BEIRUT — It is remarkable that peaceful street protests and demonstrations critical of the government have taken place simultaneously in recent weeks and months in at least 11 Arab countries. Ordinary people from all walks of life, but especially unemployed young men and women, continue to take to the streets in Jordan, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Algeria, Tunisia, Mauritania, Somalia, Palestine, Lebanon, and Morocco.

Disgruntled citizens also would be marching if they could in other Arab autocracies like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Bahrain, but the draconian measures those governments have used to jail, torture, and bludgeon their citizens into a state of pacified and dehumanized fear have minimized public protests — for the moment. Yemen and Libya are in states of war, but their people already rose up in protest eight years ago during the great Arab Uprisings of 2010-11.

Clearly, almost every person and institution in power across the Arab region has learned almost nothing since 2011. For the poor Arabs who are a majority of citizens in our region, conditions have steadily worsened in every sector of life — jobs, income, education, water, housing, health and transport services, inequalities and disparities, clean air, and others.

The Arab governments and elites refuse to acknowledge that something is very wrong across our region, when a majority of states are at war or engage in bitter internal standoffs with their own people. Many ask today whether we are witnessing a revival or continuation of the 2011 Uprisings. Today’s protests match up against the Uprisings in some but not all ways.

First, the drivers of both eras are almost identical. These are a combination of socio-economic stress on a growing number of families, more and more of whom sink into poverty and lose hope for a better life, while they totally lack any credible political power to change things for the better.

Second, the Arab governments, private sectors, and their foreign donors and patrons continue to respond in exactly the same way they did eight years ago. They fail to expand economic activity enough to generate enough decent jobs to lower poverty and unemployment. Politically, most Arab governments have become more repressive, and narrowed ordinary citizens’ ability to organize, mobilize, speak out, and participate politically in their own societies.

Third, the fundamental dysfunctions and deficiencies in Arab societies that sparked the 2011 Uprisings have worsened virtually across the board, in politics, economy, free expression, the environment, and basic human services. The resurgence of region-wide demonstrations today should not surprise anyone who knows the region.

This is because, for example, as many as two-thirds of the 400 million Arabs today suffer daily indignity and despair because they are poor or vulnerable to poverty. The poor and marginalized citizens grow, while the middle class shrinks. This is partly because most Arab workers toil in the informal sector, characterized by low pay and no protections in health, minimum wages, or retirement.

The difference today from a few decades ago is that an Arab family that becomes poor will remain poor for several generations, because our economic systems cannot create enough decent jobs to reduce poverty and unemployment. The few jobs that are created tend mostly to go to the children or friends of the plugged-in crony capitalist elite or state bureaucrats.

The non-stop peaceful marchers in the street are asking for nothing more than food, water, housing, education and jobs — and to be treated decently and as human beings by their governments. Most people feel their governments treat them with disdain — such as Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s plan to run for a fifth consecutive term when he is in nearly a comatose health condition and cannot carry out the functions of either the presidency or even a full-fledged and active human being.

For those who wish to understand both the collective failure of Arab governance and the resulting nonstop violence and popular protests, I suggest comparisons to two other cases in our lifetimes when people elsewhere erupted simultaneously in mass uprisings and resistance movements. Those two mass movements when people challenged systems that oppressed politically and economically, and robbed them of their human dignity, were the American Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and 60s, and the anti-Soviet revolutions in the late 1980s.

Arabs in the streets today feel the same deadly combination of three elements that also drove the Civil Rights and anti-Soviet uprisings: socio-economic stagnation, lack of political rights, and a degraded humanity that refuses to remain degraded or relinquish its humanity.

I lived through the last years of the Civil Rights movement during my university days in the United States. So I think sometimes that “Free at last, free at last, Allahu Akbar, we will be free at last” could be imagined as the combined drumbeat and heartbeat that now motivates tens of millions of ordinary Arab men and women who — as happened to African-Americans — have been turned into little more than beasts of burden by their own power structures and governments. When they complain, they are offered more of the same economic, political, and security policies that brought them to this sorry state during the past 40 years. So, they refuse to keep walking on command, in quiescent, silent lines, like donkeys. Instead, like Birmingham and Selma, like Berlin and Prague, they march, like humans.

It will go on and on for generations, in different forms at different times and places, until someone in authority wakes up and admits that repeating failed policies is a sign of utter and inexplicable stupidity, cruelty, and incompetence.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 March 2019
Word Count: 919
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BEIRUT — A great menace hovers over the Arab region and its people, and has started to nibble away at their societies and countries. Our region now is made up mostly of poor and vulnerable families, and it is corroding and fragmenting from within. Unlike the popular media images abroad of vast Arab wealth, the reality is the exact opposite. The Arab region is fracturing and disaggregating into a small group of wealthy people, a shrinking middle class, and masses of poor, vulnerable, and marginalized people who now account for 2/3 of all Arabs. Some 250 million people, out of a total Arab population of 400 million, are poor, vulnerable, and marginalized, according to important new research by Arab and international organizations.

The most significant new evidence for this trend comes from Multi-Dimensional Poverty studies conducted by Arab and international organizations. They give us a more accurate and complete picture of the actual conditions of our ravaged populations. This is complemented by annual region-wide surveys by Arab and U.S.-coordinated academic groups, especially the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and the U.S.-based Arab Barometer (a consortium of U.S. and Arab research institutes) that show that on average some 70% of surveyed Arab families cannot easily or at all meet their basic monthly needs.

The Multi-Dimensional Poverty (MDP) figures indicate that poverty rates are as much as four times higher than previously assumed. This is because the MDP measure of poverty and vulnerability that has been applied by economists at UNDP, the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Western Asia (ESCWA), the World Bank, the Oxford Poverty and Human Development Initiative, and other institutions has given us a much more accurate picture of poverty than the previous reliance on measures such as $1.25 or $1.90 expenditures per day. The main reason for the greater accuracy is that MDP poverty measures capture the very rich and very poor that previous studies had missed, and also define poverty more accurately in terms of families’ core needs and capabilities.

