NEW YORK CITY — The conviction in a Washington, D.C. court Wednesday of four former Blackwater Worldwide security guards for their roles in a 2007 shooting in Baghdad that left 17 Iraqi civilians dead and 17 other wounded is a small, symbolic and perhaps significant act of justice in a much bigger and unresolved drama of death, destruction and impunity. The significance is that some Americans and British who invaded Iraq on false pretense and killed many innocent Iraqis have been held accountable by a jury of their peers in a court of law, and they may be punished with long jail sentences.

The larger drama that begs moral resolution is that punishing a few hired guards and gunmen while ignoring the responsibility of the political leadership of the United States and Great Britain that waged this criminal war in Iraq in the name of their entire nations is a gross abdication of responsibility — and itself a moral and political crime that makes a laughing stock of those American and British politicians who lecture us about the value and power of democracy.

The long quest for accountability for the mayhem and mass suffering that resulted from the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 is not only about redressing the misdeeds of the past, because the death and destruction that the American and British governments unleashed in early 2003 continue to spread mayhem all around the region — and perhaps even across the world, judging by concerns about militant Salafist-Takfiris returning to Western countries from waging war with ISIS in Syria and Iraq.

The jury in this case ruled that when the Blackwater guards started shooting in a busy intersection and killed 17 civilian Iraqis, they were not engaged in a battle of war, but rather in a criminal act. Ronald C. Machen Jr., the United States attorney in Washington, D.C., said after the trial that, “This verdict is a resounding affirmation of the commitment of the American people to the rule of law, even in times of war. Seven years ago, these Blackwater contractors unleashed powerful sniper fire, machine guns and grenade launchers on innocent men, women and children. Today, they were held accountable for that outrageous attack and its devastating consequences for so many Iraqi families.”

Well, sort of. The real “devastating consequences” that need to be addressed by all Americans and British is their governments’ official decision to attack Iraq, wipe out its government and security services, and unleash a maelstrom of killings and conquests by various Iraqi and other groups that has left the country not only shattered — but also has left it as fertile ground for the birth, expansion and consolidation of ISIS and many other such Salafist-Takfiri criminals.

The bigger question that continues to plague us all is the symbolism of how the U.S. armed forces act with impunity anywhere in the world, to protect American interests — while the interests of anyone else, especially darker natives of the South, be damned. The ongoing drones attacks in several countries and the air attacks against ISIS in Syria-Iraq are just two examples of the problem of the use of American power that is both uncontrollable and unaccountable.

Attorneys for the defendants in the Blackwater security guards’ trial argued that their clients acted reasonably “at a time when the Iraqi capital was the scene of ‘horrific threats’ from car bombs, ambushes and follow-on attacks, sometimes aided by Iraqi security forces — infiltrated by guerrillas,” one press report noted.

Well, the truly “horrific threats” that faced all Iraqis — including the several million who fled the country as refugees — were mostly anchored in the consequences of the Anglo-American invasion and the American occupation that was managed by political amateurs like Paul Bremer. Violence by Iraqis was the sad and inevitable consequence of the chaotic conditions the clueless Americans created before they finally left that tortured land after a decade of playing with it like a toy they could never understand or master.

The verdict against the four Americans this week will be appealed and tested in court, and it may not hold. If it does hold, and the men are jailed for many years, a small dose of justice would have been achieved. It would also suggest that those who uphold the law in small doses can also do so on the bigger issues where criminal conduct is the work of their government, rather than individual hired gunmen. The verdict is a small, single example of the rule of law in action that does affirm one of the most impressive aspects of the American system of life and governance — the application of the rule of law. The dark side of this same matter is that such shining examples of justice in action are rarely applied to the foreign policies of the American government, whose consequences are so much more dangerous and devastating.

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: 25 October 2014
Word Count: 809
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NEW YORK CITY — The frightening rise and expansion of the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS), which has now triggered yet another round of American-led foreign military attacks in the Levant, continues to confound many in the region and around the world. Many ask: Where did these killers come from and where do they aim to go? These issues will be clarified in the months and perhaps years ahead, but one aspect of ISIS should be crystal clear to anyone who has made even a cursory review of Islamist movements in the Middle East in the past two generations.

Whatever else it represents, including a postponed and displaced resurgence of Saudi Arabian Wahhabism from the 18th Century, in contemporary terms ISIS is the latest manifestation of at least half a dozen other Islamist movements that have entered the stage of Middle Eastern society and its recurring citizen discontents since the 1970s. The very different natures of these movements and the reasons for their emergence are very relevant for anyone interested in understanding how ISIS came to be and how it could be confronted and defeated. This is because ISIS, like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizbullah, Hamas, Gamaa Islamiya, non-violent Salafists, militant Salafist-Takfiris, Al-Qaeda and others before it, fundamentally is a symptom of, and a reaction to, deeper ailments in society. Such movements did not suddenly pop out of a bottle or emerge from a historical vacuum.

