lebanon in the 80s to become the Jews of Europe in the 40s.” During the invasion itself, US Ambassador to the UN Jeanne Kirkpatrick tried to convince President Ronald Reagan and the National Security Council that “the Israeli victory in Lebanon represented the greatest strategic turnaround in the West since the fall of Vietnam.” Drawing on recently declassified material from Israeli and American archives, as well as interviews with policymakers from both countries who were involved in the war, my paper examines the ideological context and the political impact of the US-Israeli strategic relationship in fomenting and sustaining the 1982 war. I argue that the rhetoric of humanitarian intervention in Israel combined with a reassertion of Cold War geopolitics in the Reagan White House to draw both countries into the midst of the Lebanese civil war. My paper demonstrates how the silences around the invasion in Israeli, American and Lebanese scholarship have served to obscure its central role in Middle Eastern and international history as well as the continuities that inhere in more recent regional interventions.

Security Sector Reform (SSR) has assumed increasing importance as Western donor states have come to view it as critical for mediating the transition from war to peace in post-conflict states, and thus as a key part of state-building. SSR has also become the cornerstone of the Oslo-declared state-building project in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). Supported financially and politically by the EU and the US, SSR has influenced the content of international programmes for development assistance, security cooperation and democracy promotion. However, its operational success has been limited and thus far analysis has largely focused on the discrepancy between concept and implementation, to improve the operational capability of SSR programs. Although current discourse on SSR acknowledges its political dimension, it has ignored its implications. This paper aims to address this issue, and place SSR in the context of the growing body of “international expertise” used to justify and direct the highly intrusive intervention in and regulation of non-Western societies by the Great Powers. Contrary to the way it is commonly perceived, SSR is not a politically benign model. The utilisation of concepts that appear politically neutral in the official rhetoric of SSR like security, human rights and good governance strip it of historical and political content and serve to legitimise the practice of power in contemporary international relations by making the exercise of that power appear as empowering rather than domineering. The oPt provides an apt case study, as the state-building project there has become synonymous with SSR. In contrast to more conventional cases where sovereignty clouds the power dynamics behind the intervention, the oPt is an extreme example of SSR. However, it is precisely because the oPt is such an extreme example of SSR, given the absence of sovereignty, it lays bare the underlying discourse of power, on the micro level of Israeli colonialism and on the macro level of the interaction between centre and periphery. This paper will scrutinize current SSR discourse and the conceptual apparatus from which it draws its substance and legitimacy. It will examine the conceptual parameters of SSR in the oPt, its implementation and the paradoxes it has created, which diverges substantially from conventional understandings of security and statehood. SSR is therefore illustrative of the dissimulation in the discourse of power and its articulation.