Graham Allison on Taqiyya?

Harvard Professor Graham Allison is one of the better known political scientists in America. His classic text, “The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis” remains widely inflicted on graduate students and has sold over 350,000 copies. Allison later helped found Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and then served for several years in the Clinton Administration as an Assistant Secretary of Defense. A 1999 2nd edition of his Cuban Crisis text was written with Philip Zelikow – whose latest post is as Counselor to Secretary of State Rice.
Whatever his political loyalties, Allison is something other than “liberal” on his current presumed area of expertise – “nuclear terrorism.” Instead, he’s lately been making one of the more ultra-hawkish cases for “dealing with Iran.” Here’s his recent essay on the subject with Yale Global.
I emphasize the original link, because one significant alteration has sometimes been made in its subsequent re-prints around the world – namely whether one revealing sentence in the last paragraph about “taqiyya” gets included or not. More on that below.

I first heard about Allison article via As’ad Abukhalil’s boldly sardonic blog, “The Angry Arab.” As’ad links to a version of Allison’s essay published in Pakistan’s Daily Times paper.
I read about the article again when a Beirut Daily Star version of the essay appeared yesterday in a much esteemed closed forum that I have long been a member of – Gulf 2000. This Daily Star version especially caught my attention because the sentence on Taqiyya is no doubt consciously left out. It was likewise not mentioned in a recent interview with Allison, posted to the website of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations.
Allison’s headline claim: that the same CIA that overestimated Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction capability is now underestimating the same in Iran. He scorns the apparently unanimous US intelligence estimates (by 15 different US agencies) of Iran not having a nuclear weapon for 5-10 years as much too long. In his CFR interview, he specifically notes that the “Israelis have an estimate that says it’s about six months to a year away.” Allison conveniently doesn’t mention the heated internal Israeli controversy over such alarmist estimates.
To resolve the alleged dispute between the “without dissent” US intelligence estimates vs. the Israeli claims, Allison proposes a Cold-War style “Team B” approach — that is, to set up yet another group of analyst “skeptics” to re-evaluate the intelligence.
As readers who were awake back in 2002 will recognize, this “Team B” concept has a more recent and “dark” echo – namely, that of the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans. Therein, a core group of “outside” experts, “skeptical” neocon ideologues to the core, were brought in to challenge any CIA, DIA, INR, (etc.) estimates about Iraqi WMD capabilities or links to al-Qaeda as too timid. OSP’s methodwas hardly to provide a fresh, “independent” assessment of intelligence, but to “cherry pick” that best suited to support a pre-canned agenda for war with Iraq, sooner rather than later. Deja vu indeed.
Allison’s (mis)use of Taqiyya
What perplexes me the most about Allison’s original essay is not his stale notion to create an OSP focused on Iran, or his curious marshalling of alleged hidden puzzles, but his ending reference to Taqiyya – the very one sentence left out of some re-prints. According to Allison,

“Taqiyya” is an important concept in Shia Islam, which translated means “concealing or disguising one’s beliefs, convictions, ideas, feelings, opinions, or strategies at a time of eminent danger, whether now or later in time, to save oneself from physical or mental injury.” Some Islamic commentators call this “diplomacy.”

Allison, like so many other Iran-baiters in recent years, has apparently bought into the quasi-racist smear that Shia Muslims are, by creed, all liars. No wonder the Beirut Daily Star excised this outrageous sentence from its version — perhaps half of Lebanon’s current population is Shia…!
Its not that Taqiyya doesn’t exist; it does. For a brief overview, see here. Yet “prudential concealment” of one’s core beliefs is a lesser of two evils, counseled only in the extreme circumstance, not as a “way of life.” The concept of Taqiyya emerged in the context of the Shia struggle to survive persecution from the Sunni conqueror, thus permitting the idea of “dissimulating” to “conceal” one’s core faith.
The tactic is hardly unique in the history of world religions. How many a religious minority or dissenter (Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Buddhist, etc.) has had to face the choice between martyrdom (say, in a gas chamber or on a rack), severe discrimination, or forced conversion to the religion of the powers-that-were? If a rabbi, a priest, a swami, or a monk sanctioned the painful choice to convert, yet conceal one’s true faith, does that make him a closet Shia?
Of course not. But he (or she) could well recognize the concept of Taqiyya.
Then too, surely Allison has heard the classic saw among diplomatic historians (including our once venerated “Christian realists”) about how a “good diplomat is someone sent out to lie on behalf of his country.” (Ok, I never liked that line either.) And how often in this post-9/11 world do we hear of the necessity for our democratic governments to conceal, to lie if necessary, to “protect” us from the many new nefarious threats we “honest” westerners now face? Is Vice President Cheney saying that the intrepid reporters who revealed the latest scandal about America’s snooping into global bank accounts should have instead practiced “Taqiyya?”
Are we in Absurdistan yet?
As’ad Abukhalil, who is part Shia by family background, translates his angst about Allison’s invocation of Taqiyya into on-target satire:

Is Richard Nixon a Shi`ite…, because I remember him engaging in double and triple dissimulation during Watergate, or are Westerners genetically incapable of dissimulation? Wait, as a Shi`ite-born, does that… mean that I am dissimulating? What if I am dissimulating that I am dissimulating? And what if the last line was dissimulation? Or the last line now? That would confuse you all. And I can pretend to confuse you out of a genetic propensity to dissimulate?

By the way, wasn’t Nixon supposed to be a Quaker by background? If so, does that mean…? Nah, never mind. !
As Allison uses the term Taqiyya in his original essay, a raw, rather ugly meaning of his essay emerges in the closing: “In negotiating with Iran, the US and its allies should be wary of the conjurer’s trick: distracting the viewer with one hand while the other pulls a rabbit from a hat.”
In short, never mind the facts, never mind what Allison’s beloved “rational choice models” might dictate, he knows with the confidence of an evangelist, and “with nearly 100% certainty,” that Iran is concealing a much bigger covert nuclear program than that already being monitored. Where does this “belief” come from? He doesn’t really say, leaving us to presume its because those Taqiyya practicing Shia Iranians are somehow of a different species, one somehow uniquely pre-disposed to the dastardly deed of prevarication…. So therefore, whatever they say is likely to be not so — unless of course they mean to confuse us with a bit of truth-telling.
Perhaps Allison has been drinking too much neocon koolaid. Maybe Professor Allison might instead want to give an emeritus Harvard colleague – a genuine American scholar on Iran – a call for his counsel on the matter. Richard Frye, where are you when we need you?