BEIRUT — The attack Wednesday against the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo that killed 12 people has understandably sparked a massive outpouring of support around the world for the publication and the wider issue of freedom of press and expression, alongside many condemnations of the attack by Muslims in Europe and around the world. This kind and intensity of reactions has happened before in other circumstances, such as Salman Rushdie’s work or the Danish cartoon controversy, in which the Western commitment to absolute freedom of expression conflicts with Islamic sensitivities about depictions of the Prophet Mohammad that are deemed offensive and blasphemous.

The fact that we seem to replay this difficult drama over and over again every few years suggests to me that the prevailing strong views on freedom/blasphemy have prevented us from focusing on the deeper causal issues involved here and in other cases. Criminal violence against Western targets by enraged Muslims in response to what they see as unacceptable behavior towards the Prophet Mohammad is clearly criminal behavior that cannot be tolerated for any reason. Derisive Western press depictions of the Prophet Mohammad are equally offensive to most Muslims, though only a handful respond with criminal violence.

Repeating these basic points every time violent incidents has simply perpetuated the cycle of violence. I suspect the reason is that the offensive depictions of Islamic faith values in the eyes of Muslims, and the fierce Western commitment to freedom of the press and expression only address the surface issues at hand, without touching on the deeper elements of what has become a global cycle of sentiments, discontentment and actions by many actors around the world.

The best place to start appreciating some of these key underlying issues is presented to us in the persons of the two French citizens of Algerian descent, Cherif and Said Kouachi, who are the principal suspects in this latest crime. Their life experiences and recent actions capture nicely the complex web of underlying forces that have brought us to this point where a relative handful of Islamist fanatics carry out criminal attacks against targets in the West and mostly in the Arab-Islamic region, and the global response is predominately anchored in police and military actions alongside ringing defense of personal freedoms. In the meantime, we have to deal with the tide of anti-Islamic sentiments among many people in the West — which are rising sharply this week — alongside fears among many Muslims that they are being increasingly seen as security threats and cultural aliens.

The lives, attitudes and actions of the Kouachi brothers reflect many other elements beyond freedom and blasphemy that make it so difficult now to find the path to reducing the tensions and incidents of violence in this universe that broadly comprises Western societies and Arab-Islamic ones. We must probe deeper to understand why we seem to repeat these episodes of tension, extremism and death every few years, despite the trillions of dollars that have been spent on security measures in the last few decades, not to mention well-meaning but (sadly) mostly marginal inter-faith initiatives.

I doubt the killers of the Charlie Hebdo staff were thinking about the Western democratic freedoms they allegedly so hated that they would assassinate French journalists. I suspect rather that they were motivated by a grizzly combination of influences and experiences whose center of gravity comprises a problematic combination of forces and actions in several continents. These include mainly the rise of violent Islamist organizations like Al-Qaeda and ISIS; the mismanagement of many Arab and Muslim-majority countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan) by corrupt and dysfunctional family-led and military regimes; the marginalization and criminalization of some immigrants in Western countries (where most immigrants have adapted nicely, but pockets of desperate and alienated youth have not); chronic military operations by Western countries in various Arab-Asian lands, especially the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and some other related factors that fall under these broad categories.

This web of forces helps us understand why political or psychological phenomena like the violent Kouachi brothers come into being and continue spreading around the world, but they do not in any manner rationalize their crimes, which must be addressed in the first instance by using the full force of the law around the world. Waving the intensely emotional and absolutist flags of liberty and blasphemy seems only to deepen and widen the circles of anger, fear, and violence. Powerful emotional declarations of ’Je suis Charlie’ are understandable and genuine, but they will not do anything to prevent further deaths, because they ignore the central reasons why young men become crazed fanatics and assassins.

A much more sophisticated analytical process is needed to find that middle ground between global police actions to fight crime; political, military and diplomatic policies that bind Western and Arab-Islamic countries; sociological insights and remedial policies that address youth alienation in both regions; and, better governance systems in Arab-Asian countries that remain the fulcrum of this gruesome — and expanding — universe in which the Kouachi brothers, among perhaps tens of thousands of others, have lived, killed and died. It is time to get more serious, and more focused on the real drivers of tension and violence that plague the multinational, transcontinental universe in which the Kouachi brothers lived.

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: 10 January 2015
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BOSTON — The most dramatic development in the United States in recent months in my mind was the sustained nationwide protests against two related events: the deaths of several African-American men and teenagers at the hands of police, and the decisions by the judicial system not to prosecute anyone for the deaths. Local protests across the country have gone on in different forms for several months now, and many ethnicities have participated in the movement that broadly marches under the banners of “Ferguson Action,” “Don’t Shoot!,” “Black Lives Matter,” and other coordinating groups.

