NEW YORK— Never in my adult life have I ever experienced in the Middle East and the Western world anything like the prevailing disjunction today between the “Islamic State” (ISIS) threat that preoccupies all publics and governments, and the apparent inability of political systems to deal with it coherently. This is a problem everywhere, and I mean literally everywhere, in the world, making Arabs, Americans Europeans, Israelis, Russians, Iranians and all other concerned people equal partners in this astounding example of collective political and strategic transcontinental incompetence.

Take Friday’s New York Times front page as an example of both widespread concern and lack of progress on ISIS. It included: several news stories about the latest Islamist terror attack in Mali, the aftermath of the Paris attacks last week, and ISIS networks in Belgium; opinion columns about how to respond to ISIS threats; a story about Hillary Clinton’s strategy for dealing with ISIS; a story on Russia’s concerns about growing ISIS links in the Caucasus region; assorted items linked to American state governors’ debate about allowing or forbidding Syrian refugees from settling in their states; ideas from broadly bizarre Republican presidential contenders about Muslims having to register in the United States; an editorial about how to respond to ISIS, and other bits and pieces. And this is just the front page!

This disproportionate amount of attention to ISIS terror threats is typical of the American public realm that I have experienced in the last two months in the country. Several broad trends are evident in public reactions to ISIS attacks in several countries and expanding American military involvement in Syria-Iraq. A heartening one is that, unlike 2001, some wise, honest, and diligent American journalists and political analysts are responding to ISIS much more coherently and maturely than American society’s broadly incoherent and emotional response to Al-Qaeda. These remain in the minority, however, and in general the political system and public sphere — especially the cable television world dominated by low quality, sensationalism and quasi-racism from Fox and CNN — are defined mainly by a combination of five troubling sentiments: perplexity (“why are we in the West being attacked?”), ignorance (“who are these people and what do they want?”), arrogance (“only American leadership and military might can rid the world of this scourge”), militarism (“this is the war of our generation and our national destiny, and we must fight them hard over there before they come to the United States to destroy us”), and emotionalism (“we have to remain tough, reaffirm our values, stand our ground, defend freedom, load our rifles, protect our children, wake up every day and eat our Cheerios without giving in to their devilish intimidation, and God bless us because we’re the greatest country ever to exist on Earth”).

Each one of these attitudes is bad enough on its own, but in combination they are a catastrophe. Indeed, the American-led “global war on terror” response to Al-Qaeda since the late 1990s has been a continuing failure and catastrophe. Though the United States has been largely shielded from major terror attacks since 2001, the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, has become a hell-hole of escalating violence that is mostly beyond the control of sovereign states and therefore is almost impossible to stop. To enjoy military and financial support from the United States and oil-rich Arabs, most Arab states have shut-down any serious political or economic reforms, which has worsened life conditions for most citizens and therefore expanded and deepened the pool of willing recruits to groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda.

I must acknowledge, though, an important new streak among Americans from all quarters, from senior political leaders in Washington who once shaped the cloddish war on terror, and senior think tank and donor foundation officials, to professors, students, journalists and members of the public I have engaged in many discussions in recent months. This is a more humble and inquisitive attitude that asks questions such as: Are we in the United States doing the right thing in the Middle East? Do people over there want us to continue? What can others do better than we can? How can we respond beyond military attacks? Why do we have to go back and fight again after decades of fighting over there?

This reflects the best aspects of American culture, which asks why things are going badly, and why legitimate aims like fighting terrorism are not being achieved. This attitude is not reflected by Fox and CNN, or most public political figures, and certainly not the traveling circus that is the Republican presidential hopefuls. It is, however, the dominant strain of comments and questions I have encountered in my many engagements in the United States during the past two months, both in public and privately.

“What can and should the U.S. do more effectively to defeat ISIS?” everyone asks. Nobody I have talked to or read offers a fully convincing answer to this critical question. I do not claim to have the answer, either. But in my next column, based on my extensive discussions in the United States with thoughtful Americans and others, I will suggest some principles that we should apply in order to have a better chance of coming up with concrete answers and suggestions. That would require our working together across continents with humility, realism, courage and rationality, instead of the cartoon-world toolbox that the U.S.-led West and leading Arab states have used to drive us all like cattle to this moment when our Arab lands are drenched in blood, war, and refugees, and the world’s great newspapers’ front pages mirror corresponding spheres of death, fear and perplexity.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 November 2015
Word Count: 940
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BOSTON — The devastating terror bombs Thursday in a south Beirut high-density residential and commercial area, following the apparent bomb that brought down a Russian civilian airliner last month in Sinai, indicate heightened will and ability by the “Islamic State” (ISIS) to widen its terror war against foes near and far. At least four important dimensions of these latest developments are worth pondering.

The first is ISIS’ strategy of carrying out dramatic attacks outside its territory, even as it fights for its life in the lands it controls in northern Syria and Iraq. It alerts us that ISIS will try to expand and defend its territory, but also will strike further afield when necessary to hurt its adversaries.

