Agence Global

Patrick Seale, “Lessons from the Arab Revolution”

-

Europe and the United States were taken by surprise by the revolutionary changes sweeping the Arab world. They failed to foresee the sudden awakening of the Arab peoples. Arab rulers who had evidently imagined they could rule for life have been swept away. Several others are under threat, and may well follow. 
 
It is widely agreed that the Arab world is undergoing a profound transformation and will never be the same again. Europe, a mere step away from the Arab world, was evidently blind to the powerful pressures which were building up and which eventually could no longer be contained. 
 
A striking example was provided by Michele Alliot-Marie, France’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, sacked on 27 February by President Nicolas Sarkozy. She is the first European ministerial victim of the Arab revolution — in particular of the revolution in Tunisia, which overthrew President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali.
 
Alliot-Marie’s catalogue of blunders was to take a vacation in Tunisia when the troubles had already started; to offer the Tunisian President French riot police to help quell the demonstrators; to take free flights on a private plane owned by a businessman close to Ben Ali; and to allow her parents, who had accompanied her on vacation, to buy a hotel company from the same Tunisian businessman. Such errors suggest a profound incomprehension in Paris of the Arab mood.
 
Inevitably, the escalating revolts in the Arab world were the principal subject of debate at this year’s meeting of a high-level discussion group, known as the Club de Monaco, which met in Monte Carlo from 25 to 27 February.
 
Attended by some 40 former prime ministers, ministers, ambassadors, academics and journalists from more than a score of countries, the proceedings were opened by Prince Albert of Monaco, and were chaired by the Club’s founder, Claude de Kemoularia, a veteran former French ambassador and international banker, who had served as Minister of State in Monaco under Prince Albert’s father, Prince Rainier.
 
The Club makes no public recommendations, nor does it allow individual speakers to be named, so the remarks that follow are merely some of the lessons I personally drew from the prolonged and animated three-day debate by the distinguished participants.
 
One such lesson is that the burgeoning democratic movement in the Arab world will need to be underpinned by urgent financial support. If immediate and substantial financial and economic help is not given to Egypt and Tunisia, but also to Yemen and to the Sahel countries bordering the Sahara desert, as well as to other relatively poor countries, the great hopes that have been aroused will be dashed. It is no accident that terrorism thrives where poverty and hopelessness are widespread.
 
When the Soviet system collapsed in central and Eastern Europe, the West created the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) in 1990 to promote economic development, multi-party democracy and to help the transition to capitalist economies. 
 
Something similar is urgently required in the Arab world: if not an Arab development bank, then a massive fund, something in the nature of the Marshall Plan which the United States launched after the Second World War to rescue and revive European economies. 
 
This is today the challenge facing the Arab oil states and their sovereign funds. They must help their poorer neighbours, if they wish to be protected from the storm engulfing the entire region. Europe, too, must lend a hand if it is not to be submerged by a flood of illegal immigrants from across the Mediterranean.
 
One of the key underlying social reasons for the revolution in the Arab world is the population explosion. In every single country birth rates are too high. Economic growth simply cannot keep pace. As a result, unemployment is a universal problem. 
 
To quote a single example, when Napoleon invaded Egypt in 1798, there were just three million Egyptians. When Gamal Abd al-Nasser and his ‘Free Officers’ seized power in 1952, this had risen to 19 million. Today, less than sixty years later, there are 84 million Egyptians, and the number is increasing by nearly a million a year. Clearly, reducing fertility rates and job creation must be the priorities not only of Egypt but of every Arab country. A revision of the educational system must also follow. In most Arab countries, over-burdened schools and universities produce large numbers of poorly-trained graduates for whom no jobs exist.
 
Another subject of debate by the Club de Monaco was the whole range of issues concerning Israel. The revolution in Egypt was likely to bring Cairo back into the Arab mainstream. This would have a profound impact on Israel’s strategic environment. Was it not time for Israel to rethink its security doctrine, so as to seek co-existence with its Arab neighbours rather than military domination? 
 
Now that the United States had failed to advance the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, could Europe and Russia step in to give the process a much-needed nudge? Was Israel beginning to grasp that its continued theft of Palestinian land was a curse from which it must itself inevitably suffer? A major attempt had to be made to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict before it exploded into more violence. There was no viable alternative to a two-state solution.
 
Iraq’s revival was hailed by members of the Club de Monaco. After the horrors of recent decades, the country was being remade as a decentralised democracy. It had overcome its civil war of 2006-7 and was making a successful transition from foreign occupation to real sovereignty. Its relations with such neighbours as Turkey and Iran had much improved. Given time, there were real hopes that Iraq would recover its role as a major oil producer and a leading Arab state.
 