The names of dead African-Americans like Michael Brown and Eric Garner resonated across a country that was not witnessing only a spontaneous expression of anger, vulnerability and self-assertion by African-Americans who feel that they are unfairly monitored, targeted, detained, frisked, arrested and occasionally killed by predominantly White police forces. This situation touches the fears of many more Americans, who see what appeared to them as a dysfunctional or prejudiced judicial system that allowed deaths of young Black men at the hands of police to pass without any judicial proceedings to discover if the police were acting illegally, unprofessionally or unethically. The status quo seemed to endanger young black men in the first instance, but many other Americans sense they would be losers also if they, too, do not enjoy the safeguards of the rule of law and an equitable justice system.

So during the last weeks of my extended visit to the United States this autumn, I sought out activists and organizers to learn more about the causes and consequences of the protests. Two seasoned community organizers in the Boston area, Terry Marshall and Lizzy Padgett, explained to me how community-based, locally-organized and largely spontaneous protest movements used street demonstrations and other non-violent actions to disrupt normal life in order to bring attention to the issues at hand. Marshall and Padgett have been involved in community organizing for 15 years, and are founders of groups such as Deep Abiding Love and Intelligent Mischief.

Based on their years of activism, they saw qualitative differences in the current protests from previous ones. They had learned from the short-lived Occupy Wall Street protests of two years ago that they had to prepare ahead of time in order to be able to maintain longer and more effective protests. They also felt that the active use of social media “amplified” local events such as the first major street demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, and spurred nationwide protests by Americans everywhere who felt that their system of law and justice had failed.

The tactic of peaceful marches that sought to disrupt normal life — like briefly closing the Brooklyn Bridge in New York or the metropolitan transport system in San Francisco — seeks to disrupt “business as usual” for people far away from the deaths of young Blacks, so that they “feel the pain and trauma,” and grasp that a crisis is happening in the lives of Black people that cannot continue.

When normal life and the economy are disrupted briefly, they told me, the American system feels uncomfortable, and America takes notice. They gave examples of some initial successes such the police in St. Louis issuing far fewer warrants to people, or the police in Boston now discussing the use of body cameras, after initially rejecting the idea. The extra costs of overtime for police personnel due to the protests — which amounted to some $2 million in Boston and the state of Massachusetts during the initial weeks of protests — also captures the attention of officialdom.

When I attended a training session for mostly young Black, Hispanic and White activists in a downtown Boston hall, the emphasis was on non-violent civil action and street protests, how to act when confronted by police, what information to gather when arrested, and how to communicate with others. The training reflected the point that Marshall and Padgett mentioned, about working hard to make it safe and sustainable for protestors to make their point in the streets, and then to move beyond street action for national political, judicial and policing changes. Only such structural changes can fix the deeper endemic problems of poverty, education, unofficial segregation, a prison culture and others that allow the state to use violence against Black bodies, they said. The recent deaths will happen again and again if nothing is done, they argued.

A poster at the training session spelled out the national goals that are the ultimate demands of the protests around the country: “The demilitarization of law enforcement across the country; comprehensive review of systemic abuses by local police departments; repurposing of law enforcement funds to support community based alternatives to incarceration; a congressional hearing to investigate the criminalization of communities of color, racial profiling, police abuses and torture by law enforcement; support the passage of the ‘end racial profiling act’; Obama administration develops, legislates and enacts a national plan of action for racial justice.”

A few days later, I attended a nighttime candlelight vigil in Watertown, Massachusetts, comprising mostly older, well-off white people. They heard from their religious and civic leaders about the need to hear the cries, protests and grievances of those in society who suffered but were not visible in suburban communities. One of the speakers was the local police chief, who gave the crowd his phone number as a sign of his understanding of the need to dialogue and address the grievances that have been amplified by the protests.

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 January 2015
Word Count: 906
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NEW YORK — The move by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to sign the documents to join the International Criminal Court (ICC), and give it jurisdiction to investigate allegations of Israeli and other war crimes in Palestine, should be seen as a positive development that brings international law into play in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Yet I find it difficult to be enthusiastic or optimistic about this move, due to the whimsical, personalized, uninstitutionalized and erratic manner in which Abbas and the current Palestinian leadership go about the business of managing statehood.

We have just witnessed the sad spectacle of Abbas deciding to take the issue of Palestinian statehood to the UN Security Council (UNSC), and in the end discovering that he was unable to secure the 9 votes needed to pass the resolution (which would have been vetoed by the United States in any case). The failure at the UNSC is symptomatic of the wider problem that has bedeviled the rump Palestinian leadership that remains in place under Abbas, while many Palestinians have abandoned his drifting ship and joined Hamas and other political groups.

That problem is simply that Abbas and his few advisers have consistently failed to undertake the hard work needed to succeed in political and diplomatic action, and to mobilize those assets that the Palestinians do enjoy in the region and the world. The hard work I am talking about is nothing magical or exotic. It is simply the hard work of spending days and weeks undertaking the basic mobilizing, consulting, negotiating, threatening, enticing, and other such activities that are necessary for the success of any political campaign — whether running for local judge in a small town in Arkansas, or president of France, or seeking passage of a resolution at the United Nations or any such international forum.