Three principal realities about the many forms of Islamism that our region has generated since the 1970s should be kept in mind: 1) that socio-economic and political conditions and associated regional-international interactions (Israel, Iran, United States, UK, Russia) chronically generate miserable, often humiliating, lives for tens of millions of Arab families; 2) those same subjugated citizens refuse to acquiesce in their own pauperization, marginalization and political eradication, and will always find ways to express their grievances, and to actively challenge and resist those forces that aggrieve them; and, 3) such citizen activism will almost always take on an Islamist form, mainly because religion (pick a religion, any religion) is the most effective means of action for abused citizens who are denied political rights to push back against their domestic or foreign oppressors.

So defeating ISIS by military means primarily will likely only bring about a temporary respite in the continuing effervescence of Islamist movements across the Arab world and other Muslim-majority societies. If the Arab region suffers a continuation of the underlying conditions that gave rise to Islamisms in the first place in recent decades — like corruption, mismanagement of national resources, poor Arab governance, widespread disparities in society, poor economic prospects for a majority of citizens, abuse of power, incompetence in confronting Zionism and its threats, subservience to foreign powers, and the dominance of society by single families and their multiple security agencies — then these Arab societies should only expect to see the continued birth and evolution of Islamist movements that will keep trying to achieve their versions of justice, dignity and freedom for their citizens.

The last 40 years have been very telling in this respect. The Muslim Brotherhood movement enjoyed a major boost in the mid-late-1970s as a response to two principal grievances that stressed the lives of most Arab citizens: the socio-economic distortions and inflationary pressures of the 1970s oil boom, and the simultaneous power grab of many Arab states by families and their security services (Syria, Iraq, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, and others). In the late 1970s some frustrated members of the Muslim Brothers turned to armed violence against the state in Egypt and Syria, and were crushed by the brutal reactions of those states.

In the early 1980s Hamas in Palestine and Hizbullah in Lebanon came into being and attracted significant followings, because they combined Islamist principles of clean government with military resistance against Israeli occupation and attacks. In the latter part of the 1980s Al-Qaeda was born to fight against Soviet troops in Afghanistan and Arab governments that they saw as unIslamic. After 2001 smaller groups of militant Salafists started to operate in Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and other countries and engaged in battles with state armies, while non-violent Salafists operated at community level, especially in the poorest areas, and later showed their strength in strong election results after the 2011 revolutions.

ISIS, Jabhat el-Nusra, Ansar Beit el-Maqdas and dozens of other small Salafist-Takfiri groups have emerged in the last few years as the latest, brutal manifestation of Islamism, reaffirming the very wide range of peaceful and violent Islamist responses to oppression, misrule and occupation. Nobody should be surprised if even worse responses show up in the years ahead, if the underlying problems of our countries are not addressed at their roots.

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: 22 October 2014
Word Count: 786
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NORMAN, Oklahoma — Analysts in the United States this week are debating the precise meaning of the statements Wednesday by John Allen, the ex-Marine general who now coordinates the U.S.-led coalition’s response to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). He said that the United States is not coordinating with the Free Syrian Army, and instead plans to develop from scratch new local ground units in Iraq and Syria to fight ISIS on two fronts.

I have always felt that neither Allen’s recent track records in Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine and CENTCOM nor the legacy of U.S. training of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan provide any comfort about the current American strategy to defeat ISIS. His announcement that the United States plans to create what American press reports call “a home-grown, moderate counterweight to the Islamic State” should cause new concerns for Iraq, Syria, the United States any many others around the world who one day may be targets of ISIS reprisal attacks, or victims of the chaos it spreads in the region.

Sadly, and based on actual recent history, I suspect that the United States in fact cannot train Iraqi and Syrian forces to achieve this specific goal, because it continues inadequately to assess and respond to the frightening underlying trends across much of the Middle East that have seen the birth and expansion of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda in the first place.

I wish that were not the case, because ISIS-like fighters are knocking on the door of Lebanon where I live; and the chaos that has emerged from Syria and Iraq in recent years to threaten the integrity of many Levant states is to a great extent the consequence of…well, of the policies that well meaning folks like Gen. Allen and his colleagues and superiors have practiced since 2003, along with their Arab “allies” in the “coalition” that is now fighting ISIS after midwifing the conditions for its birth.

So when Gen. Allen says that the United States and its coalition partners will aim to strengthen the political opposition and make sure it is associated with “a credible field force” that would be intensely vetted, my eyes roll and my heart aches for the millions of people in the Arab region who will become refugees in the years ahead. The United States has tried to do precisely this kind of thing in recent years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, spending billions of dollars over ten years — but it has failed miserably on most fronts.