Its capacity to control land for long periods of time is being seriously tested now in areas like Ramadi in Iraq, and Sinjar and Aleppo in Syria. Local forces (Kurds, Iraqi militias), Syrian, Turkish and Iraqi state armies, and US and Russian air forces work together in various combinations to push back ISIS in its heartland, while Lebanese forces and Hizbollah fight it along the Lebanon-Syria border. Simultaneously, ISIS forces make forays into other vulnerable areas and take control of smaller villages here and there, to fortify ISIS’ central claim of creating an Islamic State and expanding the Caliphate.

The attacks in Sinai and Beirut offer ISIS followers and potential recruits another face of the organization, which is to retaliate firmly against those whom it considers foes, wherever those foes may reside. The Sinai attack targeted both Russia and Egypt, both of whom fight actively respectively against ISIS forces in Syria and northern Sinai. Hizbollah and ISIS have been fighting for the past two years in Syria and Lebanon. ISIS’ threat last week to carry out attacks in Russia, if implemented, would represent a dramatic new turn in its ability to act globally. If this happens, ISIS would be following in the footsteps of Al-Qaeda, which for the past 25 years has carried out terror attacks globally.

The second dangerous aspect of the two recent attacks is the confirmation that ISIS can use individuals or perhaps small cells of followers in other countries to carry out its destructive plans. This captures the real difficulty in defeating groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, which is not in destroying their headquarters or killing their leaders, but eradicating the underlying structural reasons for discontent and alienation among millions of individual citizens, across much of the Arab-Islamic world. That discontent and alienation ultimately generate desperate young men who join groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, or carry out lone wolf attacks to emulate them. It does not take much technical or logistical expertise to carry out suicide attacks or bombings like these recent ones, given the willingness of disoriented and hopeless young men to do such criminal deeds. The entry of Russia into the Syria war, the Saudi Arabian war on Yemen, Hizbollah’s battling ISIS and Jabhat el-Nusra in Syria, and Egypt’s hard crackdown on the mainstream Muslim Brotherhood and ISIS-affiliated groups in northern Sinai will only increase the flow of recruits and suicide bombers who respond to ISIS’ tale of Sunnis being under global attack by “infidels” and “apostates.”

The third dangerous aspect of the ISIS attacks is their explicit targeting of Shiites, other “deviant” Muslims, and polytheists whom they see as apostates who deviate from the true faith that ISIS claims to assert in its Islamic State. The brief ISIS statement issued after the Beirut bombings mentioned Hizbollah as embodying the attributes in people whom hardline Sunnis see as apostates who should be killed, unless they repent and join ISIS’ true path. We should expect more vicious Sunni-Shiite warfare, as well as ISIS attacks against others in the region who do not share its narrow and militant interpretation of Islam.

The fourth important aspect of the bombings in Beirut in particular, but also in conflicts elsewhere in the region, is that most of the fighting is being done by non-state militias and political groups. These include ISIS, Jabhat el-Nusra and dozens of other Islamist and nationalist rebel groups in Syria, Hizbollah, four major Kurdish fighting forces in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, and tribal and Iranian-supported militia in Iraq, to mention only the most prominent ones. Combined with the fact that Russian and American jet fighters dominate the Iraqi and Syrian air spaces, this means the Middle East has become a region in which active warfare, terror attacks, ethnic cleansing, and often barbaric sectarian violence are routinely the work of armed groups that may be beyond the control of any government. This does not detract from the fact that some Arab governments also actively engage in ethnic cleansing and sectarian violence.

All this augurs badly in the short term for the Middle East and perhaps for countries further afield that actively wage war in the Middle East. The deeper problem behind these troubling trends is the continued unraveling of state-centered, government-controlled societies in the Arab world (and this is mainly an Arab problem), in favor of tribal, ethnic, sectarian and ideological groups that often resort to arms to protect themselves and their turf. ISIS and the violence it has sparked must be seen as the cruel outcome of the last six decades of autocratic and authoritarian Arab states dominated by soldiers and social chieftains, to the almost total exclusion of citizen rights. This structural failing of the modern Arab world cannot be fixed by foreign armies and Arab counter-terrorism efforts, but rather only by transformations towards participatory, pluralistic and accountable governance systems. The sooner we all work towards that noble goal — in fact, our right as citizens — the sooner we can get out of the current cycle of death and chaos that plagues us all. Until then, ISIS and perhaps even worse phenomena will continue to plague our region and others who are sucked into it.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global
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Released: 14 November 2015
Word Count: 978
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BOSTON — As I travel the world and witness the global quest for Palestinian national rights and a normal life, I become increasingly confident of our eventual success. Because everywhere I encounter the tenacity and depth of Palestinians’ individual and collective identity, the essential foundation of statehood and nationhood. Jews know this better than anyone else in the world, as do Armenians who achieved their state, and Kurds who are on their way there.

Palestinians have been denied their state since the creation of Israel in 1948 took over 78% of historical Palestine. The 1.5 million Palestinians of 1948 now number an estimated nine million; the 750,000 Palestinians who were expelled by Zionists or became refugees by fleeing war in 1947-48 now number around 4.5 million. They achieved a symbolic milestone recently by becoming a “non-member observer state” at the United Nations. Sovereign statehood remains a distant dream, goal, and right.