In ten Arab states surveyed by ESCWA, 116 million people were classified as poor (41% of the total population), and 25% were vulnerable to poverty, according to Dr Khalid Abu-Ismail, chief of the Economic Development and Poverty section of UN ESCWA, based in Beirut. The “vulnerable” families live right on the edge of poverty, but they simply cannot afford any increase in prices, taxes, or fees, which would immediately plunge them into poverty.

This may explain why tens of thousands of people have demonstrated against their government policies recently in Iraq, Lebanon, Tunisia, Sudan, and other Arab countries, with a strong emphasis on resisting new taxes and price increases.

Even when the World Bank’s poverty measure of less than $1.90 daily expenditure per capita is used, in the period 2011-2015 extreme poverty in the Middle East increased from 2.7% to 5% — and the Middle East was the only region in the world where this indicator increased in that period. Consequently, the middle class in non-oil-producing Arab states has been shrinking from 45% to 33% of the population, according to ESCWA economists who have analyzed this issue. Greater inequality seems to be moving alongside greater poverty and vulnerability.

Not only are Arab poverty and vulnerability much higher than previously thought; the poor and marginalized also are destined to suffer for generations, for two reasons. First, because early childhood development conditions and a family’s highest attained education level are two credible predictors of life-long poverty — and both are problematic in many Arab areas.

Second, because Arab economies in today’s conditions cannot generate sufficient quality jobs to increase family incomes and reduce poverty rates. Dr Abu-Ismail explained in several interviews here that in recent decades most Arab families experienced social and economic mobility that would reward them for their educational or employment efforts by improving their income and well-being. More recently, however, he said, higher social capabilities in health and education often did not translate into better lives, mainly because not enough decent jobs were available. So many people panicked about their and their children’s future prospects.

To complete the ignominious circle of misery that plagues the hundreds of millions of stressed, often desperate, poor Arabs who are a majority of their populations, these people also lack the political rights to credibly express their grievances or to participate meaningfully in decision-making that could turn around their imperiled countries.

The political consequence of all this is that many Arabs have become increasingly marginalized and alienated from the economic mainstream, and also, in many cases, from the political and national institutions of their own country. Citizen alienation from the state combines with rising disparities in every dimension of life that are now well measured both quantitatively and qualitatively, such as gender, ethnicity, rural-urban location, education, health, security, wealth and poverty, self-confidence, trust in government, and others.

As a result, the citizens of once homogeneous Arab states have fractured into several distinct groups: a small wealthy class, a shrinking middle class, and a big majority of poor, vulnerable, and desperate people. Perhaps a majority of Arab citizens no longer feel they can rely on their states and governments for their identity, security, opportunity, voice, basic needs, and other critical factors that shape both healthy citizenship and a dignified human life. Such men and women who become alienated from their state seek identity and allegiance in institutions beyond the state that meet their needs, such as religion, tribalism, ethnicity, criminal networks, or militancy.

The existing Arab governments and private sectors simply cannot generate the number of new jobs needed to reduce poverty in the decades ahead; the IMF and others say we need 60-100 million new jobs by 2030, and 27 million jobs in 2018-2023, to meet the needs of new graduates, reduce existing unemployment, and raise family incomes.

This means that Arab labor markets will continue to be defined heavily by informal labor, which is now estimated to account for some 50%-60% of all workers. Labor informality, due to its lack of worker protections, is a major cause of poverty and vulnerability, and thus a guarantor of permanent poverty for the informal worker’s family.

The widespread poverty, vulnerability, and inequality that threaten our current and future well-being are consequences of the bad policies of widely incompetent Arab elites — but also aided by important contributions from aggressive regional and international powers that support those elites and stoke the many wars in the region.

All these issues now form a single destructive cycle of low-quality governance, stagnant economies, deteriorating education and health services, insufficient quality jobs, and widespread warfare — not to mention degrading environments, water shortages, food insecurity, incoherent urbanism, and rampant corruption. This bundle of factors is perhaps the greatest shame of a modern Arab region that is failing its people, because it is failing its century-old tests of statehood, sovereignty, and citizenship.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and adjunct professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2019 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 February 2019
Word Count: 1,143
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BOSTON — The announced abrupt U.S. withdrawal from Syria has sparked widespread speculation about what we might expect next, with most U.S.-based analysts emphasizing the “who wins and who loses” approach to their conclusions. This is understandable in a society whose foreign policy is heavily mercantile, self-centered, militaristic, and absolutist in its strategies and tactics, but it misleads the public that listens to such narrow views.

I am watching the American political mainstream analyze Syria and the region while I also closely follow my other love in the USA: college and professional sports. I am troubled to see identical approaches to Syria analyses and to discussions about what happens in the National Football League playoffs or college basketball rankings. When a leading player is injured or a powerful team slumps for a few weeks, the sports analysts suggest and explore endless possibilities about what might happen, and which teams will win or lose from the changed circumstances on the playing fields.

But Syria analysts diverge from the high-quality American sports coverage tradition in two critical ways: The sports analysts are experts who genuinely know their material, and also analyze events dispassionately. Syria analysts usually exhibit much less genuine expertise and far more ideological bias about the implications of the U.S. pullout. The American mainstream media and political tendency to discuss Syria like one covers college sports is among the destructive American deficiencies and foreign policy mistakes that have been repeated and aggravated over decades.

Anyone interested in anticipating Syria developments and their wider Levant/West Asia region should pay attention and grasp events in the same way that we analyze a four-way trade in professional baseball or basketball — one of the most exciting, sophisticated, and meaningful dimensions of American sports. Multi-team trades are deeply negotiated, attentive to the desires of several parties, and lead to a win-win situation that strengthens all the teams, according each one’s self-defined priorities.

Syria now is a rich landscape of power politics in which at least 13 big and small actors seek to strengthen their position and minimize their weaknesses — a 13-way potential confrontation that could also end up being a 13-way negotiated tradeoff that achieves the minimum needs of all, or most, parties.

The 13 parties I identify include the six most powerful ones (the U.S., Syria, Turkey, Iran, Russia, and Israel), and seven weaker ones (Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Saudi Arabia, assorted Kurdish groups, and the Islamic State remnants), along with other interested parties like the United Arab Emirates, France, Qatar, Egypt, and Syrian and Iraqi tribal forces.

This constellation of actors has started to negotiate with one another to achieve their desired results — just as serious sports teams negotiate with three or four others simultaneously to fill in gaps in their rosters and trade away players who are not essential to their success.

