BEIRUT — In classic American Western movies, a common theme is the brave sheriff of a small town whose task to maintain law and order often finds him in need of assistance to capture a really dangerous threat, usually a gang of criminals led by a tough guy. When the sheriff is unable single-handedly to apprehend the outlaws, and needs more armed men, he puts together a posse of local volunteers whom he temporarily deputizes to give them the legal authority to participate in tracking down and arresting or killing the criminals.

What we have coming together in the “coalition” led by the United States to defeat the “Islamic State” (IS) in Syria-Iraq is the modern equivalent of a posse in Western movies. One of the common features of a posse is that its members sometimes are reluctant volunteers, because they are not trained fighters and often are scared of being hurt or killed. They come together with a sense of protection from two sources — their collective number when a dozen or more posse members stand together, and their leadership by the brave sheriff who is always out front leading the battle. They often do little fighting themselves, but assist in logistics that support the sheriff, like tying up and bringing to jail the captured bad guys, providing cover fire without endangering themselves, or blocking the bad guys’ escape routes.

The United States’ taking the lead to harness regional and global assets to defeat IS is impressive, but also telling of several troubling trends. The most important one is the startling reality that Arab governments and societies whose practices allowed dangerous phenomena like Al-Qaeda and IS to grow seem unable or unwilling to take decisive action to protect themselves when the moment of reckoning arrives — as it has now. In three domains in particular, Arab governments generally have proven negligent or totally incompetent in addressing the root causes of the birth and rise of the sort of Salafist-takfiri militancy that defines Al-Qaeda and IS, which is why these governments seem handcuffed now in responding more forcefully.

The three ‘negligent or totally incompetent things’ that explain the birth and spread of these extremist movements and also the reluctance of Arab states to fight IS seem to me to be:

• the provision of socio-economic development patterns that respond to citizens’ basic needs, including a sense of social justice in society;

• the shaping of a public political space in which ordinary citizens have an opportunity to express their views, hold power accountable, and somehow share in decision-making, even at the most rudimentary and symbolic levels; and,

• harnessing plentiful security resources to defend national sovereignty against foreign threats, whether primarily from Israel or Western armies that invade Arab lands with dizzying regularity, or from foreign involvements in Arab affairs by Russia or Iran.

Most Arab governments seem logistically unable to play a direct role in attacking IS, or find it politically damaging to them with their own publics to be seen working closely with the United States in yet another assault on an Arab target. Arab power elites also have learned by experience that if they wait long enough, the United States will step in and protect them from the dangers they generated by their own practices.

The key lesson to me from this sad state of things is not really about radical Islam and its discontents, as confused political hucksters and money-minded carpetbaggers like Tony Blair would have us believe. It is rather about the cruel reality of modern Arab statehood and governance — the modern Arab security state that has dominated and defined our entire region both creates monsters like mass corruption, terrorism and Al-Qaeda-IS, and simultaneously is unable to fight them when they grow and expand.

It is not surprising that when the threat becomes really serious, Arab leaders wait for the United States to save their skins. After all, British and French bureaucrats once created many of our countries, so perhaps reliance on Western support is in our political chromosomes (or reliance on Iran, in the case of Arabs like Hizbullah, the Syrian regime, or some major Iraqi groups). IS, Al-Qaeda, the Mahdi Army in Iran, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Palestine, Hizbullah in Lebanon, half a dozen militias in Libya, and dozens of other armed groups that now strut on the battered stage of modern Arab statehood clarify that the most serious underlying threat to most Arab countries is not primarily an itinerant reactionary movement of misfits like IS; rather, it is the dysfunctional, paternalistic, often corrupt and largely amateurish nature of statehood and governance that our Arab elites have practiced for half a century now.

If a coalition to fight IS does not simultaneously acknowledge and start to address this fact, the sheriff and the posses of our modern Middle East will be busy for many decades.

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: 17 September 2014
Word Count: 808
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BEIRUT — I dearly wish that the “Islamic State” (IS) will be contained and then defeated by the many countries and non-governmental armed groups who say they are committed to achieving that goal. From the evidence to date, it is hard to be confident that the American-led coalition under construction will be the effective vehicle to do that, which is a very uncomfortable feeling. Here are some key reasons why:

We have decades of experience in the Middle East in initiatives of various sorts (promote democracy and human rights, expand free markets, etc.) that failed because they were unilaterally conceived in the West in panic, and announced to the region by the United States — and only then were the actual Middle Eastern actors who were central to progress identified and engaged. Announcing a coalition before its members are on board is an amateurish way to operate, because it makes the local players — Arab governments of already mixed legitimacy in this case — look like hapless fools who snap to attention when an American gives the order.

