Syria has always been a larger idea than its own geography, whether in the past or in modern times. Half a century ago, Syria was called “the throbbing heart of Arabism,” and in previous centuries the word “Syria” always referred to a wider region that covered much of the Levant. Today, the fourth anniversary of the war in Syria provides a somber opportunity to grasp again the reasons for the crises, violence and occasional chaos and state collapse we witness in half a dozen Arab countries.

It will take many years to restore Syria to its pre-war condition, but in the meantime it would be useful to understand the underlying drivers of the country’s terrible plunge into inhuman warfare and suffering, so that we might avoid perpetuating them in other Arab lands. Syria reflects the consequence of several trends that are peculiar to this region and that have persisted over several generations. Reversing these factors will be essential if Syrians or other Arab people are to have any chance of enjoying a more stable and productive national trajectory than they have experienced in the past century.

We can clearly see in retrospect the key dynamics that have shaped much of the modern dysfunction of Arab states, whose high point of national incoherence and fragility we witness these days in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya and other countries. The three most destructive trends during the past century have always gone hand-in-hand. They are that
a) entire countries have been ruled by small elites, often individual families or a group of military officers, which results in
b) security agencies dominating governments and defining most aspects of people’s lives, which finally leads to situations where
c) ordinary citizens never enjoy the opportunity to shape their national and civic institutions and to define the social contract that is essential to promoting decent governance, socio-economic growth, and stability.

These three phenomena all have their origins in the manner in which so many Arab states, like Syria, were established by European colonial powers, and did not necessarily reflect the free will or natural inclinations of their indigenous people. Not surprisingly, state fragility and collapse in the last half a century often have reflected tensions and then outright warfare among ethnic, national, tribal or sectarian groups that never found comfortable identity in the new state structures that suddenly defined their lives.

Local and regional wars or long-simmering ideological confrontations among Arabs, Israelis and Iranians, most notably, and with Western powers in recent years, fatally diverted attention and resources from democratic nation-building and cemented the military’s hold on power. Military-run security states resulted in large-scale corruption, mediocrity or broad incompetence in governance. This included erratic health and education systems that doomed millions of people from birth into chronic poverty, which entrenched the cycle of human despair that in recent years has been one element in fueling the growth of terror movements.

Home-grown mismanagement and oppression have always had a symbiotic relationship with foreign military invasions, coups and other political interventions across the region. The region’s heavy reliance on direct or indirect oil and gas income, rather than productive and creative economic endeavors, also minimized the role of the private sector in creating jobs and wealth and in promoting a sense of satisfaction and security among citizens who otherwise had to rely on mostly meaningless government jobs.

Such weaknesses and vulnerabilities were camouflaged during the early decades of state development last century, but ultimately they were exposed by two factors that are very evident in Syria’s current demise — unsustainably high population growth rates and steadily worsening environmental deterioration (especially water shortages). When Arab population growth outstripped economic growth in the mid-1980s, most countries in this region started to suffer more poverty, social dislocation, and expanding hopelessness by millions of ravaged citizens. Two reactions from within heightened the inevitable stresses and some collapses we witness now: more severe security oppression by the state to maintain order, and the scramble by citizens to ensure their needs by turning to their own religious and tribal movements. The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is merely the latest and most severe of many such manifestations.

With the end of the Cold War and the Anglo-American-led invasion of Iraq, weaker state authorities started to retreat from some sectors and areas of society, and the vacuums were quickly filled by tribal, religious and militant groups. Syria reminds us that we are likely to endure many years of dislocation and violence until local authorities re-establish order that is not based on the security dictates of a single family with its national army, but rather on a more credible social contract among citizens who feel they belong to a state and consensually agree on the ground rules of that state.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 14 March 2015
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BEIRUT — Jordan’s public opinion, political leadership and regional and international dynamics today offer very useful insights into the current condition of the entire Arab world, and should be studied carefully by anyone interested in how things operate in this region and where it may be heading.

The immediate mass-anger emotional reaction among Jordanians to the brutal killing of air force pilot Muaz Kasasbeh is totally understandable and justified; but behind the current wave of enraged sentiments and demands for revenge is a complex matrix of emotions, ideologies and state-building realities that reveal the deeper challenge that faces King Abdullah. Three particular elements shape this kind of analysis of Jordan, which also apply to most other Arab countries. They are 1) the nature of national political and strategic decision-making, 2) the role of public opinion and limited involvement in governance, and 3) the socio-economic condition of the country and its reliance on foreign support.