This is not because the United States lacks technical capabilities or good intentions — it is amply endowed with both. It is rather because the United States allows broadly ignorant and politically constrained political figures in Washington, D.C. to come up with strategies that are simultaneously hair-brained, unrealistic, inappropriate, detached from reality, and, therefore, unachievable — even predictably unachievable, and repeatedly predictably unachievable, at that.

Gen. Allen warned that, “It’s not going to happen immediately. We’re working to establish the training sites now, and we’ll ultimately go through a vetting process and beginning to bring the trainers and the fighters in to begin to build that force out.”

Of course it’s not going to happen immediately; that is because foreign policy catastrophes never happen quickly, but rather they build up over time as ignorance, arrogance, ordinance, confusion and romanticism all blend together to generate foreign policy failures so dramatic that politicians in Washington inexplicably seem to need to repeat them again quickly, perhaps to make sure that their initial failures were not a fluke.

The prevalent skepticism about this latest American plan is not about the United States or Iraq-Syria. It is about human nature and history, and the proven inability of a superpower’s army to travel halfway around the world and reconfigure local conditions to its liking. This lesson has been repeatedly reconfirmed since approximately the 4th Century BC, largely because local folks do not take kindly to foreign armies that come in and try to reshape their society according to alien values and goals. Why does the United States repeatedly ignore the fact that the single biggest driver of the birth and growth of criminal groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS in the past quarter century has been the direct involvement of foreign armies — mainly the USSR and the USA — in Arab-Asian-Islamic lands, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Libya, Lebanon and others?

Why does the United States repeatedly discard the relevance of human nature and history when it unleashes its guns and goes into action around the world? There are no indications that the United States today has any clearer appreciation than it did a decade ago of the critical political, strategic, cultural, historical and psychological contexts of Arab lands where it seeks to undertake larger-than-life military and political missions that have serially failed in recent years.

They have failed and will continue to fail, I fear, because American policy-makers fail to understand what their armed forces were doing so far away from home, in those always confounding realms of real life and society beyond McDonalds and Disneyland.

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: 19 October 2014
Word Count: 843
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The Palestinian unity technocratic government that held its first meeting in war-torn Gaza on Thursday marked several significant if symbolic realities, the most important being the need to unify all Palestinians under a single legitimate leadership. It could be an important first step in a historic series of actions that are needed to address the visible weaknesses in the Palestinian national condition.

Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah said at the meeting — held in Gaza because Israeli would not allow Gaza-based ministers to travel to the West Bank — that, “This is the government of all of Palestine… therefore I demand all factions support the government in rebuilding the Gaza strip and restoring a normal way of life.”

If Hamdallah was speaking for the government or for all Palestinians, the welcomed drama of his presiding over a national unity government in Palestine could not hide the still missing element that weakens his words and deeds. We were all reminded of this last week by a fine report from the International Crisis Group (ICG) that noted that the vast majority of Palestinians who are refugees living outside of Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, remain politically outside the corridors of Palestinian power. Until the refugees are credibly re-integrated into the political decision-making system, as was the case at the height of the Palestinian national movement in the 1970s, statements and decisions by Palestinian leaders in Ramallah and Gaza will have very limited impact, because they do not reflect the pain and the will of the Palestinian majority.

The ICG report, entitled “Bringing Back the Palestinian Refugee Question” and available on the www.icg.org website, is a timely and convincing reminder of why the Palestinian refugees must be central actors in the quest for a negotiated resolution of their conflict with Israel. It notes correctly that, “The Palestinian refugee question, like the refugees themselves, has been politically marginalized and demoted on the diplomatic agenda. Yet, whenever the diplomatic process comes out of its current hiatus, the Palestinian leadership will be able to negotiate and sell a deal only if it wins the support or at least acquiescence of refugees — because if it does not, it will not bring along the rest of the Palestinian population.”

For Palestinians, their refugeehood always was and remains today the central issue that must be seriously addressed and equitably resolved for any permanent peace agreement to take hold. That it can be resolved politically is inherent in the 2002 Arab Peace Plan that acknowledges two critical realities: Any negotiated agreement must respect the concerns of both Israelis and Palestinians, and it must be based on international law and UN resolutions. That is a tough nut to crack, but it is, with hard work, a crackable nut.

Refugees today are almost totally neglected by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its negotiators in the occupied territories, the report notes, and refugees also resent the class structure that the PA and its economic policies have produced. Neither in their demand for basic services nor political representation are Palestinian refugees anywhere finding receptive ears among Palestinian leaderships, especially since the PA has assumed the mantle of national leadership in place of the now dormant Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

The positive symbolism of a national unity government meeting in Gaza to demand the rapid reconstruction of that territory captures the shrinkage of the Palestinian leadership’s concerns from truly national concerns to much more localized ones. Gaza absolutely needs reconstruction, but this is a meaningless process for all Palestinians if reconstruction only leads to renewed warfare a few years from now — which is what will happen if the political validity and force of the refugees are not harnessed and incorporated into Palestinian leaders’ daily priorities.