Washington is correct to say that a combination of effective local military action and inclusive domestic political systems are required for progress in destroying IS, in Iraq especially. I lack confidence in this aspect of the American approach because it is foolhardy to expect that such important central requirements can be forged quickly and in the heat of battle — after the United States has just spent a full decade and trillions of dollars in Iraq trying but failing to achieve precisely those two important goals. Perhaps we can even see some counter-productive consequences of the US legacy, such as the rampaging IS troops taking from the retreating Iraqi security forces the fine arms and equipment that Washington had provided.

My confidence in the success of the coalition being assembled to fight IS drops sharply when I hear the American president cite Yemen and Somalia as examples of how this war will be waged. Yemen and Somalia are modern catastrophes of state-building and foreign intervention, including most recently the United States’ drone-based assassination campaigns that are supposed to diminish and degrade the Qaeda-related groups there. Yet somehow those killer groups keep expanding, not retreating, and they have spread into half a dozen other countries in the region. No wonder, then, that resolve among regional players to do this Washington’s way is erratic at best. Someone should tell the American president that Yemen and Somalia are political nightmares to be avoided at all costs, not replicated or touted.

Naming retired Marine General John Allen to coordinate the anti-IS coalition also raises questions anchored in real experiences. My concerns are that the areas of Gen. Allen’s expertise and experience in recent years raise many doubts about American efficacy in the Arab-Asian region, instead of inspiring confidence. He oversaw the war in Afghanistan, worked closely with Iraqis in Anbar Province, was deputy commander of all US military operations in the Central Command region, and worked with John Kerry on the security training and coordination side of the recently failed, American-mediated Israeli-Palestinian peace process. It’s hard to think of a more depressing combination of American serial failures in the military-political realm in this region than those four episodes where Gen. Allen was a central actor. I hope he was only following orders. His playbook today is to do exactly the opposite of everything he did during the past ten years, which would inspire some confidence in chances of success.

Americans’ mixing emotional remembrances of the 9/11 attacks this week (a legitimate and understandable human act) with the current mission to defeat IS in Syria-Iraq is factually incorrect and unnecessary, and probably will be counter-productive. It will detract from an accurate analysis of what IS represents and how it came to be, and therefore will induce exaggerated emotional reactions, ideologically charged jingoism, and mostly military-based counter-terrorism policies that are not suited to the real threat. American foreign policies since 2001 have helped to expand the threat of Al-Qaeda, IA and dozens of similar groups, rather than defeat them; framing the attack on IS in Syria-Iraq through the lens of 9/11 will only perpetuate this problem.

The Arab and Turkish allies being herded into the coalition do not inspire a great deal of enthusiasm or confidence, I am sad to say — genuinely sad, because only dynamic and effective local action will defeat IS and other deviant and dangerous dimensions of our societies. John Kerry looks less like the maestro of a united orchestra and more like a strong-willed sheriff assembling a half-hearted posse of scared locals to chase a dangerous bad guy.

Finally, Syria and its challenges is the heart of the IS phenomenon, and the coalition being assembled seems unclear about what to do about Syria.

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: 13 September 2014
Word Count: 794
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BEIRUT — Never in the modern history of the Middle East have so many countries experienced such intense, often violent, domestic conflict or political paralysis. The ongoing wars or severe ideological confrontations in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Lebanon, Egypt, Sudan, and Bahrain have sparked a new industry in explaining what is really going on in this region: Sykes-Picot-crafted artificial borders collapsing, Shia-Sunni and/or Saudi Arabian-Iranian tensions sparking proxy wars, or failed state-centered nationalism being replaced by sectarian identities.

Turmoil and violence are most evident in the inability of formal institutions of governance to achieve credible power-sharing or even serious consultations on decisive issues. In some countries, this has led to military clashes or recurring terror attacks, leading to near national collapse in a few cases (Syria, Somalia, Libya Iraq).

Even when serious attempts are made to establish formal institutions of governance that are pluralistic and democratic, progress remains spotty at best. We see this now in the Libyan, Egyptian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian and Yemeni endeavors to create new constitutions, parliaments and governments, or elect new presidents. Otherwise rational men and women cannot sit down together and hammer out agreements on fair power-sharing, representation, decision-making, and accountability.

Central government positions, like cabinet posts, often become vehicles for different sectarian or ethnic groups to gain a share of power and the resources of the central state, which they then share with their own people in the form of jobs, contracts and other benefits. If one or more parties do not get what they feel is their share of power, they withdraw from consultations and shut down the system — as has happened in Lebanon for years — or they take to the streets and sometimes take up arms — as we are witnessing in Yemen these days with the Houthi pressure on the government.

The baffling thing to my mind is the great contrast between this immaturity, violence and immobilization in the conduct of the affairs of state, on the one hand, and the much deeper tradition of individuals and families of different ethnic or religious groups getting along just fine in their daily lives at the local level. Sunnis and Shiites, Christians and Muslims, Kurds, Amazigh and Arabs or any other combination of citizens of different identities have cooperated, inter-married, shared businesses and coexisted respectfully for centuries at the community level all around the region, and this is still the pattern that defines most communities that have not been wrecked by war.