This repeats the dynamic that defined the war in Syria during the past eight years, in a fracturing, evolving, Middle East: Power flows from a coalition that includes, typically, one or two foreign powers, Arab states/governments, non-Arab regional powers, and Arab and non-Arab non-state actors with clout. So the Russia-Syria-Iran-Hezbollah coalition triumphed in the very costly war in Syria, while the U.S.-Turkey-Saudi Arabia-Syrian rebels coalition essentially lost. Others in between (Israel, assorted Kurds, Islamic State, tribal groups, Jordan) gravitated to one side or the other as conditions demanded for their wellbeing. Other such coalitions are engaged in the Saudi-Emirati-led war against Yemen.

I assume that these 13 parties will not deliberately choose to start new wars in this exhausted region, but instead will try non-violently to emerge from today’s transforming era in solid and safe condition. All parties will define the minimum needs that they will seek to achieve through a combination of secret talks, saber-rattling, open bilateral diplomacy, and endless multi-lateral consultations.

Will Russia-Turkey-Iran and allies be the dominant power that calls the shots? Will a new combine of Russia-Israel-Saudi Arabia emerge, or one that sees Israel-Russia-Turkey working more closely together? What of the Turkey-Qatar-Iran group that is becoming a regional player in some arenas? Will the Kurds find protection and an autonomous but normal life as part of a reconstituted Syrian state, which will assuage Turkish fears of a strong, state-like Kurdish entity? And what of the Syrian state itself, and its configuration and interests?

If you have ever been impressed by the central bazaars in the capitals of Turkey, Iran, and Syria, you should now pay attention to the political haggling, bluffing, table-banging, raised eyebrows, threats, walk-outs, sweet talk, feigned disinterest, serial tea offerings, troop redeployments, and other essential elements of the negotiations that will now take place in and around Syria. This will likely result in no absolute winners and losers, but rather might formalize power relations that were created since 2011 by actors who understand the nuances and pragmatic negotiating positions needed to survive, in the first instance, and then to thrive in the longer run.

They do this by giving and taking, in discussions with their foes and allies. The critical three elements for success in such a dynamic are: knowing precisely your real national self-interest, what you must obtain, and what you can give away. The United States, almost uniquely in the world of culture and diplomacy, is alien to this ancient craft of political bazaar negotiations, because it has not defined its genuine national interests in the Middle East after the Cold War, and prefers the tools of threats, sanctions, wars, and other destructive, usually ineffective, unilateral action.

Washington is moving its troops out of Syria, but still has significant indirect influence if it wishes to use it. To do so, it must figure out how to engage in this great transcontinental negotiation over Syria that is already underway. Four-way sports trades are really complicated, but Americans mastered that skill decades ago. This is an opportunity for Washington to make the effort to apply this negotiating skill in global politics, so that it stops wasting trillions of dollars and its squandered cultural goodwill, leaving behind destroyed lands — the way it has done for decades in the Middle East and Asia.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 21 December 2018
Word Count: 1,017
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NEW YORK — The United States’ announcement that its troops will leave Syria as soon as possible marks one more important stage in the recent evolution of strategic and diplomatic moves across the Middle East — anchored in Syria, of course, as many such moves have been for most of the past century, and much of the last four millennia before that. This episode is worth pondering by those who wonder why and how things happen in the Middle East, and how foreign powers should interact with our societies, countries, and political power centers.

The short-term focus on the Trump administration’s incoherent and erratic conduct of foreign policy is deservedly a short-term issue. It will give people more reasons to fear a continuation of this administration and seek ways to end it or blunt its power, as the mid-term congressional elections have already done. The White House, Congress, and the Defense and State departments all seem to be saying or leaking slightly different things about why the U.S. is leaving Syria. This continues a legacy of inconsistent American behavior there during the past eight years of the uprising and war in the country. It badly cripples and makes fools of those American officials, especially the special envoy to Syria, Ambassador James Jeffrey, who have been saying for months that Washington will stay in Syria for as long as needed to drive out Iran — a patently ridiculous and unattainable policy for anyone who knows anything about anything east of the East River in New York City. Ambassador Jeffrey and others have served their country diligently for years, but end up deeply tarnished because of the wider incoherence of their elected masters in the White House. This makes it difficult for any American foreign service officers to try and do an honorable job, if their words cannot be believed, which is in fact often the case these days.

But this is a short-term problem reflecting the comic, mercantile, and sophomoric nature of the Trump administration. The deeper significance of the U.S pullout relates to the modern legacy of U.S. policy in the Middle East, which includes a truly monumental and frightening combination of at least the following dynamics: faulty analysis, cultural ignorance, political manipulation by domestic and foreign forces, over-reliance on military force, excessive protection of Arab and other Middle Eastern authoritarian regimes, inattention to powerful indigenous forces of identity, religion, nationalism, dignity, and other intangibles, creating, using, and abandoning allies of convenience in the region who often suffer terrible fates when the U.S. tires of them and leaves, an almost absolute ignoring of the wishes, rights, and concerns of the 750 million or so Muslim-majority citizens of Turkey, Iran and the Arab states (of whom 400 million are Arabs), a total misreading of the region’s widespread parallel respect for American values and disdain for America policies by ordinary citizens and elites alike, and chronic confusion about why ordinary men and women become violent and a few of them become terrorists.

This breathtaking legacy of ignorance, incompetence, and militarism allows President Trump to add to the long lexicon of American absurdities in the Middle East that he is pulling out the troops because “we have defeated ISIS” in Syria. He betrays the simultaneous and dangerous reality that he understands nothing about the real meaning of defeat, Syria, and ISIS. The truth is that ISIS and others like it emerge from stressed, fractured societies where tens of millions of desperate men and women grasp on to any group that promises them $150 a month, the dignity of resistance (as they see it) against what oppresses them, or salvation seated next to God. The conditions created by the list of policy misdeeds I mentioned above are the core creators of such terrorist movements, which will thrive where conditions remain troubling for ordinary families.