The ICG reports captures this urgency very well: “For the Palestinian leadership, the main priority must be to reclaim representation of the majority of refugees, for without their acquiescence it will be exceedingly difficult to implement any comprehensive agreement with Israel; this therefore should be a concern of all who seek one. The growing chasm between the political elites and the refugees also portends greater instability, particularly should refugees or their advocates, despairing of the diplomatic process, seize the political initiative. But stability in and of itself is no answer: the marginalization of refugees within their host societies has left them with little choice other than to fantasize about returning to their former homes in Israel.”

This is precisely the moment when Palestinian everywhere should actively work to rebuild a credible national movement that focuses on a realistic and fair resolution of the conflict with Zionism and Israel. Gaza’s recent war experience reminds us of the power that Palestinian refugees can muster when they work seriously, but also of the immense waste and destruction that occur when political arenas — both Zionist and Palestinian — neglect the centrality of refugeehood to the conflict.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow at 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: 15 October 2014
Word Count: 810
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NORMAN, Oklahoma — The American-led air attacks against ISIS in Iraq and Syria have triggered new debates in the United States about how the U.S. should respond to this and other challenges in faraway lands that may or may not directly threaten American interests. I have had enjoyable and substantive discussions with students and faculty at the University of Oklahoma this week, in which this question has come up repeatedly — and understandably so, given that most Americans had felt that their country was withdrawing from its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rather than re-engaging in new combat action.

My response has been that there is no correct, obvious, simple answer. Rather, I have suggested, the thoughtful and questioning manner in which Americans seem to be approaching their military actions against ISIS contains within it the seeds of an answer. This is a far cry from the reflexive, massive military attacks that the United States launched against Afghanistan and Iraq after the 9/11 terrorism of 2001. Americans wonder whether their military participation will expand or continue for years, and seem more prepared than in previous years to ask whether they are doing the right or the most appropriate thing.

I have responded to questions on this issue by suggesting that what is needed now is a more nuanced and fact-based analysis of conditions on the ground, as well as the implications of renewed American militarism. The situation with ISIS in Iraq/Syria could well resurface in similar forms in other countries, should the ISIS brand of Islamist militancy continue to spread. The best recommendation I can make in this situation has been to suggest that Americans — or any other foreign powers — should ask and honestly answer three basic questions before they send their troops to fight and kill people in distant lands.

The three questions are about the legitimacy, the efficacy, and the consequences of military involvement. I mention these three critical issues mainly on the basis of the events of the last quarter century, when assorted American military ventures in Arab-Asian lands have resulted mostly in problematic long-term consequences. These include creating the kind of chaos in which groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS thrive, or providing new recruiting tools for such criminal organizations to attract new members who feel they are fighting a defensive jihad to protect Islamic lands from foreign invaders.

I suspect that if any foreign power asked about the legitimacy, the efficacy, and the consequences of its military involvement in other countries before actually launching such militarism, it might be possible to minimize the negative consequences that we have experienced in the Middle East in recent decades.

The legitimacy of foreign military action is probably the most complex of my three criteria, but also the most important. Legitimacy ideally requires consent and validation by both the local populations where the warfare will occur as well as the international institutions that are mandated to do this, such as the UN Security Council. This is not an easy goal to achieve, which is why it is rarely attempted. Lack of legitimacy, however, is almost certain to guarantee that the foreign military intervention will create more new problems than it will resolve existing ones — as happened in the war against Iraq in 2003.

The second criterion, efficacy, is closely tied to the legitimacy issue. If local and foreign actors agree on the need for military action, they can then define its specific aims more rigorously and precisely. This was not done in the NATO-led military action in Libya in 2011, even though that episode was widely seen to be legitimated by Libyans, the Arab League and the UN Security Council. The imprecision of the mission and its extension to overthrow the Libyan regime helped to create the chaotic conditions that prevail in the country today. Military action succeeds best when it has precise, contained and limited aims, which are essential to determining its efficacy beforehand.

The third criterion — the consequences of militarism — is the most difficult to ascertain before the fact; but this must be attempted in all cases if one wishes to avoid the kind of debacles we have witnessed in Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq in recent years. In some cases runaway militarism generates unintended consequences that end up creating huge new threats, such as ISIS in Iraq-Syria, or the spread of such ideologies in North Africa via Libya.

It is not clear if the White House went through such an analytical process before deciding to attack ISIS targets, but it is heartening to see more and more Americans today — unlike in 2002-3 — asking about whether this is the right thing for their country to do.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 October 2014
Word Count: 775
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NEW YORK — The announcement by the new center-left government in Stockholm last Friday that it intended to recognize a state of Palestine should trouble the Israeli government and all those Zionists who assume that the current situation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can remain as it is indefinitely. The Swedish announcement at one level is just one more sign of the political and popular opinion trends around the world that continue to show support for a two-state solution that treats Israelis and Palestinians equally.

