WASHINGTON, D.C. — After the Hamas victory in the Palestinian parliamentary elections last week, the United States may be the party that has to face the most complex calculations as to its next moves. During the past ten days of travels, meetings, lectures and panel discussions throughout the United States, I have come to appreciate more the importance of the American perspective, because the U.S. is so deeply involved in so many dimensions of the Middle East. Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, promoting democracy and reform, the spread of political Islamism, oil, counter-terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction non-proliferation are only the main issues, and Washington’s policy on one issue inevitably rebounds to impact on the others.

I took advantage of being in Washington this week to speak with one of the most astute observers on immediately significant matters: Arab attitudes towards the United States across the Middle East region and options for the U.S. in responding to the Hamas victory.
Professor Shibley Telhami, Anwar Sadat Chair for Peace and Development at the University of Maryland, regularly conducts public opinion surveys that help assess the political mindset and worldview of people throughout the Arab world. His thoughts on American policy options are anchored in part in the results of a recent public opinion survey he conducted jointly with the respected polling company Zogby International, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, Jordan, Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates.

One of the significant findings of his latest poll was that Arab citizens by a very large margin — 75 percent of all respondents — do not believe that democracy is the real objective of the U.S. efforts to promote political reform and change in the Arab world. A full 58 percent of Arabs think that the Iraq war resulted in less rather than more democracy in the Arab world. Very large majorities of Arabs — three out of every four persons — believe that the main motives of American policies in the Middle East are “oil, protecting Israel, dominating the region, and weakening the Muslim world.”

While these findings are not so surprising, they take on fresh, major significance in view of the Hamas victory and how the U.S. responds to it. The U.S. faces a huge dilemma now, precisely because people throughout the Middle East will judge its response to the Hamas victory as a litmus test of its attitude to promoting democracy in Arab lands. Washington has already stated clearly its view — shared by others in the West — that it will not deal with or fund a Palestinian government that includes Hamas. It takes this position because Hamas does not recognize the legitimacy of Israel and actively fights it, using violent means that sometimes include terror attacks against civilians.

If the U.S. pushes for sanctions against Hamas, which seems likely in view of bills to cut off aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA) already moving through the Congress, skepticism about the U.S. democracy promotion policy will skyrocket throughout the region, and probably all around the world.

“The result of the Palestinian elections has refocused attention on Palestine, and how Washington responds to the Hamas victory will be a test case in a way of U.S. policy throughout the region,” Dr Telhami said. “American sanctions on Hamas and the Palestinian Authority will not change the behavior of the Palestinian government or of public opinion, but would certainly hurt the United States standing in the Arab region.”

The people of the Arab world already generally think the United States government is not a good or credible agent for democratic change in the Middle East. Sanctioning Hamas and the PA, therefore, would exacerbate this situation. This is why the best American policy now is to keep a low profile and remain quiet for a while, allowing the Palestinians and Israelis enough room to agree on a cease fire as a prelude to other diplomatic moves down the road, Telhami suggested.

“The Arabs in the past two years had already viewed the U.S. largely through the prism of the pain of American policies in Iraq, which are almost all seen in negative terms,” Telhami explained, “and now attention is also shifting back to American policies in Palestine.”

The American administration, like many others around the world, was caught totally unprepared for the Hamas victory. Washington had spent the last 18 months completely supporting Ariel Sharon’s unilateral moves, including building the separation wall and unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza. During this time the U.S. almost totally ignored the Palestinians, and saw Palestinian rights or views as fully subordinate to Israeli plans.

That worldview has all been turned on its head, as it becomes clear that the Hamas victory was not an isolated phenomenon, but rather is part of a wider trend throughout this region: democratic political openings usually result in victories by Islamist parties. The best policy therefore, Telhami suggests, is for the U.S. to find a way to work with the Islamists while nudging them towards the pragmatic political center. The American response to the Hamas victory will be a major signal of Washington’s plans in this respect.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 03 February 2006
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RALEIGH, North Carolina — I nearly fell out of my car window Monday morning while traveling around several of the fine universities in North Carolina, when I read U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s statement on the Hamas election victory in Palestine. She stated: “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming. It does say something about us not having a good enough pulse.”

Good grief, Condoleezza, this is not about having or not having a good enough pulse. It’s about the consequences of the last decade of Israeli and American policies towards the Palestinians in general, and the Islamist resistance movements in particular. This is not a time to persist in simplistic, counter-productive policies that will only further strengthen the forces of military resistance against the Israeli occupation, and wider Arab-Islamic political resistance against America’s blatantly pro-Israeli position.

To add a new dose of American perplexity and wonderment now to several existing layers of mistaken policies on Arab-Israeli peacemaking will be of no help to anyone. If Washington’s initial reaction is bewilderment at why it did not see this coming, and a reaffirmation of its policy of placing Israeli security above Palestinian security, then we are all in far more serious trouble than we can imagine. What is required now is a combination of honesty, independent analysis and composure that have long been missing in Washington’s policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Though the Hamas victory was surprising in its magnitude, it was no surprise otherwise, because it was the sixth consecutive strong showing by Islamist groups running in political elections in the Middle East in the past year.