The widespread reaction in the region and the world will be that the U.S. is not a reliable ally, and can easily be driven out of foreign lands where it has sent its impressive military machine that is deployed by unimpressive, often ignorant, uncaring, and chaos-generating politicians. We will now all watch — once again — as Russia, China, Turkey, ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and many others at local level take advantage of the vacuums and openings the U.S leaves behind in the wake of its politically misguided military deployments in the Middle East, in the wider context of a region deep in metamorphosis into new ideological and state configurations in large part because of the older legacy of such manipulations, interventions, and aggressions in the region by foreign powers, including Zionism/Israel in the past century.

At the same time the Arab authoritarian regimes will try to move closer to their traditional allies — the U.S., Israel, Iran, and others — to dampen the turbulence that will inevitably surface soon, as our region continues to suffer growing poverty and vulnerability (which now define two-thirds of our Arab population) amidst expanding inequalities and chronic disparities in basic human services and needs. This is not due to what the U.S. is doing in Syria today, to be sure. But it is a consequence of what the U.S., other powers, and virtually all local power elites have done in the region for the past century. To miss that connection is to make today’s violence a kindergarten exercise in the face of what we should expect in the near future if current trends continue, whether via foreign armies, adjacent colonizers of our lands, bone saw-wielding rulers, or just greedy ruling elites who expect their growing armies to keep them safe.

The impulsive Trump pullout from Syria — which is a logical move, because the U.S. never should have been there in the first place — is noteworthy because it reminds us of all the bad and destructive policies that Arabs, Iranians, Turks, Israelis, Russians, British, French and many others have practiced in our lands for so many decades, if not centuries and millennia. Watch what happens now as local, regional, and global forces jockey for influence and territory in Syria, while some of them return home on troop ships waving the embarrassing banners of ridiculous missions they never should have been sent to pursue. You will learn much from this, especially how Arab societies have become a global laboratory for imperial mismanagement, indigenous failed authoritarianism, and the two parties’ ongoing joint venture in garbage governance and denied humanism.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 December 2018
Word Count: 1,063
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BOSTON — This is a historic moment in relations between the United States and the Middle East, because we may be witnessing the beginning of the decline of that combination of forces that has been at once the most destructive and the most powerful in our modern history. I am speaking about the U.S.-Israel-Saudi Arabia close relationship that reached its apex, and saw its Israeli-Saudi Arabian dimension emerge into the public, in the past two years of the Donald Trump administration.

Events in recent weeks and days signal that this collaboration is eroding and being discredited. This reflects both short term developments like the Yemen war and the Jamal Khashoggi assassination, and longer term transitions that have seen the power of pro-Israeli and pro-Saudi groups slowing or even retreating within American society and Washington politics.

The important historic angle to this is that the powerful U.S.-Saudi-Israeli combine has been the most destructive force in modern Middle Eastern history due to its three component elements of Western imperialism and militarism, Zionist colonialism and endless warfare, and Wahhabi social and political extremism. Few if any other local and foreign forces have had as much negative impact — on so many lands, for so many decades — during the modern Mideast era that started around World War One.

The United States is problematic because its political and military interventions in the Arab/Mideast region reflect that older Western, mostly European, legacy of colonial controls that brought our region into the 21st Century limping and shattered, due to two main legacies: direct and constant military interventions, with dozens of permanent bases, that eventually contributed to our broken states and stressed societies that cannot withstand permanent warfare; and, non-stop support for autocratic local regimes that prohibit the emergence of credible democracies or expression of the will and interests of the Arabs and other people.

Israel is problematic because its modern legacy of non-stop war between Zionism and Arabism since the early 20th Century has heavily contributed to the prevalence of Arab authoritarian states run by military men and their families, and mostly incompetently so. A century of Arab-Israeli wars has diverted the resources and capabilities of these Arab states, eroded numerous indigenous attempts at serious, genuine, national development, and hardened the Arab power elite’s autocratic ways that also prevented pluralism, participation, and accountability from ever taking root in our societies to the point today that Israeli companies sell technology to some Arab governments that allows them to spy on their own citizens and prevent any freedom of expression, and the Israeli prime minister intervenes in the White House to promote U.S support of the embattled Saudi crown prince.

Saudi Arabia is problematic because the extremist form of Wahhabi political philosophy it exported to Arab-Islamic societies has been both the foundational anchorage and continuing fuel that have helped midwife the birth of modern militant Islamist movements, some of which ultimately evolved on their own into terrorist groups like Al Qaeda, Islamic State, and dozens of smaller ones — even though, it is critical to appreciate, the vast majority of Saudi men and women reject such criminal militancy.

Wahhabi-stoked extremism, predatory Israeli Zionism, and American imperial militarism each contributed in parallel, over many decades, to nipping in the bud any nationalist developmental movements across the Arab region, while actively or implicitly supporting the persistence of Arab authoritarian regimes.

The advent of President Trump and Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman converged with several other recent dynamics: the interests of American Christian Zionists and pro-Israeli zealots that heavily influenced the White House, including through Trump’s son-in-law and Zionist settlements supporter Jared Kushner; the rightwards drift of Israeli politics under Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu; and, the three countries’ shared desire to counter Iran’s influence in the region.

Yet this trilogy of mostly failed extremism now seems to have reached its peak, and is likely to be rolled back and perhaps even shattered. All three leaders have generated immense opposition to themselves and their policies, and may be charged with criminal actions or even evicted from office.

The U.S. Senate vote earlier this week to hold Mohammad bin Salman personally responsible for the assassination of Khashoggi and to demand the end of U.S. military assistance to the Saudi and Emirati war in Yemen represents a historic change. It shows the U.S. legislature playing a greater role in conducting foreign policy and checking Trump’s excesses, as they explicitly demand that Washington reduce its close links with the Saudi government until the truth of the Khashoggi killing is revealed and the assassins and their commanders held accountable. Mohammad bin Salman now faces real pushback from real power, which he has never faced before.

The tempering of U.S.-Saudi ties and the possible reduced role of Mohammad bin Salman will both weaken the ability of Netanyahu and his extremist zealots in Washington to keep promoting their aggressive, apartheid-like policies that have only generated tensions across the region. These three embattled leaderships may combine for one last, wild fling in the world of political extremism and brutality where they seem to live so comfortably — but they will also face a much more hardened opposition across the world, including in the halls of American power.

