BEIRUT — The difficulty of making progress on resolving internal political tensions in several Middle Eastern countries is directly linked to the parallel difficulty of making progress on resolving regional and global conflicts. We’ve seen all three levels — domestic, regional and international — stuck in stalemate these days in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq, despite intense diplomatic and political activity to try and find solutions.
The core problem is that the five most crucial points of contention have no immediate resolution in sight: Lebanon’s government and Hizbullah’s arms, Iraq’s domestic order, Palestinian political power-sharing, Syria’s fate in the wake of the upcoming UN commission or enquiry’s report on the murder of the late Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, and Iran’s nuclear industry.
These issues are all directly or indirectly linked to one another in some way, so we should not expect anything very different within individual countries in the region, unless some dramatic diplomatic initiative is launched. That could have happened this week, with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visit to the Middle East, but she obviously decided to take the low road and the grocer’s route to conflict resolution. Her main diplomatic achievement, from what we can see, has been to secure an imprecise and limited Israeli agreement to open the border point between Gaza and Israel more often. This is mainly designed to alleviate pressure on Palestinian exports of fruits and vegetables, which are a key part of the battered Gaza economy.
This is a useful move for tomato and olive growers, but hardly a serious step towards conflict resolution. Rice also pledged to support the security forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is locked in a bitter political struggle with the Hamas-led government that was elected earlier this year but was quickly boycotted and put under financial siege by the United States, Israel and Europe.
It’s hard to think of a more inappropriate path to moving things forward throughout the Middle East than the approach being applied this week by the United States, which remains the only possible external mediator or facilitator that can realistically move the parties towards agreement. By continuing to shun or actively oppose those populist forces in the Arab-Iranian world that clearly have significant or majority support among the public, the United States pursues a policy that is guaranteed to fail.
More than that, it will probably also make things much worse if the United States and others start funding and arming political, security and militia groups that are actively engaged in domestic ideological struggles. Many sensible but bewildered people do not see much difference between Iran supporting and arming Hizbullah in Lebanon and the United States supporting and arming the Fateh security forces in Palestine, as both recipient groups are engaged in militant political activity and deep contests over the identity of their societies.
Baby steps being attempted by the United States and others in the region are a sign of the inability or unwillingness to do much more than that. There is a collective bankruptcy to American, official Arab and Israeli political approaches these days that is stunning for what it tells us about the prevailing ruling elites. Not only have they largely failed to address the issues that matter to the people — sovereignty, security, economic well-being, a sense of dignity in day-to-day life — but they have also managed to spread the consequences of their collective incompetence to cover most of this region.
A generation ago, this region was plagued primarily by the Arab-Israeli conflict and its ramifications. Today, political disputes and the causes of chronic violence are much more diverse, and manifest themselves in greater suffering by ordinary people who are the target of either official oppression and armed forces or the deeds of criminal bombers. This is why today it is impossible to get any movement in Lebanon, for example, until the status of the Syrian ruling regime is resolved, or until the Iranian-Western nuclear issue is resolved. The Palestinian and Iraqi situations similarly will not improve while countries like Syria and Iran remain locked in ideological battle with the U.S.-led West. The Iranian-Western nuclear standoff would be easier to resolve if the situations in Iraq and Palestine were better, and American and Israeli attitudes to Iran and assorted Arab political forces were less hostile.
It is not fair or reasonable to put all the blame for this situation at the door of the Americans, because the criminal neglect and incompetent management that brought us to this point are also shared by Israeli, Arab, Iranian and other leaders. The United States, though, is the party with the greatest ability to break this pattern of stalemate and mediocrity if it wishes to do so. The signs continue to be that it is not interested in exploring a grand bargain that tries to simultaneously address the main conflicts in the area. So we will remain mired in the peculiar world of global powers with the ability to change history but that prefer to act with the vision of small town grocers, while the rest of the interested parties in the Middle East slowly sink in their self-made marginality and irrelevance.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 06 October 2006
Word Count: 858
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