BOSTON — Watching the flurry of developments across the Middle East from the United States, as I have done this week, makes me more concerned for the well-being of the region and its people than I have been for many years. This is mainly because we are witnessing the convergence of several destructive forces that are troubling on their own, but collectively devastating when together they drive regional events.

They include most importantly five elements: the domestic and regional policies of the new Saudi Arabian leadership of Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman; the explicit support for these policies by United States President Donald Trump and his Mideast maestro Jared Kushner (aka Junior Moron); an aggressive, colonial, right-wing government in Israel that seeks to get closer to Saudi Arabia and also to knock back Iran and Hezbollah; half a dozen fragmenting and unpredictable countries in the region that are wracked by sectarian and political conflicts; and intrusive regional actions by Russia, Turkey, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates.

By far the most important dynamic within this broad regional picture is the convergence between the policies of the United States and Saudi Arabia, which essentially means the policies of President Trump and Mohammad bin Salman, with Junior Moron greasing the wheels that bring these two men together. Not surprisingly, for both the United States and Saudi Arabia, their policies reflect a combination of dramatic initiatives as well as deeply perplexed global and local audiences. What are these men trying to achieve, people ask throughout Arabia and America?

The answer is not clear, but a few certainties are: Both men are woefully inexperienced in the business of statecraft, yet take on gigantic projects to transform their states and others. Both men have massive egos that make them feel they know what is best for their people and the world, and they repeatedly make dramatic decisions in the realm of social engineering based mainly on their instincts. These broad personal values coincide with the policy lines that both men seem to adhere to: push back Iran and its allies in the region, support Israel, beat the terrorists, promote big commercial deals, and affirm the rule of autocratic, family-anchored regimes. So it’s no surprise that Trump tells the Saudi leaders in a phone call a few days ago that he has full confidence in the Saudi policies now being implemented.

This unprecedented phenomenon of two inexperienced, brash leaderships in two of the world’s most important countries working together to change the world is troubling and dangerous, primarily because the available evidence to date suggests that in their policy-making worlds they are mostly serial failures. Neither Trump nor Mohammad bin Salman have achieved any significant successes, and most of what they have attempted at home and abroad has failed, or even backfired.

The most glaring example of this is their shared desire to push back against what they see as Iran’s dangerous projection of its power, alliances, and interests across the Middle East region. The awkward reality is that for the past 15 years or more, Saudi- and American-led efforts to reduce Iran’s regional strategic assets have failed miserably, and in fact in situations like Yemen, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon the Iranians are much stronger today because of inept American and Saudi policies. Lebanon may join this list soon.

A critical question is whether this is due to the ill-conceived policies of the United States and Saudi Arabia, or the more clever capabilities of the Iranians in working the regional geo-strategic landscape. A hint is perhaps to be found in their relative experience levels: Mohammad bin Salman has been active in statecraft for about two years or so. Trump has been active for ten months, and Iran (and its predecessor Persian cultures) has been active for around 2,600 years.

We might now see efforts to forge overt or covert cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Israel, though this will hit against the major obstacle of Arab public opinion being seriously against such a move until the Palestine-Israel conflict is resolved. There is also much speculation about a new war in Lebanon between Hezbollah and Israel, due to the chaos Lebanon might experience from the apparently Saudi-induced resignation of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri. I doubt this war will happen, but I leave open the wild possibility that we might see a combined Saudi-Israeli-American military operation against some combination of Iranian and Hezbollah interests. This sounds crazy, but the policies now emanating from the Israeli-Saudi-American combine make the crazy very possible.

The bottom line for my concerns stems from what I see in the bigger picture of events in Saudi Arabia in the past few months, as Mohammad bin Salman assumes almost total, unchecked, power in all spheres of state and society. We are witnessing the third historic phase of the capture of Arab states by family-based, security-anchored leaderships personified in a single man. The Egyptians introduced this durable and ugly governance model to the Arab region in 1952; the Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, Tunisians, Sudanese, and Yemenis adopted it in their countries in the 1970s and 80s; and now we see it taking hold for the first time in a wealthy Arab monarchy that, like all Arab monarchies, used to rule by promoting a minimum of consultations and consensus across the various power groups in society.

We might have cause to worry that the two powerful countries of the United States and Saudi Arabia are each led by a single person who assumed power legitimately (according to local traditions), and whose large ego and grandiose plans are offset by very little experience or appreciation for nuance.

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 08 November 2017
Word Count: 937
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WASHINGTON — The United States and many Arab governments are looking at the really big challenges they face in our region — and then simply leapfrogging them, and venturing into make-believe new worlds where everything is easy, clean, and modern. In Arab countries, this trend is primarily represented by governments that cannot address the daunting (and still worsening) challenges of equitable and sustainable human development that have accumulated after half a century of poor quality governance, and that are captured most dramatically in unemployed and unemployable youth, rising poverty, worsening income and quality of life disparities, poor education outcomes, high informal labor rates, environmental distress, and expanding wars.

Instead of tackling the root causes for these serious deficiencies, more and more Arab governments are turning to gimmicky and flashy plans to build new cities, even new capitals, that capture all the glitter of technology and green-friendly modernity. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Kuwait have all announced plans for such dramatic new mega-urban projects to build entirely new cities that would instantly solve all the problems those countries face. Such ventures seem to me to aim primarily to impress foreign donors and private investors, rather than to tackle the root causes of the poverty- and inequity-based stresses that increasingly plague many Arab countries.

This capacity to ignore reality and escape into a happy new world where peace, security, technology, and modernity reign is now also spilling over into the political and diplomatic realm. Not surprisingly, the United States government actively promotes such fantasies that expect hope and dramatic innovation to replace the hard work of identifying the root causes of a political dispute and tackling them decisively and fairly.

