Deconstructing the Discourse of the State

The former head of MI6 provides a masterclass

As regular readers will already know, I am very interested in the language of power. I have done a lot of reflection on my own time as a diplomat where the language we used was very particular and fetishised, where some terms were elevated and some all but prohibited. I wrote about this in my book, Independent Diplomat. Of course, you don’t need to be a post-structuralist to recognise that language defines reality and who chooses those terms, and controls what is regarded as acceptable terminology, is the one with the power.

So I was intrigued to see John Sawers write an article in the Financial Times about the Middle East crisis. John is a former diplomatic colleague of mine. We spoke quite a bit when I was at the UK Mission to the UN covering the Middle East and he was Counsellor (Political) at the British embassy in Washington. He was later to become the British permanent representative to the UN and head of MI6, Britain’s external intelligence service. If anyone is representative of the ‘state’, it is John. I haven’t seen him for a while, but he has always been nice to me (well, once he wasn’t) and I have a lot of respect for his professional abilities, even if we doubtless differ politically. So, here’s his article (NB if the FT catch me pasting the article, they will make me take it down, so get it while you can!). You will learn a lot, though not perhaps what the author intends.

Middle East’s power scales tip as Israel senses Iran’s weakness

In the past two weeks, Israel has used its huge military advantage, underpinned by AI-enhanced intelligence, to overwhelm Hizbollah. The organisation has lost its top leadership and many of the next generation. Its communications system has been destroyed, as have many of its rocket and missile launch sites. This comes after Hamas’s military capacity has been largely dismantled.

It feels like we are witnessing a substantial shift in the balance of power in the Middle East, in Israel’s favour and at Iran’s expense.

Since Hamas’s brutal October 7 assault a year ago, Iran has been loud on rhetoric but has done little of substance to protect the militias it helped build up. In his UN speech, President Masoud Pezeshkian put the priority on lifting sanctions — a goal diametrically opposed to getting involved on Hizbollah’s behalf. Iran’s vice-president for strategic affairs, Mohammad Javad Zarif, said recently that supporting the Palestinians didn’t mean going to war for them. Iran seems cowed, lacking the will and military capacity to respond and not prepared to risk instability at home as it enters an uncertain leadership transition.

Israel has smelled the weakness in Tehran and is driving home its advantage. No one should feel sorry for Hizbollah — for over 40 years, it has used violence to accumulate power in Lebanon. Those who live by the sword die by the sword.

How will Hizbollah respond now it has been brought to its knees? It still has the much-vaunted precision missiles which could strike at Israeli cities. Iran may be holding Hizbollah back as these were provided as a deterrent against an Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. We don’t know if Iran has a dual key over their use. But if Israel starts to destroy the missile arsenal then Hizbollah may face a “use it or lose it” moment.

Widespread Israeli civilian deaths would probably trigger a ground invasion by Israel, which some in Hizbollah might relish — a chance to even the scores in the hostile terrain Israeli forces would have to advance through. While cross border incursions have begun, Benjamin Netanyahu would probably prefer to avoid a full fledged invasion rather than marching his troops to Beirut’s southern suburbs and to the Bekaa Valley where Hizbollah’s most deadly missiles are probably located. A more limited advance to the Litani River is possible but would leave Israel half in and half out, with no exit strategy.

An alternative path for Hizbollah would be a resort to international terrorism. When well-organised regional groups lose their leadership, a more extreme and violent entity can take their place. Isis emerged after more sophisticated opposition groups in Iraq and Syria were dismantled. Killing seasoned political leaders like Hassan Nasrallah and Hamas’s Ismail Haniyeh is a gamble for Israel but one it seems ready for.

Tough military action against Iranian-backed militias dovetails neatly with Israel’s politics, which lean further and further to the right. Enduring stability for Israel will ultimately only come with a political solution in the region. But the same domestic dynamics that are driving Netanyahu to press home Israel’s advantage make a broader political settlement more distant. The best time to engage in a political process is when you are strong and your enemies are weak. But the make-up of Israel’s ruling coalition makes a political initiative with the divided and badly led Palestinians hard to conceive.