What Abbas has not done is to go to the UNSC armed with political firepower that could assure his success, because he did not bother to spend time consulting with Palestinians everywhere in order to mobilize a strong national consensus for his move. The lack of consultations with Palestinians is one of Abbas’ fatal flaws, because he ends up looking like a frail old man who naively calls for the application of law and justice to the cause of his people — a noble and just cause, to be sure — but nobody takes him very seriously because he is perceived to be speaking for himself and his few advisers only.

At the Security Council specifically, he seems not to have done the necessary hard work of consulting widely with all members of the council and other interested parties, nor to have engaged in reasonable bargaining to achieve a draft resolution that could secure a majority. There is no moral victory or any advantage whatsoever in doing what Abbas just did — go to the UNSC and fail to get a 9-vote passage. All he has done is to diminish himself and look like a bumbling beginner in the eyes of the diplomatic world, and thereby set back the Palestine cause at least in the short term.

I fear now that the Palestinian decision to join the ICC will repeat this pattern of political failure anchored in a personalized, non-democratic and authoritarian style of governance that has been the ruin of the modern Arab world. The Palestinian cause has massive support around the world, among ordinary citizens, political groups, governments, religious and professional organizations, and the overwhelming majority of Arabs, and most of their governments. Abbas has consistently failed to mobilize these forces and direct them into the political arena where he engages in global action, such as the UNSC and the ICC.

There is no price to be paid if a country does not support the Palestinians in the UNSC, because Abbas and his colleagues do not constitute a formidable force that can cause anyone any pain. The Israelis and the pre-state Zionists in Europe especially understood this very well, and have consistently achieved their main political objectives globally because they understand how to transform a limited number of assets into maximum political leverage.

Abbas lacks the charisma and political legacy that Yasser Arafat enjoyed, but the main reason for his repeated failures to move the Palestine cause forward has been his insistence on acting like a lone old man. The Security Council failure should be a huge wake-up call. Abbas and the people around him should acknowledge that their political approach or strategy have failed repeatedly, and they must reach out first and foremost to the human, political, and intellectual wealth of their millions of fellow Palestinians who have been alienated from the Palestinian leadership since the Oslo accords in 1993.

If the Palestinian leadership under Abbas’ wobbly, personalized guidance pursues the ICC route as it has pursued other diplomacy, the Palestinian people have nothing to look forward to. Serious issues of national fate require serious leadership, and Abbas does not fit that bill any longer.

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 January 2015
Word Count: 825
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NEW YORK — This week’s mark of one full year in detention in Egyptian jails for three convicted Al-Jazeera television journalists is an opportunity for all those who love Egypt and Egyptians to reflect on the wider predicaments and distortions that this country suffers, which augur badly for itself and the entire Arab world. The case of the three journalists — Mohammad Fahmy, Baher Mohammad and Peter Greste — is merely the tip of the iceberg of scandalous misuse of the judiciary and the police as tools by which the executive branch and the armed forces behind it reassert full control of all public power.

Dozens of other Egyptian journalists and an estimated 21,000 other Egyptians — according to credible Egyptian human rights organizations — have been detained during the past year of military rule that overthrew the elected presidency of Muslim Brotherhood member Mohamad Morsi and ushered in the current President Abdel Fattah Sisi.

The charges that these three men or the Al-Jazeera channel itself could be involved in security threats and assisting the Muslim Brotherhood in a plot to destabilize Egypt are so beyond the realm of the reasonable — and the evidence the Egyptian prosecutors presented in court can only be described as a joke — that the charges against them will likely be dropped soon, their convictions overturned, or retrials ordered which would find them not guilty. Or President Sisi could pardon them, since they have been sentenced to 7-10 years in prison.

All these options would be good news for these three men and their families, and perhaps will help free other journalists who are similarly detained on mostly fabricated charges. But if this happens, it should not be seen as reflecting a political governance system that is able to right its wrongs, because it would mirror exactly the opposite — the sad depravities of a diseased and vicious political power structure that can jail tens of thousands of its people and use the judicial and security systems to achieve the administration’s desire to eliminate any opposition views and maintain Egypt under the control of the armed forces and their crony capitalist colleagues who have run the country into the ground since 1952.

Releasing the three Al-Jazeera journalists would be a welcomed humanitarian gesture. But it would not dent the political power structure that has found that it can perpetuate the armed forces’ 62-year-old rule in Egypt without suffering any serious drops in its international military or financial support, whether from Arab or Western sources. The real danger for Egypt is that continuing to rely on the military to mismanage the country will only aggravate existing conditions (poverty, social and income disparities, lack of jobs, mass informal employment, corruption) that ultimately led to the uprising and revolution that overthrew the Husni Mubarak regime four years ago.