One after the other since last spring, we have witnessed the Hamas victory in municipal elections, Hizbullah’s strong showing in the Lebanese parliamentary election, the Iranian presidential victory of populist hard-line neo-Khomeinist Mahmoud Ahmadinajad, the Muslim Brotherhood’s big wins in the Egyptian parliamentary elections, the Shi’a-dominated Islamists’ victory in the Iraqi parliamentary election, and now Hamas’s triumph in Palestine.

If the United States government, with all its capacity to collect and interpret information, did not see Hamas doing very well in the Palestinian election in the wake of these other Islamist victories, then it is either willfully blind or totally incompetent — and neither possibility is a very comforting thought.

The domestic and war-and-peace-making implications of the Hamas victory would appear to be rather clear. It was elected to throw out the incompetent, increasingly corrupt, and aloof Fateh-dominated Palestinian Authority, and to try and restore a sense of order and decency in Palestinian governance and life. Its victory patently was not a popular Palestinian mandate to establish an Islamic state, revive the Caliphate, apply Islamic law, or wipe out Israel. The hysterical spin-doctoring and obfuscation coming out of some circles in Washington and Israel to this effect are just that: hysterical scare-mongering.

The fact is, we do not know how Hamas will use its newfound political power. It is, perhaps, the most legitimate political leadership in the Arab world, because it is the only one to be voted in through a free and fair election monitored by the international community. Whether it will be an effective leadership, or a humane, fair and tolerant one, remains to be seen. It will have to make some important decisions in the coming weeks about how to apply its power, keeping in mind the desires of its constituency — the Palestinian people living in the West Bank, Gaza and Arab East Jerusalem — to live a normal life, not a life of perpetual war, occupation or resistance.

The most interesting thing about the Hamas victory is its legitimacy, as the consequence of a free, fair and pluralistic democratic election. This raises a massive new challenge to the American leadership, which is why Condoleezza Rice and her colleagues in government should be overcoming their perplexity and replacing it with some strong doses of realism and rationality.

The choice facing the United State is now very stark and simple: will its tradition of tilting towards the Israeli position triumph over its professed policy of promoting freedom and democracy in the Arab world? Put in more blunt terms: does the United States favor Israeli over Arab rights and interests? Or does the United States see peace in the Middle East as a consequence of a fair approach that gives Israeli and Palestinian rights the same weight and priority?

The right thing to do now is to explore how to take advantage of the fact that we have a legitimate, democratically elected Palestinian leadership. The last two times this happened in recent years — the presidential elections of Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas — Israel and the United States responded by giving primary attention to Israeli demands, thus only weakening and de-legitimizing the Palestinian leadership. That policy has been a colossal failure, and has resulted in part in spurring the string of Islamist victories throughout the region.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 01 February 2006
Word Count: 812
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It has been particularly fascinating to be in the United States this week to watch the reactions to the dramatic victory by the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, in Wednesday’s parliamentary elections. Media and official comments both indicate that the historic nature of what has just happened in Palestine is unlikely to be grasped in the U.S. or many other parts of the Western world, because Hamas and the rest of the Middle East continue to be judged by the litmus test of their acquiescence to Israeli security demands.

This is a tragic shame, because Hamas’s victory — coming after similar Islamist triumphs in Egypt, Lebanon and Iraq — also offers a potential political opportunity, if only sober minds would prevail on all sides. I say a potential opportunity because Hamas’s ascent to power remains riddled with many unknowns and deep concerns among many people in the Middle East and other parts of the world. They are not certain to succeed as the party in power.
Three key points seem important about Hamas’s victory. The first is that the election campaign was not a referendum on making war or peace with Israel. Hamas did not win because it promised to wipe out Israel. It won because it held out the promise of redressing some of the terrible imbalances and chaotic distortions that have come to define Palestinian domestic society in the past few years. These include corruption and incompetence in the Palestinian Authority governance system, lawlessness at the local level, and a humiliating inability to protect Palestinian communities’ basic day-to-day ability to function from the sustained onslaught of the Israeli occupation policies. Hamas won because Palestinians think it can do a better job than Fateh in bringing order and self-respect to the business of daily life.
The second important aspect of the election result is that Hamas will now experience the responsibility and accountability that come with incumbency. As a democratically elected governing authority, whether on its own or in coalition with Fateh and other Palestinian groups, Hamas will have to act in a manner that broadly reflects the views of the majority of the Palestinian citizenry. That  majority has clearly and consistently expressed a desire to negotiate a fair, permanent peace with Israel and coexist in peace with the Jewish state, rather than to wipe it off the face of the earth.