This diplomatic version of the Arab world’s escapism into shining new zones of high tech bikini beaches is exemplified by fresh reports that Jared Kushner, President Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, has just made another secret visit to Saudi Arabia to explore ideas for a regional Israeli-Palestinian peace process. This was reported by Politico newspaper, which noted that this is Kushner’s third such visit this year.

Kushner reportedly continues to focus on attempts to draw Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and others into a grand bargain peace plan between Palestinians and Israelis that also repels Iranian influence in the region. Such an “outside-in” regional collaboration would reportedly resolve the Palestinian-Israeli and wider Arab-Israeli conflict, promote closer ties between Israel and many Arab states in the region, and create a united Arab-Israeli-American alliance to confront and “roll back” Iranian influence in the region.

If these reports of American diplomatic aims are true, then it is probably time to assign Jared Kushner the title of “Junior Moron,” because these aspirations are totally unrealistic, and reflect mindsets in the U.S., Israel, and Arab capitals that prefer to escape reality than to grasp and address its complexities. They also totally ignore the sentiments of hundreds of millions of Arab men and women who repeatedly express their support for Palestinian rights and a fair resolution of the conflict, rather than submitting to Israel’s U.S.-backed militarism.

It is not just morally wrong, but also functionally impractical, to try to impose a solution in Palestine-Israel that reflects rightwing Israeli-Zionist expansionist tendencies, Israel’s military superiority, and Washington’s pro-Israel bias, even if some Arab governments seem resigned to accepting this as a key to their own incumbency and longevity.

Billionaire real estate investor Tom Barrack, a close Trump confidant, told Politico that, “Jared has always been driven to try and solve the Israel-Palestinian dispute. The key to solving that dispute is Egypt. And the key to Egypt is Abu Dhabi and Saudi Arabia.”

Well, not really… The key to solving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is actually to affirm Israeli and Palestinian equal rights to statehood by implementing all pertinent UN resolutions that enjoy a global consensus; end Zionist colonial expansion and occupation; end Palestinian refugeehood; and, affirm Israel’s full security and acceptance in the Arab- and Muslim-majority Middle East as a normal, rather than a predatory, state.

The American-Israeli-Arab approach now being explored occurs, ironically, exactly 100 years to the week after the British government in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration, which promised U.K. support for the creation of a Jewish homeland — eventually the state of Israel — in Palestine. Big powers today, as in 1917, still view the Middle East through the lenses of their capacities to create make-believe worlds that suit their own needs, rather than to fix the problems of the real world we live in.

Then and now, denying the needs and rights of a majority of citizens in the Middle East who remain powerless to participate in the shaping and constant re-sharing of their hapless world will not bring stability or prosperity, but only endless resistance and conflict. Nothing captures this better than the century-long continuing struggle of Palestinians to achieve their national rights, alongside a defined state of Israel that also has a right to exist. Repeating today the unethical political mistakes of the Balfour years by pushing a few Arab leaderships to link with Israel in order to force a “peace” resolution on the weak Palestinians and then confront Iran will repeat the imperial dynamics of the deceitful Balfour Declaration, for several reasons.

First, because we continue to see in this century-long sad saga of Western powers’ engagements in the Middle East diplomatic moves that are designed in London and Washington (and now also in Moscow and Tehran) with the primary purpose of serving their imperial interests above anything else. Second, it continues the destructive tradition of foreign powers engaging with unaccountable Arab elites, without considering the interests or sentiments of the Arab citizenries. Third, it avoids coming to grips with the heart of the conflict in Palestine — the assertion of Zionist dominance at cost of Palestinian exile or occupation — and instead assumes that the Palestinians are too weak to resist what may be imposed on them because the envisaged new order suits the interests of Arab elites and foreign powers, and those are the only interests that count.

These very troubling trends are manifested by the politics of some Arab governments and their crony capitalist elites, alongside the wayward leadership in Washington that desperately seeks a foreign policy achievement. The Balfour legacy should remind us that political facts can be imposed on weak Arabs in certain moments of history, but such reckless behavior only leads to a full century of warfare by many millions of ordinary men and women who value their human dignity and national rights, even if their Arab elites seem mainly to value validation by American investors and cable television hosts.

Please, please, somebody give Junior Moron Jared Kushner a new golf course investment in an Arabian desert somewhere, and spare us this terrible fate that awaits our region.

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 01 November 2017
Word Count: 1,129
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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NEW YORK — Should one welcome or worry about the new string of bold announcements by Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman about his plans to remake the country in his image concerning what it requires to thrive into the coming generations? I think a bit of both is the answer, because there is cause for optimism as well as serious concern.

The cornerstone of the national reconfigurations is an instant megacity in the desert in the very northwest of the country, near the borders with Jordan, Israel, and Egypt. The new urban wonderland that will be called “NEOM” will cost over $500 billion and will operate independently from the “existing governmental framework.” This is in line with the crown prince’s two-stage vision: gradually leaving behind the traditional Saudi way of governance and social conservatism, and instead engaging in novel forms of dramatic social engineering designed to create a new Saudi society that is sustainable in a future when oil income is expected to decline steadily and the state does not control or finance all aspects of life.

The day of non-stop drama in the desert included the crown prince’s remarks that Saudi Arabia was returning to “moderate” Islam and intended to “eradicate” extremism.

“We are only returning to what we used to be, to moderate Islam, open to the world and all religions,” the 32-year-old prince said. “We won’t waste 30 years of our lives dealing with any extremist ideas. We will eradicate extremism.”

He also said that the kingdom is moving to a “new generation of cities,” powered by clean energy, with no room “for anything traditional.”