Perpetual military rule, which means forbidding genuine pluralism and accountability, guarantees that the long-term, slow-motion corrosion of the integrity of governance and public authority will become institutionalized, but camouflaged beneath a bitter brand of mass public hysteria that dreams of strong leaders who can provide instant national salvation. The Al-Jazeera journalists’ case rightly received massive international attention, but tens of thousands of other examples of misuse of the judiciary, the security agencies and the executive branch occur routinely across all sectors of society, in Egypt and most other Arab countries.

This case truly is a tip of an iceberg of mass misgovernance by military men that ultimately hollows out what had once been a leader among Arab public authority and cultural systems. This in turn leaves Egyptian governance as a mere shell of its former self, little more than a vehicle for the well-being of a small minority of Egyptians, while the majority spirals into an unending maelstrom of poverty, marginalization, vulnerability, incompetence, and petty daily corruption as a wholesale survival strategy by tens of millions of Egyptian nationals who explode from their own dehumanization one day, and seek solace in a savior the next.

The corrosion and decay of Egyptian public life offers the frightening specter of this pattern spreading across the Arab world — in those countries, that is, that have not plunged into gruesome civil war and dropped out of the business of orderly governance and sovereign statehood. The last four years have clarified that military-run political orders and their allied civilian-commercial colleagues will fight hard to maintain their autocratic rule, at any cost.

The most awful sign of their ability to do this is evident in the Egyptian case of the jailed journalists: Military regimes turn once proud and credible judiciaries into cartoon-like international laughing stocks, and the regimes’ incompetence and authoritarianism lead to such stressful life conditions for their own citizens that tens of millions of those citizens eventually come around to asking the military to come back and fix the mess it created in the first place.

The journalists must be freed, but so also must the Egyptian and Arab people be freed from the crippling, deadly grip of military rule.

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 © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 31 December 2014
Word Count: 829
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NEW YORK — In the coming weeks, an important debate will take place at the UN Security Council (UNSC) on draft resolutions to resolve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. We should pay attention, because the positions taken by the main players at the UNSC will signal the diplomatic lay of the land that will shape political conditions for years to come. It is easy and understandable for many observers to view the upcoming UNSC debates with disdain, seeing this as a venue where a handful of big powers dominate the rest of the world and the weaker states only play an ornamental role.

The two draft resolutions presented to the Council by Jordan and France capture very well the two prevailing attitudes to the work of the Council and the UN system as a whole: Does it reflect the will of the powerful, or the dictates of attainable justice for all as manifested in international law and conventions? The debate on these resolutions therefore is not only about how to achieve a fair and permanent peace in the land of Palestine and Israel through peaceful negotiations, rather than the nearly century-long legacy of violence by all sides, including Western big powers.

The debate is also about the relevance of the UNSC and the wider UN system (the UN Human Rights Council, or High Commissioner for Human Rights, for example) to achieving international peace and security by implementing the rule of law, in a manner that all parties can agree to. The particular significance of the upcoming debate on Palestine/Israel relates to two facts that can no longer be ignored, which is why the matter has been brought to the Council.

First is that this issue has been in front of assorted UN bodies since its inception in 1947-48, without adequate action by the UN system. Second is that direct Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli negotiations have taken place almost non-stop since the early 1970s — nearly half a century of negotiations — mostly mediated solely by the United States, without any serious progress on the central Palestine-Israeli conflict (though peace agreements were reached on the Jordanian and Egyptian fronts).

So the debate at the UNSC in coming weeks is important for what it will tell us about two corresponding issues: Can the UN system come together now in light of its conflict-resolution failures of recent memory, and devise a more effective peace process that respects the legitimate rights of both sides? Can a debate and decisions through multi-lateral action at the UNSC be more effective than the United States-managed failed bilateral negotiations?

The two draft resolutions forwarded by the French and Jordanians broadly reflect the views respectively of many Western and Arab parties. The important differences between them on issues such as Jerusalem, refugees and settlements have been well and succinctly analyzed by my colleague Daoud Kuttab in a column for Al Monitor this week (almon.co/2bq7), which I highly recommend. The fundamental question that emerges from his analysis, and from following the diplomacy of the United States-Israel and the Palestinians-Arabs since the early 1970s, is very clear, and will take center-stage at the UNSC. It is about whether peace-making diplomacy will be anchored in the balance of power on the ground that favors Israel and its demands, or on concepts of mutual, reciprocal and simultaneous justice that are anchored in the idea that the international rule of law can meet the legitimate needs of both sides without violence or occupation.

In many ways, the UNSC debates will not be mainly about Israel-Palestine, but about the UN Security Council itself. The Council has always been hobbled by the structural reality that any of its five permanent members can veto a resolution and thus immobilize it from taking action. This is what has happened often in relation to debates on the Israel-Palestine issue, with the United States vetoing countless resolutions that otherwise would have had significant majority international support. That approach has not achieved peace, security, justice, stability or anything else other than perpetual warfare and destruction.