The third important point about Hamas’s victory is that it represents a brand of political leadership legitimacy that has been rare in the modern Arab world. Hamas’s massive victory is significant in itself, but it also represents a historic, peaceful transfer of power from what has effectively been a one-party state run by Fateh to an opposition that came to power through democratic elections.
There are important differences between the causes of Hamas’s victory and its possible consequences. These must be sorted out if this striking democratic victory is to lead to positive outcomes for Palestinians, Israelis, and the rest of the region and the world.
What is clear in the United States is that the Hysteria Brigades are already on the march here and in Israel in particular. Hamas is judged almost solely on the basis of whether it will disarm and recognize Israel’s right to exist — to the extraordinary exclusion of the fact that Hamas only armed in the first place to resist the Israeli occupation after 1967. It would be a terrible tragedy and a huge missed opportunity if Israel, the United States, and the rest of the civilized world would simply compound the mistakes they have made that gave rise to Hamas in the first place.

Above all else, the birth, rise, and political triumph of Hamas reflect a sustained Palestinian response to the American-backed Israeli government policies of colonial disdain for Palestinian national rights. For decades, Israel and the U.S. have refused to acknowledge that Hamas (like Hizbullah) was born as a reaction to Israeli occupation and abuse of Arab rights and national integrity. Hamas’s policies must be viewed in the context of the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians.

Unilaterally demanding that Hamas disarm its resistance wing or unilaterally acknowledge Israel’s existence will get nowhere if such a call is not matched by parallel Israeli steps to stop assassinating Palestinians and colonizing their land. The urgent priority now for would-be third party mediators  is to calmly craft a process that simultaneously identifies the legitimate rights and aspirations of Israelis and Palestinians, and take diplomatic steps to achieve those rights.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 27 January 2006
Word Count: 778
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BEIRUT — The respected lawyer, professor and democracy activist Chibli Mallat is running for president in Lebanon, at a time when no presidential election has been officially declared, in a system in which parliament chooses the president. Succeed or not, his candidacy is worthy because he is challenging, and may help to change, two core enigmas of the modern Arab world and its bizarre political order: executive power that remains in the hands of the same person for many years; and, individual citizens who feel helpless and angry, but do not try seriously to change their unsatisfactory autocratic systems.

Mallat’s candidacy provides a rare example of how individuals can instigate change by demanding that those who wield power should be held accountable to the law. It also affirms the novel idea that any Arab citizen can aspire to become president through democratic political action and personal initiative.

This is not new ground for Mallat, who has a track record in challenging the political impunity of leaders throughout the Middle East. He actively and publicly campaigned for years against the practices of leaders like Muammar Gadhafi in Libya and Saddam Hussein in Iraq.

He was one of a handful of lawyers who took the daring step in June 2001 of filing a criminal complaint in a Belgian court on behalf of 28 witnesses and survivors of the 1982 massacre in the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila in Beirut, which resulted in the brutal death of between 700 and several thousand Palestinian civilians. The suit charged Israel’s Ariel Sharon and General Amos Yaron, and several members of a Lebanese Christian militia, with war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide. Mallat and colleagues made their point on the global stage: political impunity and wanton killing of any people, by any people, is unacceptable, and has to be ended.

Sharon’s name will forever be linked with the Sabra and Shatila massacres, partly due to this legal action. Five books have been written on the “Sharon case” in Belgium, including a splendid volume of essays edited by Dr. John Borneman of Princeton University. Entitled The Case of Ariel Sharon and the Fate of Universal Jurisdiction, it was published in 2004 by the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies.

I visited Mallat in his office last week to find out more about his motivation and expectations in running for president, assuming that his candidacy was something of a long-shot. Yet, like the Sharon case in Belgium, I also knew that Mallat’s political activism and legal initiatives tended to anchor a specific local event in its much wider, often universal, moral and constitutional context. In this case, the core issue is one he has been writing and speaking about for years: the crucial constitutional rotation of presidential power.

Mallat, Jean Monnet Professor of Law at St. Joseph University in Beirut, sees his presidential candidacy as a logical continuation of the same legal and ethical principles that demanded that the Sabra and Shatila killers be held accountable. No person, group or country was above the law. All had to be held accountable for their transgressions. Impunity was intolerable.

He, like a majority of Lebanese, was outraged in autumn 2004 when Syria unilaterally extended the 6-year mandate of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud for another 3 years. Mallat saw this as clear foreign interference in Lebanon’s domestic affairs, making the extension “illegitimate and unconstitutional because it reflected external coercion and therefore it must be reversed.”

He also believes that many of the assassinations, threats and explosions that have rocked Lebanon since autumn 2004 are linked to Lahoud’s extension.

“We have to reverse the presidential extension through more than just talk or political pressure,” he told me, “we must create a real, viable alternative to unseat Lahoud.”

So he launched his campaign, a very organized affair, with a website updated daily, media releases, local and international support committees, position papers, regular press interviews and public lectures, and a complete action for national political renewal. He meets regularly with politicians, members of parliament, and small groups of interested citizens. Win or lose, he sees his candidacy in the wider context of the urgent need to change the political culture throughout the Arab world.

“We have to promote democracy in the Arab world by ensuring that power at the top of the executive branch rotates regularly. We must unblock the hold of power at the top of our systems. In this case, parliament has a duty to reverse the president’s term extension and unseat Lahoud,” he says.