So since his assumption of power in the kingdom, the crown prince has announced and then revised plans for a major overhaul of the national economy, significantly softened restrictions on women drivers, laid the groundwork for privatizing some of the national oil company Aramco and reducing state subsidies on basic services, and announced plans for a gigantic international tourism development along the Red Sea coast that will be covered by liberal international norms instead of the austere Saudi-Wahhabi traditions.

At the same time, he has launched a terrible and endless war against Yemen, laid siege to Qatar, continued to explore how to either interfere or constructively engage in the domestic politics of assorted Arab states, such as Iraq, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria, arrested both liberal and conservative Saudis who do not fully support his plans, and engaged in a relentless and largely fruitless regional and international attempt to isolate Iran.

Mohammad Bin Salman is certainly making headlines; but is he also making history, or making a mess? For now we can only acknowledge the strengths and weaknesses of his current approach.

The good news about his non-stop breaking news style of governance is that he obviously grasps that the current system of Saudi governance and economy is totally unsustainable, and must be changed so that future generations of Saudis can live a decent and dignified life. It is also refreshing to see a young Arab leader who is not afraid of taking bold decisions and making innovative changes in key dimensions of national life. The commitment to eradicating “extremism” also is welcomed, though it would be useful if he would explain a bit more whom he sees as “extremist”. Many analysts and historians feel that some extremist Islamist movements emanated from historical associations with conservative Wahhabi movements in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere; nevertheless, it is important that the Saudi leader is on record as rejecting Islamist extremism.

There is much good sense in Mohammad Bin Salman’s visions — but there is also much to worry about, for Saudis and all others in the Arab world, given Saudi Arabia’s insistence on trying to shape the region in its own image. The main negative is that the Mohammad Bin Salman school of governance is not a new turn towards liberalism; it seems more like a new form of top-heavy decision-making by a small group of men who suddenly announce new national transformation plans to their citizens, without any serious citizen participation in decision-making or any accountability in the politics or financing of the new world to come.

Also unclear is whether it is constructive or destructive in the long run to establish totally autonomous units of life and economy beyond the reach of traditional government systems, and intimately linked with private capital from other Arab and foreign countries. The message this sends is that the existing system of statehood and governance that has defined our lands for nearly a century are hopelessly beyond reform, and simply must be bypassed and ignored in the bright and happy new world ahead. It can generate massive disparities within and among countries, as islands of wealth, innovation, and dynamism create a world totally disjointed from the rest of society where the old ways persist and the dysfunction and miseries accumulate.

This is troubling because it can create resentments among millions of citizens who see themselves as lesser “traditional” beings in their own societies, left out of a shiny new city on a hill, or at least a possible appearance on a CNN special about the Modern Arabs, or The Young Prince That Could, or something like that which we will inevitably see on our screens. The predominance of a handful of Arab officials, an army of Western consultants, managers, and contractors, and endless global private capital in designing, owning, and enjoying the new institutions that are announced to the world — while tens of millions of ordinary citizens remain outside the process — is one of the most problematic aspects of this kind of development that is now common across the region.

Also, if individual men and women of liberal or conservative quarters who dare to use their minds and offer their views on the trajectories of their own societies are arrested and indicted by Arab governments simultaneously with the announcement of the glories to come in our societies, this is even more reason to wonder if this style of decision-making and national planning is the right one. National reconfiguration that denies a role to nationals who insist on using their own minds is thin at best.

I view this balance sheet and I am skeptical, because of what seems to me to be a naked truth: What Saudi and other Arab leaderships across the region have unleashed is less a drastic lurch into a bold new form of national governance, but rather is mainly a reconfigured form of the traditional autocratic, non-participatory, unaccountable ways of Arab governance that have been central to the weaknesses and occasional collapse of Arab states in the past half century or so.

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 25 October 2017
Word Count: 1,108
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BOSTON — As the whirlwind of dozens of major and minor players that interact and battle one another across the Middle East continues unabated, the same players also criss-cross the world to explore new strategic or tactical alliances. The political dynamics of the Middle East have been totally upended. To try and discern what is going on in the region today one has to look first to Russia, Ankara, Tehran, Tel Aviv, and the Dahieh of southern Beirut, with secondary attention to Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Cairo, and Doha, and only occasional fleeting glances to Washington and Brussels.

Immediate issues that once riveted our attention may lose some of their urgency or danger. It is still fascinating but perhaps less ominous than a few years ago to wonder what happens next in the Kurdish regions of Iraq and Syria, what will tens of thousands of takfiri-salafist militants across the region do in the wake of the destruction of the Islamic State, what is the fate of Yemen, Libya, and Palestine? Is the big story this week still the fate of some small towns on the Syrian-Turkish border, or who first reaches and controls the Syrian-Iraqi Lower Euphrates region? How long will the Saudis and Emirates continue their two great failed adventures of the war in Yemen and the siege of Qatar?

We cannot predict which existing or unidentified new major actors will influence events in the coming years, in view of the constantly evolving political relations among the many powers operating throughout the Middle East. This we do know, though: The single momentous dynamic that towers above all others in the Middle East comprises the unknown impact of this unprecedented, ongoing, period of non-stop, multi-year warfare in half a dozen countries, with proxy ideological battles in half a dozen others. Everywhere, it seems, local, regional, and global parties all fight each other militarily, while also exploring new political alliances, mostly with non-Arab powers in Russia, Turkey, and Iran.

All our big questions can no longer be assessed on the basis of predictable interests and expectations of sovereign states in the Middle East, as had been the case since the 1930s. Today, Turkey, Iran, and Russia coordinate their military presence inside Syria to effectively preserve the presidency of Bashar Assad — and after that they will figure out how to handle the U.S. military, the remnants of Islamic State, the dozens of smaller takfiri-salafist militants, tribal coalitions, and Kurdish aspirations.