This trilateral Middle East wrecking machine probably has seen its best days behind it, for which we thank all those Arabs, Americans, Israelis and others who resisted these purveyors of destruction, and whoever else on earth or in the heavens had a hand in this. One also hopes this means the proven natural decency, moderation, and pragmatism of most American, Saudi, and Israeli people would emerge once more, and help shape policies for peace, justice, and co-existence, rather than for perpetual fear, hatred, war, and fanaticism. But being thankful for changes underway is not enough; we must all continue to work to make sure that this shift away from collective fanaticism, and towards rule of law and humanism, persists.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 December 2018
Word Count: 982
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CIA leaks spark new era in Khashoggi case 

by Rami G. Khouri

BOSTON — The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s leaks to several American news organizations this weekend that it believes with “high confidence” that Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman ordered the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi has triggered a series of fascinating political contests and confrontations that may profoundly impact several decision-decision-making spheres in Washington, within Saudi Arabia, and between the United States and foreign countries. We enter uncharted terrain here with potentially tumultuous results, largely because of the unprecedented, unpredictable, and mostly uninformed, uncaring, and dangerous nature of the Trump presidency and the rule of Mohammad Bin Salman.

Never in modern history has the effective ruler of the Arab region’s biggest power and the president of the world’s most powerful country both been publicly challenged by the CIA, which essentially calls them both liars, and the crown prince a murderer. So we now witness several important, often unprecedented, confrontations that will play themselves out in the coming weeks or months, due to the CIA’s “high confidence” conclusion, the serial incompetence of the Saudis in covering up the assassination they organized and executed, and President Donald Trump’s apparent desire to protect the Saudi crown prince from responsibility.

Several critical contestations underway include at least the following, with others that might appear soon:

1. The CIA vs. the United States president. We saw a few weeks ago the initial signs of this tension when the CIA director flew to Turkey to examine for herself the evidence of the Turkish government and others that seemed to tie the Saudi government, in the form of the Crown Prince’s office, with the death squad killing of Khashoggi. The CIA’s “high confidence” in the assessment is important because it indicates that the agency has its own sources of first-hand evidence. So we can be quite certain that the crown prince was involved in the killing.

The CIA leaking its assessment to major U.S. media is an unusual challenge to the president and his authority to conduct foreign policy — not the direct conduct of foreign policy itself, but the creation of a public opinion environment around how the U.S. should handle the accusations and evidence against the Saudi leader.

2. The U.S. Congress vs. the U.S. president. Some senators in the Congress had already started to initiate legislation on arms sales to Bahrain and military assistance to Saudi Arabia, due to those countries internal human rights gross misconduct or their involvement in the war in Yemen. Some congresspeople have started publicly agreeing with the CIA, while demanding that the Saudis find a way to replace their crown prince with someone more responsible and less erratic and dangerous, in the worlds of some senior senators. So we will now witness a dramatic contest to see who really makes foreign policy — as the CIA, the president, and the Congress all publicly lay out their positions on how to respond to the culpability of the Saudi crown prince.

3. President Trump vs. the Republican Party. President Trump has largely been able to maintain the Republicans in Congress on his side. This is changing suddenly with the CIA assessment, as some Republican leaders, like Senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, openly say they will refuse to deal with the Saudi crown prince, at a time when the president repeatedly says the Saudis are important allies and major sources of income for the U.S., and that the evidence against the crown prince is not clear yet.

4. The U.S. vs. its major Western allies. The major European allies have all made public statements that reject the Trump position and demand a thorough investigation of the Khashoggi murder. If Trump rejects the CIA verdict and growing congressional opposition to his position, and continues to shield Saudis who seem to be complicit in the murder, we may see a novel situation where the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and Israel are isolated from the rest of the world (the Israelis are in this trio of rogues because their prime minister asked Trump to take it easy on the crown prince because of the importance of the Saudis to Israeli interests).

It will take some time — months, I estimate — before these contests play themselves out and the final official American position on the murder is defined, and it becomes clear if the crown prince stays as he is now, gets his wings clipped, or is quietly removed by a decision of the king and the royal family council that was established by the late King Abdullah to determine the royal succession.

The matter grows bigger by the day, and will not quietly go away, no matter how much Trump, or his son-in-law and friend of the crown prince Jared Kushner, would like that to happen. This is because of three factors:

a) the barbaric nature of the planned killing, body dismemberment, and dissolution in acid is so extreme that it cannot be overlooked as just another routine crime by another violent Middle Eastern government;

b) the repeated lying and succession of ridiculous stories the Saudi government provided to cover up the crime reveal it to be both hapless amateurs as well as cold-blooded killers; and,

c) this is the opening that gave the world, especially officials and media in the U.S., the opening they needed to truthfully assess and politically push back against the destructive track record of the crown prince in domestic, regional, and international affairs, and to speak out against it.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 November 2018

Word Count: 906

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BEIRUT — Our continued focus on resolving the facts of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul last month is important for four reasons that will impact the fate of the Middle East and U.S. policies there for years to come. We will know soon if the killers are held accountable or the world loses attention, succumbs to the allure of the fortunes of oil and gas, and leaves largely unchanged the current power structures of our region. Which of those routes we take will determine whether we generate a more decent, participatory, accountable, and just region, or fall into a death maelstrom of unchallenged and cruel autocracy where money and guns rule, and citizens enjoy neither rights nor humanity.

The first critical issue is the moral need to identify who ordered and conducted the Khashoggi assassination, hold the criminals accountable, and develop mechanisms that minimize such inhuman deeds in the future. If such a grotesque crime as this is allowed to pass unpunished, the dark quarters and busy killers and jailers of the Arab and Middle East region will continue their deathly deeds with total impunity — and almost always with the explicit or quiet support of major foreign powers like the U.S., UK, France, Russia, Iran and others.

The second important dynamic is the tiny window that has been opened into the shadowy world of decision-making inside Saudi Arabia (and in most other countries in the region, to be fair). For the first time in recent memory, intense discussions are taking place in world capitals to determine who inside the Saudi system did this deed and how to punish them, especially if a direct line of culpability to the office or the person of the Saudi crown prince is identified beyond doubt, including how the crown prince might be relieved of his authority. This has momentous implications in several realms. One is the unprecedented new levers of external accountability that could shape power inside the kingdom, and another is the consequences for regional political contests if the crown prince’s current Saudi domestic and regional policies should suddenly stall or disappear if he is diminished or dismissed.