All three of these dimensions are active this week as Jordanians come to terms with the massive hurt they feel at the gruesome and cruel Kasasbeh killing, and ponder options on how to respond. Public opinion has swung strongly behind King Abdullah and the armed forces, reflecting the understandable desire to hit back at ISIS and cause as much death and damage in their ranks as possible. This is a sharp reversal from the situation weeks ago, when Jordan enjoyed a lively debate about the wisdom of the country joining the American-led coalition to fight and defeat ISIS. Vocal critics of the Jordanian armed forces’ involvement in the actual attacks as well as in other aspects of the anti-ISIS campaign included personal criticisms of the king’s role in such decisions.

The important point here is not whether the Jordanian decision to join the anti-ISIS fight is sound (I personally believe it is sound, given the real threat ISIS poses to the whole region) but rather the manner in which such fateful national decisions are made in Arab countries without any credible popular consultations or participation by the spectrum of indigenous ideological views. This legacy has led to state ruin in places like Libya, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and a few other Arab states.

Jordan is not in that situation, and remains tightly managed from above by a determined leadership supported by a capable security and military sector — but also with little if any credible popular participation. This is evident in Jordan on controversial issues like relations with Israel — with whom Jordan has a stable peace treaty — or cooperation with the United States and other powers in military arenas.

When things return to normal, Jordan will once again have to confront the big issues that its citizens have long debated, such as the central role of the security sectors in national governance and decision-making, whether or not the elected lower house of parliament accurately mirrors the views and interests of the entire citizenry, how development funds are managed, or why the parliament has no oversight of military-security spending in the national budget.

Other factors at play here should be considered, including Jordan’s existential reliance on foreign aid for its national wellbeing. Foreign grants keep Jordan afloat, and the kingdom relies heavily these days of budget support from the United States and the Gulf Cooperation Council — to the tune of some $2 billion per year. This makes it very difficult for Jordan to conduct its foreign policy in any manner that deviates from the strategic interests of it major backers. This in turn only increases the potential internal tensions between masses of low-income citizens who resent their country following closely the dictates of conservative or militaristic foreign donors, and their own government that has few real options in this respect.

In the short run, Jordanians always behave like all other human beings, in that they will subdue any political misgivings they may have in favor of the two immediate needs that we see in action today: the emotional and political need to assuage their anger and bereavement at the Kasasbi killing, and their government’s need to secure foreign aid to keep the economy going and maintain jobs and income for millions of citizens.

In the longer run — one day when that generous foreign aid may slow down, or internal socio-economic and political marginalization stresses become too intense — the current blend of a strong leadership, able military, and emotionally supportive citizenry, but without any serious mechanisms of political participation and credible accountability, may find it more difficult to respond to the threats and opportunities of the day.

Jordan’s dilemma, which is on full display today, is that its strengths are also its weaknesses.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

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Released: 07 February 2015
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BEIRUT — The predictability of the sequence of events between Israel and Hizbullah in the last two weeks played out like clockwork. While there are some unknown motivating factors about the Israeli air attack in the Golan Heights on Jan. 18 that killed six Hizbullah men and an Iranian general, there was no such imprecision about the events that followed.

Hizbullah retaliated on Jan. 28 by lethally attacking an Israeli army patrol in the occupied Shebaa Farms region along the Lebanese-Syrian-Israeli borders, and Israeli responded the same day by shelling a range of areas in south Lebanon, killing a Spanish UNIFIL peace-keeper.

For half a day last Wednesday much of the world speculated whether the tit-for-tat attacks would spiral out of control into another full-fledged Israel-Hizbullah war, as happened several times before in recent years. The fact that this has not happened now is an important marker that tells us much about the new mutual deterrence condition that now defines this hostile relationship.

The tit-for-tat attacks did not lead to a full war because of two main reasons, I suspect: They followed the almost scripted sequence of how to conduct such attacks that Israel and Hizbullah signed on to some years ago, and they reveal the significant deterrence on both sides against waging all-out, indiscriminate warfare as they did in 2006, and as Israel and Hamas did last year.

The 1996 understanding and the 2006 UN Security Council Resolution 1701 spell out constraints on both sides’ military attacks, designed to allow them to hit each other’s targets in a limited manner but without destroying civilian infrastructure or killing civilians in population centers. That process worked perfectly this time, as all the attacks either hit military targets or isolated non-populated border regions. Each side retaliated as it said it would.  The message from the two mighty warriors Israel and Hizbullah was that they would not allow themselves to be attacked without fighting back, but they would avoid large-scale war and death.