This happens because each individual respects the ethnic/sectarian identity, values and rights of his or her neighbor who has a different identity; they also cooperate easily on matters in the public sphere that require them to work together for the common good. A typical example is what I experienced in my own life for 27 years living in Amman, Jordan, as a Christian in a Muslim-majority society. On major Islamic holidays like Adha and Fitr, we would visit our Muslim neighbors to wish them greetings of the season, drink coffee, eat a sweet, ask about the family’s health and well-being, and say how much we enjoy seeing our children play football in the street every afternoon after school. They would do the same by visiting us at Christmas and Easter, with identical rituals of food, drink, greetings and neighborly good wishes. This was often the only regular interaction we had, other than friendly greetings in the street during our comings and goings.

The mutual messages were clear, and very meaningful. Though we had different personal identities, we recognized and honored the identity, values and rights of our neighbor, with whom we repeatedly and ritually expressed our mutual desire to coexist in equality, friendship and peace — not just in the realm of tolerance, but going beyond that to mutual solidarity that would see us protect each other in times of need. This kind of fraternal coexistence crossed all possible lines, such as Muslim-Christian, Palestinian-Jordanian, Arab-Druze-Armenian-Circassian, and any other such identities. It also translates all around the Arab region into millions of cases of mixed marriages, business partnerships, best friends at school, and cultural/artistic collaborations.

But when it comes to the business of governance — electing a new Lebanese president, agreeing to parliamentary and constitutional advances in Yemen and Libya, defining who can participate in public politics in Egypt, reforming the parliamentary system in Kuwait or Bahrain — these long and solid traditions of communal mutual respect and coexistence break down.

There seems to be a huge disconnect between the solid values of ordinary people in the Arab world in their family and community lives, and the dysfunctional and often violent conduct of political leaders who represent these same citizens in the national political arena. This suggests a strong case for much more decentralized governance systems that anchor power more at the regional and local levels, without concentrating assets and arms in the hands of central government that has often abused that power in modern Arab states.

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: 10 September 2014
Word Count: 821
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BEIRUT — Credible press reports and recent hints by Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas both indicate that Abbas will soon unveil a new diplomatic initiative aimed at achieving Palestinian statehood, and the end of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. As is usually the case with this kind of political development by the Palestinian leadership, it includes very sensible and very foolish elements, which diminishes its chances of success.

The reports suggest that the initiative comprises three elements: first, the United States would be asked to resume its diplomatic mediation in order to reach an Israeli-Palestinian agreement on defining the borders of a future Palestinian state. The United States reportedly will be asked to do this within a time period of four months. The second phase would see the Palestinians go to the UN Security Council to seek implementation of their case for statehood and ending their occupation by Israel. The third phase would have the Palestinian non-state member of the UN raise cases against Israel in arenas such as the International Criminal Court (ICC) or other international forums.

The good news about this process is multi-faceted. This kind of ambitious, dynamic initiative is a welcomed move by the Palestinian leadership because it is precisely what a leadership should do for its people — lead them towards the goal they all share, using all available and legitimate means. Its three elements are logical means for achieving the goal of credible Palestinian statehood, especially if coordinated with other means of direct political action with Israel or global popular mobilization and political or legal moves.

The bad news is equally significant and multi-faceted. The most serious flaw about this initiative is that it does not seem to build on the single most critical imperative for the Palestinians today, which is to cement the national unity that was so visible during the recent Gaza war. To work effectively in international forums, the Palestinians need above all strong national unity in leadership and among the citizenry. This means that Hamas, Fateh, Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and half a dozen other smaller factions must operate on the basis of a single national political program, while drawing on the cohesion and support of thousands of civil society and popular organizations across the region and the world.

President Abbas’ initiative shows no signs of being based on any such consensus, and there are absolutely no indications that any of these ideas have been discussed among, or ratified by, the millions of Palestinians whom Abbas is supposed to represent. Abbas also does not seem to care to draw on the many good ideas and valuable mobilizing participation that Palestinian activists and professionals all over the region and the world can offer in the service of their national cause. This lack of popular consultation is the second major flaw in this initiative, which perpetuates a personalized, paternalistic style of governance among Palestinians that has always been a reason for failure.

Abbas had been indicating for weeks that he was going to produce a diplomatic “surprise” of some sort after the Gaza fighting stopped. This kind of unilateral, secretive, father-knows-best style of governance is an insult to the Palestinian people, along with being a recipe for continued diplomatic failure. We went through this a few years ago when Abbas held the world and his people in suspense about whether the Palestinians would seek non-state membership in the UN. That option was finally activated, but with little impact so far.

Retrospectively, I would suggest, the lack of impact of becoming a UN member largely reflects the fact that the decision to do this was taken surreptitiously, totally without any strategic thinking, and fully devoid of the power that should have come from massive popular support for it. Now we see the same process playing out as to whether or not the Palestinian leadership will take its case to the ICC.