In country after country, Arab protesters have voiced the same demands. They want an end to random arrests, torture and police brutality; they want the dismantling of the Arab ‘security state’; the right to speak and be heard; to participate in politics; to choose their own representatives. They want a better life for themselves and their children, the end of corruption and the gross privileges of a narrow elite. In brief, they want freedom, social justice, economic opportunity, dignity and democratic governance.
 
Those Arab leaders still in office should urgently take note or face the consequences.
 
 
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).
 
Copyright © 2011 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global
 
—————
Released: 28 February 2011
Word Count: 1,044
—————-

Patrick Seale, “Can Europe Rescue a Shackled Obama?”

-

In the Greater Middle East — that vast stretch of territory from the Maghreb to Pakistan – the once-mighty United States has been exposed as a paper tiger. It has failed to have the slightest impact on the tidal wave of popular protest that has engulfed the region. 
 
This is one of the most striking features of the political tsunami that has already destroyed two Arab regimes and is shaking the foundations of several others. 
 
America’s European allies have watched with growing anxiety Washington’s irrelevance in the face of the raw expression of ‘people power’ in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Iran, Jordan, Iraq, Algeria — and who knows where next? 
 
In recent days, in what looked like a vain attempt to catch up with events, Obama and Secretary of State Hilary Clinton made several public comments, seeming at times to encourage the protesters and at others to chide them. But no one took the slightest notice. They would have been well advised to keep silent.
 
Nothing has so vividly illustrated the decline of American power. The United States may still be the world’s greatest economic and military power but, in country after country, whether friend or foe, America’s ‘hard power’ is being challenged and its ‘soft power’ derided.
 
European leaders are busy taking note. But what are they to do? Is there any way they can help correct America’s mistakes or fill the current vacuum? The European Union has so far failed to grow into a coherent political power, but some individual leaders in major European countries are waking up to the challenge posed by American impotence.
 
Quite apart from the storm blowing through Arab societies, two related problems are of special concern. The first is Afghanistan, where the United States seems to be leading its allies into a bloody morass. Victory in the ten-year war seems far out of reach. In neighbouring Pakistan, hostility to the United States is at fever pitch. 
 
Should a contact group of European nations propose to conduct an urgent negotiation with the Taliban, even with Mullah Omar himself? It may be the only way for the international coalition to escape a humiliating defeat.
 
The second burning problem is the collapse of the Arab-Israeli peace process. For decades, the United States monopolized the process on the grounds that it alone had the necessary influence with both sides. The Europeans agreed to play second-fiddle. They funded the hapless Palestinians but were denied any political input into the negotiations. 
 
Today, America’s abject failure can no longer be disguised. As a result, there is a growing realisation that Europe must act, if only to protect itself. If Israel’s extremist government proceeds with its ‘Greater Israel’ agenda; if its dispossession of the Palestinians continues unchecked; if the two-state solution is truly dead; then, sooner or later, Arab and Islamic rage will erupt. Violence, in one form or another, is bound to overspill into the Western world. The precedents are there for all to see.
 
These are only the most obvious of America’s foreign policy failures. In Egypt, a revolution has overturned thirty years of American diplomacy. Lavish U.S. subsidies, paid to the Egyptian military, were intended to protect Israel by keeping Cairo out of the Arab mainstream. This outworn strategy may no longer work. In Tunisia, an American-backed ‘kleptocrat’ has been sent packing. In Yemen, Bahrain and Algeria, pro-American regimes are facing a swelling movement demanding change. The Libyan regime, recently reconciled with Washington, is proving to be the most blood-thirsty in slaughtering its own people. 
 
In Lebanon, America’s allies have been routed in a constitutional process which has brought a Hizbullah-backed prime minister to power — to the dismay of the United States and its Israeli ally. In Iraq, America’s huge investment in men and treasure has failed to win it any lasting influence. On the contrary, the Iraq war — a criminal enterprise launched on the basis of fraudulent intelligence, largely fabricated by pro-Israeli neocons — has brought to power in Baghdad a Shia-dominated regime with close ties to Iran — an unforeseen outcome hardly to the liking of the United States.
 
Although Iran, too, has been profoundly unsettled by a surge of ‘people power’, it has remained defiant and unbowed in the face of American sanctions and the ever-present threat of military attack, either by Israel or by the U.S. itself. 
 
Israel, America’s closest ally, has provided one of the most striking examples of the paralysis of American power. At the UN Security Council last Friday, the United States vetoed a draft Resolution, sponsored by no fewer than 120 countries, which proposed to condemn Israel’s West Bank settlements as illegal. With the sole exception of the United States, all the 14 other Council members voted in favour. 
 
Rarely was there a more blatant illustration of the capture of American decision-making by pro-Israeli forces — whose influence extends, not only in the Congress, in the various lobbies, think-tanks and media outlets, but inside the U.S. administration itself.
 