He also feels that his candidacy has triggered two other important ideas: “The dike has broken on the idea that a normal Arab citizen cannot aspire to compete for the top post in the country,” and, “we insist on ending the norm that governments or officials can get away with killing people”.

How sensible, how long overdue, and how unsurprising that it should be a single man of the law in little Lebanon that translates these ideas into action. This strikes me as a candidacy not only worth watching, but also worth emulating in other Arab lands. We need to break more dikes.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 24 January 2006
Word Count: 859
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BEIRUT — Their faces flashed across my television screen at home in Beirut Thursday evening like multiple choice answers to a quiz show question, “which of these three images best personifies the future values you want to define the Arab world?”

First there was Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden, releasing another audio tape addressed to the American people. He repeated the same ideas and rationales he had offered the world many times before, threatened more violence against the U.S., but also offered a long-term truce. Then came U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney, speaking again about the American-led “global war on terror”. He also repeated why the U.S. had to track down and kill terrorists around the world before they invaded America and destroyed Western civilization.

It was something of a political anthropology overload: to witness on the same day, Osama the moral troglodyte emerging from his cave, and Dick the collector of indictments emerging from his bunker, both delivering ideological sermons. Neither one was very convincing, or appealing. Their deadly, supposedly divinely-sanctioned, combination of arrogance and violence has elicited the rejection and active political resistance of virtually the entire world. And in any case, both these guys are already in some trouble with the law.

The third image on my television screen was more hopeful, and probably represented an option that most ordinary Arabs would choose to define their future. That television image was a live debate in Rafah, southern Gaza, among eight candidates running for the Palestinian parliamentary elections scheduled for January 25. (Mini-memo to Karen Hughes: it was carried live on Al-Jazeera television, so for the sake of promoting freedom and democracy it’s a good thing nobody bombed that pan-Arab satellite station a while ago).

The eight candidates, included several women and representatives of Hamas, Fateh and independent parties, spoke openly about the problems of their society and their proposed solutions. The audience, as is typical in Palestine after 38 years of harsh Israeli occupation and a decade of low quality Palestinian self-governance, was slightly disheveled, occasionally raucous, and often inattentive. But it was as authentic an expression of the Palestinian and Arab will to live in a sovereign, pluralistic, free democracy as we will ever see in this region.

The event reflected shared sentiments among all the candidates, who routinely criticized the corruption, incompetence, crime, and security laxity prevalent in the Palestinian territories managed by the Fateh-dominated Palestinian Authority. The debate also captured an ongoing historic trend in Palestine: the leading Islamist group Hamas is making a slow, steady ideological strategic shift that sees it focus primarily on meeting the day-to-day needs of its constituents, including local security, jobs, basic social services, and clean, responsive, accountable governance.

Hamas has not dropped its antagonism to Israel, its resistance to American hegemony, or its desire to see Islamic law and values define nation and society. But it has quietly let those three traditional core dimensions of its political program take a back seat to the more urgent needs of Palestine’s citizen-voters. Hamas, like Islamists everywhere in the Arab world, and politicians everywhere in the whole world, has recognized that its surest route to political success is responding to its constituents’ practical, local, day-to-day concerns.

This is why we should grasp two key points about the televised Palestinian election debate. The first was the imperturbable, almost heroic, determination of ordinary farmers, workers and mostly unemployed and poor Palestinians in the deeply scarred town of Rafah to practice electoral democracy and political pluralism — to demand an end to Israeli occupation, subjugation and attacks, but also to demand an end to Palestinian corruption, incompetence and gangsterism. The second was the almost perfect convergence of all the candidates’ electoral programs on these common points.

Once seen primarily as an extremist, violent, militant armed group, Hamas’ migration towards the political mainstream of Palestinian politics is why it swept many municipal elections in Palestine last year, and is poised to win a quarter or more of parliamentary seats this week. Hamas’ pragmatic journey towards the political center of Palestinian life has been well documented in a report published earlier this week by the respected International Crisis Group (http://www.crisisgroup.org). This is must reading for anyone who seeks to grasp the facts and actual trends of Hamas’ place in Palestinian politics, which in turn mirrors the broader transformation taking place among mainstream Islamists throughout the Middle East.

Here’s where the Osama and Dick Horror Show comes in again. A new pragmatic center is starting to take shape in many Arab lands. It articulates the sensible aspirations and solid values of ordinary citizens who reject Osama- and Dick-style political extremism, intemperance, and sustained violence. These two fellows represent dark political underworlds inhabited by frightened people who spend much of their time hiding in caves and bunkers, deprived of natural light, unaware of the moral and political trajectory of normal human beings. Give me a televised political debate from Rafah any time.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 22 January 2006
Word Count: 821
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BEIRUT — An important aspect of the Arab mass media, especially satellite television, that has not been sufficiently assessed is its power to deliberately mobilize masses in order to achieve political objectives. The best example of this has been Future Television’s role in fostering mass street action and political change in Lebanon.

Future Television (FTV), run by the Hariri family and its political interests, has played the leading role in the political developments in Lebanon in the 11 months since the murders of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and the few dozen other public figures and innocent bystanders. Its broadcasts have included non-stop political reports, analysis, debates and opinions. These have been wrapped in a powerful, emotional package of graphics, content and continuity that deliberately sought to bring out people into the streets for political action.