At another, more important, level, it signals that Israel is wrong to believe that while the Palestinians can always muster a majority of Third World countries at UN General Assembly, the “countries that matter,” i.e., Europeans and North Americans, will always hold off any serious diplomatic moves against Israel by supporting it without reservations.

The Swedish move is both symbolic and substantive. It is symbolic because Stockholm would be recognizing a state that does not actually enjoy any sovereign powers — but it is also substantive, and should frighten Israel, for signaling that even Europeans and other people who matter to it will eventually become fed up with Israel’s violent, extremist and colonialist policies and demand real changes in its behavior towards the Palestinians.

We saw this in the past year when the European Union initiated implementation of its decision to ban dealings with Israeli organizations or institutions that are based in or benefit from the occupied Palestinian territories. The Swedish move is likely to open the door to other such decisions by European countries that have been timid to date in pursuing policies that mirror their rhetoric of supporting a two-state solution that sees Israelis and Palestinians living in adjacent states with equal rights.

Swedish Prime Minister Stefan Lofven, in his inaugural address, did not say when his country would recognize the State of Palestine, but he made the important point that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can be resolved only through negotiations “in accordance with the principles of international law.”

Israel and Zionist supporters around the world have always worked hard to prevent the Palestine-Israel conflict from being adjudicated in arenas where international law prevails, mainly because they are fully aware that Israel is badly contravening this body of law in many ways, including collective punishment, illegal annexations of land, unlawful colonization, disproportionate militarism, and many others. Israel and the United States have also vigorously fought against Palestinian plans to take the case for Palestinian statehood to diplomatic forums at the United Nations and other international arenas.

The Israeli preference, which the United States as the sole mediator in recent decades has always supported, has always been to demand that only through direct negotiations could the conflict be resolved. Yet over 20 years of direct negotiations since the Madrid Peace Conference followed by the Oslo Accords have produced no breakthroughs. This is because the Palestinians insist on their national and territorial rights under international law, while Israel insists that any agreement must accommodate the gains of Zionist colonialism and also institutionalize Apartheid-like arrangements that legally and institutionally make Palestinian partial rights subservient to the greater, priority, and absolute rights of Israelis.

Israelis claim that the Swedish recognition could lead other major European countries to follow suit, which could pre-empt the results of future negotiations over a Palestinian state and its borders. Those who support equal rights for both Israelis and Palestinians argue precisely the opposite — that recognition of a Palestinian state and its borders is necessary because negotiations in the existing unbalanced power equation, under pro-Israeli American mediation, have led only to more Zionist colonization and the shrinking of the land area of any future Palestinian state.

The Swedish Foreign Minister, Margot Wallstrom, more or less said this when she declared via social media Monday that, “two less unequal partners would facilitate negotiations.”

She also noted — a thought that we are likely to hear from other Western countries, I expect — that, “We must respect Israeli reaction — but we are prepared to lead the way.”

In other words, the world is keen to ensure the safety and vitality of an Israeli state within its pre-June 1967 borders, but it is not willing to put up with indefinite Israeli criminal actions like colonization, siege, and the Judaization of Jerusalem.

Israeli reactions to the Swedish announcement by the prime minister and foreign minister predictably emphasized two central tenets of Zionist propaganda and diversionary tactics, by saying: “Unilateral moves are contrary to agreements. They will not bring peace closer, they will distance it,” and, “If what concerns the prime minister of Sweden is the situation in the Middle East, he would better focus on the more urgent problems in the region, such as the daily mass murder taking place in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere in the region.”

Israel wants to keep the world’s eyes off its actions and instead to address other crimes in the region, while leaving the negotiations in the hands of the United States-Israel combine that has driven them into the ground since 1992. Sweden sends a welcomed message that this formula is a proven failure, and other approaches, anchored in law and true reciprocity, must be tried.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 October 2014
Word Count: 859
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BEIRUT — One of the most significant common factors that has exploded throughout the Arab World in recent years has been the birth and spread of non-state actors — organizations, parties, militias — that have assumed the role of traditional governments in many countries. These non-state actors do not follow a single pattern of behavior, but they do highlight a common trend across much of the Arab World — the continuing fragmentation of once whole states into a patchwork of armed groups that operate within the borders of once sovereign countries.

The most extreme cases are Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, Lebanon and Somalia, where state authority has been replaced in large areas by the power of armed groups. The most dramatic example is the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that has taken control of a large swath of land across the northern expanses of those two countries. Others include Al-Shabab in Somalia, the Houthis in Yemen, Hizbullah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, several large militias in Libya, a patchwork of rebel groups in Syria other than ISIS, and other smaller groups across the region.