The reason for this must be the massive deterrence pressures that constrain them both from reigniting full-scale war across civilian and military targets. The Israelis know that Hizbullah’s perpetually improving capabilities in rocketry, protecting their launchers, communications, field tactics and other military areas mean that an all-out war would be very costly for some parts of Israel, including possibly shutting down the national airport as happened briefly during the Gaza war. A war also — as happened in previous ones — is unlikely to destroy Hizbullah or wipe out its military capabilities, given its nature as a civilian-based fighting force operating in its own territory. The Israeli population will not support a war of choice that is not required to secure the country from an actual threat.

Hizbullah for its part has to think hard before engaging in another total war against Israel, for similar reasons. Israel would inflict immense damage across all of Lebanon, as it did in 2006, causing large-scale civilian refugee flows and adding to the pressures of the 1.4 million or so Syrian refugees in the country. War would also provide an opportunity for takfiri militants like ISIS and Nusra Front to attack along Lebanon’s northeastern borders, which would be a catastrophic blow to the country. The political condemnations of Hizbullah within Lebanon would also be loud and strong, if it were seen to be waging a war of choice that was not necessary to ward off a real threat or attack from Israel.

This bilateral Israeli-Lebanese equation is rather straightforward and clear, but what makes this latest round of military exchanges fascinating is that it started in the Syrian Golan Heights, which has always been the quietest from with Israel. I have yet to hear a definitive explanation of why Israel attacked the Hizbullah-Iran convoy on the Golan Heights in the first place, though speculation is plentiful.

What we can conclude, I suggest, is that we would not be in this situation had Israel seriously studied and responded to the 2002 Arab Peace Plan that provided an important opening to negotiate a permanent, comprehensive and mutually just peace accord between the Arab states and Israel. Why Israel and the United States both ignored that historic offer remains unclear; what is certain is that Israeli-Lebanese-Syrian-Iranian tensions and active warfare would not be a recurring problem, as in fact they are, had Israel responded to the Arab peace plan.

The capacity of the unresolved Palestine issue to destabilize and radicalize the Middle East region and lead it into recurring wasteful wars is very much in play here. The deterrence condition between Hizbullah and Israel only postpones active warfare, if the underlying causes of the confrontations are not addressed.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

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Released: 31 January 2015
Word Count: 778
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BEIRUT — Perhaps the most dramatic aspect of the succession in the Saudi Arabian monarchy last week was how undramatic and routine it was. The sixth such succession to a new monarch and crown prince in modern Saudi history lacked the tension and behind the scenes jockeying for power that had been so widely hyped in much of the Western and sensationalist Arab media.

This is because two of the three most important dimensions of Saudi state and society — domestic governance and petroleum policy — are fully under control and in the hands of the ruling authorities, headed by the House of Saud. There is little chance for the moment that any external exhortations would bring about any significant changes in these two domains. Saudi internal and petroleum policies in recent years have evolved broadly in line with prevailing priorities, including occasional local and limited reforms alongside occasional forceful moves — like the current sharp oil price drop — to maintain Saudi Arabia’s share in the global oil sales market.

Any faster or further reforms in domestic policy will reflect the natural evolution of interests and values within Saudi society. These move very slowly — somewhat like gun control policies within the United States, which reflect the same kind of persistence of conservative values that seem impervious to even the most shocking abuse of guns.

The third major dimension of Saudi society and state — regional policy — is the most dynamic and intriguing, because it responds heavily to the actions of others who are not within the control of the Saudi system. Regional and foreign policy is the arena where traditional conservative Saudi values and operating methods run up against the challenges of modern geopolitics and aggressive initiatives by many other states and non-state actors.

Regional and foreign policy has always been conducted quietly and discreetly, using Saudi moral, political and financial influence to maintain stability above all else in the region. Occasional forays into regional conflicts — like confronting Gamal Abdel Nasser in Yemen in the 1960s — was just that, very occasional.

Those days are behind us. Today’s Middle Eastern and global orders present a very different picture from the previous 80 years of Saudi statehood. The collapse of the Cold War in 1990 removed the great stabilizer that had kept the Middle East largely unchanged politically for half a century. The combination of rapidly growing populations alongside economic stagnation and disparity caused most Arab countries by the 1990s to suffer internal stresses and challenges to their established power structures. Some states fragmented or reconfigured, like Somalia, Yemen, Sudan and Lebanon; others saw their all-powerful central governments cede authority here and there, which allowed non-state tribal, militia and religious actors to emerge and share power, if not formal sovereignty.