The Palestinians became so exasperated with their lack of progress in the US-mediated bilateral negotiations with Israel that they finally decided to leave that unbalanced arena that favors Israel so heavily. Instead, they now seek a redress of grievance in international forums whose founding charters value the concepts of justice and the rule of law. The Palestinians have several options to pursue in international arenas, including the UNSC, the UN General Assembly, specialized agencies, the International Criminal Court, and others.

This initial move in the UNSC is likely to set the stage for others to follow, which in turn will test whether there is any credible capacity in the prevailing international system of states to resolve conflicts through negotiations, and thus to achieve peace, justice, security and stability that are the rights of all people, especially Palestinians and Israelis.

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 © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 December 2014
Word Count: 807
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NEW YORK — So is the Global War on Terror (GWOT) that the United States launched in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks succeeding or failing? This would seem to be a compelling question for the United States and the world — but it receives surprisingly little attention. After 13 years of the GWOT, events this year emphasize the big new development of militant and terror groups who now carry out dramatic and gruesome attacks that kill or kidnap hundreds of victims at a time; this is combined with the fact that some of these groups — such as ISIS, Jabhat el-Nusra, Boko Haram and others — have taken control of territories in Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, Mali, Yemen and elsewhere.

The attack that killed over 130 schoolchildren in Pakistan earlier this week shows that this kind of danger lurks across a very wide region of the world. Some of these takfiri militant groups control territory, allowing them to train, mobilize, propagandize, and launch operations across many continents, should they wish to do so.

The fight against them is now led primarily by the United States military and its aerial attacks and associated ground operations in northern Iraq and Syria primarily, alongside drone-launched missile strikes to assassinate presumed terrorists in other countries. In the past five months of aerial attacks, the balance sheet of success in containing, rolling back and defeating ISIS has been mixed. ISIS has been pushed back from some lands in northern Iraq that it grabbed in the late summer, but it continues to gain control of small bits of land in other parts of Iraq and Syria, and very small numbers of adherents in neighboring countries.

Earlier this week, some 8000 Kurdish forces combined with continuous American airstrikes to successfully liberate lands controlled by ISIS in Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria. This largest such joint air-land operation of its kind indicated that if local ground troops from Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Iran or other countries combine with devastating American, Arab and other air power, ISIS and other such threats could be quickly rolled back.

That is not happening very quickly or in very many places, however, while these militant groups continue to expand their operations. The most troubling aspect of this dynamic is that the underlying condition that has allowed these violent groups to materialize and spread in recent decades — corrupt, violent, unjust, elitist and inept governance systems in most Arab countries — remains almost totally untouched and unchanged. The forces that give birth to an ISIS or an Al-Qaeda will continue to generate the sentiments of anger, alienation, humiliation and desperation among millions of Arab citizens, which ultimately midwifed such extremist movements in increasingly violent forms over the last half century.

The more the GWOT continues, the greater seems to be the expansion and impact of the very terror groups it seeks to defeat, with ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra being the most recent examples. During the last few months that I have spent in the United States, I have wondered, with growing perplexity, why there is so little discussion here of why the GWOT seems only to have sparked the continued birth and expansion of international militant and terror groups across the Arab-African-Asian region.

The only conclusion I can draw comprises two elements: These groups may be a menace to their local populations, but they do not seem to directly threaten the United States or truly strategic American interests; and, Washington seems to feel that it can handle the existing threat through its current approach of providing air power and technical assistance to local forces on the ground.

The important lesson would seem to be that populations and government in the Arab-Asian-African region had better start taking the threats from these militant groups much more seriously, because the American-led international parties that now fight ISIS and Al-Qaeda seem perfectly willing to keep attacking from the air, and containing or disrupting these groups, without providing the ground troops needed to remove the threat completely.

The really puzzling question that poses itself at the end of this frightening year is simply, why have local Arab countries themselves been so hesitant or unable to confront and fight ISIS and other such takfiri groups? The answer would seem to be equally simple: The same government systems and power structures that allowed ISIS and Al-Qaeda to come into being cannot easily muster the legitimacy and technical capabilities needed to defeat them, or to prevent other such violent groups from rising from their ashes.

With the United States and other foreign powers apparently willing for now just to shoot from the air and essentially freeze conditions on the ground, this augurs badly for some Arab countries that can expect semi-permanent, constant warfare, huge refugee flows, and some national disintegration for years to come.

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 © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 December 2014
Word Count: 795
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BOSTON — We have learned much about the Arab world in the last four years, including a combination of heroism and criminal deviance that both dwell deep within our societies. In fact, we have learned more about ourselves in these four years than we did in the preceding century — because this has been the only stretch of time in which history in the Arab region has been driven heavily, even primarily, by the actions and sentiments of its own ordinary men and women, rather than only by its narrow elites or foreign powers.