It succeeded, probably beyond its own expectations, resulting in the Syrian army leaving Lebanon, the arrest and indictment of top Lebanese security officers, a newly elected parliamentary majority, and the UN’s launching of an international investigation into the Hariri murder. FTV’s senior management has now analyzed its own role in the massive, sustained popular political mobilizations that changed Lebanon last winter and spring. Its important conclusions clarify two political phenomena that we should expect to witness in the Arab world in the months and years ahead: the continued development of mass media, and the sentiments of angry citizens that will be increasingly channeled through the media.

I learned more about this when I spoke recently with the chief executive officer of FTV, Tarek Aintrazy, during a media-related conference in Dubai, where he made a presentation on FTV’s broadcasting in 2005. His views are important for what they tell us about the media’s performance and impact in a moment of political emotionalism and change, but also for their implications for mass media in other Arab countries.

Aintrazy believes that the activist, engaged media, especially FTV and An-Nahar newspaper, were key reasons why mass mobilizations succeeded in changing the Lebanese security regime, a transformation that he equates with the toppling of the Soviet Union 15 years ago.

He notes that television played a key role for four main reasons:

* It is the only truly mass medium that has almost 100 percent penetration of households;
* its impact is not hurt by the relatively high illiteracy rate in parts of the Arab world;
* it converges well with the tendency of many Arabs to be politically subdued and laid-back, preferring to receive information without making an effort to seek it out; and,
* television has unmatched abilities to communicate human emotions, if it chooses to do so.

He says that “Al-Jazeera and other satellite stations opened a platform for ordinary Arab people to talk and debate, but they did not call the people to action or try to mobilize citizens. Future Television and An-Nahar, mainly, deliberately called on people to act after the Hariri murder, and did so repeatedly, openly, all day long. It worked.”

A more thematic analysis of FTV’s impact during the months after the mid-February murder shows that its programming and tone passed through several successive stages, intriguing in themselves. At first the broadcasts “nationalized grief,” highlighting the trauma that impacted the entire country, showing the crime as directed at all of Lebanon and not just one family or party. Then it “personalized the loss,” making every viewer share the impact of the act and the loss. After that it built up a dynamic between “the personal and the political”, promoting individuals to translate their personal grief into political action. And finally it “mobilized the masses to march,” resulting in a million or more people on the street on March 14.

Such deliberate politicization of the media, however, comes at a cost, and Aintrazy lists four specific ones that FTV experienced. The station lost its objectivity, through due to a deliberate decision it made in order to fight the prevailing security regime, as it saw it. The station suffered a “wear-out effect,” as people tired after some time, and wanted to get back to a normal life. Commercial consequences included tens of millions of dollars of lost advertising, because advertisers generally do not want to be associated with political views and causes. The station also suffered more intolerance from the security forces, which it says included media-targeted direct threats, smear campaigns, assassinations, and several failed assassination attempts, leaving a residue of fear within the company.

This particular media experience in Lebanon in early 2005 was an isolated, particular development. Yet it will prompt others throughout the region — politicized citizens and security regimes alike — to absorb its lessons and react accordingly. I expect other Arab media companies to embark on this same path, moving from expressing political sentiments to mobilizing for political change, because people deprived of their right to engage in political life will find the vehicles that allow them to do so, in religion, media, tribalism, terrorism, or other forms.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 18 January 2006
Word Count: 827
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BEIRUT– Here’s one for the Moral Confusion and Political Double Standards Department: the United States armed forces and government are holding discreet talks with Iraqi “insurgents” who are attacking and killing Americans in Iraq, and negotiating with a North Korea that they see as a nuclear threat. Yet the same United States government refuses to talk to Hamas, Hizbullah, the Moslem Brotherhood, and other Islamists in the Arab world and Iran, all of whom challenge the state of Israel. Say what?

The United States single-handedly created the Iraqi insurgents through its invasion and regime change, and now acts rather sensibly in opening discussions with these Iraqi groups who fight to drive the Americans out of their country. The U.S. did the same thing years ago in Vietnam, when it negotiated with the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong while thy actively fought and killed Americans. It also pursued a similar strategy in Northern Ireland, where it played the third party mediator role and actively (and successfully) engaged the various Protestant and Catholic militant groups who routinely used terror as a political tool.

These are examples of realism and pragmatism for which assorted American administrations should be commended. Living in the real world is a noble and useful endeavor. When Washington practices this here and there on the international stage, it should be acknowledged for its level-headedness, and encouraged to expand this approach consistently to define its policies everywhere.

However, something happens to official American pragmatism and realism when it comes to political and diplomatic moves related to Israel. The Moral Confusion and Political Double Standards Department kicks in, and the U.S. repeatedly opens itself up to accusations of hypocrisy and expediency. If the U.S., Israel, and Tony Blair are tired of hearing these accusations, they should stand in our shoes and feel the pain of being at the receiving end of this sort of sustained moral laxity and political double standards for decades on end.