So King Salman now engages with regional and global orders marked by several new patterns: total chaos in some areas, partial state collapse in others, widespread use of political violence and terrorism, and massive intervention by foreign actors. Saudi Arabia itself suffered from political violence in recent decades, but ultimately beat back the attempt by Al-Qaeda within the kingdom to foment trouble and challenge the state.

The traditional Saudi style of quiet action and indirect intervention in regional issues is unlikely to succeed in the turbulent new regional conditions. Violent actors like ISIS, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and many other smaller such groups do not respond to the kinds of Saudi and other political engagements that maintained regional calm in the past, including mediation, development aid, and others. A new sectarian streak in regional and local tensions — especially Sunni-Shiite rivalries — is a troubling and novel element, which the Saudi authorities cannot ignore because of their historic role as custodians of the Islamic heartland and guardians of Sunni Islam.

The late King Abdullah responded to these realities quite forcefully, and quickly grasped the new factor in the Middle East that now faces his successor King Salman: There are no more local conflicts in this region, and all local or national strife is directly linked to greater regional powers and sometimes global confrontations. It is not feasible to address local issues with a local power-sharing antidote, such as happened in Lebanon at the end of the civil war in 1990. Conflicts like Syria, Iraq, ISIS, Yemen, Bahrain, Lebanon, Libya and even Egypt link directly to regional actors like Iran, Turkey, Qatar and others, now including Saudi Arabia, which itself has responded to the regional conflicts by stepping in to forcefully support rebels in Syria, the Lebanese armed forces, the Egyptian government, and, when possible, conflict-ending peace agreements such as the Saudis attempted over the years in Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

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Released: 28 January 2015
Word Count: 772
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LONDON — The recent terror attacks in Paris and arrest of suspected terrorists in Belgium clarify the dangerous reality of thousands of European radicals who go to fight with ISIS in Syria-Iraq and return to carry out attacks in their home countries. Europe may be repeating the same mistakes that George W. Bush made in the initial American-led global war on terror after the Sept. 11, 2001 attack in the United States.

The main problem in both cases is that countries or societies that see themselves as innocent victims of foreign terrorism have tended to respond with a broadly failed combination of massive military attacks, and jingoistic patriotism at home that touts one’s own fine values of liberty, pluralism, and freedom of speech, alongside a desk-pounding determination to be strong and to assert those values due to the terror threat.

This combination of responses is on show again these days after the Paris attacks and the arrest of suspected militants across Europe. The result is likely to repeat the counter-productive post-9/11 anti-terror policies, because this generation of militants in many ways was born as a consequence of the U.S.-led war on terror, which killed thousands of militants and civilians, disrupted terror networks, and unwittingly promoted the fastest growth of Islamist militancy and criminal behavior ever seen in modern history.

Recent studies say perhaps over 5,000 foreign militants from Western and Arab-Asian countries may be on the battlefield in Syria-Iraq alone. So we do face a real serious threat, but have we analyzed it accurately and responded appropriately?

Twenty-one member states of the coalition to fight ISIS met in London this week to discuss progress in the fight at hand and ways to reduce the blowback of Europeans who carry out terror attacks at home after returning from action with ISIS or Al-Qaeda. The indications from these deliberations are that the prevalent approach to fighting this threat will succeed in the very limited arena of containing the spread of ISIS in Syria-Iraq due to sustained foreign bombings combined with some ground attacks by local Kurdish and Arab forces — but it will not make Western and Middle Eastern countries any safer, because the underlying causes of the broad phenomenon and the specific criminal acts of groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda will not have been defeated, or even, in many cases, addressed.

The dilemma that Europeans and Americans seem unwilling to confront is two-fold: Their own policies or actions are responsible to a significant degree for two out of the three elements that cause their own citizens to become radicalized, adopt terror, join ISIS and Al-Qaeda, and return to attack their own Western societies.

Those two are:
1) The socio-economic conditions and policing policies in countries like France, the United Kingdom and others that result in small numbers of very alienated, marginalized young men who see no future for themselves in their land of birth and citizenship, and so they gravitate to the extreme fringes; and,
2) Western states’ foreign policy actions that include ongoing warfare in Arab-Asian regions (Iraq, Afghanistan) that results in catastrophic collapses of society and the deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians.
(The third and most important reason for this problem is the half-century of miserable, incompetent Arab governance and tyranny that humiliates hundreds of millions of men and women, some of whom respond by also moving to the extreme fringes and creating groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS).