I witness the vitality of Palestinian identity every time I take a trip somewhere. Anywhere, it does not matter where. Here on an extended trip in the United States, I see Palestinian identity rear its head everywhere. On over 125 university campuses, chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine actively challenge oppressive and illegal Israeli actions. Palestine Film Festivals span the world, including in Boston, Washington, Chicago, Toronto, London, Ann Arbor, Atlanta, and many others cities. Hundreds of films and documentaries on Palestine made and shown every year can only correct Zionism’s distortions of our shared factual history.

But most of all I was struck this autumn by the efforts of a certain Maher Nasser, a 53-year-old Palestinian United Nations staffer in New York, who for months trained for, and then last week completed, the New York City Marathon race. He did so registered under the “State of Palestine.”

This is not earth-shattering stuff, I know; but in the annals of durable identities and indestructible communities, of entire peoples who will not disappear from the world because others have more power, imperial political support, or money than they do, it is actually the stuff of legends — and certainly a building block of statehood. When he first registered for the preliminary races that runners must complete to qualify for the marathon, Maher did not find “Palestine” in the website’s pull-down menu of countries. He only has a Palestinian passport, so could not register under another nationality.

He contacted the organizers, shared with them the UN General Assembly Resolution making Palestine a non-member observer state in the UN system, and the organizers correctly added Palestine to the list of countries. On the marathon website, Palestine (PAL) now nestles between Pakistan and Panama, just hanging around matter-of-factly with all those other established countries, waiting only for recognized borders and stuff like that.

Maher enhanced my conviction that we will one day live in a Palestinian state because he also set a goal of raising $32,000 to provide scholarships for Palestinian university students at Birzeit University in Palestine (he is just $3000 short and is continuing his fund-raising efforts on Facebook and elsewhere). When he, four siblings and his father were all going to college simultaneously 35 years ago, they all benefited from scholarships. He wanted now to give back to younger Palestinians, he said, so the next generations of young Palestinian men and women could succeed and become the best in their fields of interest, to serve their fellow Palestinians, and also to serve all humanity.

He was the only Palestinian to finish the marathon this year. A few others had completed the race from 2005-14, men with names like Bandak (two years in a row), Rantisi, and Nureddin, and two women from the Fakhry and Wafi families. For Palestinians, these are familiar family names, even though we do not know them personally. They are the names of our neighbors, schoolmates, grocers, and teachers. We recognize them, because they form our community, dispersed, occupied, and exiled as it is.

It was important for Maher to run and be listed as a Palestinian because, he said, “It is the only identity I’ve ever had.”

What does it mean to be a Palestinian, I asked him. “It is the collective feeling of being denied something,” he explained, that something being a normal life in one’s ancestral homeland.

At two points during the race when his strength and will both flagged slightly — not surprisingly for a non-expert runner — he turned a corner and saw his wife and two daughters waving a Palestinian flag. His legs and lungs found new strength. He finished the race.

Afterwards his wife told him that a policeman near them asked what the flag represented, as he was not familiar with it.

“It’s the flag of the state of Palestine,” she told him.

Many more people around the world today know about Palestine and its flag, and most importantly, its determined and devoted citizens. They run. They make movies. They challenge public misconceptions. They support other Palestinians in college. Most of all, they assert their humanity, and work to end the denial of their statehood.

I learned this again this month, as I do every time I travel, anywhere in the world.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 07 November 2015
Word Count: 860
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BEIRUT — This week’s 70th anniversary of the American nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that killed 200,000 people coincided with intense debate in the United States Congress in particular about the recent agreement that prevents Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons (which Iran claims it has never sought). The matter of mass killings using weapons of mass destruction has preoccupied humankind for some time now, and it raises four related issues that deserve much more attention than they have received:

• accountability for crimes committed,
• intervention to protect civilians,
• deterrence to prevent possible future atrocities and crimes against humanity, and
• whether political agreements that end active wars should allow leaders who presided over mass atrocities to enjoy amnesties and not be held accountable legally or politically.

These issues matter more than ever in the Arab world because we seem to be the world’s most problematic arena for mass killings, refugee flows, and the use of violence by states and non-state groups that is rarely if ever subject to any accountability. While we remember this week the 200,000 Japanese who perished at the receiving end of American nuclear weapons, we are reminded regularly that well over 200,000 people have died in Syria in the past four years; over a million have died in Iraq since the 2003 Anglo-American invasion; estimates say that in Sudan over the past two decades at least 2.5 million people died in civil wars. Thousands have died in Palestine at the hands of the Israeli armed forces, against a much smaller number of Israelis killed by Palestinians. We now also witness thousands dying in the new war in Yemen, while in once rock-solid Egypt government forces and opposition militants routinely are killing each other by the dozen. Even Saudi Arabia now witnesses terror attacks that kill scores of civilians or military personnel at a time.

Perhaps so much death and destruction take place around the Arab world, at the hands of Arabs, Israelis, Americans and others, because no serious process exists that holds individuals or governments accountable for the atrocities they commit. The International Criminal Court’s indictment of Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir for war crimes a few years ago has never been followed up by a serious effort to bring him to court for a fair trial. This means that other Arab autocrats, the Israeli government, and many non-state killers go about their routine business that includes killing thousands of people, often their own citizens. The extent and nature of the mass killings in our region make it all the more imperative that such criminal action be dealt with in a serious court of law. Accusations against Arab, Israeli, American, British, Iranian or other governments of criminal actions usually seem to be well deserved, but only a legal indictment and a fair trial can prove the guilt or innocence of the accused.