This touches the third dynamic, which is the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. One part of this is the bilateral relationship where Washington must determine if it cares to do anything meaningful to show its disagreement with incidents like the Khashoggi murder, or, rather, if it is perfectly satisfied with a symbolic but meaningless slap on the wrist to the Saudi leadership and only some minor adjustments in Saudi policies.

The second, more significant, part of the U.S.-Saudi relationship ties the possibility of the crown prince’s wings being clipped, or he is retired, to the fate of Trumpian Washington’s fantastic grand strategy for Middle Eastern politics and pressures on several fronts simultaneously. This is because in the fantasy world of Kushner-Trump Middle East policy, Saudi Arabia (often in alliance with Israel) is the vital lynchpin around which revolve all major U.S. policies, of which four are paramount: a) the dreamland “deal of the century” for Israeli-Palestinian peace; b) the coordinated Arab-Israeli front to “roll back” Iran in the region; c) the Saudi-led coalition of Arab-Islamic states, with U.S. and foreign support, to fight terrorism (delusionally called the “Arab NATO”); and, d) the policy since 2012, in the wake of the Arab Uprisings, to support autocratic Arab governments and ruling elites that kill any movement towards freedom of expression, participatory and pluralistic politics, free elections, accountability of power, citizenship rights, and an independent civil society. All four of these American core policies across the Middle East region will come crashing down if the Saudi crown prince comes crashing down, which would vilify some Saudis as criminals, and certify the Trump-Kushner team as immature and greedy fools.

The fourth and perhaps most interesting aspect of the post-Khashoggi murder dynamics is the face-off between Turkey and Saudi Arabia. This is both a vicious battle for ideological, cultural, and geo-strategic dominance in the region, and also an old-fashioned negotiation between two wily bazaar merchants trying to outwit each other. In the month since Khashoggi’s murder, the Turks have seriously outwitted the Saudis by using numerous tools in their deep reservoir of nuance, tactics, bargaining, and statecraft that have accumulated in that materially and culturally fertile Anatolian Plain for the past, oh, 4,000 years; while the Saudis have looked like hapless amateurs, as they offer lie after lie and keep changing their story, thereby totally destroying their credibility and stature, and opening themselves up to the sorts of pressures on their internal governance system that are now being examined by many foreign quarters, including the U.S. Congress.

The repercussions of the Khashoggi murder may be with us for years to come, but their full scope and impact will only be known after the facts of the case are verified beyond a doubt, which is what the entire world now should keep working to achieve — because the murder of an innocent man is unacceptable, as is the virtual imprisonment and immobilization of 400 million Arabs who continue to strive for their rights as human beings and citizens of their countries.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 06 November 2018

Word Count: 863

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Do you get angrier and angrier with every lie and cover-up on the killing of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government, its Arab allies and paid foreign propagandists, and the American president? If you do, I suspect this is because Khashoggi achieved in his life and death something that nobody else in modern history has been able to achieve: Ordinary people, media figures, and politicians throughout the world now appreciate how it feels to be treated like a helpless idiot by an Arab power elite that believes it can manage its citizens with brutality and disdain, without any accountability or consequences.

The intense and escalating political anger around the world about the Khashoggi assassination and cover-up reflects something far more profound than routine lying by public figures. I believe this is because the reaction is really about ourselves — all of us, everywhere — and our feeling of being  insulted, humiliated and dehumanized by power elites that treat us and their own citizens like cattle, idiots who have no rights. We can take a lie, but we cannot take being taken for total, helpless fools.

It is profoundly significant that people around the world now understand a little better what ordinary Arab men and women have endured for the past half a century: the daily, numbing feelings of helplessness, voicelessness, and hopelessness, in almost every walk of life, in the face of power elites that monopolize wealth, rights, and opportunities, and also use violence against anyone who dares to defy them.

It is even worse than this, though, and this captures what Jamal Khashoggi and thousands of other brave Arab men and women have struggled for unsuccessfully in the past 50 years, since security and military officers fully captured power in Arab states around 1970-75: The ghastly reality of modern Arab governance is that the power elites not only want to define what we citizens are allowed to do; they also want to control what we think, feel, and speak. The modern Arab security state has disfigured the dignity and ancient nobility of Arab-Islamic culture by giving incompetent, uncaring thought control colonels the authority to attempt to re-wire our brains, restrict our minds, dictate our identities, and turn us all into servile, mindless, heartless robots. We can handle their taking our money, but we cannot handle their taking our humanity.

Perhaps the intense anger against the Saudi and American leaderships for their grotesque cover-up and lies about the Khashoggi killing mirrors the similar reactions across the Arab region to the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi in southwestern Tunisia some eight years ago, which sparked a pan-Arab uprising of citizens who demanded their human dignity along with their citizenship. Now millions around the world understand how, why, and when something in that inviolable sacred space between our gut and our heart that makes us fully human refuses to be totally silenced, whether by the foolishness of ministers of information, the ignominy of unqualified presidents, or the macabre handiwork of bone saw operators.

Our gruesome, painful legacy of foreign-backed, long-running Arab authoritarianism must be shattered and buried. It is clear now that only a combination of Arab public activism with allied international solidarity will get this job done. Interested observers therefore might ponder the four critical dimensions of the Khashoggi situation.

First is the attitude of the Saudi Arabian government to deal with its citizens with brutality, disdain and lies, and cover up its crimes with lying propaganda and commercial inducements — all of which reflects a wider Arab problem that has reached breaking point. Second is the terrifying specter of alliances among governments like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Israel, and the Trumpian United States to camouflage criminality and emasculation of the citizenry by appeals to unproven “security” imperatives and commercial gain. Third — the nightmare for the 400 million Arabs who will continue to suffer these agonies well after the West loses interest — is the confirmation yet again of the combination of authoritarianism, militarism, cruelty, and utter, sustained, incompetence that defines the governance legacy of most Arab power elites and governments. Fourth is that these destructive hereditary Arab autocracies are explicitly supported by Western, Asian, and non-Arab Middle Eastern governments that value arms sales and strategic transit routes for their imperial interests above anything else, including the 400 million mangled, mind-shriveled Arabs who refuse to cede their humanity to the rule of the bone saw.