Simultaneously, the Saudi monarch is in Russia exploring new commercial, military, or tactical political relationships — or perhaps just bluffing. Turkey, the NATO member, is buying advanced missile systems from Russia. The United Arab Emirates and Egypt work together to reconfigure the governance system in Gaza, allowing a former small-time Palestinian ruffian named Mohamad Dahlan to share power in the strip with Hamas, Fateh, and anyone else who will dance for money. Their collective survival is at stake in Palestine, and perhaps they have nobody else to turn to — or they simply do not know what to do in these existential times, other than in panic to seek a strongman, any strongman will do, to save them, with someone else’s cash.

The combined insult and imbecility of American policy on the Palestine-Israel conflict is captured by President Trump’s determination to rely on his apparently clueless son-in-law Jared Kushner, while the American ambassador to Israel keeps making statements that deny the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands and sanctifying Israel’s illegal colonization of Arab lands. United Nations agencies meanwhile draw up lists of Israeli companies that exploit the colonized Arab lands, so the world can refrain from dealing with them.

These and other bizarre developments alongside our many ongoing wars indicate that the very nature of national sovereignty based on territorial control in the Arab region continues to fray at many of its edges. The less-than-a-century-long modern legacy of independent states that firmly controlled their land, economies, resources, and means of violence in their armed forces and police is gradually slipping out of modern history’s leaky fingers that never seemed to get a good grip on our area.

So we continue to ask, still with no credible answers: Who is sovereign in northern and eastern Syria this week? How will things develop in the rest of Syria and Iraq, in the Kurdish regions, throughout Yemen and Libya, or among the post-Islamic State militants who supported that short-lived extremist, violent venture? What is the future of Jerusalem?

Sovereignty, authority, legitimacy, and military power in some lands are no longer are vested in the hands of Arab central governments. This peculiarly Arab dysfunction sees us living in a region of sovereign states, semi-states, quasi-states, truncated states, states-within-states, invading foreign states, virtual states, mini-states, ethnic and sectarian states, and hollow, helplessly dependent poor states that will dance for money. They all compete against one another for land, resources, and authority, in a region that has plentiful land and resources, but many fewer credible single national authorities, as a dozen other forms of power, sovereignty, territoriality, and legitimacy continue to spring up and heighten the cacophony.

There is nothing mysterious or unexpected about any of this. Badly mismanaged countries with degraded populations and little hope of change refuse to remain in a state of permanent anguish. Some resist. Some rebel. A few try half-heartedly to reform. Many fragment, to be reborn in a thousand smaller pieces, or a handful of militias, or sub-contractors to foreign powers, or just new gangs with friendly nearby funders.

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 11 October 2017
Word Count: 913
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BOSTON — A new public opinion poll in the Arab Gulf region reminds us again of a cardinal truth about political realities in the Arab region: make sure to listen to what ordinary people feel, more than you listen to what local or foreign governments say.

I was reminded of this while reading the results of a public opinion poll of citizens in Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Oman, by Justin Gengler, professor and head of the Policy Department at the Social and Economic Survey Research Institute (SESRI) at Qatar University, and colleagues at the University of Michigan. They sought the public’s views on the leading security threats they perceived, with a special interest in whether citizens viewed Iran as their major security concern and threat — as the governments of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) say is the case.

As Gengler noted in an important article in Foreign Affairs a few days ago (https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/persian-gulf/2017-10-02/how-gulf-citizens-view-iran), the results show that, “Iran and its suspected nuclear weapons program is today but one of several competing state and non-state threats to Gulf national security: also figuring in are the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS) and other Sunni-dominated terrorist organizations; economic stagnation due to low oil prices; and, from the standpoint of some, continued foreign intrusion by the United States and other Western governments.”

Their survey of five Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states (the UAE did not participate) interviewed more than 4,000 citizens aged 18 and older. The results were important, but not surprising for people who pay attention to ordinary citizen sentiments in the Arab world.

First, they revealed widely varied orientations toward individual security challenges among the five states, alongside differing feelings of security versus insecurity. For example, 46 percent of Omanis said that no country poses a challenge to their stability and security, while 22 percent of Qataris and just two percent of Kuwaitis felt no security threats from other states (no surprise, given Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait decades ago and the current siege and regime change attempts against Qatar by the Saudis and Emiratis).

More significantly perhaps was the finding that, “Iran all but disappears from the picture” when Gulf citizens are asked about threats from transnational terrorism, Western interference, and economic crisis. A majority of all respondents (53-68 percent) except in Bahrain saw terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al-Qaeda as their leading security threat. Iran placed a distant second in Qatar and Kuwait (23 and 21 percent of respondents identified it as their top security concern). Iran took third place in Oman (just15 percent of respondents), where second place was economic issues due to the oil price collapse. In Saudi Arabia, terrorism tops citizen concerns, and Iran comes in second place (25 percent).

Second, I would add, this poll is important for reminding us that the intense anti-Iranian campaigns by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Israel, and the US government seem to reflect very narrow political concerns or manipulative ambitions, more than they reflect the human realities or sentiments of people on the ground in the Gulf and the wider Arab region. Thousands of businesses and families in Arab Gulf states have significant commercial or personal links with Iran (including Emiratis and Saudis whose governments trash Iran daily). Such structural human and economic links suggest that Iranians and Gulf Arabs know each other and viscerally understand the importance of maintaining good neighborly relations in all fields of life, for their collective well-being.