The fact that no such actions occur means that active killers go about their criminal deeds with total impunity, which may explain why so many governments and non-state organizations kill at will across the region. The current increasing talk of moving towards a political process in Syria that ends the fighting rests heavily on a single issue: What will be the fate of President Bashar Assad and his family if a political agreement does end the fighting, and make way for a transition to a new government?

Will Assad be allowed to step down and retire quietly somewhere? Or should he be held accountable for most of the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have died in the war there? Is there enough evidence of his use of chemical weapons and inhuman barrel bombs against civilians to indict him and his officers? Or is it preferable to allow him to retire in peace, for the sake of ending the fighting and sparing the lives of perhaps several hundred thousand other Syrians who are alive today?

While we debate this, we also face the related issue of whether and how regional and foreign powers should intervene inside Syria to slow down the mass routine killing of civilians by the Syrian air force. The international doctrine of the “responsibility to protect” was largely discredited by the heavy-handed manner in which NATO and Arab forces intervened in Libya four years ago to overthrow the Gaddafi regime and lead the country into its current chaotic and violent state.

The mostly Arab, Turkish, American intervention in Iraq and Syria to fight the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is another example of how to react, but its outcomes remain unclear. These really tough issues cannot be ignored for long, because hundreds of thousands of people at a time are dying in assorted wars across the Arab world, mirroring the hundreds of thousands who died in Japan on two days 70 years ago.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 August 2015
Word Count: 802
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BEIRUT — The most dangerous and troubling among the terror attacks in Tunisia, Kuwait, France, Egypt and Yemen in the past week are probably the Kuwait and Egypt attacks. The bombing of a major Shiite mosque in Kuwait City by a young Saudi man and the assassination in Cairo of the Egyptian public prosecutor show the ease with which ordinary citizens in those countries can move about, cross borders, and kill at will. They also affirm that heavy security and spreading the wealth by munificent governments are unlikely to check the spread of this terrible new scourge of violence by “Islamic State” and others.

Equally troubling is the simplistic response of British Prime Minister David Cameron after 30 British citizens were killed in the Tunisia attack, signaling a continuing lack of appreciation among leading Western governments of the full spectrum of reasons why ordinary young men suddenly turn into vicious killers. This is mirrored in the policies of other Western powers like the United States and France, who cannot seem to grasp the connection between the time and effort that leaders put into selling or giving arms to Arab autocrats and the parallel continued expansion of anti-Western militancy by militant criminals like those who carried out the attacks this week.

As long as Western and Arab power structures refuse to delve fully into the long but clear causal cycle of political and socio-economic factors that transform ordinary young men into global terrorists — including some of the policies of those same Arab and Western powers — then we are all destined to suffer more and more attacks in the years ahead. This is also likely to perpetuate the trend we have witnessed in the past two decades or so: the steady retreat of the reach, relevance and legitimacy of central governments across much of the Arab world.

Government authority has been replaced by a wide range of other organizing forces, including religion, tribalism, ethnicity, civil society, private wealth and others. So ungoverned areas of Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and small bits and pieces of Lebanon, Egypt, Bahrain and Sudan are not wild aberrations of a stable Arab status quo; rather they point to the expected new normal in situations where sustained indigenous autocracy, expanding domestic socio-economic distress, and runaway Western militarism corrode the foundations of existing states and also expose the frailty of those foundations that had been camouflaged for half a century.

The Kuwait and Cairo attacks are especially troubling for several reasons. The Saudi national who bombed the mosque in Kuwait has been identified as Fahad Suleiman Abdulmohsen al-Gabbaa, a Saudi in his early twenties who flew to Kuwait via a connection in Bahrain last Friday morning. The real worry here is multi-faceted: He was a Saudi Arabian national, was not on anybody’s watch list as a potential terrorist, moved around the Gulf region at will, entered the mosque easily, and deliberately assaulted both the Shiite Kuwaitis in the mosque and the modern legacy of Shiite-Sunni coexistence that has always been particularly evident in Kuwait.

The history of terror actions and counter-terrorism in Saudi Arabia over the past 35 years, since that homegrown attack on the Great Mosque in Mecca, includes waves of attacks by terrorists and retaliatory massive moves by the state to contain and eliminate this threat. The Kuwait attack should set off major alarm bells about the continued radicalization and sectarian extremism of youth in some Gulf countries, and the need to understand more precisely why this happens. This is especially perplexing in wealthy states that have recently suffered anti-Shiite mosque bombings like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, where state policies provide for citizens’ needs and open many opportunities for a good life.

Similarly, the assassination of the public prosecutor in Cairo, on the eve of the second anniversary of the overthrow of former elected President Mohamad Morsi, suggests that the tough anti-terror measures introduced by the government of President Abdelfattah Sisi during his year in office have not adequately contained political violence in the country. The combination of more military security measures alongside a squeezed political system that leaves little room for any voices other than those in or near the ruling elite, while economic stress continues to pervade most Egyptian households, bodes badly for Egypt, as it does for any Arab or Western state that applies such a strategy to quell terror attacks.