This combination of retreating state authorities and surging non-state powers is common across the region, but it is also very difficult to apply a single analysis that uniformly explains why this is going on. Rather, it is more useful analytically to ask about a series of sub-state factors when examining the development of groups like ISIS, Hizbullah, the Mahdi Army in Iraq or Hamas and many others.

I would suggest that seven issues in particular need to be applied in order to gauge the real power and longevity of these non-state actors, alongside the dilution of state authority. These seven are Identity, Sovereignty, Territoriality, Service-delivery, Legitimacy, Nationality, and Statehood. One important reason why so many Arab countries are fragile and turbulent is that these factors have never coincided naturally, as they must do for there to be stable, satisfying and durable statehood — a rare feat in the modern Arab world.

So we can assess a group like ISIS as controlling territory and reflecting important identity elements among its adherents, thus enjoying semi-sovereignty in its areas of control. But it is hard to see them as legitimate because most of the people under their control did not assent to ISIS rule.

Similarly, Hizbullah reflects important identity elements among its mostly Lebanese Shiite adherents, and is fully legitimate in the eyes of its supporters, as well as many Lebanese on the strength of its being in the government and parliament. But it does not aspire to its own statehood, nationalism or formal sovereignty, while simultaneously reflecting elements of those phenomena by the fact that it enjoys full control of land, people and resources in its core areas.

Hizbullah, like Hamas and other Islamists and many large non-governmental organizations working at community level, offer important services that citizens want (health and welfare, food, social support to families, security) — but this service delivery in itself is not a basis for governing legitimately.

The fragmentation and occasional collapse of some Arab states in recent years force us to come to grips with the reality that we should not assess Arab countries through the traditional modern lens of statehood, where a geographically delineated land and its inhabitants formed a single state or nation whose sovereignty was managed by the government. More significant nowadays are the dynamics captured in these seven sub-state phenomena that ultimately define whether a state, community or citizen exists in a healthy and lasting manner.

The single most important of the seven, in my view, is Legitimacy. This is the glue that binds a citizen to his or her state, which in turn shapes the extent of nationhood, statehood and sovereignty in any particular case. The problem with all Arab countries, without exception, is that they have never credibly given their citizens opportunities to legitimize their states, for example by writing their own constitutions and defining their national power structures, values and accountability mechanisms. So we ended up with countries that enjoyed strong central governments and ruling elites based on the support of their massive militaries and police systems, but these countries’ government usually lacked legitimacy because the power that was vested in the ruling elite and its soldiers lacked the validating force of the participation and consent of the citizenry.

So when we see Arab countries today fragmenting into smaller units without necessarily creating new sovereign states, we should worry less about the fate of old borders and rather ask about whether the new dynamics of armed populations reflect identity, service delivery and legitimacy in the eyes of their own people — because those are the factors that ultimately will determine whether certain people in a territory will be seen by the rest of the world as a state or a nation.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 October 2014
Word Count: 801
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BEIRUT — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to the UN General Assembly Monday may go down in retrospect as a sign of two linked issues: how badly out of touch he is with the rest of the world, and how the traditional Zionist use of scare tactics to maintain virtually absolute American support for any Israeli action is steadily wearing thin.

His two principal points were that Hamas, Iran and ISIS emanated from the same roots and had similarly dangerous and predatory global aims, and that it was foolhardy for the United States and other Western powers to negotiate an agreement with Iran on nuclear issues and removing sanctions. All of those basic points he made are factually wrong. Consequently, because he has repeated them so many times without offering any proof beyond his own deep frowns and wild exaggerations, these points do not gain traction among the American public. They have also created the greatest strains in top-level U.S.-Israeli relations for generations.

The accusation that Hamas and ISIS are two branches of the same tree is palpable nonsense. The only thing they have in common is that they draw on Islamic doctrines and values as their guiding principles — in the same way that all recent American presidents and some weirdo, kookie Texan cults have all based their actions in Biblical texts and values. In both cases, though, each group interprets the religious text in very different ways, leading to very different actions that are worlds apart.

The repeated mistake Netanyahu makes — or perhaps it is a deliberate lie — is to see any movement or rhetoric in the Middle East that references Islamic values as a dangerous threat. Indeed, Iran, Hamas and ISIS all claim to act on the basis of religious principles, even dictates, but they operate in three very different universes that Netanyahu conflates into one.

Hamas is a resistance movement that was born in the 1980s primarily to fight against the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. Iran is a strong and proud ancient civilization and country that lingers under the fading influence of its 1979 Islamic Revolution, but mostly is powered by a determination not to bend to Western colonial manipulation and threats anchored in double standards. ISIS is a violent, cult-like movement that emerged in recent years from the post-1990s legacy of Al-Qaeda, and both reflect a fringe micro-minority of Muslims who react to the despicable way they have been treated for decades by their own power structures and invading foreign armies alike (American, British, Soviet and others).