Third, the past four decades in the Middle East reflect the catastrophe we have all suffered by basing policies mainly on Arab-Israeli-American government views, without sufficiently taking into consideration the sentiments of ordinary people on the ground in these countries. The Saudi-Emirati-Israeli-American government view of Iran as a dangerous hegemonic threat to the entire Middle East and the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism seems at great odds with the more nuanced views of the people of the Arab Gulf region, who see any threats from Iran within the context of other more pressing, actual, constraints and fears in their lives.

The last four decades have witnessed a slow fraying of Arab state control and legitimacy, and diffusion of sovereignty and power among assorted non-state actors that now often drive history. We are stupid indeed to keep following the violent, fear-laden hysteria policies of governments in assorted Middle Eastern and Western states, and ignore the sentiments and aspirations of ordinary men and women who increasingly shape our societies and their historical arcs. If we persist in this course, we will expand the catastrophes all around us to new heights of reckless irresponsibility by criminal governance.

So this is a timely reminder that we should pay attention to the credible pollsters and analysts who help us hear the views of those ordinary citizens who have been ignored for so long in the Middle East. Those citizens’ views will shape our world to come, or bury us and our children before our time has come.

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 04 October 2017
Word Count: 828
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — The changes that have characterized Saudi Arabia’s domestic and regional policies in the past three years are among the most important developments in the contemporary Arab world — but like most developments in Arab public policy, they are managed in secret by a handful of men, usually with unpredictable outcomes and uncertain motivations.

First came the deep involvement in arming rebels trying to overthrow the Syrian president and regime. Then came the support for Field Marshall-turned-President Sisi in Egypt in his successful overthrow of the elected President Morsi, followed by the collapse of the traditional royal family succession system as King Salman named his son Mohammad bin Salman as Deputy Crown Prince and then Crown Prince. The war on Yemen was then launched with the close cooperation of the United Arab Emirates; both countries flexed their regional muscles in a bid designed to show that they were willing and able to use their resources to defend themselves against what they perceived to be serious security threats from Iran and its surrogates around the Arab region, though it remains unclear if these threats were real or imagined.

The sudden announcement of Saudi Vision 2030 followed soon after that, as Mohammad bin Salman and a thousand hired consultants single-handedly revealed the new trajectory of Saudi Arabia’s national development, with apparently little or no consultation among ordinary Saudis whose lives would be significantly changed by this new national development strategy. A year or so after Vision 2030 was announced, it was quickly revised, either because the American consultants had no idea of what they were doing in a land they perhaps did not fully understand, or because the ambitions of the dynamic young Mohammad bin Salman were way too big in comparison with the economy’s and society’s ability to adjust quickly.

Then Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates launched the siege of Qatar some three months ago, radically upending decades of attempted integration and cooperation among the six countries in the Gulf Cooperation Council. A hundred years of Saudi diplomatic traditions of working quietly and discreetly were discarded in favor of the Chicago Gangsterism School of using crude and brutal means to convince your friends to fall in line with you, if they know what is good for them. The most recent dramatic moves include a sustained security operation in the Eastern Province, especially the town of Awamiya, which resulted in many deaths and the destruction of some quarters of the town, and this week’s arrest of several dozen activists and clerics who represent both the conservative Islamist and liberal wings of society.

The sheer scope, scale, and severity of these unusual Saudi moves (and some other ones, like withholding $3 billion of promised financial support for the Lebanese armed forces, or drawing close to Shiite leader Muqtada Sadr in Iraq) suggest a historic change that could have shock waves across much of the Arab region and further afield, given Saudi Arabia’s extensive links with Islamic, Islamist, and Salafist groups around the world. Yet the exact extent of the events in Saudi Arabia and their motivations promise to remain elusive, because Saudi policy-making is a secretive process that is not open to either public participation or accountability.

The fact that Saudi Arabia is no longer a sleeping giant but instead has woken up and become a feisty and dynamic giant throwing its weight around the region cannot be judged very easily yet, because the outcomes of Saudi moves remain to be fully revealed. What is clear to date is that new policies that have been initiated in almost all cases have failed badly, especially in Yemen, Syria, Qatar, Lebanon, and against Iran. Saudi statesmanship has proved to be largely unsuccessful to date in its regional dimensions.

The domestic changes will take a longer time to bear fruit. The sudden roundup of individuals from all sides of the ideological spectrum who showed a willingness to speak freely (without necessarily directly opposing or challenging the state) is a troubling sign. The worst to come could see Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman adopt Egyptian Field Marshall-turned-President Abdelfattah Sisi’s manual of governance that simply detains and imprisons thousands of people whose views differ from the state’s ordained truths.

The many Arab countries, media institutions, private companies, and other organizations that depend on Saudi financial support might then have to fall in line. This would be a catastrophe for an Arab world that is already struggling with many challenges, whose solutions need us to expand and tap into the minds and energies of our young people. The current trajectory that we witness is closing Arab minds, restraining cultural and artistic dynamism, reducing the indigenous pluralism that many of our societies enjoy, destroying the last vestiges of a free and deliberative press, fostering greater warfare and sectarian tensions, and shattering the economic potential of our lands by encouraging tens of thousands of our brightest young men and women to emigrate permanently.

Saudi Arabia in the past half a century has played an important role in fostering national development across many Arab lands, but the drastic recent changes in its policies suggest that perhaps this era has ended, and we now venture into the unknown.

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 September 2017

Word Count: 866

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

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BEIRUT — For the past six months or so, twice a week the regional and international media warn about the looming risk of war between some combination of Israel, Iran, Hezbollah, Syria, and Arab- or Iranian-backed popular militias. The stories’ frequency and regularity are striking, and presumably based on some certainties for this war-is-coming mindset.