The deadly combination of domestic and foreign policies by Western governments has been identified as causing the radicalization of many, many studied young men who joined terror groups and conducted criminal attacks at home. Any successful anti-terrorism policy must include a serious attempt to address all three Middle Eastern and Western drivers of transnational terror, including the reality of French, British and other Western citizens who were born and radicalized in their home countries, due in large part to their reactions to their own governments’ policies.

This is a tough pill to swallow, but the phenomenon must be seriously assessed if there is to be any chance of defeating terrorism by wiping out its root causes, rather than emotionally waving freedom flags, singing national anthems, pounding chests and committing to fight forever to defeat a phenomenon that cannot be defeated only militarily.

New York Times reporter Alan Cowell correctly noted earlier this week that, “As much as Western governments may clamor for enhanced powers to round up suspects or penetrate social media sites in their battle to ward off attacks, it seems that Europe has reached a tipping point where the distant killing fields of Syria and Iraq have fused with — and fueled — homegrown extremism.”

Unraveling and understanding that fusion of mind-altering domestic and foreign conditions that drive extremism is the critical first step to reducing blowback from home-grown French, British and other European terrorists. Let’s hope Europe does a better job on this than the Americans did.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.
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Released: 24 January 2015
Word Count: 820
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BEIRUT — The Israeli attack Sunday in the Syrian Golan Heights that killed Hezbollah and Iranian officials has understandably generated much speculation primarily about whether, when and how Hezbollah would retaliate against Israeli targets. The easy answer is that, of course Hezbollah will respond, in some manner that it deems appropriate, but this is really not the most significant aspect of what is happening. That label must go to two related phenomena, which are the tangled dynamics of Hezbollah’s relations inside Lebanon and around the Middle East, and that the Israeli attack in Syria — an almost routine event in the last few decades, sadly — actually hit three targets in one, namely Hezbollah, Syria and Iran.

How those three members of the “Resistance and Deterrence Front” (RDF) will or can retaliate against Israel strikes me as the significant issue here, because it can clarify the consequences of Hezbollah’s two concentric circles of its relationships within Lebanese politics and among the RDF in the wider Middle East.

Years ago, Hezbollah was a simpler actor, defined mainly by its two most successful legacies: military resistance to Israel, and mobilizing and lifting up the Lebanese Shiite community from the bottom of Lebanese society to dominance of the national governance system (even though that dominance usually was played out behind the scenes and took the form of blocking decisions it disliked, until a national consensus was a reached that it liked). Today, Hezbollah is a different and more complex actor, reflecting new, or just more explicit elements of, its basic dimensions: its active warfare and military deterrence with Israel, its fighting in Syria to maintain the Assad regime, its fighting against takfiri militants like Jabhat el-Nusra inside Lebanon, its continued structural and strategic links with Iran, and its deep dialogue with the Future movement and allied March 14 forces in Lebanon to reduce domestic polarization and reconstitute a legitimate governance system with a functioning parliament and presidency.

A decade ago Hezbollah was widely acclaimed in much of Lebanon and the region for leading the battle to liberate South Lebanon from Israeli occupation. With every post-2000 military engagement with Israel that caused great destruction and human dislocation inside Lebanon, Hezbollah’s luster has dimmed a bit; today very polarized Lebanese see it either as the nation’s savior and protector, or a dangerous Iranian Trojan Horse. The latter argue that Hezbollah is an instrument of Iranian foreign policy that ridicules Lebanese sovereignty and endangers all Lebanese by keeping them hostage to another destructive war with Israel to serve Iranian strategic interests. That argument about whether Hezbollah serves Lebanese or Iranian interests has gone on for years and remains inconclusive.

Hezbollah’s active military and intelligence work in the north-east of Lebanon and its cooperation with the revived and strengthened Lebanese armed forces is a new dimension of its actions and priorities, one which most Lebanese are grateful for because they know that its military capabilities are a valuable element in repelling takfiri assaults from Syria by groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra. So quite a few Lebanese now have another reason to simultaneously criticize Hezbollah for entangling Lebanon deeper in the war in Syria which has come into Lebanon in a frightening manner, while quietly appreciating Hezbollah for its role in fighting alongside the Lebanese armed forces against the takfiris and maintaining Lebanon’s integrity.

So the answer to the common question of whether Lebanese citizens support or oppose Hezbollah is, “a little of both.” This complexity which has now replaced the formerly linear and one-dimensional attitudes to Hezbollah is matched by similar multi-faceted regional entanglements. Hezbollah-Syria-Iran are a single unit in geo-strategic terms, and in recent years Iraq and Hamas variously have been part of that alignment. So when Israel struck against all three parties in the Golan Heights Sunday, it meant that analyzing when and how any retaliation would occur had to consider the condition, interests, capabilities and broader strategic interests of Hezbollah, Syria, and Iran.