The timing, location and target of the Cairo killing should help focus state attention on finding a better way, through inclusive democracy and an expanding economy that is not skewed to the military, to safeguard Egypt and its people. This also requires identifying more honestly the combination of reasons that drive ordinary citizens into the arms of killers. This same challenge has stumped Arab and Western authorities for decades now, though any Arab teenager could probably explain in five minutes what ails them, and channels some of them into criminal acts.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 July 2015
Word Count: 818
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NEW YORK — Rarely has amateurism in American foreign policy in the Middle East been as glaring and shocking as it has been in the past year in relation to Washington’s policy on the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In the United States during the past two weeks I have had the opportunity to follow more closely than usual news, analysis and political discussions about how the U.S. should respond to the threat of ISIS, and the experience has been frightening.

In almost every aspect of American policy related to Iraq, Syria and ISIS — threat analysis, addressing key underlying causal factors, policy formulation, geo-strategic coordination, military strategy and operations, and public diplomacy — Washington’s approach has consistently asked the wrong questions, identified the wrong threats, used the wrong tools, and applied wrong policies. No wonder it has resulted in cumulative failures.

The most recent disappointment is how the U.S. government (and many other Arab and European states, to be fair) emphasize public diplomacy and offering a “counter-narrative” to ISIS’ message as a key pillar of the strategy to defeat ISIS. This is part of a wider mistaken and failed response to ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other such criminal movements, one that seeks to emphasize and activate “moderate Muslims” and “moderate Islam” or to highlight the brutal and barbaric acts of ISIS as a means of reducing the flow of its recruits. Ever since the idiocy of George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror from 2001-2002, the American government has assumed that positive media messages through a public diplomacy campaign would dry up recruits to Al-Qaeda, and now to ISIS.

Well, that approach has proved to be a colossal failure and waste of money, despite a succession of consistently clueless strategies that have spent billions of dollars on television, radio, web sites, social media and other means to check the growth of Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The result to date is that Al-Qaeda and ISIS today are the fastest growing political brands in the Arab world, and are infiltrating some other parts of the world as well.

What do American leaders need to finally get the point that public diplomacy as a core weapon in the fight against ISIS is no weapon at all, but a terrible self-induced delusion and hoax? It seems that day is still far off, because this week we learn via the New York Times of an internal State Department memo that, “paints a dismal picture of the efforts by the Obama administration and its foreign allies to combat the Islamic State’s message machine.”

The memo to Secretary of State John Kerry by Richard A. Stengel, the State Department’s under secretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, paints a sad picture of a public diplomacy multi-national coalition in disarray, but also proposes a more focused and enhanced effort to do more of the same kind of messaging using social media to counter ISIS narratives. The Times notes that, “State Department officials have repeatedly said that ‘countermessaging’ the Islamic State is one of the pillars of the strategy to defeat the group. But Obama administration officials have acknowledged in the past that the group is far more nimble in spreading its message than the United States is in blunting it.”

The tragedy is not just that public diplomacy procedurally has failed; it is also the profound analytical failure of emphasizing “messaging,” which totally misses the point of why people from many different backgrounds gravitate to ISIS, or simply do not resist it. ISIS and Al-Qaeda can only be fought by cutting out from beneath their feet the combination of policies and conditions in the Arab region that deeply offend and threaten ordinary citizens, and ultimately turn a very small number of them into ISIS recruits.

ISIS’s appeal to those people succeeds because their real life conditions — poverty, corruption, tyranny, occupation, subjugation, colonization, drone attacks, foreign invasions, humiliation, hopelessness — push them into desperate quests for something that offers them an alternative life. Some end up in ISIS — not because of ISIS’ messaging, but because the policies of Arab, Israeli, American, British, Russian and other governments over the past several decades have sucked the life and hope from the lives of hundreds of millions of Arab men and women.

ISIS’ appeal is that it offers a shock-therapy alternative to the dismal conditions that define the precarious lives of perhaps half the Arab world’s 375 million citizens — maybe over 150 million people who barely meet their daily basic needs, have no educational qualifications for decent work, and face a future of almost certain perpetual poverty and misery. That kind of desperation is the consequence of failed governance across the Arab world.

The world’s most powerful country should snap out of its analytical silliness and political dishonesty, and admit that this kind of dark dynamic that is tearing apart the Arab world cannot be fought with Facebook likes.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 June 2015
Word Count: 814
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GDANSK, Poland — During a week-long working study-tour to Poland last week to explore several aspects of Polish recent history that struck me as pertinent to current developments in the Arab world, I made sure that I had the opportunity to visit the Gdansk shipyards where the Solidarity labor movement was born in 1980. I have long admired that movement’s pivotal role in initiating workers’ strikes and sit-ins, collective bargaining, political negotiations and, ultimately, an agreement in 1989 with the Soviet Union for a liberalization of political governance in Poland. That year, the Soviet Empire collapsed like the hollowed hulk of rusted steel that it had become after decades of deadening Communist dictatorship.

I met and interviewed the founding leader of Solidarity, Lech Walesa, on the assumption that our Arab struggle for liberty and dignity could benefit from lessons he drew from his historic experiences and achievements that ended the Soviet universe in the period 1970-1990. I was not disappointed.