Equally striking is the depth of details about the enhanced and substantial war-making capabilities of both sides, in particular Israel and Hezbollah. I doubt anyone else will be seriously involved in the next war, whenever it comes. Having lived through the last such battle in 2006, with the sound of Israeli missiles whizzing over our apartment to strike an old communications tower on the Beirut shoreline, I believe the stories that say the ferocity and extent of the fighting to come would cause unprecedented damage in Israel and Lebanon, mostly to civilians.

Having also lived through the last 50 years of Arab-Israeli wars, I also have no doubt that one more war — however barbaric and destructive it would be — would not solve anything, but would only make things worse in the post-war period. One more Hezbollah-Israel war would only pave the way for even worse things ahead, if we do not resolve the core issues that have made our lives a long-running tragedy of destruction and wasted national capabilities on both sides. This has been the case for the past 100 years of the conflict between Arabism and Zionism.

What started early in the 20th Century as occasional local skirmishes between handfuls of fighters for control of a farm, a hilltop, or some village fields, during Palestine’s transition from Ottoman to British control, has always — always — seen every round of fighting give birth in the post-war period to reinvigorated capabilities and will to fight on both sides, because they never resolved the core reasons that pushed them to war in the first place, and often created new issues that had to be resolved.

Those handfuls of rag-tag village and kibbutz fighters a century ago have now become hundreds of thousands of both sides’ armed soldiers, another several hundred thousand missiles and rockets, hundreds of advanced fighter jets, nuclear weapons, assorted banned weapons, significant capabilities in drones and electronic warfare, and perhaps a few million crazed citizens on both sides who are willing to charge at the other and fight to the finish. In the past 60 years the conflict that was left unresolved has given birth to Israeli nuclear weapons, Lebanese resistance movements in the south, Israel’s occupation of Syrian and Palestinian lands, the birth of Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran’s involvement in Lebanon and Syria, terror attacks against civilians on all sides, and the expanding Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israeli colonial practices.

The gravity of a new war’s devastating consequences on civilians and national infrastructure has now prompted assorted scenarios to prevent an accidental war from breaking out, or to minimize its extent if it does happen. Those might be useful efforts, but history again suggests that we cannot avoid another round of devastating war that ravages entire countries if we leave the fruits of past conflicts — occupied lands, denied national integrity, settler-colonialism — to ripen and blossom annually with the certainty of the changing seasons.

We would be much better advised to find a way to prod all sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict, and those who have joined it, like Iran and the United States, to go back to square one and ask some simple questions that can be found in any introductory primer on conflict-resolution: What are the core territorial and political issues in this dispute? Do we know the proven positions of the populations engaged in this battle on terms for accepting a negotiated, permanent peace? Are there proposals on the table that would allow leaders of both sides to agree on a permanent resolution of the conflict’s many dimensions, and thus eliminate once and for all the continued underlying causes of war?

The Arab, Israeli, Iranian, and American leaders who manage war scenarios have acted with astounding and continuing collective incompetence in resolving this conflict, for reasons that I cannot understand. The few potential breakthroughs in the past century — the mid-1970s disengagement agreements, the 1990s Madrid Peace Conference, the bilateral Jordan-Egypt-Israel peace agreements, the Israeli-Palestinian Oslo Accords — all failed to push the parties to a comprehensive, permanent peace.

So the small and big wars continue, alongside regular assassinations, missile attacks, and other limited military actions, after which new organizations and capabilities are always born and prepare to fight the next, more devastating war. It is human nature, probably, that sees the indomitable human will to survive muster its fighting capabilities, in situations where diplomacy and reasonable compromises have failed repeatedly to achieve the satisfactory exercise of mutual national rights.

We know both sides can fight, as they have proven over and over again. We also know neither side will surrender, as they have also proven. Why have we never seen these obviously determined and able leaders put their minds to resolving equitably the underlying issues that keep them fighting and their people suffering?

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 12 September 2017
Word Count: 853
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — The complex battle over the future of Syria is like something we have never seen before in this region or perhaps anywhere else in the world. An unprecedented array of local, regional, and global political actors, using a wide range of instruments of power and influence, engage each other militarily to achieve dozens of different and usually clashing outcomes.

So most of the analysis about Syria’s future — in both the credible and nonsense forums around the world — are routine and reasonable speculation, wild guesses, or self-serving propaganda. The overwhelming novelty of events in Syria preclude anything else, and the uncertainties of what is to come there, and, as history suggests, in the wider Arab region, are beyond comprehension.

For once, though, history is not a good guide, even though Syria has more documented settled human and political history than almost any other place on earth. Syria repeatedly was a pivotal imperial prize or headquarters in ancient history, and it was central to the post-Ottoman birth (or manufacture) of the modern Arab state system, when, like today, many foreign powers had a hand in the outcome. Yet all this history is of no use to understanding where Syria is heading, because during the past 10 years or so we see for the first time, in Syria in particular, the full consequences of this generation’s six great, historic developments that are rewriting the rules of statehood, identity, community, nationhood, sovereignty, and legitimacy across much of the Arab region. These are:

1. The full consequences of the end of the Cold War around 1990; as the two superpowers pulled back in parts of the region to focus on other priorities, some dependent governments and economies weakened, triggering continuing structural changes in how citizens, societies, and states interact with each (including the birth or re-birth of new states, statelets, and quasi- sovereignties in Kurdistan, South Yemen, South Sudan, Gaza, pockets of Iraq, Lebanon and Sinai, Islamic State, and dozens of similar others).

2. The widespread stagnation of real economic growth as measured by family well-being, alongside widening socio-economic disparities; the non-stop rising economic and political pressures on perhaps 50-60 percent of Arab families since the early 1990s — alongside their almost zero real political rights — has sparked social, economic, and political fragmentation, and shattered the integrity of once stable states like Syria, Libya, Iraq, and others.