That mini-universe automatically dovetails into a much wider cosmos that includes the United States, Russia, global oil markets, Sunni-Shiite tensions in the Middle East, fighting against ISIS, and other factors that directly link Israeli-Syrian-Iranian-Hezbollah relations to half a dozen major dynamics in the Middle East and further afield. There is not a deep history of Syria and Iran directly attacking Israel or Israeli interests (perhaps, as some argue, because they have always left this dangerous task to Hezbollah), so the focus of speculation today rests largely on what Hezbollah will do. Yet Hezbollah’s options for action are more constrained than ever by its simultaneous fighting and negotiations within its turbulent Lebanese-Syrian terrain; it also still faces immense pushback from millions of Lebanese who do not want to see their country destroyed because of Iranian- and Syrian-backed decisions by Hezbollah to fight Israel, which it is able and willing to do.

Hezbollah probably also has a new challenge which is to tighten up its security system, following the recent capture and trial of one of its members who was an Israeli spy, and the probability that Israeli intelligence that allowed the Sunday attack to happen reflected continuing security leaks in what had always been a well-sealed system.

Because of all these inter-linked local, regional and global factors, any expected retaliation against Israel in the near future will reveal much about the state of Hezbollah, Syria and Iran and the condition of their Resistance and Deterrence Front.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

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Released: 17 January 2015
Word Count: 901
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BEIRUT — Watch out, the Quartet is waking up and threatens to make a move. We should have mixed feelings about the news that the “Quartet” group of powers that aims to shepherd Palestinian-Israeli negotiations to a successful peace accord will convene soon to seek to revive diplomatic efforts that have been stalled for six months.

I say “watch out” because the Quartet, since its establishment 12 years ago, has not lived up to its expectations in promoting Palestinian-Israeli negotiations under the umbrella of its four members — the United States, Russia, United Nations and European Community. Years of negotiations since the Quartet was formed in 2002 have generated much heat, some hope, and mostly unfulfilled expectations, but no breakthrough.

Maybe that was the aim and the Quartet has indeed achieved its main aim. Some people more sinister than myself argue that the Quartet’s main role was to provide an international cover for the United States’ dominance of the peace negotiations and making sure they respond first and foremost to Israeli concerns.

A United Nations announcement that Quartet states diplomats would meet in Brussels Jan. 26 coincided with the UN Security Council’s first formal meeting on the Middle East this year. At that session a senior UN official offered a bleak assessment of the current hostility and mistrust between Israelis and Palestinians who are “engaged in a downward spiral of actions and counteractions.”

The Quartet was a good idea that initially aimed to expand the circle of major parties that lent their weight to achieving a negotiated peace; it allowed both principals to feel that they were not on their own in the negotiations arena, but rather felt secure that Quartet members would ensure a level playing field, or negotiating table. That never happened, for several reasons.

The United States dominated the Quartet’s actions and perpetuated the reality that bilateral Israeli-Palestinian negotiations took place according to priorities and red lines established primarily by Israel. The Palestinians did not harness the considerable support they enjoy around the world and among the Quartet member states or organizations, and the European Union and Russia proved fickle in their Mideast peace-making actions. The Quartet’s special envoy to the Arab-Israeli peace process, former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, was also a failure who seemed to spend more time making money for himself in consulting and speech-making than in engaging in the needed even-handed diplomatic mediation.

Blair once again showed his incompetence and misreading of realities on the ground in the Middle East this week, when he addressed a group of 300 Republican members of Congress and staffers. His remarks on radical Islamists, Western responses to them, the US- and UK-led war against Iraq, and other issues revealed a man whose penchant to repeat clichés and simplistic exhortations about Islam and Muslims reflected his wider inability to grasp the realities and causes of political sentiments in the Middle East.

An example of his poor analysis is the assertion that the root of several factors that contributed to radical Islam is a struggle within Islam about the nature of the faith and its relationship with other religious communities. More accurate is the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims have no problems with the nature of Islam or its relations with others, but small pockets of cult-like extremists and criminals carry out actions, including terror attacks; these generate global responses that often alienate that massive majority of Muslims who are neither confrontational nor confused about their faith and their relations with non-Muslims.

A Guardian newspaper report of the sessions said that “he reportedly argued that the US and UK had learned that if you topple dictators, you release other forces that have to be dealt with. However, the Arab Spring demonstrated that many of those dictatorships would be swept away in any event.”