It is telling that Al-Qaeda and, more recently, ISIS have tried repeatedly to harness mass support among Arab public opinion, but always without success. The masses of Arabs who are discontented with their socio-economic or political conditions and look to their faith for succor, hope and strength, chronically reject the cults of death, destruction and terrorism that ISIS and Al-Qaeda represent; instead they support the nationalist-, resistance- and community-based strategies of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hizbullah and others of this kind. ISIS has only been able to control some lands in Syria and Iraq by the threat and use of brutal force, rather than by the consent of those whom it rules (with very, very few exceptions that prove the rule).

Hamas and Hizbullah are very similar groups that are anchored in Islamic values and operate in several arenas that reflect widespread public sentiments: resistance to and liberation from Israeli occupation, building more equitable and less corrupt societies, and, in their words, defiance of American-led Western and Israeli hegemonic aims. Their relative successes have earned them significant indigenous support; their real problem is that they have not been able to offer their people a long-term strategy or national vision that transcends military resistance and regular bouts of savage and destructive wars with Israel. Netanyahu refuses to acknowledge that Hamas’ birth and development are almost totally a reaction to Israeli policies of occupation, annexation, colonization, death, mass imprisonment and racist-like repression.

Iran is a totally different story, and one that has evolved recently with the election of President Hassan Rouhani, whose government has negotiated seriously with world powers to resolve disputes related to nuclear issues and sanctions. The fact that the United States, European Union, Russia, American public opinion, and practically the entire world support the negotiations with Iran indicates how isolated Israel is in its hysteria about Iran’s potential threat. Netanyahu’s claim that Iran is the greatest threat to world peace should be viewed in the context of the most recent WIN/Gallup International Global Survey of 65 countries that identified the world’s most dangerous threat to world peace as the United States (24% of respondents), followed by Pakistan (8%), China (6%), North Korea, and then Israel and Iran (5%).

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 October 2014
Word Count: 793
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BEIRUT — Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ speech to the UN General Assembly Friday was expected to launch a process that combines wishes with threats. Both sides of that equation show why the Palestinian leadership under Abbas, and Yasser Arafat previously, has achieved virtually nothing in the last two decades since the Oslo Accords launched the Palestinian Authority experiment.

Abbas specifically wants the UN Security Council (UNSC) to pass a resolution that would establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza within three years, and if that does not fly he wants the United States to revive bilateral negotiations that would see Israelis and Palestinians focus immediately on the borders of a new Palestinian state. If this approach does not succeed, Abbas also threatens to sign the statutes of the International Criminal Court (ICC) and take the Palestine state case there. He would reportedly delay this if major European powers recognized the state of Palestine.

How he expects to convince the United States to go along with these ideas is not clear, and the main reason for this is that Abbas has no bargaining power to nudge the United States into his camp. The Abbas approach is diplomatically weak because he is politically weak — for he has not marshaled behind him the forces and assets at his disposal in order to be in a bargaining situation that enjoys some credibility. Those forces and assets are considerable, and have been on public view on and off for some years.

They include a unified Palestinian government acting through a revived Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO); strong popular support for his position by Palestinians everywhere; the backing of Arab governments who have been fickle for years but will support a reasonable Palestinian position; and the support of millions of ordinary people and over 150 governments around the world that have spoken out for ending the Israeli occupation and establishing a Palestinian state. Abbas would be in a much stronger position at the UN if he had marshaled these and other assets to back his demands, and put some teeth into his threats to act in other arenas if the UN and the United States do not make progress on Palestinian statehood and the end of Israel’s occupation.

The problem here is two-fold: Abbas is making these decisions on his own without consulting widely among all Palestinians, and he is using the ICC as a threat, when it should be a central component in any Palestinian strategy that seeks to hold Israel accountable to the international rule of law. There is a long and deep (and continuing) catalogue of Israeli actions against Palestinians that contravene international humanitarian law (IHL) and various conventions on war crimes and crimes against humanity. There is strong support among all Palestinians for going to the ICC, including Hamas who must be part of any serious diplomatic initiative.

The Palestinian leadership should have turned to international legal forums years ago in order to pressure Israel by harnessing the power of international public opinion through sanctions and boycotts, just as was the case with Apartheid South Africa decades ago. IHL should be a central pillar of Palestinian diplomacy that is only effective when it rests on a foundation of international legitimacy.

Neither militants’ resistance fire from Gaza nor Abbas’ repeated supplications to the United States and Israel by themselves can force Israel to end its occupation, agree to a Palestinian state and work with others to end the refugeehood that is a central Palestinian grievance. The combination that has not been attempted, and would probably be more effective than all the recent diplomatic duds, would include the legitimating force of international law and conventions with the dynamism of popular actions, like non-violent passive resistance and international sanctions and boycotts, backed up by the deterrent power of military resistance.