3. The weakening and occasional collapse of central government authority and legitimacy inevitably followed; as the world no longer cared when strategically insignificant Arab states occasionally collapsed into a bloody civil war, contracting central governments focused on serving their own supporters, sectarian kin, contractors, business partners, cousins, and guards, leaving large swaths of their populations abandoned and vulnerable.

4. Understandably, to fill the voids created by retreating central governments, powerful new indigenous, non-governmental political and military forces emerged, often based on religion, ethnicity, or tribalism; these included organizations like Hezbollah and half a dozen major Christian, Muslim and Druze organizations in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, Muqta Sadr’s ever-evolving movement in Iraq, Ansarullah (Houthis), Islah and others in Yemen, Islamic State and Al-Qaeda, and hundreds of smaller armed Islamist, tribal, and secular groups fighting and/or governing local principalities in Syria and Iraq.

5. The most recent historic change has been the direct engagement of major and mid-level regional powers (Iran, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Hezbollah, United Arab Emirates [UAE], Qatar) in other states’ affairs, including active military warfare on several fronts simultaneously, e.g., Turkey’s new role in Syria, Qatar, and the Kurdish regions; Iran’s deep strategic involvement in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq; the Saudi-UAE war in Yemen; and many Gulf states direct or indirect militarism in Syria and Libya.

6. This coincides with the direct, long-term military actions of global powers inside Syria and Iraq, mainly Russia and the United States, who coordinate in virtual joint operations centers to allow their respective air forces to bomb away at will inside Syria; this novelty caps the others above, and completes the circle of extreme military and political cacophony that leaves Syria (and other Arab lands) in a condition of total unpredictability as to the future.

These six dramatic phenomena all had low-intensity historical antecedents in the region. But only now have they all reached fruition, and converged into a situation like Syria where thousands of local political and military actors, hundreds of would-be new post-war governance candidates, dozens of regional armed groups and states, and a handful of world powers all simultaneously intervene inside Syria for perfectly normal reasons. They each seek to preserve their interests, support their allies, counter their strategic foes, and carve out permanent footholds for their future involvement strategic well-being.

The most important unanswered question is: Which of the six major developments above is the most significant one that shapes the others, and perhaps holds the key to the future of Syria and other vulnerable Arab lands? We shall know soon enough — and in the vocabulary of Syria’s rich history of statehood and national configuration, “soon enough” means by about 2060 or so.

So my suggestion is, do not spend too much time worrying about what will happen in post-ISIS Raqqa or Deir ez-Zor in the next 3 months. Instead, more usefully try to help identify the critical drivers of the recent historical forces that have brought us all to this difficult situation — so we, and the Syrians in all of us, can have some chance of getting out of this shooting gallery of statehood.

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 August 2017
Word Count: 908
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — After the governments of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Bahrain broke ties with Qatar in early June and laid siege to it by blocking its land, sea, and air routes through their territories, an unfortunate aspect of the dispute has been the four siege states turning their mass media into propagandistic attack dogs. Their media assault against Qatar with a wide range of vicious propaganda, exaggerations, distortions, half-truths, fake news, and occasional outright lies has had no impact at all on world public opinion, which mostly rejects their wild accusations against Qatar. If anything, the propaganda attacks have only hurt the reputation of the media of the four siege states, turning once credible institutions of news, analysis, and views into sad shells of their old selves, in some severe cases becoming hysterical embarrassments to the world of credible journalism.

The role of the media is significant in this crisis for two reasons. First, the four siege states have specifically demanded the closure of Al-Jazeera television and other news outlets that Qatar has established, accusing them of promoting terrorism and threatening their security. The Saudi, Emirati, Egyptian, and Bahraini governments reject the open media systems and free flow of news and views that Al-Jazeera represents. They prefer their citizens to live in desolate information landscapes where the government’s opinion shapes what is said or heard in the public sphere.

Al-Jazeera generated the single biggest audience in the history of the Arab media precisely because it respected citizens’ ability to think for themselves, and hold and debate a variety of views, rather than live like unthinking cattle that move with the herd, shuffling along with their feet and minds tethered, their brains operating only according to their master’s wish.

Second, by unleashing the attack dogs of propaganda, hysterical lies, and exaggerations that have tried but failed to discredit Qatar in every possible way, the four siege states have only badly damaged the reputation of their own media — perhaps irreparably. After Al-Jazeera opened the door to professional, open pubic affairs reporting and analysis in the mid-1990s, some Arab media rose to the challenge and vastly improved their professionalism and credibility, especially in Egypt and some Gulf states. Those gains have now been mostly shattered and buried, given the willingness of some of the Saudi, Emirati and Egyptian media to comply with the orders of their thought-control colonels and spread propaganda about Qatar that is reminiscent of the old totalitarian ways of Stalinist Russia, the worst Third World dictators, and the former Soviet states. Arab citizens should not have to suffer such disdain by their own governments.

The most unfortunate example is the Saudi-owned satellite television news network Al-Arabiya, which reached a high level of professionalism and credibility after it was launched to offer a more conservative Arab perspective on the news than Al-Jazeera. I used to watch Al-Arabiya regularly for its news reporting and especially its nightly live, all-news show.

Al-Arabiya has now been savaged by its masters by being forced to broadcast material that is not only unsuccessful and boorish propaganda, but that also calls into question the network’s overall credibility. For example, the website now carries a permanent feature called “TQI-The Qatar Insider”, which is a non-stop flow of only negative news about Qatar that is selective, exaggerated, often wildly distorted, inaccurate, incomplete, one-sided, taken out of context, and perhaps even outright false in some places. It is sub-titled “Putting the pieces together on Qatar Crisis” and “Your comprehensive source of information on Qatar Crisis.” In fact it is a hatchet job that tries only to show that Qatar is sinking under the pressure of the siege, which any visit to Qatar shows to be untrue. It belongs on a North Korean television service, not on the respectable Al-Arabiya, whose dedicated staff of professional journalists and honorable men and women had painstakingly built it up over the years into one of the best public affairs television networks in the Arab world.