More problematic than the insult is the fact that this persistent double standard has enormous practical consequences over time, which is why it must be dealt with in a more effective manner than has been the case to date. It generates strong skepticism of American policies in Middle East public opinion as a whole, and has sparked active military and terror attacks against American interests and troops.

The most important point about the double standard these days is not that it is counter-productive, but that we may have an opportunity to replace it by a more sensible and effective policy that responds to the legitimate concerns of all parties — namely the U.S., Israel, Arab groups and states, and Iran. This opportunity is the current twin focus on the widespread international and more limited Arab demand to “disarm” Hamas and Hizbullah, while those groups and other Islamists actively engage in democratic elections and slowly move into power-sharing arrangements in national governments.

The key to progress requires acknowledging the basic legitimacy of both sides’ posture and principles, in order to induce changes in their respective policies. The current American-Israeli approach is unlikely to succeed because it places the security of Israel at a higher priority level than the security of adjacent Arab societies, especially in Lebanon and Palestine. A better way would be to apply the American approach to North Korea and the Iraqi insurgents/terrorists to the Islamists in the Middle East: identify the legitimate needs of both sides and engage in sober discussions to agree on how to move to meet those needs.

This is not only eminently sensible and politically productive; it is also profoundly American in its conceptual and moral approach. Americans generally adopt a nuts-and-bolts approach that embraces the realities of the world, rather than a romantic or stubborn divergence towards political landscapes inhabited by people who are unreasonable, colonial and racist.

I suspect we do have an opportunity today to replace the distortions, double standards and killing cycles of the recent past with a win-win outcome that is more satisfying and humane. Israel is unlikely to budge for the moment, but Washington is not so fettered (one presumes), as evidenced by its pragmatism in talking with the killers-of-Americans whom it spawned and nurtured in Iraq.

The Islamist groups and Iran for their part also must reach into their largely untapped reservoirs of diplomatic sensibility and bold realism. Hamas, Hizbullah and others should spell out more clearly — in public or private, it doesn’t matter much in the early stages — how they would envisage moving along the same path of military disarmament, political empowerment, and national integrity and security that, say, the IRA in Northern Ireland has traveled in the past decade.

Washington is comfortable with this approach, and the Arab and Iranian Islamists should exploit it more adroitly than they have to date. The aim is to close the Moral Confusion and Political Double Standards Department, not chronically to dwell in it and suffer its ravages.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 14 January 2006
Word Count: 822
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BEIRUT — It seems that the roads around Damascus remain active in the business of miraculous transformations. After St. Paul had his vision on the road to Damascus some 2000 years ago, he dedicated the rest of his life to preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God, through the instrument of the Holy Spirit. Former Syrian Vice-President Abdel Halim Khaddam seems to have had his own miraculous vision as he was leaving for retirement on the road out of Damascus; he wants to dedicate the rest of his days to bringing on the Republic of Democratic Syria, through the instrument of President Khaddam.

Since St. Paul has defined and inhabited this Damascene transformational terrain for so long, he probably deserves more credibility in the miraculous revelations department than Abdel Halim Khaddam. We are still in the early stages of the aftershocks of Khaddam’s blockbuster revelations last week, in which he accused the Syrian regime of Bashar Assad of being behind the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. He has since raised the stakes, stating explicitly that he is working with other opposition groups to overthrow the Syrian regime, and that he hopes to become president himself.

We will find out soon enough whether the Assad regime is vulnerable and in trouble, or whether the Khaddam challenge ends up being just one more pinprick that the Damascus ruling elite can absorb with only minor annoyance, rather than any serious threat. I am more concerned with the grotesque phenomenon that Khaddam represents in the modern Arab political context.

While so many in the region are entertained by the drama he has sparked, and others exploit him to increase the pressure on the Syrian government, the real loser in the end is likely to be the average Arab man and woman. The good citizens and ordinary people of our otherwise warm and sensible Arab societies are once again seeing our integrity demeaned and our very humanity scarred by a peculiarly modern Arab combination of public criminality and disdain.

There is zero credibility in Abdel Halim Khaddam’s attempt to reinvent and market himself as a born-again democrat, lover of freedom and national savior, after spending the last half a century as a central cog in an undemocratic power structure that propelled a wealthy country into mediocrity, poverty, isolation and marginalization. Khaddam helped to engineer and implement the modern Syrian governance system, using force when necessary, since his days as a law student in the 1950s, when he joined the Baath Party. After the party assumed power in 1963, his days as a lawyer ended and his political career developed briskly, and it skyrocketed after Hafez Assad seized power in 1970. For the next 30 years Khaddam held top posts in the government and the party.

He started molding Lebanon into Syria’s preferred image as early as May 1975, when he first directly intervened in domestic Lebanese politics to engineer the appointment of Syria-friendly prime ministers. For the next quarter century, Lebanon was Khaddam’s political responsibility, where he wielded and brokered power like a football coach moving players on the field.