Millions of people and many officials around the world, for the first time ever, now feel in their bones these same sentiments that have turned many Arab societies into dysfunctional, dilapidated wrecks — where 260 million of the 400 million Arabs live in poverty and vulnerability, unable to buy essential survival goods for their families that are doomed to chronic poverty and marginalization for generations to come. Jamal Khashoggi would be pleased to learn one day that his life and death might have sparked that global coalition of sensible people who can work together to transform the Arab region into stable, prosperous, and decent societies — ones that could be freed once and forever of the symbols of the bone saw, the torture rooms, the jailed tweeters, the disappeared human rights activists, and the mind-control colonels who manage these gut-wrenching new symbols of Arab mis-governance that pierce that inviolable space between our gut and our heart, whose agonies are now heard and shared around the world.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 October 2018

Word Count: 896

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BOSTON — I have followed closely in the United States the unusually sharp reactions to the apparent abduction and possible murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. This is as heartening as it is unusual. It may also miss the point about the deeper meaning of Jamal Khashoggi’s life and work.

We have never seen such an outpouring of public and political anger in the United States that now demands answers from the Saudi Arabian government about what happened to him. Yet I fear this also encapsulates a deep, dark, black hole of selective, occasional, and personalized moral and political outrage that ignores — and perhaps perpetuates — the true crimes and pressures that plague all journalists and ordinary citizens across the Arab world.

The Khashoggi case is only the latest and most severe of tens of thousands of cases of Arab men and women who have been detained, imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases killed by their own governments or domestic political movements — usually for the “crime” or “security threat” of speaking their mind independently, offering views that differ from the state’s positions, or simply refusing to parrot the government’s propaganda.

The ghastly kidnapping and/or killing of Khashoggi — especially if it has been ordered by the Saudi leadership, which remains an unconfirmed accusation — absolutely deserves the international attention it is getting. Yet this attention will remain transient, deeply flawed, and lacking credibility if it does not translate into a more serious effort to join hands with brave Arab men and women across our region who continue to struggle for the freedoms, rights, and basic dignities that are denied to us by those very governments that the U.S. and other world powers support almost absolutely.

This is a pivotal moment because of both the nature of the crime and the nature of the victim. The single most important basic human right that has been denied the Arab citizen, in my view, has been the right of freedom of expression. It is telling that many reforms across the Arab region in administrative, commercial, judicial, educational, gender, and, even occasionally, security sectors have not touched the home-based Arab mass media, which remains under the licensing and legal thumbs of governments and security agencies.

Consequently, the Arab security state’s insistence on treating its nationals like robots and parrots may well have been the single greatest detriment to the normal, stable, equitable national development of our Arab countries since the 1950s — when army officers seized power and gradually steered the region towards its current fate of tensions, violence, disparities and mass emigration of tens of thousands of our brightest young people, who refuse to acquiesce in their own dehumanization and mass mind control experiments.

Khashoggi would not quietly accept life in an Arab region of 400 million people who are not allowed by their governments to use their entire brain for cultural, political, intellectual, scientific, discovery, or just entertainment purposes. He understood that Arabs who could speak their minds and debate their common public conditions would eventually play the major role in ending the multiple economic and political miseries that plague us today.

Societies wither and states fragment and collapse when their human element shrivels because it is not allowed to use its brain to express opinions, engage in public discussions, and offer suggestions for how to resolve the few problems we faced before we entered the era of the security state some half a century ago. Freedom of expression does not mean political opposition plots, security threats, or sinister foreign conspiracies, as most Arab governments frame the accusations they make against those citizens whom they torment, deter, detain, expel, imprison, indict, and, in some cases, torture and kill.

The added dilemma is that Arab governments that prevent their citizens from thinking and speaking freely do so by following their own laws, which allow them to abuse citizens in the ways that prevail today. Jamal Khashoggi understood this and sought in vain to find a way to achieve normalcy, dignity, integrity, and fraternity in our Arab societies, working within the established state system. For years he worked within the limits of what his Saudi government deemed permissible, cooperating closely with government officials and organizations to try to achieve a more equitable society that treated all its citizens decently. He fled abroad when he realized he could not achieve his goals, and felt his life was in danger.

I am sure that if Jamal Khashoggi could speak today, he would ask those individuals and institutions in the world that genuinely care about his fate and legacy to do this: Turn your faces towards those masses of ordinary Arab men and women who are suspended in the impenetrable zones of their own dehumanization, at the hands of those state powers that are vehemently supported by the American, British, Israeli, Iranian, Turkish, Russian and many other foreign governments.

I suspect he would remind those who now clamor for information about him that this case is not mainly about him. He is just the most visible and tragic — but heroic — tip of the iceberg of hundreds of millions of Arab citizens who are denied their voice, and therefore their humanity, but who persist in their struggle to regain that humanity. They languish in Arab jails in their tens of thousands in most Arab countries, and in their tens of millions they wander across Arab lands like mindless robots, comprising that deep, dark hole where the selective, occasional moral and political outrage we hear today from the U.S. and other lands refuses to tread.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow, adjunct professor of journalism, and Journalist in Residence at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Middle East Initiative. He can be followed @ramikhouri

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 October 2018

Word Count: 922

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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, The Arab Weekly and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.

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The streets of Amman today appear calm and everyone seems to be going about their business as usual. But just two months ago, the country faced massive protests which mirrored others it had seen before. The script of the May-June events developed along the usual lines: public protests over price increases made the king dismiss the government, freeze price increases, name a new prime minister, and ask for fresh reforms.

For the past 40 years, such events have recurred regularly, while Jordan’s major problems remained the same: corruption, unemployment, poverty, poor government services, and increasingly difficult living conditions for middle and lower-income Jordanians who make up the majority of the population.

In that time, the state adjusted its fiscal policies to accommodate growing public spending. It reduced subsidies and raised taxes and fees, which the citizenry grudgingly accepted, even after short-lived protests. This time, though, the situation is very different, and the same old government response will not work, because the scale, depth, and consequences of Jordan’s economic stresses are unprecedented.