It is usually the Americans who try to midwife political progress in the region. But the Biden administration’s power — never very strong in the Middle East — is wilting. It takes months for a new administration to decide on its priorities, and the approaches of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris would be very different. Meanwhile, the Middle East will remain tense and volatile.

One actor we have heard little from in the past year is Syria. The Syrian regime used to be the arbiter in Lebanon and was willing to kill any Lebanese politician who didn’t bow to diktats from Damascus. The regime is now much weaker after the civil war and Bashar al-Assad is not a patch on his father when it comes to political power plays. But Syria remains relevant as an ally of Iran, Russia and Hizbollah, and a crucial link in Hizbollah’s supply chain.

Although Hizbollah helped the Assad regime survive in 2013-14, Damascus will want to stay aligned with Iran if it can. It also has bitter memories of the 1982 Lebanon war when the Syrian air force intervened only to be destroyed by Israel. With Iran and Syria focused on their own issues, only the distant Houthis seem up for attacking Israel, so far to little effect. This may be the start of the final chapter for the Axis of Resistance.

This article is very typical of the writing that you see in government. It reminded me of the sort of prose used, for instance, in a Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) report - the synthesis of all of Whitehall’s views about a particular issue, to which MI6 are major contributors. As you can see, at first sight it’s a very well-drafted analysis - succinct and clear. John now works for a consultancy so if you read this you might be inclined to hire that outfit, though I’m not claiming that was his purpose. And indeed, Derrida would tell us that his purpose in writing is not really relevant to understanding what the text means. Indeed, I’m not sure that John knows what the text really means, as we shall see.

What else is going on? The text is very much about geo-politics, that familiar discourse of what states do. The dominant descriptor is the name or capital of the state, Israel, Iran, Damascus etc. People’s names are mentioned but they tend to be subsidiary. All the individuals referred to are in any case leaders or part of leadership elites.

The article strongly implies that the author has some kind of superior knowledge that is inaccessible to the reader. Sawers for instance says of Hezbollah,

The organisation has lost its top leadership and many of the next generation. Its communications system has been destroyed, as have many of its rocket and missile launch sites.

How on earth does he know this? The implication is that Sawers has access to intelligence (in this case sensitive military intelligence) that we, the ignorant reader, do not. Maybe he does. But this is classic government talk. In government, you are encouraged to make big statements about the rest of the world without sourcing the claim: government presents itself as omniscient.

At the risk of being an Iraq War/WMD bore, I know all too well that this is a false presumption. Very often, government has no idea what is going on or simply regurgitates information it picks up from elsewhere, such as the press, but presents it as its own and thus authoritative version, sanctified by the aesthetics of the grave ministerial statement, intelligence report or diplomatic despatch. When I was a political officer in the British embassy in Kabul, ‘London’ once asked me about a Taliban attack in Jalalabad. I didn’t have a clue what was going on, so I wrote a telegram paraphrasing a BBC report I found on the web. Writ large in that benighted country, the circular community of diplomats, international organisations and the more gullible press repeated to each other the ‘narrative’ that the Taliban had been defeated and that ‘Afghans’ wanted democracy. We know how that ended.

Government’s alleged omniscience is one of its main claims to legitimacy. It knows things we do not and can thus be trusted with our security. You will almost never find hints of doubt or uncertainty in government statements, especially those in public. And so it is with Sawers’ article. In the final paragraph, he says that ‘Damascus will want to stay aligned with Iran’. Has he talked to Bashar al-Assad recently? My guess is not. So this statement is inevitably conjectural, but that’s not how it’s presented. This confidence is how authority is preserved.

There is a tone of hard-nosed ‘realism’ in the article. Sawers dismisses Hizbollah’s destruction thusly, ‘Those who live by the sword, die by the sword’ (that this axiom could equally be applied to Israel goes unmentioned.) Statements like this signal that the author is tough-minded with no time for sentiment. This too is redolent of the discourse of states. Officials in government take pride in taking the decisions the more wimpish - like the general public - cannot face. This plays into the rarely-noted claim that government does things for ‘our’ security so that we do not have to ourselves. Statecraft is a dirty business and someone has to take the tough decisions.