Another even more dangerous example is a short video clip that has been running on the front page of the Al-Arabiya website, ostensibly explaining how any country has the right to prevent threatening aircraft from entering its airspace, or shooting them down with missiles if need be. The animation shows a Qatar Airways civilian jet being shadowed and then attacked by a missile from a jet-fighter. The video is chilling, unjustified, and unreasonable, sending the message that people who fly on Qatar Airways could be shot down if their plane strays into the airspace of the siege states.

This is not only belligerent and dangerous escalation of the political conflict, it is intellectual and media terrorism as we have rarely seen it practiced by Arab states.

The bottom line is that when this dispute is resolved one day soon, which it will be, the self-inflicted damage that Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Bahrain have caused their own media will take many years to dissipate. This is due to their transforming once honorable media professionals and institutions into purveyors of an Arab intellectual and cultural wasteland where lies and media terrorism are acceptable tools, where only the thought-control colonels speak, and everyone else nods, shuffles, closes their mind, and sleeps in shady pastures. What a shame. What a waste. What stupidity by the incompetent thought-control colonels who still plague us across many Arab lands.

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 August 2017
Word Count: 898
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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BEIRUT — If you were looking for a single moment that captured the peculiar nature of leadership and how history is determined in the Arab region today, it would be the meeting that took place a few weeks ago between the crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad bin Salman, and the populist Iraqi Shiite leader Moqtada el-Sadr. There are enough fascinating aspects of this meeting to fill a graphic novel. Several pertinent ones that stand out tell us much about how the destiny of this turbulent and still deteriorating region will be determined by some relatively young men operating in the shadows, for the most part.

Moqtada el-Sadr inherited from his assassinated father the leadership of a grassroots movement of Shiites in Iraq that has emerged as a pivotal actor in the ever-changing Iraqi political scene. Mohammad bin Salman vaulted to the Crown Prince position in Saudi Arabia thanks to the decisions of his father the king, and some wily palace machinations that remind us why kings and princes are such popular figures in television series. They are quite young as Middle East leaders go, and both assumed power without any formal training or experience, but thanks only to their fathers.

Like most Arab leaders, they have immense power, are accountable virtually to no one, and can wage war or make peace with former enemies at the drop of a hat, a kefiyyeh, a turban, or any other Middle Eastern head covering. We should take a good, hard look at these two men, because they and others like them will shape the future of the Middle East.

We have to remain both equitable and vigilant towards them and their like — equitable, in not judging them too quickly but rather giving them time to show if they are reckless dangers to us all, or bold and visionary young men who have learned the mistakes of the autocratic leaders of the recent past; but vigilant, in watching them closely to spot any signs of utter foolhardiness and destructive actions that promote sectarianism and warfare in lands that beg for pluralism and calm.

The Saudi crown prince sees himself as perhaps the protector of all Sunni Muslim Arabs, if not all Sunni Muslims in the world. He has spoken harshly of alleged predatory Iranian intentions in Arab societies, and has launched military (Yemen) and diplomatic (Qatar) efforts to stem alleged Iranian inroads into Arab countries that include Shiite Muslim minorities. Whether his fears of Iran are justified, exaggerated, or fully hallucinatory will be determined by history to come.

Moqtada el-Sadr represents the modern phenomenon of a dynamic, charismatic grassroots Shiite Muslim organizer and leader in an Arab country. He has fought the Americans, negotiated politically with other Iraqi political groups, spent time in and out of Iran, spoken harshly of Saudi Arabia in the past, and generally sought to position himself to become the most prominent Iraqi Shiite spiritual and (unofficially) political leader after the imminent death of the leading Iraqi Shiite authority Ayatollah el-Sayyid Ali el-Sistani.

Each in his way represents a break from the past, and both of them have spoken about the need for serious political, economic, and social-cultural reforms within their own countries. Sadr wants a serious anti-corruption effort in Iraq, and Mohammad bin Salman has championed an ambitious national economic reform plan. These are novel and potentially historic developments, if they are sincere and will be translated into action. So we must wait and see if and how these young men’s rhetoric promotes real changes for the better for the people of Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which would immensely benefit many others in the Arab region and Iran.

The meeting of these two men raised eyebrows across the region because it was widely assumed that intense Shiite-Sunni rivalries throughout the region precluded such interactions and consultations across sectarian lines. It turns out that this meeting resulted in some bilateral agreements, including a $10 million Saudi donation to meet the needs of Iraqis displaced by war in Mosul. Then the Iraqi government announced that it was asked to mediate to improve relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia, and a long-closed Iraqi-Saudi border post will be reopened to facilitate the flow of people and goods that will benefit both states.

The big riddle is whether this meeting will pave the way for more normal relations among Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Iran, or generate more intense political rivalries and sectarian competition for influence. More sinister analysts than myself wonder if these Saudi and Iraqi figures are using each other mainly to strengthen their internal position and also create more troubles for Iran. We will know in the months ahead.

We should not rule out the possibility that even brash, inexperienced, unconstrained, and bold young men who make war at will would one day see the folly of their ways and start to act more sensibly. That would be good news for the entire Middle East, which is why these two fellows are worth watching closely.

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

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 15 August 2017
Word Count: 833
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Agence Global is the exclusive syndication agency for Le Monde diplomatique, and The Washington Spectator, as well as expert commentary by Richard Bulliet, Rami G. Khouri and Immanuel Wallerstein.
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