The May-June events represent a broad-based, nationwide popular tax rebellion that, unlike past demonstrations, brought together all sectors of society — poor and middle-income people, professionals and private businesspeople, men and women, young and old, rural and urban folk, and Jordanians of all ethnic and geographic origins.

After former Prime Minister Hani Mulki had proposed in early May reforms to address a multiyear economic adjustment plan agreed with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other donors, it became clear that the government had pushed past the limit of what citizens could bear financially or accept politically.

Jordanians are and feel poor after years of gradual austerity, according to the soon-to-be-published 2016 data from the Arab Barometer survey. This shows that only 35 percent of Jordanians can meet their families’ needs without difficulty, while 64 percent face difficulty or cannot meet their expenses. At the same time, the state has exhausted existing ways to raise enough revenue to cover its core current expenses of salaries and loan interest payments.

The Mulki government had to increase taxes for 2019 because the country faced bankruptcy if no extra income were found to bolster state coffers. This reflected Jordan’s tighter situation the past few years when it could not easily obtain the high levels of foreign grants, loans, and guarantees that it had secured over previous decades.

Yet the state’s recent fiscal performance has been impressive in many ways. Between 2012 and 2017, according to IMF data and interviews with several former officials who dealt with these issues, domestic income from taxes and fees increased from covering 67 to 95 percent of current expenditures (this covers loan interest payments, but does not cover loan principal repayments, which annually require billions of grant dollars).

The May tax measures and price rises aimed to close that last five percent gap, and set Jordan on a sustainable growth path that would see new jobs created and incomes increase – or so the theory of economic adjustment said. But the theory did not account for falling standards of living, recent slowing down of economic growth, and rising expenses which have brought the general population to the brink.

The Jordanian people made it clear that they refuse to accept more austerity, when they feel they have no say in political decisions, corruption remains unchecked, and the political elite continues to enrich itself.

How to introduce meaningful changes The new Jordanian government must respond with simultaneous meaningful changes in four areas: expand real citizen participation in the top-heavy political system, jolt the weak economy onto a growth path, reduce polarisation between rich and poor, and reduce the chronic need for large-scale foreign aid grants (which is the basic aim of the IMF plan that is being implemented).

New Prime Minister Omar al-Razzaz’ government got the message. In its policy statement it promised the parliament to act in its first 100 days on a wide range of issues, including corruption, a national dialogue on “tax justice”, improving health, water, transport, and other public services, and opening direct electronic communication channels with citizens.

The $3bn emergency aid that came into the treasury this summer gives Razzaz some breathing space to formulate new policies that bridge the massive gap between the state’s fiscal needs and the citizens’ demand for political dignity and material well-being.

One of his biggest challenges is citizens’ large distrust in his government and the system, in general. Recent polls by the respected local NAMA Consultants and the University of Jordan Strategic Studies Center indicate a steady decline in how citizens view the government’s track record in serving the people — from around 65 percent in 2011 to just 35 percent today. Equally troubling are Arab Barometer findings that a large majority, 79 percent, feel that corruption exists in state institutions, and the two biggest concerns of Jordanians are the economy and corruption.

The demonstrators from all walks of life took to the streets because they all felt that none of these issues were being equitably addressed in the Mulki government proposals. Rebuilding citizen trust in political institutions will require both economic and political measures in a genuinely consultative context, rather than the usual top-down edicts from the government or benevolent gestures from the monarchy.

What would ordinary citizens see as signs of success that promise to improve their lives? These could include a more egalitarian tax law, social services improvements, more serious anti-corruption measures, and genuine citizen-state consultations that reduce the pervasive polarisation and marginalisation that are among Jordan’s biggest threats today.

The Razzaz government must do this while it reduces the state’s steep fiscal pressures. For example, the national debt-to-GDP ratio has risen in recent years to 95 percent, instead of declining, but should start to drop in 2019, according to the IMF. The economy has slowed to just two percent average annual growth, which is below the population growth rate. Citizens who already suffer low living standards cannot withstand more chunks of their low incomes being grabbed by new taxes (85 percent of Jordanians make less than $720 per month, according to existing wage labour data at state institutions).

Only about five percent of Jordanians pay income tax, which the economic adjustment programme aims to increase to 11 percent, while also lowering the thresh-hold for tax exemptions. The Mulki measures announced in May would have increased the financial burden on most Jordanians, due to the combined tax increases, lower taxable thresh-holds, less tax evasion, higher indirect taxes, fewer subsidies, and other related measures.

Because nearly 80 percent of the state budget covers salaries, pensions, and debt service payments, and about half of all employed citizens depend on the state for their wages and pensions, the state has little room to lower expenditures. The agreed government-IMF programme anticipates the need to raise nearly $2bn every year in foreign loans or grants to cover repayment of debt principal, which requires huge Arab and international aid that is often exacerbated by current political conditions in the region.

This is the most serious challenge of King Abdullah’s reign, because along with the domestic economic/political stresses, several senior analysts and former officials said in interviews, it might include a controversial new foreign policy twist: In return for long-term cash-aid, Saudi Arabia and the US might pressure a vulnerable Jordan to join their “deal of the century” proposal on Palestine-Israel, which Jordan has resisted to date.

The king has not indicated how he plans to reconcile these conflicting demands, beyond broad generalities in his letter appointing Razzaz. The demands of his restless citizens include political reforms based on genuine participation and accountability, which have been rare in the entire Arab region’s recent history.

Jordan is not moving towards a constitutional monarchy — this is not a serious populist demand, in any case — but neither can it continue doing business as usual. Forced by the circumstances of its difficult external shocks in energy imports, war-closed borders, lower transit trade, and erratic Arab budget support, along with its own domestic political and economic mismanagement, Jordan must soon indicate its direction. Will it boldly make the structural political and economic changes its citizens seem to seek, but that all other Arab states have furiously resisted? Or will it remain hobbled in the shaky authoritarian bargain of the corruption-riddled rentier states that dot the Arab landscape?

Decisions made in the coming six months will be crucial to the future of Jordan, and perhaps a sign of the future of other Arab states.

Rami G Khouri is a senior public policy fellow and journalism professor at the American University of Beirut. This article originated at Al Jazeera.com

Copyright ©2018 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 31 July 2018
Word Count: 1,413
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