Abbas’ approach that he articulates at the UN this week weakens all of these elements individually and collectively, when his approach should be precisely the opposite. The Palestine cause is just and compelling, but on its own moral and legal merits it has no power to leverage global diplomacy in order to achieve Palestinian rights and a lasting peace agreement that responds to Israeli and Palestinian needs alike. One of the unfortunate weaknesses that has left the Palestine issue unresolved for so long has been the incompetence of the Palestinian leadership, which achieved record heights after the Oslo Accords of 1993 created the Palestinian Authority. This move degraded the national deliberation and representation role of the PLO, and removed international law and conventions as the anchorage for any diplomatic moves. Abbas should be working to reverse these mistakes, rather than perpetuating them as he seems to be doing.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 September 2014
Word Count: 784
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BEIRUT — The continuous upheaval of ideological forces and reconfiguration of geo-strategic conditions across the Middle East took a dramatic turn Sunday-Monday, as reflected in three principal developments in and around the Arab world: The combined American-Arab Gulf states air strikes in Syria, the control of the Yemeni capital by Houthi rebels, and the meeting in New York between the Saudi Arabian and Iranian foreign ministers.

Each of these developments is dramatic in its own way, but together they capture two overarching developments that interact deeply and shape the region today. The first is that the domestic configuration of some Arab countries like Syria, Libya, Yemen, and Iraq is being defined (often for the first time ever) by a balance of forces that usually emerges from military clashes among sectarian and ethnic groups. The parallel phenomenon that is not so novel is that major regional powers like Iran and Saudi Arabia are intervening directly, militarily, financially and ideologically in these domestic contests to shape the identities and policies of Arab countries. They routinely do this with the active participation of their allies, like Hizbullah and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) smaller states.

The American-led air strikes against ISIS in Iraq and Syria are not so noteworthy in themselves, because the United States has been bombing assorted Arab countries at will for the past several decades. That such foreign militarism is one of the factors that has fueled the continuous growth of salafist-takfiri extremist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS is a tangential matter for Americans or Arabs right now, when the real and immediate threat of ISIS must be beaten back and, if possible, eliminated altogether.

The really novel development this week is the combined air attacks against ISIS targets in northern Syria by several GCC states and the United States, which signals a historic shift in how the traditionally conservative and low-key Gulf states always used their power in the region. Direct air attacks against targets in nearby Arab countries indicate that all the constraints that had traditionally defined intra-Arab engagements are now removed. We pretty much have a free-for-all situation in the region, with traditionally clear ideological demarcation lines all totally blown to hell, whose gates the United States has said it is willing to reach to defeat the ISIS threat.

Americans, French, many Arabs, Kurds, Iranians, and others are all directly involved in military clashes in Iraq and Syria, with important supporting roles by Russia, Hizbullah and Turkey. The ongoing aerial attacks against ISIS targets in Syria and Iraq will certainly weaken ISIS, and perhaps transform it from a movement that wants to create an “Islamic state” in the lands it controls, to a movement closer to Al-Qaeda in its tactics of attacking Arab and Western targets of its ire anywhere in the world. The gates of hell may be forming before our eyes.

Degrading or dispersing ISIS in Syria is likely to strengthen the Bashar Assad government in Damascus that the United States and most of the Arab states attacking ISIS have been trying to overthrow for the past three years. The fate of the Assads’ rule will directly interest Iran, which calculates its interests and assets around the region in denominations of allied movements, such as Hizbullah or the Huthis who now play a leading role in governing Yemen.

Chaos created by foreign military action in the Arab World in recent years has always provided openings for Russia and Iran to improve their strategic relations across the region, which may happen again now, at least in the short run. If Yemen stabilizes under a government in which the Huthis are dominant, and Iran already has close ties with the governments in Iraq and Syria, this makes it all the more urgent for Iran and Saudi Arabia to work together to forge a regional security arrangement that protects their vital interests while acknowledging their interests on the ground in various countries. This is why the Iranian-Saudi meeting in New York is so significant, because it is the first tangible public sign of both countries’ understanding of their urgent need to cooperate to reduce regional tensions and work out a new regional security system that they both guarantee.

“This is a new page in relations between the two countries,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said after the meeting in New York. “We hope this will have a positive impact on restoring peace and security in the region and the world….”

The Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal for his part noted, “We believe we must avoid the errors of the past to successfully confront the current crisis.”

Indeed, we now either walk through the gates of hell or act rationally and create a regional balance of power system in which Iran and Saudi Arabia anchor a wider set of relationships based on mutual collective self-interest rather than wasteful militarism.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon. You can follow him @ramikhouri.

Copyright © 2014 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 September 2014
Word Count: 811
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For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757