Abbas is behaving more like a parent who promises his or her children a birthday surprise than a responsible leader who has been handed responsibility for the fate of some eight million Palestinians entering their fourth generation of exile, occupation and refugeehood. The Gaza war’s many negative aspects were offset by the positive display of national unity that clearly was an asset for the Palestinian negotiators in Cairo. It would be a terrible shame for this promise to be dissipated now by the political incompetence of a few aging Palestinian men in the twilight of their leadership years — some of them with 40 years in power and little to show for it — who have never understood that their weakness and failure have been due heavily to their refusal to make the effort needed to harness the power of a unified national citizenry.

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: 03 September 2014
Word Count: 797
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BEIRUT — So the United States is bombings targets in Iraq from the air, active on the ground with hundreds of its special forces, and exploring targets to bomb in Syria. Who is the enemy the United States is now attacking? Well, judging from the public political discussions in the United States, the simple answer is, “we’re not really sure.” This highlights the most amazing dimension of the rise and power of the Islamic State (IS), from its former configurations as the Islamic State in Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) and Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia: very few people outside its own leadership really know very much about it, including its actual strategy and aims.

What everybody does know is that we are faced with a violent, vicious group of tens of thousands of men who have carved out for themselves a territorial base in the area of northeast Syria and northwest Iraq, and they continue to engage in limited military forays in areas along the edges of their control in both countries. The debates now taking place about the IS phenomenon and threat focus on who is to blame for allowing it to develop, how widely will IS spread territorially, and how much support does IS enjoy around the region in lands where it does not control territory?

All this is important, but the most terrifying aspect of the IS phenomenon is not about the extremist young men who gravitate to its call, but rather about the factors across the Arab region and beyond that allowed it to come into being in the first place — factors that continue to shape our troubled region today. The IS is a living, expanding phenomenon, and the factors that cause people to join it remain active in many countries. So our collective challenge is to correctly identify those elements that gave birth to the mindset that has caused young men to join such movements and indulge in the kind of barbarism that IS now disseminates in its videos and social media broadcasts.

In that respect, I have no doubt that the single most important, widespread, continuous and still active reason for the birth and spread of the IS mindset is the curse of modern Arab security states that since the 1970s have treated their citizens like children or sheep that need to be taught obedience and passivity above all else. Other factors played a role in this modern tragedy of amateurish statehood across the Arab world, including the threat of Zionism and Israeli violent colonialism (see Gaza today for that continuing tale) and the continuous meddling and military attacks by foreign powers, including the United States, some Europeans, Russia and Iran.

In view of my 45 years in the Arab world observing and writing about the conditions on the ground, the only thing that surprises me now is why such extremist phenomena that have caused the catastrophic collapse of existing states did not happen earlier. For the past 40 years, at least since around 1970, the average Arab citizen has lived in political, economic and social systems that have offered zero accountability, political rights and participation; steadily expanding state dysfunction and corruption; ravaging economic disparities that have driven majorities into chronic poverty; humiliating state inaction or failure at confronting the threats of Zionism and foreign hegemonic ambitions; and, an almost absolute ban on developing one’s full potential in the fields of intellect, creativity, public participation, culture and identity.

The IS phenomenon is the latest and perhaps not the final stop on a journey of mass Arab humiliation and dehumanization that has been primarily managed by Arab autocratic regimes that revolve around single families or clans, with immense, continuing support from foreign patrons. Foreign military attacks in Arab countries (Iraq, Libya) have exacerbated this trend, as has Israeli aggression against Palestinians and other Arabs. But the continuous single biggest driver of the kind of criminal Islamist extremism we see in the IS phenomenon is the predicament of several hundred million individual Arab men and women who find — generation after generation — that in their own societies they are unable to achieve their full humanity or potential, or exercise their full powers of thought and creativity, or, in many cases, obtain their basic life needs for their families.

The expressions of bewilderment we hear today from many Arab and Western politicians or media analysts about why IS rose and what to do about it have zero credibility or sympathy in my book. Some of the same people who pontificate about the IS threat were often directly involved in actions that helped to bring it about (corrupt Arab security states, invasion of Iraq, total support for Israel).

There is only one antidote in the long run to eliminating the Islamic State and all it represents, which is to stop pursuing the abusive and criminal policies that have demeaned millions of decent Arab men and women and shaped Arab countries for the past half a century. Bombing Iraq and Syria will gain some time and probably must happen in combination with serious military action by local Arab and Kurdish forces; but if the fundamental systems of the corrupt and amateurish modern Arab security state are not radically reversed, the mass desperation and hysteria that IS represents will only emerge again in other, more extreme forms.