Similarly, you will notice a glaring absence in the whole article. There is not a single word about civilian casualties, whether in Gaza, Lebanon or indeed Israel. The only mention is the possibility of Israeli ‘casualties’, a typical euphemism for death. The actual deaths of Israelis or Arabs - forty thousand in Gaza alone, including eleven thousand children - are invisible. Actual civilian casualties in Lebanon, likewise not worthy of mention. If you read this article alone, you wouldn’t know anyone had died. In Sawers’ analysis, such death and suffering is not a factor to consider. But this too is typical of the security elites who run our countries. States come first, then security (measured usually in military terms), then, bottom of the list, real, bleeding humans. A particular sort of inhuman reality is being promoted here in the very phrases, words and blank spaces.

More obviously, Sawers very much represents the dominant US-British view of the ‘Middle East’ (Americans talk about ‘Europe’ in a similar way, as if its complexity can be analysed as a singular entity, and it is as offensive to Europeans as such Orientalist depictions of the ‘Middle East’). The giveaway phrase is, ‘It is usually the Americans who try to midwife political progress in the region’. My guess is the every single Palestinian, and indeed Arab, would react to this ludicrous statement with a hollow laugh. Even Israelis know perfectly well what this means - the opposite of what it says. The West’s self-serving view of itself as a neutral arbiter of course conceals the reality that it has consistently tacitly backed the occupier, in particular by doing nothing about the occupation.

Likewise, there is no attempt to look at root causes, presumably because this is too uncomfortable. The root cause of the current violence is Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territory. If there were a genuinely, independent Palestinian state born of a just settlement, Hezbollah, Iran, Houthis and others would have no justification to attack Israel. Maybe they would anyway, who knows? But for now we need to take them at their word, just as we should take the statements of Israeli leaders that they intend to occupy and annex Palestinian lands, including in Gaza, at face value.

Instead, revealingly, there is a sort of present-ism about Sawers’ analysis. It is ahistorical. No thought to the deeper patterns and reasons. This too is very ‘government’. When I worked on the Israel-Palestine ‘issue’ (I was head of the antiquarianly-named ‘Middle East Peace Process’ desk), we were not encouraged to read history. My predecessor in the job suggested I read the journalist Thomas Friedman’s ‘From Beirut to Jerusalem’ as my primer. We never referenced history in our analyses for ministers or those JIC briefs. I remember being shocked when told by an Israeli that ‘it was all Britain’s fault’.

Of course, this speaks to a broader and deliberate silence about Britain’s shameful colonial contribution to the present disaster. But it also allows past territorial acquisition by Israel to be ignored - note how rarely 1948 is referenced. The current position is presented as the only reality worth talking about. If history is mentioned at all, it’s talked about as a kind of unintelligible mess of competing religious and nationalist claims: who can make sense of it? (This by the way feeds the depiction, common in the press, of ‘all sides at fault’¹). This too speaks of a latent racist Orientalism, which interestingly is also here applied to the Israelis, though they are also typically described as superior - ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’. Only we, the rationalist West, can see what’s really going on.

To sum up, Sawers’ analysis is a highly-skilled presentation of known evidence (the speeches of Iranian leaders), purely conjectural knowledge (the motives of foreign leaders or the military capabilities of Hizbollah) and a cogent if implicit reiteration of the Western framing of 'the Middle East’. Yet at first sight it seems so convincing! This is exactly its purpose. It plays into traditional discourses of how we should talk about geopolitics and conflict - ahistorical, depersonalised and, literally, inhuman. The wooden chessboard of actors, beautifully picked apart. This is how governments talk to themselves about Gaza, Lebanon and regional war. Is it any wonder that impassive inaction is their reaction to the bloodshed?

As ever, I’d welcome your comments.

1. At a talk I attended the other day, one Western journalist complained that he had been assailed with criticism when commentating on the region. But, he said, the criticism was equal from ‘both sides’, implying to him that he must have ‘got it right’.