Our hour-long discussion reflected a few key issues like organization and strategy, the role of faith, and understanding one’s struggle within its wider regional or global contexts. Central to their success in achieving labor and wider political rights was the importance of organizing patiently and steadily over many years, using non-violent methods, and communicating and coordinating regularly with colleagues in labor and intellectual circles across Europe. These were critical moves because armed resistance, street violence, or traditional strikes could not triumph against the overwhelming might of the Soviet military that managed the puppet government in Poland.

“The only way for us to be strong was to organize within large factories which provided us with the big social base we needed to succeed. The police and army found it difficult to enter large plants, especially when strikes and sit-ins occurred simultaneously in many places due to our constant coordination,” he recalled.

He mentioned faith as a critical success factor, meaning the role of the Catholic Church and Pope John Paul II who visited his native Poland and also received Walesa at the Vatican. He recalled: “The Pope’s visits made a big difference. His public masses drew massive crowds that speeded up our growth to the strong social base of ten million members of Solidarity, and faith gave us courage to confront the powerful alien enemy we faced. The 2000th anniversary of Christianity also helped. We took big risks and always faced the possibility of a military crackdown, without having the capabilities to protect ourselves. While the Soviets showed our generals the missiles pointed at major Polish cities, we did not have any protection against such threats other than our courage, our faith, and our ability to organize and be patient. We released the power of the human spirit in response to their threat of missiles.”

Recognizing that victory would only come cumulatively and in stages, Walesa said their movement’s non-violent resistance, protest and strikes always included demanding practical, limited rights from the state, rather than asking for impossible concessions. “We also made sure that our demands from the government always responded to the practical needs of our popular base, which allowed us to mobilize ten million members and maintain cohesion.”

By the 1980s, the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev’s rule in Moscow, Ronald Reagan’s increased defense spending in Washington, and the Soviet debacle in Afghanistan weakened the Soviet system and signaled its likely collapse. Some Polish rulers under Russia’s thumb who saw this quietly did not defend the system strongly, which made it easier for Solidarity to negotiate with the external Russian enemy it faced, he said.

Walesa led the first independent free labor movement in the Soviet world, and in 1990 was elected president of the democratic country, only to lose his luster a decade later when his party was badly defeated in the 2000 elections. What lessons does he retain from managing a democratic system?

“I believe from experience that three crucial elements are needed in a democracy,” he replied. “The rule of law, economic well-being, and engagement with the people.”

Does he see any new threats in Poland or Europe that require new forms of activism and popular mobilization such as what Solidarity did?

“I think we are on the verge of major change and perhaps upheaval all over the world,” he said, “directed against capitalism and the practice of democracy in its current form. Protests all over the world scared me in recent years, but they pointed out the excesses of capitalism and the demagogic political class in many countries. The elites must hear the people’s calls in such situations.

“Every lesson and experience adapts to its time and place, and some things exhaust themselves with time. I would give one piece of advice to activists today: act like good bacteria, and do not destroy the organism you live in. Leaders, for their part, must be like football coaches, not doing too much or too little, increasing pressure gradually, and not subjecting people to excess stress.”

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 June 2015
Word Count: 827
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GDANSK, Poland — It was not accidental that during this past week, as I and so many others remembered the life and work of the late Samir Kassir, who was assassinated ten years ago in Beirut, I also spent an hour discussing with Lech Walesa in Gdansk, Poland, some of the lessons and experiences of his historic workers’ movement Solidarity. Thirty-five years ago, Wales and Solidarity were instrumental in speeding up the collapse of the entire Soviet Union and its ugly empire of captive lands in central Asia and Eastern Europe.

Not an accident, I say, because these two men who lived in very different times and places captured in their values and actions the universal sentiments of tens of millions of their compatriots, most notably the struggle for human freedom, dignity and decency. I will write in a separate set of columns in coming weeks my reports and analyses of discussions with Walesa and a handful of other leading Polish intellectuals and activists. Their thoughts are worth pondering because their historic activism helped to transform Poland into one of the remarkable success stories of former Soviet-subjugated lands that have achieved democratic and economic success today — while they also continue to struggle against new threats and dangers, such as the hardships of the vulnerable in society who are trampled by the excesses of runaway capitalism and globalization.

The analogy with Samir Kassir is relevant because the battles these men fought and led remain alive today for hundreds of millions of people across the Arab world and other societies. Kassir focused on the Arab condition and its troubles, whether the Syrian subjugation of Lebanon that he experienced and resisted actively — at the cost of his life ultimately — or widespread dehumanization of citizens across the Arab world who grappled with the multiple stresses of their own domestic subjugation, the ravages of Zionism, or the complexities of their erratic relations with Western powers.

The three most important points that I retain from my conversation with Lech Walesa ring massively familiar in the current struggle for freedom, stability and legitimacy across the Arab world. They are that, the struggle for workers’ and citizens’ rights in Poland ultimately succeeded because, a) they organized patiently and steadily over many years, recognizing that victory would come cumulatively and in stages, rather than instantly, b) they used non-violent resistance, protest, strikes and sit-ins, because they could not match the Soviet arsenal of weapons and tanks they knew would be used to crush them (“we released the power of the human spirit, not missiles”), and, c) they worked for practical, limited gains that resonated with their popular base and allowed them to mobilize a following of some ten million members at their height.