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 August 2014
Word Count: 884
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BEIRUT — There is neither symmetry nor equivalence in the capabilities or the suffering of Palestinians and Israelis who have battled each other non-stop since 1947-48. Destruction and death tolls in battles are wildly skewed — over 2000 Palestinians killed to 67 Israelis in this round, over 16,000 Palestinian homes destroyed or damaged to half a dozen minor hits to Israeli structures. Israel enjoys an enormous advantage in military capabilities, ironclad diplomatic protection by the United States, and a totally free hand to keep attacking, arresting, and killing Palestinians at will.

As they continue to fight in the seventh decade of this conflict, Palestinians and Israelis registered a milestone of sorts in the rare symmetry of the attacks against each other last Tuesday. That was a noteworthy and symbolic day when Hamas fired 168 of its rockets and smaller projectiles at targets in Israel, and the Israeli armed forces attacked over 150 targets in Gaza. The almost equal number of attacks by each side against the other was not matched by the impact of those attacks, with Israel’s causing much more damage in Gaza than it suffered at the receiving end of Hamas’ less effective weapons.

This one-day balance sheet of mutual attacks confirms once again that neither side will unilaterally submit to the demands of the other, even under fire, and both will continue attacking each other, despite the proven futility of using military force to achieve political ends. Warriors on both sides thump their breasts in defiance and determination, vowing to fight forever and to kill as needed to protect their people.

The sharp irony is that Hamas’ capacity to maintain a high rate of attacks in the war with Israel coincided with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement on Wednesday that Israel had hit Hamas with the hardest blow ever, and would continue attacking Gaza militarily until Israel’s security needs were met (though those security needs were not spelled out). He seemed to ignore that since 1967 Israel has occupied, colonized, sieged and attacked Gaza, and in each of the last three rounds since 2009 inflicting massively greater damage, death and displacement, mainly on hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians. With what result? Hamas fired more rockets at Israel in one day this week than it ever was able to do before.

Thoughtful Israelis would profitably ponder at some point why their tough and repeated military policy has resulted only in an ever stronger Palestinian resistance movement that has developed significant local military production capabilities, and the ability to protect its rocket launchers. More threats to attack Gaza even harder by the Israeli prime minister would appear quite silly in the realm of effective security doctrines, and quite amateurish in the realm of effective statesmanship. Hamas also is nearing the point where its steadfast and resistance strategy may prove increasingly less attractive, if it results in the repeated death, injury, displacement and homelessness of Palestinians on a large scale.

Is there a better option that Israelis and Palestinians could explore to end their mutually destructive and clearly ineffective and even counter-productive militarism? Could a political option allow both sides to achieve their legitimate demands, especially the right to live in peace and security? Can diplomacy allow Palestinians and Israelis simultaneously to live without being attacked by the other, but also in freedom to move, trade, fish, build and travel?

On August 15, the European Union (EU) repeated its standing offer to resume the system by which EU personnel inspected the flow of imports and exports through Gaza border crossings, to ensure that no new military equipment reached Gaza. Hamas has also accepted the principle of the Palestinian national unity government playing a major role in managing the border crossings, jointly with Egypt at Rafah. The UN also said it was ready to be more involved in monitoring border facilities and reconstruction in Gaza, so that both sides could live in peace. It is likely that the United States would also be involved in such border crossings management, given that Israel only fully trusts the US in such circumstances.

Such an approach would stand a very good chance of meeting the key demands of both sides for now — lifting the Israeli siege and attacks on Gaza, and ending Palestinian resistance attacks against the Israelis and their siege through a long-term cease-fire or truce. Significant external participation in such a process would also augur well for a renewed diplomatic effort to achieve a permanent, comprehensive peace agreement that resolves the tougher underlying issues. Statesmen and women should grab this opening, rather than leaving the stage for the chest-thumpers and their failed 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: 23 August 2014
Word Count: 771
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BEIRUT — The dramatic expansion of the territory controlled by the “Islamic State” (IS) in Syria and Iraq in the last few months has generated a historic moment of reckoning in several arenas in those two countries, which mirror similar trends across the entire region. These relate to statehood and nationhood, governance, and foreign military involvement in Arab lands, and in all three arenas we still dwell in ambiguous territory for the most part.

I will touch here only on the most important big picture issue that touches on the fate of many Arab countries, which is the nature of statehood and nationhood in the Arab region, and whether some Arab countries will collapse soon, or slowly over time. Some Arab countries that have existed for nearly a century today appear to face the risk of collapse or fragmentation into smaller units; many of them already witness ethnic cleansing, rapid demographic polarization, and the reversal of the tradition of pluralism among different groups that had lived together for centuries or even millennia.

Iraq and Syria are prime examples of this, as both comprise a mosaic of different ethnic, religious and national groups living alongside a dominant majority (Sunni Arabs in Syria, and Shiite Arabs in Iraq). They were both ruled for decades by military men who put state power largely in the hands of their own minority, i.e., Saddam Hussein and Baath Party Iraqi Sunnis who ruled with an iron fist over the majority of Shiites, Kurds and others; and, Hafez and Bashar Assad and Syrian Alawite/Shiite compatriots who have maintained their style of autocratic rule for nearly 45 years now. Once their absolute control of their state and people was shattered by foreign invasion (2003 in Iraq) or domestic rebellions (2011 in Syria), the previous unity of the country was weakened and society started to fray and fragment.

