On September 19th of this fall semester, I got to hear acclaimed writer and Middle Eastern policy expert Ken Pollack speak at a lecture entitled “The Middle East: How It Got so Bad and What To Do About It”. As a senior at UT Austin majoring in Arabic, experienced in a wide range of Arabic research from Sharia law to radicalization, I was skeptical. After the talk had finished, as a senior at UT Austin majoring in Arabic, experienced in a wide range of research, it turned out, I was right to be skeptical. To start off with, his lecture, including the title, was far too broad. It can be very damaging to cohesive discourse around polarized topics to speak on the Middle East as a whole. It causes people to categorize the Middle East even more so in their minds as a completely homogenous society, culture, religion, and ethnicity. It is impossible to have an actual productive dialogue when two or more people are discussing such a broad topic, because one statement that might be true for one part is not true for the other, and this almost certainly leads to confusion and polarization.
Although I have to give Pollack credit where credit is due. He managed to polarize me from the discussion within one minute of his lecture when he sarcastically criticized the over emphasization of the Sykes-Picot Agreements affect on the Middle East. The majority of Middle Eastern scholars focus intently on how the drawing of new and artificial borders under Sykes-Picot after WWII left the Middle East and North Africa fractured, incongruent, and impaired. Even though some scholars do not focus on it with high regard, almost all acknowledge its damaging effects. What was also extremely off-putting, was to have a man who is not from the Middle East or North Africa, claim that such a thing as Sykes-Picot and colonization in general, had little effect on the Middle East. If he had bothered to back up this point with trusted data of interviews from many different regions in the Middle East and North Africa, that would have made it slightly better. However, Pollack still would be missing a fundamental point. Deep understanding of different regions of the world is not just about looking at economic trends in the area and then claiming something did not affect that region, it is about understanding how people of that region view it.
Regardless whether Sykes Picot affected the MENA region economically, it will always affect the area culturally because of how people have internalized and experienced colonialism. To top it off, he justified his position on Sykes-Picot by citing himself and two other scholars (not from MENA as well) drawing borders themselves for an exercise with Vanity Fair.
Pollack’s apathy towards people’s experiences and perspectives on their history in their homeland was extremely ill founded, to say the least. He continuously put topics in terms of US interest, never considering humanitarian reasons, which is not in itself damaging but does not paint an accurate and complete picture of the topics he was referring to. When addressing the civil war in Syria, he clearly said the only interest that the US has in the country is containment and prevention of spillover. However, he failed to mention how the US refusing to aid the countless people who are dying or are in danger is perpetuating a horrible stigma of the US in the MENA region. In short, he paid almost no attention to MENA popular opinion. I did not know someone could speak about an area for an hour long without discussing that regions public opinion, but Pollack surpassed my expectations .
He concluded criticizing Trump’s simplistic attitude towards ISIS and Iran, saying “blowing ISIS to smithereens and handing Syria to Iran and Russia is not the answer”. Unfortunately, he did not get more specific from there. Although his conclusion mirrors numerous facebook comments, and his perspective on the MENA region excludes Middle Easterners and North Africans, I did learn that Vanity Fair is a well trusted academic journal.
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