My impression is that the life and thought of Samir Kassir mirror most of these same values and tactics. It is always worth recalling them on the anniversary of his assassination because the struggle he embodied continues today across the entire Arab world, without exception. Even in wealthy energy-producing states, where most material needs are met, many citizens are constrained by limits on their freedom of speech and collective political action outside the realm of what the government approves. In most of the poorer Arab world, several hundred million people suffer these same rights humiliations, along with serious material deficiencies in education, housing and health care quality, jobs and income, social safety nets, and abuse of power.

The wars, insurrections, growing sectarianism and occasional savagery that define many Arab regions today are all the consequences of acts of man, not acts of God or nature. They are neither inevitable nor insurmountable. They can all be fixed by better acts of man, better government policies, and, above all, more active participation by ordinary men and women in the business of governance and public policy.

A generation after Walesa’s successful mobilization of shipyard workers and then millions of other Polish men and women who insisted on practicing their human right to free expression and collective labor bargaining, Kassir’s writing and activism articulated these common human values and demands, in the much more convoluted context of a shattered Arab world that was triply colonized and subjugated by Zionism, western imperialism and Arab dictatorships and autocracies.

The straight historical trajectory of the human quest for freedom, justice and dignity has passed through the hearts and acts of many inspiring men and women, like Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Lech Walesa and, in his own world, Samir Kassir. Thousands of others marched to the same tune as these people, whether they brought down entire empires or simply galvanized their neighborhood or village to work together for a clean, safe, productive and pluralistic communal environment. Their spirit is indomitable, and it will triumph for sure — because it is not only their spirit, but rather a mirror of all humanity’s most cherished and powerful instinct to live in freedom, with dignity and tolerance above all. This is what you feel, whether you sit next to Samir Kassir’s statue in downtown Beirut, the monument to the Polish workers at Gdansk shipyard killed on Soviet orders in 1970, or a hundred other testaments to the human spirit like these around the world.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 June 2015
Word Count: 870
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BEIRUT — While a series of really serious new dangers like ISIS’ atrocities, the wars in Yemen, Syria and Libya, fighting in and near Lebanon, Iranian-Arab tensions, and an erratic governance transition in Egypt occupy the minds of most people around the Middle East, let me be the quiet voice that whispers in the ears of Middle East watchers: This Friday, May 15, marked the 67th anniversary of the 1948 Palestinian exile and displacement, which occurred as a result of the creation of the state of Israel. That fact matters still today, and we ignore it and its consequences at our peril.

It is relevant to recall this fact alongside the many other pressing issues across the region because of the many direct and indirect links between the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and those issues. This conflict remains the oldest and most radicalizing and destabilizing force in the Middle East, and its consequences continue to ripple through the region in real and measurable ways. This goes against the predominant mindset in the United States east coast and Israel, where presumptuous political and thought leaders routinely repeat the refrain that what happened in 1947-48 happened a long time ago, and the Palestinians and Arabs should get over their defeat and get on with their lives, and do something modern like emulate the lifestyle of Dubai.

Well, the facts of human nature and history suggest otherwise, and this is the moment every year when we should remember this. Forcibly exiled people, as Jews and Zionism remind us, will always strive for repatriation in their ancestral homeland, rather than seeking refuge or escape in wondrous commercial malls. The 1.5 million Palestinian Arabs of 1948 are now around 12 million, according to official Palestinian statistics. There is no mall big enough to accommodate them, so they continue to seek justice and a fair political resolution of their conflict with Israel and Zionism.

We should also ponder the corollary point that resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict in an equitable manner that satisfies the legitimate national rights and needs of both sides would quickly help reduce the feverish pace of spreading turmoil and violence across the Middle East. On this day of commemoration — when Israel continues to expand its settlements in occupied Arab lands, shoot and jail Palestinian children under the age of ten years old, and (with Palestinians) is the object of a preliminary investigation for war crimes by the International Criminal Court — we should anticipate that a resolution of the Palestine-Israel conflict could reverse this pattern of rippling conflicts we have witnessed since the 1930s, when Zionist-Arabist tensions and clashes first surfaced in British-ruled Palestine. The earliest communal confrontations between Palestinians and Jewish Zionists expanded in the 1940s into a full-fledged nationalist battle. The creation of Israel in May 1948 quickly transformed the local dispute into the wider Arab-Israeli conflict; today this has expanded further into even wider domains that include Iranian-Israeli and Turkish-Israeli tensions and threats, and antagonisms between the state of Israel and dozens of other countries and societies around the world who support the Palestinians.

A peaceful resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict that is legitimated by popular consent on both sides could steadily roll back these rippling concentric circles of confrontation, including with the three parties the Israelis see as their most serious foes today: Iran, Hizbollah and Hamas. A credible and equitable peace agreement would also immediately spark serious counter-ripples of economic expansion, investment, trade, tourism, technological and manpower exchanges and development, and positive regional cooperation in critical issues like water, energy, security and environmental safety. Tens of thousands of new jobs would materialize for hopeless young people in the region who are easy pickings for extremist movements; militant movements of both Israelis and Arabs would whither as their fear-based popular support declines among populations more motivated by hope, justice and a normal life.