Some months ago, Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu felt able to reject Obama’s appeal to freeze West Bank settlements. Last Friday at the Security Council, he was able to secure America’s protection for Israel’s illegal practices. Obama’s humiliation was complete. He had set his heart on resolving the Arab-Israel conflict but was defeated by a small Mediterranean country of some seven million people — which is, moreover, totally dependent on American aid and support. 
 
Will a group of European states now produce its own blueprint for a settlement – as Obama has so far failed to do? Will it dare warn Israel that it might risk a boycott, and even the exclusion of its exports from European markets, if it continues to trample on Palestinian rights?
 
Ideas of this sort are beginning to circulate in some European circles, where there is growing impatience with Israeli intransigence. Some would like to see Britain take the lead of such a movement, if only to redeem the catastrophic legacy of the Blair era, when Britain slavishly followed former US President George W. Bush and Washington’s neocons in making war on Iraq. There seems to be a move afoot for the UK to reassert its independent voice in foreign affairs.
 
Miracles, however, should not be expected. Prime Minister David Cameron is deeply preoccupied with the task of rescuing Britain from an unprecedented economic and financial crisis. Foreign Minister William Hague may not have the knowledge or the stuffing for such a bold move.
 
What is beyond dispute, however, is that European leaders are watching the unfolding Middle East drama with great anxiety. What will the emerging political landscape look like? What if the immense and angry energy of the Arab peoples were channelled into the Arab-Israeli conflict? Who could deal with an intifada on such a region-wide scale? Might it not be wise to act before the storm breaks?
 
 
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).
 
Copyright © 2011 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global
 
—————
Released: 21 February 2011
Word Count: 1,136
—————-

Patrick Seale, “The Future of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty”

-

Israel has been unnerved by Egypt’s Revolution. The reason is simple: It fears for the survival of the 1979 Peace Treaty — a treaty which by neutralizing Egypt, guaranteed Israel’s military dominance over the region for the next three decades.
 
By removing Egypt — the strongest and most populous of the Arab countries — from the Arab line-up, the Treaty ruled out any possibility of an Arab coalition that might have contained Israel or restrained its freedom of action. As Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan remarked at the time: “If a wheel is removed, the car will not run again.”
 
Western commentators routinely describe the Treaty as a “pillar of regional stability,” a “keystone of Middle East diplomacy,” a “centerpiece of America’s diplomacy” in the Arab and Muslim world. This is certainly how Israel and its American friends have seen it. 
 
But for most Arabs, it has been a disaster. Far from providing stability, it exposed them to Israeli power. Far from bringing peace, the Treaty ensured an absence of peace, since a dominant Israel saw no need to compose or compromise with Syria or the Palestinians. 
 
Instead, the Treaty opened the way for Israeli invasions, occupations and massacres in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, for strikes against Iraqi and Syrian nuclear sites, for brazen threats against Iran, for the 44-year occupation of the West Bank and the cruel blockade of Gaza, and for the pursuit of a “Greater Israel” agenda by fanatical Jewish settlers and religious nationalists. 
 
In turn, Arab dictators, invoking the challenge they faced from an aggressive and expansionist Israel, were able to justify the need to maintain tight control over their populations by means of harsh security measures. 
 
One way and another, the Israeli-Egyptian Treaty has contributed hugely to the dangerous instability and raw nerves which have characterized the Middle East to this day, as well as to the sharpening of popular grievances, and the inevitable explosions which have followed. 
 
Suffice it to say that, emboldened by the Treaty, Israel smashed Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor in 1981 and, the following year, invaded Lebanon in a bid to destroy the PLO, expel Syrian influence and bring Lebanon into Israel’s orbit. Israel’s 1982 invasion and siege of Beirut killed some 17,000 Lebanese and Palestinians. In an act of great immorality, Israel then provided cover (and arc-lights) to its Maronite allies as they engaged in a two-day slaughter of helpless Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. Israel remained in occupation of southern Lebanon for the next 18 years, until driven out in 2000 by Hizbullah guerrillas. So much for the Peace Treaty’s contribution to Middle East peace and stability!
 
The origins of the Peace Treaty can be traced to the diplomacy of Henry Kissinger, President Nixon’s National Security Adviser at the time of the October War. Anxious above all to protect Israel and contemptuous of Palestinian and Syrian aspirations, Kissinger maneuvered Egypt’s Anwar al-Sadat out of his alliance with both Syria and the Soviet Union, and towards a cozy relationship with Israel and the United States. 
 
With the 1975 Sinai Disengagement Agreement, Kissinger removed Egypt from the battlefield — a fateful decision which led directly to the Camp David accords of 1978, and the Peace Treaty of 1979. Sadat may have hoped for a comprehensive peace, involving the Palestinians and Syria. But he was out-foxed by Israel’s Prime Minister Menachem Begin, a fervent Zionist who was determined to destroy Palestinian nationalism and prevent the return of the West Bank to the Arabs. Begin was happy to return the Sinai to Egypt in order to keep the West Bank. 
 