Nobody knows whether Iraq and Syria will hold together as centrally dominated or loosely federated states, or collapse into smaller units. The main reason for this uncertainty is that we have no clear evidence for the actual wishes of their populations — the only exception being the evident desire of Iraqi Kurds to move towards independence, which might prod their Syrian Kurdish compatriots to join them. Yet even this is riddled with some new uncertainties, for during the current battles in northern Iraq to push back the IS forces there the Iraqi Kurds clearly needed the support of the Iraqi armed forces, American air power and Kurdish troops from Turkey to simply hold onto their territory, let alone roll back IS units.

Kurdish officials have also asked the new Iraqi prime minister to deliver to them the withheld billions of dollars of oil revenues that the Kurds see as their fair share of Iraqi oil income. This suggests that the Kurds’ understandable and legitimate quest for independence is likely now to be tempered by their obvious benefits from remaining within the Iraqi state.

We simply have no idea if the majority of Alawites, Druze, Shiites, Assyrians, Christians, Sunnis and other distinct demographic groups in these two countries genuinely seek independence or feel more secure within a larger state of Syria or Iraq. The personalized security state rule of the last half century or so never allowed any citizens in these countries to express their views on this pivotal element of statehood, e.g., how do citizens feel about their relationship to their state and government? Does religion or ethnicity equate in their minds with statehood?

This is a challenge that many Arab lands face, including Libya, Yemen, Lebanon, Morocco, Sudan and others to lesser extents, as evidenced by recent history. Iraq, Yemen and Sudan in the 1990s offered perhaps the earliest signals of how thin was the glue of unified statehood that held together diverse population groups. Yemen split up, fought wars, and reunited several times, Sudan similarly saw its southern district secede peacefully, while other regional wars continued, and several Iraqi regional rebellions in the north and south against the central government in Baghdad were brutally put down.

The advent of the IS and apparent adherence to it by some Sunni tribes in Syria and Iraq is the latest attestation of the fickle and thin nature of citizen allegiance to the contemporary centralized Arab state. It reaffirms the basic recurring principle in all these cases: Citizens will rebel against their central state if they do not feel that their needs are being met equitably, or that they are being mistreated by the government and its military forces. The antidote to this remains decent governance and equitable development policies, which Arab citizens have long sought but never fully enjoyed.

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: 20 August 2014
Word Count: 775
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BEIRUT — One of the fascinating dimensions of the battle between Israel and Palestine is how Israeli leaders and their American apologists keep changing their propaganda message aimed at generally ignorant Western audiences. The core, but always evolving, message that Zionists keep sending out is that Palestinians who challenge Israel are part and parcel of a larger universe of frightening figures that espouse criminal values, and represent a direct, mortal threat to Israel and also to all Western civilization.

The latest version of this fear-mongering campaign of lies and fantasy seeks to paint Hamas and others militant Palestinian resistance groups in Gaza as integral elements in the world of vicious actors and terrorists who fight in the name of Islam, such as the Salafist-takfiri extremists Islamic State in Syria-Iraq, Al-Qaeda, or the Taliban in Afghanistan. Most people in the United States or other Western lands who hear these messages lack the base of factual knowledge to understand that Israel’s accusations are bold and ridiculous lies; yet these lies often strike a receptive chord among uninformed audiences that only have two images drilled into them year after year: Israel and Jews are threatened with death and extinction in the Middle East, and the region is full of rabid killers who want to kill Christians and Jews and turn the world into one big Islamic society that enslaves women and martyrs its children.

The problem with this latest twist of Zionist propaganda is that it tries to put into a single basket a series of very different groups with totally unrelated inspirations, agendas and operating methods. It aims to tar Hamas, and also Hizbullah in Lebanon, with such extreme attributes that foreigners refuse to deal with them, and only see them as part and parcel of that frightening body of Islamic State and Al-Qaeda killers who claim to speak in the name of Islam and go around crucifying and cutting people’s heads off.

This strategy has actually worked for some time, as most Western powers have shunned dealing with Hamas or Hizbullah. Yet that pattern has started to break down in recent years, as foreign governments and civil society activists alike come to understand that groups like Hamas and Hizbullah essentially are locally anchored, state-based resistance groups that fight two battles at once: They seek to reverse the Israeli occupation, colonization and subjugation of their countries (Palestine and Lebanon), and they seek to create a more efficient, less corrupt domestic governance system that responds to the needs of all its citizens. (On balance, they have done much better at fighting Israel than at generating better domestic governance).