It is difficult to have a clearer track record than this man — and his record is a moral and political abomination. Corruption, criminal violence, state bureaucratic incompetence, abuse of power, massive wealth disparities and increasingly violent and intemperate opposition movements are just some of the legacies that men like Khaddam have bequeathed us after their half a century in public life.

He now wants us to believe that he can make right all that he made wrong in the first place? His attempt now to repackage himself as a white knight who will fix the mess in Syria and restore Lebanon’s splendor is profoundly insulting and contemptuous of our dignity as Arab men and women whose entire lives have been plagued by autocratic and authoritarian rulers like him. It is bad enough that we endured the initial insults and pains of his abuse of power; now he insults and pains us again by expecting us to embrace him as the remedy to the disease he represents?

If Khaddam goes anywhere from Paris it should not be to the presidential palace in Damascus: It should be to a modern court of law in a civilized country where he can be held accountable for the consequences of his half century of abuse of power. If he is innocent, then God be with him and let him finish his life in peace and health. If he wants to entertain the befuddled, dazed, dehumanized Arab masses with new forms of political titillation and freak shows, let him use his wealth to start a satellite television station.

Above all else, people like him need to be held accountable for their decades in power, for the thousands of deaths and the lives of decent citizens spent in prison that occurred on their watch, for the fabulous riches that individuals and families accumulated without merit but merely for being well connected, and for allowing splendid, wealthy, humanity-rich lands like Syria and Lebanon succumb to a modern legacy of institutional mediocrity and low-intensity criminality.

When men like Abdel Halim Khaddam suddenly see the light and cry “give me liberty or give me death,” ordinary Arabs who have suffered the indignities of their sustained abuse of power should respond, “give us accountability before all else.”

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 10 January 2006
Word Count: 894
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BEIRUT: Ariel Sharon’s health seems finally to have ended the active political career of a man who has been widely hailed in the West as an innovative, daring “man of peace”. The view from the Arab world is considerably different and much less fawning. In his political life — unlike his military escapades — Sharon often deployed flashy tactics when he could not forge successful strategies and policies. He was a political illusionist who took the stage at a time when his people needed his kind of emotional force and comforting power, but he leaves behind a confused, fractured, uncertain landscape, in both Israel and Palestine.

He ends his public life having patently failed to achieve the one thing he says he strived most passionately for his entire life: to ensure the security and acceptance of Israel in the Middle East. His reliance on military force and tactical boldness, in the end, proved to be high drama, but poor strategy.

He is less a man of peace than a creator of chaos, as his successors in Israeli power will learn soon enough. He entered hospital last week during a foreign policy episode that is one of the most ironically shocking testaments to the deadly combination of his political amateurism and reliance on force. He was frantically, almost hysterically, recreating in the northern Gaza Strip the same sort of “security zone” that had been a colossal failure when he tried it in southern Lebanon over two decades ago.

The Israeli army under his command had occupied much of southern Lebanon in 1982 and stayed there until 2000, using every possible combination of brute force, political intimidation, surrogate Lebanese forces, and widespread death, destruction and punitive measures to subdue a Lebanese population that refused to be occupied by the Israeli army. Israel finally withdrew unilaterally in the spring of 2000. He also never learned the lesson of south Lebanon: that only a truly free, sovereign Arab neighbor can be a peaceful neighbor to Israel.

His much-ballyhooed unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip has neither pushed forward the peace process with Palestinians nor brought peace and quiet to that frontier with Israel. This was a magician’s withdrawal, an illusion, with Israel still controlling many dimensions of Palestinian life, movement and economy in Gaza. His construction of the separation wall that increasingly isolates Palestinian communities, including Arab East Jerusalem and Bethlehem, has combined with his continued expansion of settler-colonies in the West Bank to generate new levels of Palestinian resentment — which ultimately translates into new forms of resistance.

Unable or unwilling to accept the global consensus that Israel ultimately must withdraw from all the territories it occupied in 1967, he scrapped the land-for-peace negotiations leading to a two-state solution. He replaced this approach with his own unilateralism — building the wall, leaving Gaza, steadily assassinating Palestinian militants, and deciding when and if Palestinians could be engaged in political discussions.

He refused to deal with Yasser Arafat, but then proved he could do nothing when he was faced with the newly-elected Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who campaigned on a platform of stopping armed resistance and negotiating peace with Israel. Unable to make peace with the Palestinians, he played tricks on naive Americans. Sharon sold himself as a “man of peace” to a White House in Washington which was as clueless and belligerent as he was when it came to dealing with the Palestinians according to the dictates of international law, let alone common human decency.

Sharon leaves behind a fractured, bloody landscape defined by tension and confrontation with the Palestinians, and confusion within Israeli society. This is because his policies ultimately proved to be more bravado than real courage based on honesty. During the past quarter century, he held positions defining Israel’s defense, security and occupation policies, expansion of Israeli settler-colonies, and, most recently, overall foreign policy. He used that time to generate fragmented, often leaderless Palestinian communities of deeply angry and indignant ordinary Palestinians.