Those elites and foreign powers were caught off guard four years ago today, on December 17, 2010, when Mohammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in the rural Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, when he became exasperated by the mistreatment he experienced within hours at the hands of his local police and governor’s office. His action sparked demonstrations of support by hundreds of rural Tunisians who immediately understood what had driven him to his suicidal act. His frenzied exasperation was also a dramatic, reckless self-affirmation announcing that, in fact, he was not helpless, voiceless and without any sentiments or citizen rights. He turned out to be the most powerful Arab of all time — for he sparked the greatest simultaneous citizen uprisings ever known in this region.

When the protests quickly spread to the capital Tunis and demanded the overthrow of the regime, hundreds of millions of Arabs instinctively followed the events on satellite television. They knew in their hearts and felt in their bones the sentiments that Bouazizi and a demeaned Tunisian population expressed in rebelling against the regime that had mistreated them for decades on end.

That was four years ago, and in the interim we now know much more about ourselves and our world, because only in this period of time have we seen unleashed in our countries the many forces that had been bottled up in the strange circumstances of our past century — circumstances of manufactured statehoods, compounded and conflicting identities, breezy nationalisms, and an increasingly desperate race by tens of millions of families to keep their children and their own humanity alive. Those unleashed forces have included the most noble aspirations for democracy, pluralism, citizenship and dignity, alongside the darkness and demons of criminal minds who destroy their countries and kill their own people by the tens of thousands to perpetuate their authoritarian control.

I remain convinced, as I have been from the start of the uprisings and revolutions four years ago, that the most important lesson of this process has been the unquestioned desire by the vast majority of Arab men and women to live decent, ordinary lives defined by dignity, equality, liberty and opportunity, without the dictatorial mismanagement and corruption that they had suffered for three generations at least. That noble desire — a universal human characteristic — could not prevail and transform societies to functioning pluralistic democracies, with the exception of Tunisia to date.

One major reason for the slippage of half a dozen Arab states into violence, chaos and fragmenting statehoods has been that those indigenous elites and foreign powers who had been taken by surprise in early 2011 regained their footage that summer, and fought back viciously to reassert control. Fear then took hold among tens of millions of ordinary men and women who did not flee their countries and risk their lives. Fear transformed otherwise normal people into fanatical killing machines that often dealt death according to sectarian identity.

This was not the first time this had occurred in our modern history, of course. We had killed, burned and looted like this before — in Iraq, Lebanon, Algeria, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen and other troubled lands, where citizens and governments killed each other ferociously and routinely in some years. Savage death squads, terror attacks, ethnic cleansing and wholesale urban warfare scarred some of our cities and towns once again, revealing a sick streak that we had seen only briefly among some Arab quarters.

This time, however, has been different, because the killings were preceded by a rainbow. Death by devils was heralded by a chorus of angels asking to live freely and fully. The noble aspirations of those Arabs who non-violently rebelled against their dictators in early 2011 never had a chance, it now appears in retrospect. Some Arab governments and foreign powers poured guns and money into other Arab countries, as old elites and comfortable generals with their backs to the wall lashed out mercilessly and killed everything in sight in order to remain in power. We learned about a dark side of ourselves that we never imagined could exist. We know today, though, about both our angels and our devils, and they will battle for our souls for some years to come. We have become normal countries, in the early years of our painful birth.

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 © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 December 2014
Word Count: 804
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BOSTON — This moment is about as American as it gets here in the United States. The exemplary release of a Congressional investigation into the Central Intelligence Agency’s brutal interrogation techniques reflects the finest practice of citizen oversight of government executive and security agencies, truly one of the United States’ great gifts to the world; at the same time, the revelations of torture and deception at the highest levels of government reflect the worst practices of police states and authoritarian despots.

So is the United States the shining republic, or just another banana republic? Is this a moment of pride or shame for Americans? Right now, it seems to be a bit of both, but how it emerges in the longer term remains to be seen. I deeply admire that the Congressional committee carried out the multi-year investigation into the CIA’s practices and then agreed with the president to release the executive summary of its findings. The fundamental reason for doing this has been the right of the American people to know what is being done by their government, in their name.

Regardless of the awkward, awful and even criminal findings of the report, this episode affirms the central idea that the American revolution, Declaration of Independence, Constitution and 240 years of democratic governance experience have given life to — the consent of the governed. This means that the citizens rule by choosing their government every few years, and by holding it accountable every moment of every year, through the institutions of the rule of law, a free press, an independent judiciary, the right to protest peacefully, and parliamentary oversight.