Resisting and reversing Israeli actions forms the core of Hamas and Hizbullah strategies, therefore the Israeli spin masters try at all costs to prevent anyone abroad from seeing these Lebanese and Palestinian groups as having been born primarily to fight back against Israel’s excessive occupation and colonization. The easiest way to do this in the fact-light minds of many Western citizens and politicians is simply to associate Hamas and Hizbullah with Al-Qaeda, Islamic State and Taliban.

This strategy has started to wear thin and collapse in places because reasonable people in the world have repeatedly seen the overwhelming evidence of Israel’s own violence and occasional criminal atrocities in Lebanon and Palestine. The many pictures of Lebanese and Palestinians simply protecting their lands from repeated Israeli attacks — including by attacking Israel with small rockets and as yet mostly harmless projectiles — have been coupled with repeated Israeli destruction of thousands of Arab homes, and many schools, hospitals, power plants and other civilian facilities.

More and more governments and observers around the world have realized that Hamas and Hizbullah have nothing to do with Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, whose agendas reflect bizarre religious fantasies rather than state-based resistance goals. We started to see this rejection of Israeli propaganda over a year ago when Americans and Europeans ignored the wild scare tactics of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and went ahead with negotiations with Iran on nuclear and sanctions issues. The Western ability to ignore Zionism’s wild men in favor of a more rational approach to the world was also evident after the formation of the Palestinian national unity government several months ago, which the United States and EU among others accepted to engage with, rather than to boycott, as Israel desired.

Israel and its howlers in Washington will continue to try and lump nationalist resistance groups like Hamas and Hizbullah with criminals like Al-Qaeda and its offshoots, but the efficacy of such crude propaganda is steadily decreasing. This means we should be alert to the next set of exaggerations, diversions and lies that Israel and its Western hit men and women will use in their attempt to prevent any rational accountability of Israeli actions.

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: 16 August 2014
Word Count: 796
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BEIRUT — Rare in world history do we have a case like the state of Iraq today, which now captures all the worst aspects of indigenous, regional and global political failures, but in history represented the pinnacle of human achievements in art, culture, poetry, learning, architecture, industry, irrigation, religion, governance and other civilizational domains. Iraq is everything we could be, and everything we fear to become, rolled into one land.

Historians and contemporary ideologues will long debate who is primarily to blame for Iraq’s slide into its current state of fractured statehood, political immobility, widespread corruption and inefficiency, massive security lapses, and the new threat of the spread of the poisonous ideology of the “Islamic State” — a phenomenon that has as much to do with prevailing global Islamic norms as I have to do with the man on the moon.

For now we should first grasp the various elements that paved the route to Iraq’s current misfortunes, so that we do not repeat them again across the region. Iraq’s condition is not a unique case; the factors that shaped it operate in many countries around the Middle East — foreign interests that created the country in the first place, decades of megalomanial security-state rule that led to corruption and mediocrity in state institutions, structural meddling in Iraq’s affairs by strong regional powers, repeated foreign military interventions, socio-economic mismanagement and incompetence in governance, the fracturing of the central state in favor of decentralized sectarian identities and interests, reassertion of sect-centered single strongman rule, and, most recently, the rise of various militant movements that use religion for mobilizing and legitimizing purposes.

Most of these elements exist in many other Arab states that face similar vulnerabilities, like Syria, Libya, Yemen, Sudan, and more limited aspects of Lebanon, Algeria and even wondrous Egypt. While it is easy to list the elements that have brought Iraq to this dangerous point, it is much more difficult to identify the route to emerging from the crisis and steering the country onto a path to recovery and normal development. Where to begin? Electing or choosing a new president, prime minister and speaker of parliament, as Iraqis have just done? Asking for foreign military intervention to stem the expansion of the Islamic State (IS), as is now happening with U.S. air strikes and other foreign powers’ arming of Kurdish forces? Mustering indigenous Iraqi military capabilities to push back and eventually liquidate the IS threat? Iraqis themselves working to re-establish credible national institutions that serve all Iraqis, such as the armed forces, the education and health sectors, and the oil industry? Promoting inclusive governance and other state systems that are not based on sectarian identities? Fighting corruption?

All of these things need to be done simultaneously, and to a large extent many honorable Iraqis are trying heroically to do just this. Checking and then reversing the expansion of the area ruled by the IS is clearly the top priority right now, because IS’s ability to consolidate and extend its rule is a direct consequence of the inefficiency and collapse of Iraqi state authority. In fact the incentive to fight back and destroy the IS in Iraq should be the most important impetus for Iraqis to work together more effectively to rebuild their state institutions, and reinvigorate a new sense of citizenship that is meaningful to all because it serves all citizens equitably.