His life’s work has now rebounded against him in several forms, including lawlessness in many parts of Palestine, a discredited and weak Palestinian leadership, uncertainty about the future status of Gaza, a high probability of Hamas and other Islamists doing very well in the Palestinian parliamentary elections this month, and rising anti-Israeli sentiments across the Arab world and even further afield.

If the measure of a man is in the results of his life’s work, Ariel Sharon this week must be seen as a great purveyor of chaos, confusion, uncertainty and fear. To encapsulate this legacy in a strategy that sees an entire nation try to retreat behind a wall is not only a great and enduring failure of policy — it is also a great human tragedy about dashing warriors who could not stop warring, and turned to illusionist tricks when handed the reins of power.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 6 January 2006
Word Count: 799
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BEIRUT — The dramatic interview that Syrian former Vice-President Abdel Halim Khaddam gave to Al-Arabiyya television last weekend sharply criticized the Syrian regime’s policies in Lebanon, implicitly implicated it in the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, and injected a new political calculus into an already complex and fluid situation. His main revelations would seem to be that the Syrian leadership, including the president himself, harshly threatened Hariri before his death; Syrian intelligence officers, most recently under Rustom Ghazali, for years ran and exploited Lebanon as a personal fief, working with Lebanese security officers and in close coordination with Lebanese President Emile Lahoud; and, a sophisticated act such as Hariri’s murder could only be undertaken by a disciplined organization rather than individuals, and if Syrians were involved, this could not have happened without the knowledge of the top leadership.

None of this is new, but it is all very significant, for two main reasons. The information Khaddam provided corroborates numerous facts and allegations already gathered from other sources by the UN-run international commission. For corroboration to come from such a high source who intimately knows the inside of the Syrian political system is a major push forward for the investigation. Khaddam has been a senior political thug in Syria for 35 years, but in such cases a thug’s testimony is very useful — assuming it is factually correct. The convergence of his statements with similar evidence from multiple other sources, investigating commission sources say privately, is both clear and useful.
The second important thing about Khaddam’s behavior is that it seems to represent the first major political crack or defection in the top-level Syrian solidarity system that has long defined the regime in Damascus. Whether or not this is the crack in the dam wall that soon widens into a runaway political torrent remains to be seen. Either way, its significance should not be underestimated. Khaddam pointing fingers at President Assad and his security chiefs is the equivalent of Dick Cheney in the U.S. saying in a press interview that President George Bush knew all along that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction but was determined to overthrow the Saddam Hussein regime at any pretext.

If the combination of the revelation and its source is compelling, the political consequences may be huge. The interview set off a new round of speculation and expectation in Syria and Lebanon, and coincided with moves launches in the previous weeks by the UN investigating commission to request interviews with the Syrian president, foreign ministers and other senior officials.

The net, cumulative impact of these developments is to raise the diplomatic and political heat on the Syrian government, because Assad’s government is now challenged by a new and dangerous phenomenon — his own regime’s former pillars. This is extremely worrying for Syria, which now finds itself challenged simultaneously by a credible domestic force, the Lebanese public, and the world acting through the UN.

The UN probe’s request to interview Assad, Sharaa and others will be the next important litmus test of this process because of several key implications.

It represents yet another step forward in the very persistent, steady determination of the UN commission to keep investigating the Hariri murder and not get sidetracked by political diversions or tricks, whether from the Middle East or the West. It reflects the determination of the investigation to speak with all potentially relevant persons, including the highest political and security officials in Syria and Lebanon. It will be a key test of the UN’s demand, in Security Council Resolution 1644 of December 15, 2005, that Syria must “cooperate fully and unconditionally with the Commission,” including a specific demand “that Syria responds unambiguously and immediately in those areas adduced by the Commissioner and also that it implements without delay any future request of the Commission.”

Well, one such future request is here: an interview with the top leaders in Damascus. Resolution 1644 also includes an important new wrinkle in its clause 5, which “Requests the Commission to report to the Council on the progress of the
inquiry every three months from the adoption of this resolution, including on the cooperation received from the Syrian authorities, or anytime before that date if the
Commission deems that such cooperation does not meet the requirements of this resolution and of resolutions 1595 and 1636.”

In other words, the element of time, or playing for time, seems to be changing hands from a mechanism the Syrian government has always used efficiently, to one that the UN will use to pressure the Syrians to cooperate more diligently and quickly.

The fourth important development is the slow, patient expansion of the Hariri murder probe to look into any possible linkages with the dozen or so other bombings and killings that have occurred in Lebanon since October 2004. This selective expansion of the investigation, also on the basis of Resolution 1644, is critically important for Lebanon, because it holds out the hope that the perpetrators of the other bombings will also be identified and brought to justice, presumably also bringing to an end this ugly modern era of politics by bombs.

This occurs at the same time as UN officials are also preparing to talk with their Lebanese counterparts about what kind of “tribunal of an international character” will be established to try those who are accused on the strength of the evidence being collected. The creeping expansion of the Hariri assassination probe into a wider international mechanism increases the likelihood of identifying and bringing to justice those who have perpetrated political terrorism and murder in recent years — and also of reducing such criminality in future.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 04 January 2006
Word Count: 941
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