Will this example of democracy at work prove more lasting and productive than similar previous revelations of misconduct by officials or security agencies? The report’s findings and the intense discussions now taking place across the country are not unique, so it is fair to ask whether its publication will trigger the positive changes that most citizens would desire to see. The United States has published similar reports or revealed other misconduct — such as massacres in Vietnam, criminal conduct and cover-ups in the White House, illegal domestic spying on private citizens, or racist denials of equal rights to all citizens — often without subsequent strong action to prevent such things from recurring. So the American system is being tested once again; most admirably, it is testing itself.

The discussions since the report’s release last Tuesday have mostly centered on several issues: whether the CIA methods used constitute “torture,” how honestly and fully the CIA briefed the executive branch and the congressional oversight committees, and whether the interrogations were effective in providing information that truly served American legitimate national security interests, by helping to capture Al-Qaeda operatives or to avert other terror attacks. The public discussions themselves are a critical dimension of rule by the citizenry.

Time will tell if definitive legal safeguards will be installed to prevent recurrences of torture and deception, and whether those who are identified as having acted improperly and illegally will be held accountable in a credible manner. I would add two other questions that should be answered in the months and years ahead.

The first is about the legality, morality and efficacy of other war-making techniques that the United States continues to use today. These include  assassinating scores of people around the world via drone-fired missile attacks, and holding detainees at Guantanamo Bay and perhaps other places we do not know about for many years, without legal safeguards. These and other such issues are not only about legality, legitimacy or efficacy. They define the bigger fundamental issue of how an imperial-minded United States uses its immense global military and technological capabilities in any ways it sees fit, and justifies anything it does simply by claiming pre-emptive self-defense in the face of imminent attacks against it.

The second issue that desperately needs discussion and action in our part of the world is about the roles that Middle Eastern countries played in capturing, detaining, interrogating, torturing, or transporting detainees that the United States sought, and in many cases took to Guantanamo. A 2013 report by the Open Society Foundation’s Justice Initiative (Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition) charged that 54 foreign governments participated in the CIA’s program of “extraordinary rendition,” including 11 in the Middle East (Algeria, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen). These are serious charges that deserve more public discussion in these Middle Eastern countries, because if the charges are correct they reflect a double failure in our societies: the unethical and criminal act of participating in torture activities, and the politically subservient behavior of supine colonial subjects who perform any act — regardless of its legality or morality — demanded by the distant power they cannot resist. Will we speak of or try to repair our own criminal and imperial collusions nearly as openly as the United States addresses its own?

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 © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 December 2014
Word Count: 821
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NEW YORK — It is exasperating to listen to American officials pontificate about events in the Middle East and offer reasonable sounding proposals to resolve the area’s problems, when those same officials and the entire political power structure they represent refuse to acknowledge that they have played a major role in creating or expanding those problems. This is why it is astounding to watch the United States now lead the military assault against the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) by using the same techniques that contributed in a major way to the birth and growth of the militant Islamist ideology that forms the core of ISIS and its criminal deeds.

The latest example of this is a statement the U.S. State Department put out Monday quoting Secretary of State John Kerry saying that, “The fight against violent extremism in the Middle East can only truly be won if there are clear and appealing alternatives.”

This simplistic statement sounds so logical and reasonable, but in fact is full of dishonesty and disgraceful critical omissions. I say this because the United States itself played a direct and clear role in helping to foment the spread of ISIS-style violent extremism by creating the conditions for it in 2003 when it invaded Iraq and wiped away the former Iraqi state and government. That war created chaotic conditions in Iraq that provided an opening for Osama Bin Laden to send Abu Musab el-Zarqawi into Iraq to set up a local branch of Al-Qaeda. This small group of killers and anti-Shiite Sunni sectarian extremists expanded slowly and eventually branded itself ISIS.

Kerry’s statement is also problematic in mentioning the absence of alternatives. There are no strong alternatives in large part because for over half a century — and still ongoing today — the United States and other major foreign powers enthusiastically have supported Arab autocrats and tyrants whose disdain for their own citizens has been the single most important reason for the growth of ISIS-like mentalities and behavior. The status quo in the Middle East that the United States favored and supported for so long made it impossible for any alternatives to emerge.

John Kerry’s simplistic statement Monday reveals either dishonesty or sheer ignorance, or perhaps a bit of both. That is truly troubling given that he represents a massive amount of military force that his country unleashes regularly around the Middle East, most often leading to troubling conditions such as we witness in Iraq and Syria today. To then follow up with simplistic statements for public consumption in which he offers solutions to the problems the United States helped create is an incredible act of disregard for the basic intelligence and common sense of billions of people around the world who do not share the kind of political and intellectual dishonesty he displays in this case.

It is not the responsibility of the United States or any other foreign power to fix the problems of the Middle East, which are mainly home-grown problems stemming from over half a century of autocratic or dictatorial rule, massive incompetence and mismanagement in governance, rampant corruption, declining education quality, misguided militarism, environmental irresponsibility, and trampling on the rule of law and citizen rights. The United States knew about all this and more, but nevertheless resolutely supported the political systems that ultimately drove some of their citizens into the realm of Al-Qaeda and ISIS.