This would appear to be a damning criticism of US and UK actions in Iraq especially that helped create an environment that provided radical Islamists the space to develop into movements that now threaten us all to some extent. But Blair would never admit this, and his problem of not coming to terms with Middle Eastern realities was one reason for the failure of the Quartet.

Despite these weaknesses, the idea of a Quartet mechanism remains valid, because American-dominated diplomacy in the Palestinian-Israeli arena, however vigorous it has been in the last 20 years, has failed to achieve a peace agreement that responds to the legitimate rights and needs of both sides. An expanded diplomatic umbrella that drives negotiations on the basis of international legitimacy and the rule of law, rather than Israeli-American-dominated power imbalances on the ground, would be a positive contribution — indeed, a lifesaver — for the failed and moribund peace process.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 January 2015
Word Count: 787
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BEIRUT — Two things happened in Paris and Khartoum this week that portend bad times ahead for the Arab region and for relations between Arab and Muslim-majority countries, on the one hand, and American- and European-led countries, on the other hand. The more dramatic development was the massive solidarity march in Paris to uphold values like freedom of press and expression and condemn the two terror attacks in Paris by four radicalized, socially alienated French citizens who had joined militant Islamist networks like Al-Qaeda and ISIS. The second, and in the longer term the more significant development, was the announcement that Sudanese President Omar Hassan Bashir has submitted his candidacy to be re-elected for another five-year term in elections set for April 13.

These two developments capture two of the three main reasons that have seen many parts of the Arab region become sinkholes of political violence, extremism, sectarianism and state fragmentation or collapse — most frightfully captured in the ISIS phenomenon and the threats it poses in the region and abroad. These two phenomena are the control of Arab state power structures by military establishments at the service of individuals or families, and the militarized interventions in the Middle East by predominantly Western powers (alongside parallel military or diplomatic interventions by powers like Russia, China, Iran and Turkey). The third cause of chronic stress, waste, militarism and national incoherence is the long-running Arab-Israeli conflict, which only had faint echoes in Paris.

If we were to identify a single foundational reason for the problems and instabilities of the Arab world, it must be the continuing legacy of mostly incompetent military officers who seize control of governments and remain as presidents for life. This process hollows out the indigenous governance systems of competent personnel and replaces them with mediocre friends and cousins of the great leader; redirects security systems to domestic control rather than protecting the nation; promotes corruption that ultimately translates into socio-economic stagnation and massive disparities; and creates conditions of conflict and dependence on foreign powers that ultimately create the opportunities for those powers to intervene at will in the region, including attacking and removing regimes that are identified as undesirable.

This is why the single most important priority across our region is to figure out how to make the transition from this kind of top-heavy autocratic power structure to more democratic and participatory governance systems that tap the creativity, commitment and energy of all citizens. Indirectly, the terrorism in Paris by radicalized young French Muslims includes causal factors that touch on Western armies’ actions in the Middle East (especially Iraq) and the growth of cult-like criminal groups like ISIS whose birth and growth were incubated in the repression and jails of Arab dictatorships.

So this week’s focus in Paris on fighting “Islamic terror and extremism” or other enemies with similar names with a combination of police actions and appeals to “moderate Muslims” to take more vigorous cultural-religious measures to reduce youth radicalism is likely only to intensity existing stresses and further alienate youth who are potential recruits to radical groups. This is because Western governments continue to work closely with Arab and other foreign states whose autocratic policies contributed to the birth of the radicalism now being targeted by the West, meaning the grassroots drivers of terrorism in the Middle East will remain unchanged.

Also, the excessive Western focus on religion in this equation, rather than addressing the more significant socio-economic and political forces that transform slightly directionless young men and women into hardened killers, is likely to aggravate the existing divide that plagues all concerned. This divide is also deepened by developments such as Omar Hassan Bashir’s announcement that he will perpetuate his presidency that started when he seized power in a military coup in 1989 — a quarter of a century ago.

This is only the second presidential “election” in Sudan since then, and perpetuates the farce and illusion of popular participation in choosing the government in societies across our region. The most farcical case was the recent recurring re-election of Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who is so ill that he never appears in public and essentially fronts for the military’s control of power in that country since the 1960s.