Also, resolution of this conflict would positively impact internal political conditions in Arab countries, reversing the trends since 1948 when Arab autocrats and military dictators used the defense of Palestine as a recurring excuse to seize power, deny democratic development, and waste hundreds of billions of dollars on security systems that neither saved Palestine nor achieved internal Arab order — judging by the Arab popular revolutions and widespread civil wars of the past four years. Excessive military spending was one reason for the lack of sustainable, equitable socio-economic development in many Arab countries, leading to the tens of millions of poor, vulnerable citizens who finally rebelled against their governments.

The inability of Arab leaders to stop the Israeli conquest and continued colonization of Palestine, and the recurring Israeli attacks against Palestinian and other Arab lands, was one of several humiliating factors that contributed to the loss of credibility and legitimacy of many Arab regimes in the eyes of their own people.

Popular sentiment across the Arab world strongly supports the rights of the Palestinians and opposes Israeli policies, as polling evidence now routinely confirms, even though Arab leaders do not always reflect these views.

The decades of lack of resolution of the Palestine issue have contributed to the dire condition of the Arab world today, and wider regional tensions with Israel. This is a good moment to remember that 12 million Palestinians, like exiled European Jews a century before them, insist on justice and a normal life, and will keep struggling to achieve those legitimate goals, through reasonable political compromises or through the use of force if necessary. This, as Israelis and Palestinians alike have affirmed for a century now, is what humanity is all about.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 16 May 2015
Word Count: 925
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BEIRUT — If there is one reason above others that helps explain the many situations of armed conflict, political violence and state collapse across the Arab world, it must be that tens of millions of hopeless young men wander through their own societies like ghosts, unable to enjoy either satisfying employment or meaningful citizenship. The supply of young men, some as young as 14 years old, who are eager to join armed groups, criminal cults, and extremist militias is staggering, as we witness in Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Sudan, Libya and pockets of other countries across the region.

Among the main reasons for this sad reality is that — since the 1970s when police state-minded families took control of many of our governments — our Arab societies for the most part have failed to establish a productive relationship between the education systems and the labor markets. Millions of primary and secondary school-age youth have never entered a school, and millions more are in danger of dropping out. They create the pool of tens of millions of angry, fearful and mostly hopeless young Arabs who are easy recruits for the radical and criminal movements — and also the corrupt governance systems — that are the biggest threats to our countries these days. These are homegrown threats, not invaders and colonizers from abroad.

A new report released this week by Unicef and Unesco provides solid analysis of the magnitude and causes of this problem of “out of school children” (OOSC). It shows that more than 21 million children and young adolescents across the Arab world are either out of school or at risk of dropping out. What makes this more troubling is that the number of OOSC had decreased by 40% over the past decade, but now the fortunes of our youngest citizens have started to decline. This is due to a combination of reasons, including poverty, gender and other discrimination, poor quality learning, social attitudes, early marriage, a lack of female teachers, and conflict.

We know very well what will be the dark fate of the 12.3 million children and young adolescents in our region who are out of school, the over six million who are at risk of dropping out, and the three million children who have stopped going to school in Syria and Iraq. The overwhelming majority of this cohort of over 21 million boys and girls will likely experience a life of poverty, vulnerability, marginalization, poor health, degradation and pain, which is a sure recipe for permanent instability and violence.

The report’s most frightening finding, in my view, is that young adolescents drop out of school mainly because of poor education standards and low quality school environments. The report does not go into this issue in detail, but I learned about how badly Arab children perform even when they do attend school, when a few months ago I researched a presentation I made at an American university on the relationship between the education and the Arab uprisings.

Available date from worldwide tests that measure the numeracy and literacy abilities of students in primary and secondary school show that about half of all school children in the Arab world actually are not learning. Let me repeat that to confirm that this is not a printing error: about half of all school children in the Arab world actually are not learning.

A powerful report issued last year by the Brookings Institution (“Arab Youth: missing educational foundations for a productive life?”) analysed available global testing data from 13 Arab countries. It concluded: “We estimate, based on the average scores for literacy and numeracy for the 13 countries for which we have data, that 56% of primary students and 48% of lower secondary school students are not learning.”

These are average figures. The results for some countries are beyond belief, including from some of the wealthy oil-producing states. The percentages of primary school students who did not meet basic learning levels (average of numeracy and literacy) in 2011 was around 90% in Yemen, 77% in Morocco, 69% in Kuwait and 63% in Tunisia. The best performers, with 30-40% of non-learning students, were Bahrain, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, though in wealthy Qatar, for example, over 53% of children at the lower secondary level were not learning.

These are not just early warning signs that our societies must take seriously to stop the hemorrhaging of our human talent and potential. They are wildly flashing red lights telling us to stop building one-way highways to hell for tens of millions of our children who are denied the most important opportunity of their lives: to develop their maximum intellectual and creative potential, so that they can participate as full citizens in building stable and satisfying societies. If this does not happen, these tens of millions of uneducated young Arabs will prove to be our own homemade weapons of our own mass destruction.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 18 April 2015
Word Count: 811
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