Foreign military assistance is clearly required in the short run to give Iraqis the breathing space to regroup and repel the IS phenomenon, which should not be difficult to do once a concerted effort is made to fight back against the IS. It is remarkable to date that we have not witnessed a serious, coordinated move by Iraqis, Iranians, Saudis, Turks, Jordanians, Americans and interested others to pool their resources and crush the IS forces. All these countries are threatened by the expansion of IS and similar movements, and they have more than enough resources to shatter IS, which remains a parasitic, opportunistic, gang- and cult-like movement that can only flourish in areas of chaos and lack of state authority, and by imposing its rule by brutal force. The more time IS enjoys to consolidate its rule and perhaps evolve in a manner that generates for it more genuine local support and legitimacy — which it has largely lacked — the more difficult it will be to eliminate it some months down the road.

IS-type rule has no more chance of giving Arabs a decent life than did the centralized police state or the corrupt sectarian state that Arabs have endured for decades. Iraq is the place now where this issue will be put to the test.

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: 13 August 2014
Word Count: 775
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For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

BEIRUT — We should keep in mind two important elements of the frustrating continued uncertainties surrounding the situation in Gaza: What is this war about, and how are the main actors performing?

The first is that this is not just about Israel vs. Hamas in Gaza, as mainstream Israel-American media and politicians depict it, but rather about the deeper rights and demands of both Palestinians and Israelis. Most analysts and politicians have focused on whether either Hamas or Israel have “won,” “lost,” or come out of this latest round of fighting in a tie. That kind of very short-term analysis is useful in the span of days or weeks at a time, but the actual determinants of the ongoing clashes will likely remain the longer term drivers that have shaped this conflict for some four generations, effectively since the 1930s, when the conflict between Zionism and Arabism first ignited in Palestine.

We do not know what will happen tonight or tomorrow, because events are moving quickly. I write this a half hour after the Friday 8 am deadline for the 72-hour ceasefire to expire, and all kinds of possibilities are likely to occur. These include renewed low-level fighting, all-out warfare, or an informal continued ceasefire followed by more negotiations, after both sides show their determination to kill each other until their demands are met, while they bizarrely refuse to acknowledge that repeated warfare has not achieved any of their key demands.

The attempt by Israelis-Americans mainly to focus only on Hamas’ options, tactics and aims is a mistaken diminution of the entire Palestinian national struggle for self-determination, rights and statehood. They do this probably because it is easier for American-Israeli propagandists to highlight Hamas’ militancy rather than to grapple with the fact that all Palestinians — and most of the world, actually — support the demands that Hamas has articulated and that have been negotiated by the all-inclusive Palestinian delegation in Cairo. So the next time you hear or read an Israeli-American journalist or politician talk about the position or demands of “Hamas,” simply substitute for “Hamas” the term “the Palestinian people” and you will get a more accurate reading of the situation.

Hamas receives disproportionate attention because it and its militant colleagues are the last Palestinians standing who use armed resistance to fight back against Zionist colonization, siege, assassination and savage attacks. Hamas’ militancy sets it apart from Mahmoud Abbas’ Fateh and others who have acquiesced to Israeli demands, but Hamas’ political demands are shared widely by all Palestinians. Those demands, especially lifting the siege of Gaza, releasing prisoners and ending the Israeli occupation and Palestinian refugeehood, are the core issues that must be resolved for the Palestinians to coexist with an Israeli state. This is where the focus must remain, not only on whether Hamas does this today or that next week.

The second important aspect of the current situation — spanning both the last month and the last two decades — is that the defining characteristic of the six major political actors has been resounding and repeated failure, i.e., the Israeli government, the centrist and leftist Israeli political camps, the Fateh-led Palestinian government under Mahmoud Abbas, the armed resistance movements led by Hamas in Gaza, the United States, and the European Union. In the four critical domains of war, peace, diplomacy and development, these six actors have generated a track record of collective incompetence that is as stunning as it is sad.

The default condition in the West Bank-East Jerusalem thus remains Israeli occupation and colonization alongside Palestinian acquiescence, and in Gaza it is Israeli siege alongside Palestinian armed resistance. Neither of those situations is sustainable or desirable, but current approaches to conflict resolution have failed to achieve any long-term breakthrough — primarily, in my view, because the Israeli-American view of the conflict favors Zionist colonial supremacy over equal rights for both peoples, which prohibits Israel from acknowledging legitimate Palestinian rights and the United States from acting as an effective mediator or even just a credible facilitator.

The Palestinian side, with the sleep-walking Arab regimes competing for the Docility Award of the century, has been incompetent in mobilizing the enormous support and goodwill for their cause that exists in the world, and channeling it into an effective diplomatic process.

When these two dominant realities converge — focusing on Hamas instead of wider Palestinian national rights, while all the principal actors pursue their certificates in diplomatic incompetence — the result is the current narrow focus on military action by Israel and Hamas in Gaza. Until all parties move out of this constricted and distorted view of the conflict and tackle the wider conflict between Zionism and Arabism, we should only expect more bloodshed, destruction, suffering, and political failures.

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: 09 August 2014
Word Count: 782
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For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757