So this has been a bad week in the continuing saga of an Arab world in search for decency, democracy and development, which remain elusive despite the proven thirst for these things across the region. The Arab autocracies in part cement themselves by serving the Western tendency to use militarism as the main way to fight terror, which we have witnessed again this week, alongside other dictators like Bashir who ignore the West and single-handedly perpetuate their own incumbency at home by fighting and destroying any credible opposition.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 13 January 2015
Word Count: 789
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BEIRUT — The attack Wednesday against the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo that killed 12 people has understandably sparked a massive outpouring of support around the world for the publication and the wider issue of freedom of press and expression, alongside many condemnations of the attack by Muslims in Europe and around the world. This kind and intensity of reactions has happened before in other circumstances, such as Salman Rushdie’s work or the Danish cartoon controversy, in which the Western commitment to absolute freedom of expression conflicts with Islamic sensitivities about depictions of the Prophet Mohammad that are deemed offensive and blasphemous.

The fact that we seem to replay this difficult drama over and over again every few years suggests to me that the prevailing strong views on freedom/blasphemy have prevented us from focusing on the deeper causal issues involved here and in other cases. Criminal violence against Western targets by enraged Muslims in response to what they see as unacceptable behavior towards the Prophet Mohammad is clearly criminal behavior that cannot be tolerated for any reason. Derisive Western press depictions of the Prophet Mohammad are equally offensive to most Muslims, though only a handful respond with criminal violence.

Repeating these basic points every time violent incidents has simply perpetuated the cycle of violence. I suspect the reason is that the offensive depictions of Islamic faith values in the eyes of Muslims, and the fierce Western commitment to freedom of the press and expression only address the surface issues at hand, without touching on the deeper elements of what has become a global cycle of sentiments, discontentment and actions by many actors around the world.

The best place to start appreciating some of these key underlying issues is presented to us in the persons of the two French citizens of Algerian descent, Cherif and Said Kouachi, who are the principal suspects in this latest crime. Their life experiences and recent actions capture nicely the complex web of underlying forces that have brought us to this point where a relative handful of Islamist fanatics carry out criminal attacks against targets in the West and mostly in the Arab-Islamic region, and the global response is predominately anchored in police and military actions alongside ringing defense of personal freedoms. In the meantime, we have to deal with the tide of anti-Islamic sentiments among many people in the West — which are rising sharply this week — alongside fears among many Muslims that they are being increasingly seen as security threats and cultural aliens.

The lives, attitudes and actions of the Kouachi brothers reflect many other elements beyond freedom and blasphemy that make it so difficult now to find the path to reducing the tensions and incidents of violence in this universe that broadly comprises Western societies and Arab-Islamic ones. We must probe deeper to understand why we seem to repeat these episodes of tension, extremism and death every few years, despite the trillions of dollars that have been spent on security measures in the last few decades, not to mention well-meaning but (sadly) mostly marginal inter-faith initiatives.

I doubt the killers of the Charlie Hebdo staff were thinking about the Western democratic freedoms they allegedly so hated that they would assassinate French journalists. I suspect rather that they were motivated by a grizzly combination of influences and experiences whose center of gravity comprises a problematic combination of forces and actions in several continents. These include mainly the rise of violent Islamist organizations like Al-Qaeda and ISIS; the mismanagement of many Arab and Muslim-majority countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan) by corrupt and dysfunctional family-led and military regimes; the marginalization and criminalization of some immigrants in Western countries (where most immigrants have adapted nicely, but pockets of desperate and alienated youth have not); chronic military operations by Western countries in various Arab-Asian lands, especially the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, and some other related factors that fall under these broad categories.

This web of forces helps us understand why political or psychological phenomena like the violent Kouachi brothers come into being and continue spreading around the world, but they do not in any manner rationalize their crimes, which must be addressed in the first instance by using the full force of the law around the world. Waving the intensely emotional and absolutist flags of liberty and blasphemy seems only to deepen and widen the circles of anger, fear, and violence. Powerful emotional declarations of ’Je suis Charlie’ are understandable and genuine, but they will not do anything to prevent further deaths, because they ignore the central reasons why young men become crazed fanatics and assassins.

A much more sophisticated analytical process is needed to find that middle ground between global police actions to fight crime; political, military and diplomatic policies that bind Western and Arab-Islamic countries; sociological insights and remedial policies that address youth alienation in both regions; and, better governance systems in Arab-Asian countries that remain the fulcrum of this gruesome — and expanding — universe in which the Kouachi brothers, among perhaps tens of thousands of others, have lived, killed and died. It is time to get more serious, and more focused on the real drivers of tension and violence that plague the multinational, transcontinental universe in which the Kouachi brothers lived.

Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. Follow him on Twitter @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 January 2015
Word Count: 871
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