Thieves of State, by Sarah Chayes, is both brilliant and pathetic. In the end, it was disappointing, but perhaps still a worthwhile read.
Chayes spent years in Afghanistan and a good bit of time in Egypt, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, and other countries. Through her counter-insurgency experience at the highest levels of the military, she was able to analyze the root cause of religious extremism in Muslim countries, which she characterizes as kleptocratic governance. In a kleptocracy, the governing power systematically rips off the populace.
Chayes’ brilliance lies in the close parallel she draws between the reaction we’re seeing in the Muslim world to kleptocracies today and the Reformation, which she shows was in substantial part a reaction to the corruption associated with the Catholic Church and the monarchies that were connected to it.
In her final chapter, however, Chayes goes off the rails, and badly so. There, she offers her prescription for what the West and, particularly, the United States, should do to right the ship in the Muslim world. The underlying premise, or so it seemed, was that there is nothing fundamentally wrong with U.S. foreign policy. Rather, we just need to tweak the way we implement that policy in order to fight systemic corruption in the governments of the countries we control. You would expect something like this from someone with Chayes’ background – she was the advisor to Joint Chiefs Chair Mike Mullen – but it’s still laughable, and depressing.
Ultimately, it seems, Chayes received some blowback from her finale, which caused her to add an epilogue, in which she explains that the U.S. may indeed have some corruption problems of its own. Ya think? But Chayes still blinds herself to the reality that the corruption in foreign governments is not some independent force that happens to be facilitated inadvertently by the way we conduct our foreign policy. Rather, that corruption is part of the fabric of our foreign policy, and inextricably tied to our own corruption.
Despite the disappointing finish, Thieves of State has real value. Just stop reading when you get to the last chapter.
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”…that corruption is part of the fabric of our foreign policy, and inextricably tied to our own corruption.”
You make it sound as if we introduced corruption to the Middle East with our foreign policy. Corruption has a long and proud tradition in the Middle East that goes back as far as recorded history. It certainly predates the Muslim era. One of the reasons the Code of Hammurabi came into existence was an attempt to curtail corruption within the government of the time. When the Roman Empire – well known for its high levels of corruption – expanded into the east it learned what true corruption was. It formed the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium) that had a formalized system of bribery and corruption that was illegal and accepted all at the same time. When the Ottoman Empire took control of the region, corruption reached new heights.
All of these governments were “kleptocratic” in nature, taking vast sums of money from the population using taxes, property forfeitures and outright theft. Yet there was no uprising of extremist Islam in response. I suspect that was because there was strict adherence to the requirements of Islam.
That is why I think Sarah Chayes may have missed the point about modern radical Islam. Her contention that it is a revolt against “kleptocratic” government ignores the almost 1300 years of Islamic history. I think she is correct that the Muslim world is going through its particular form of Reformation. But unlike the Catholic Reformation, there is no centralized power base for Islam. There is no Papal Door for an Islamic Martin Luther to nail his demands for change upon. There is only Sectarian violence between the moderating forces of Islam and the forces who want to see a return to Sharia Law and the strictures of Islam. Blaming it on government corruption may be very satisfying, but it misses the truth by a mile.
I will be honest and tell you I have never read her book, nor do I think I will. I base everything I have written on what you provided in your synopsis. I could write much more on this, but I don’t want my post deleted because it is too long.
I’m not sure if the distinctions you’re trying to draw really go anywhere. The corruption can go on for a long time before the reaction occurs. Do you think Martin Luther came on the scene a month after the Catholic Church became corrupted? No, it took centuries of growing corruption for that to occur. Nobody knows when the fuse will be lit.
And it doesn’t matter whether we introduced the corruption. We knowingly entangled ourselves in it, and that’s all that matters. If you knew everything in you put in your comment, then didn’t the State Department and CIA know what they were getting into, and who they were choosing as bedfellows? When we took Mossadagh out in Iran in 1953 and installed the Shah, did we now know who we were aligning with?
Steve, there’s that old expression: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.” For more than half a century, that’s been at the heart of our policy. And the chickens are coming home to roost.
I agree entirely with Bob’s review. Thought the book was great until it neared the finish. Felt like Chayes started to run out of meaningful things to say. But, the book was interesting all the same.