How can anyone possibly take seriously statements such as John Kerry’s? Moreover, why does the United States keep insulting us and the world by making such statements that lack so much logic, credibility and veracity? Presumably, the answer is that the United States feels no real repercussions either from pursuing the corrosive policies it has for half a century, or from adding insult to injury by saying that we need attractive alternatives to stem the flow of our young men into killer movements like ISIS.

This highlights the wider problem that we continue to suffer from in the Arab world’s relations with the United States and other major world powers. This is the perpetuation of colonial attitudes among both American and other foreign elites who toy with the Arab peoples, on the one hand, and Arab ruling elites who play the game of dependent colonial subject, on the other. ISIS represents one of the few fractures in that process that shatters the prevailing conditions of the past century, and, not surprisingly, frightens both Western and Arab rulers. Until those same Arab, Western and other foreign rulers accept that their shared policies were the main underlying reason that allowed ISIS and other such movements to come into being, statements such as John Kerry’s this week will only meet with ridicule and disbelief, and zero impact on anyone other than his poor press secretary who has to disseminate this kind of ridiculous nonsense.

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 © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 December 2014
Word Count: 805
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NORMAN, Oklahoma — The dramatic spontaneous outbreak of dozens of demonstrations across major cities in the United States protesting the police killings of black civilian men captures the best and worst of American culture. It may also allow Americans to appreciate the similar sentiments of shock, anger and vulnerability — and also sustained resistance — that define others around the world who suffer similar grotesque behavior by security forces on a regular basis.

From Boston, New York City and Norman, Oklahoma in the past week, I have watched the demonstrations and heard Americans discuss the issues with a combination of sentiments that I have rarely experienced before — deep emotion and empathy, shock and anger, but also renewed respect.

This is because the two most recent incidents in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City — among many others, we will no doubt learn — touch on three principal constitutional values that have generated the mass outrage and street action. These are the conduct of police officers who are supposed to protect citizens, and mostly do so, but in some cases brazenly kill citizens; the decision by grand juries of citizens not to put on trial the officers who allegedly killed the civilians in question; and, the wider problem this suggests of systematic racism against black Americans who very often feel vulnerable to being abused simply because of their color.

The dysfunction in the three critical arenas of police protection, the justice system, and the Constitutional guarantee of equal rights and protection under law represents for many black Americans a frightening collapse of the most important pillars of the American system that are supposed to protect all citizens.

This is why I have felt shock and anger, and also empathy, because I instinctively understood how black Americans and many others in this country feel in the face of killings by security officers that seems to go unpunished, creating a situation of systemic impunity for murder by the institutions of the state. The parallel I feel is with the hundreds of Palestinian youth and thousands of Palestinian civilians who have been killed by Israeli police and army personnel over the past decades, with almost total impunity within the Israeli or international legal systems.

The renewed respect I feel for the American political system results from two things I have witnessed this week, which both are largely missing from the case of Israeli troops who wantonly kill unarmed Palestinian civilians. One is the spontaneous and sustained demonstration of citizen anger against the apparent impunity for those officers of the law who kill black men, or any other civilians. The two episodes that have triggered these protests clearly seem repugnant to most Americans, who have taken to the streets to make this clear.

The second reason has been the swift decision by local, state and federal officials to pursue further legal action against the alleged police killers. This is an impressive affirmation of the multi-tiered system of legal protections that Americans enjoy, allowing them to seek a redress of grievance at a higher level of governance if their local system malfunctions.

The actions underway represent the core operative elements that define American democracy — the consent of the governed, and the accountability of political authority to the citizenry. In some of the cases at hand, the evidence presented to a grand jury has been released to the public to review. In the demonstrations underway these days, television cameras and reporters monitor the police as they interact with the demonstrators. When it works well, the American system minimizes the ability of security, judicial or political personnel to act in the shadows and get away with murder and other abusive or illegal behavior, because citizens exercise their right to know, and check the performance of their public officials.

We will know in the coming weeks whether the protests around the United States result in actions that provide justice for those black families whose sons died at the hands of police officers, or a larger sense of assurance that their mass vulnerability to mistreatment and death will be lessened in the years ahead.

Until then, I will continue to feel both disdain and admiration for the negative and positive dimensions of American life we witness today, hoping that citizen activism will temper the criminal behavior of racist individuals and expand the protection of the law for all Americans. I also hope that these incidents might prompt some Americans — especially officials — to grasp why unarmed civilian Palestinians who have died in the thousands for decades have felt the same way about Israeli security and military forces as most black Americans feel about American police. A similar situation in many Arab countries is equally disgraceful, as armed forces and police and intelligence agencies abuse and kill thousands of their own people at will.

The United States reminds us now that killing with impunity is a terrible crime and a national failure, wherever it happens.

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 © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 December 2014
Word Count: 818
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rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757