NEW YORK — David Brooks’ latest column in the Sunday New York Times deserves a few thoughts from a colleague who has generally admired his work, but finds him now reflecting the troubling intellectual and ideological gap between the United States and the Arab world. One of the grave new threats that faces both these societies is the declining quality of public analysis and discussion of American-Middle Eastern relations, especially in the mainstream American media that has lived so cozily with the exercise of American military power in the Middle East in recent years.
I was particularly struck by this column because I read it on the last day of a two-week trip in the United States that allowed me to mix with a wide range of Middle East experts, scholars in various fields, and many other Americans. Everywhere, I encountered and sometimes engaged in a lively, healthy discussion on the deteriorating relations between various quarters of the United States and many people in the Arab-Islamic world. In all the discussions and encounters I had — including with many fine men and women at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, at the University of Chicago and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and in Philadelphia, Boston and New York City — the dominant tone was that American-Middle Eastern relations were in deep trouble and we needed to put our heads together to find a way out of the mess we had created.
I have had the exact same discussions with a variety or Arabs, Iranians, Israelis and Turks for many years, but for some reason this deeper reality of an ongoing quest for a rational problem-solving consensus rarely gets into the mainstream American media.
Brooks in his column wrote about his views after attending a weekend conference in Jordan that brought together Arab intellectuals and activists with leading American neo-conservatives. He concluded: “The events of the past three years have shifted their (the Arabs) diagnosis of where the cancer is — from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in AIPAC [American Israel Public Affairs Committee].”
He saw Arab elites becoming less introspective, and instead “blaming everything on the villainous Israeli network. And so we enter a more intractable phase in the conflict, which will not be a war over land or oil or even democratic institutions, but a war over narratives… Americans, meanwhile, will simply want to get out. After 9/11, George Bush called on the US to get deeply involved in the Middle East. But now, most Americans have given up on their ability to transform the Middle East and on Arab willingness to change… What we have is not a clash of civilizations, but a gap between civilizations, increasingly without common narratives, common goals or means of communication.”
I’ve spent my whole life between America and the Arab World, and I strongly disagree. While Arabs do blame Israel and the United States for many of their contemporary ills (and the European colonial powers, also, not to forget that older culprit), they have also spent much of the last quarter century criticizing their own elites and power structures, and trying to figure out how to make things better at home.
Our civilizations share many common goals, and can use numerous means of communications should they make the effort. My experience in traveling through these fine American and Arab civilizations for my entire life is that Arab and American people share predominantly common values and goals. However, they are plagued by the problem of entangled relations in the Arab-Israeli-American web, and all-around poor quality political leaderships that verge on the morally deficient and criminally negligent, in the United States, Israel and Arab capitals alike.
Seeing only the Arab criticisms of the United States and Israel while ignoring the rest of this cycle, and sidestepping the impact of US and Israeli policies in the Middle East, is both factually inaccurate and politically inflammatory. Our most useful job as newspaper columnists is not to lounge in the ideological fog that mediocre statesmen and angry citizenries generate, but rather to cut through it, to make way for more complete, honest communication.
Powerful leaders like George Bush, Dick Cheney and Condoleezza Rice choose to inhabit worlds in which Arabs-Muslims suffer terrible faults that must be rectified by the values-changing and swamp-draining actions of the noble American armed forces. Arab dictators, extremists, and terrorists respond with equal ferocity and intellectual dishonesty.
Those who have the opportunity to shape and enrich the public debate should describe, understand, and repudiate all such fanaticism, not just be irritated and perplexed by it. Abdicating this responsibility four years ago proved terribly costly to all of us. We should avoid repeating that shortcoming by making a more rigorous effort to understand and describe our world in all its integrity and complexity, no matter how perplexing things may appear on any one weekend.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.
Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 10 April 2007
Word Count: 812
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