Weakened at home by pro-Israeli forces, President Jimmy Carter witnessed unhappily the scaling down of his peace effort from its original multilateral aims to a mere bilateral outcome — a separate Israeli-Egyptian peace. At the end of the day, Washington swallowed Israel’s argument that the Treaty ruled out the threat of a regional war and was therefore in America’s interest. Egypt’s army was given $1.3bn annual U.S. subsidy — not to make it more warlike but, on the contrary, to keep it at peace with Israel. 
 
Defence of the Peace Treaty remains the prevailing wisdom in Washington. The Obama administration is reported to have told Egypt’s military chiefs that they must maintain the treaty. In turn, Egypt’s Supreme Military Council has said that Egypt will honour existing treaties. So there will evidently not be any revocation of the Treaty. No one in Egypt or in the Arab world favors a return to military action, nor is ready for it. But the Treaty may well be put on ice.
 
We do not yet know the color of the next Egyptian government. In any event, it will be hugely preoccupied with pressing domestic problems for the foreseeable future. But if, as is widely expected, this government will have a strong civilian component drawn from the various strands of the protest movement, adjustments of Egypt’s foreign policy must be expected.
 
It is highly unlikely that Egypt will continue Husni Mubarak’s policy — deeply embarrassing to Egyptian opinion — of colluding with Israel in the blockade of Gaza. Nor is the new Egypt likely to persist in Mubarak’s hostility towards the Islamic Republic of Iran and the two resistance movements, Hamas and Hizbullah. Whether the Treaty survives or not, Egypt’s alliance with Israel will not be the intimate relationship it was.
 
The Egyptian Revolution is only the latest demonstration of the change in Israel’s strategic environment. Israel ‘lost’ Iran when the Shah was overthrown in 1979. This was followed by the emergence of a Tehran-Damascus-Hizbullah axis, which has sought to challenge Israel’s regional hegemony. Over the past couple of years, Israel has also ‘lost’ Turkey, a former ally of real weight. It is now in danger of ‘losing’ Egypt. The threat looms of regional isolation. 
 
Moreover, Israel’s relentless seizure of Palestinian land on the West Bank and its refusal to engage in serious negotiations with the Palestinians and Syria on the basis of “land for peace” have lost it many former supporters in Europe and the United States. It is well aware that it faces a threat of de-legitimization.
 
How will Israel react to the Egyptian Revolution? Will it move troops to its border with Egypt, strengthen its defenses, desperately seek allies in the Egyptian military junta now temporarily in charge, and plead for still more American aid? Or will it — at long last — make a determined bid to resolve its territorial conflicts with Syria and Lebanon and allow the emergence of an independent Palestinian state with its capital in East Jerusalem? 
 
Israel urgently needs to rethink its security doctrine. This is the clear lesson of the dramatic events in Egypt. Dominating the region by force of arms — Israel’s doctrine since the creation of the State — is less and less of a viable option. It serves only to arouse ferocious and growing resistance, which must eventually erupt into violence. Israel needs a revolution in its security thinking, but of this there is as yet no sign. 
 
Only peace, not arms, can guarantee Israel’s long-term security.
 
 
Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).
 
Copyright © 2011 Patrick Seale – distributed by Agence Global
 
—————
Released: 14 February 2011
Word Count: 1,174
—————-

Rami G. Khouri, “Misconceptions of Terrorism”

-

BEIRUT — It has been depressing this week to watch mainstream American television networks cover Yemen and wider issues related to tensions and terrorism in our region. It is depressing because — with very few exceptions — the mass media that provides the majority of Americans with their news and views of world events is covering the Yemen story with a shocking combination of amateurism, ideological distortion, and selectivity. If the mass media is a mirror of the political system in the United States — and I believe it is — then it is no wonder that the past two decades have seen a steady expansion of two related and symbiotic problems: the spread of terrorism in and from the Arab-Asian region, and the spread of the American armed forces and covert operations in the same region.
 
Yemen media coverage captures this very neatly. The mainstream American media, especially network and cable television, mainly report that the problems that spur terrorism from Yemen are poverty, religious extremism, and ineffective government. Charismatic Muslim preachers, often using the Internet, are also widely mentioned these days as a real problem that exacerbates the terror threat. In every report I have seen, without fail, the thrust of the report is that terrorism is a consequence of Islamic religious extremism that is somehow connected with a visceral hatred of the United States or Western ways in general.
 
The flaw in this approach — and it was evident in President Barack Obama’s remarks last Thursday on how the United States will improve its intelligence defenses against terrorism — is that it refuses to acknowledge that terrorism in our age is largely a reactionary movement that responds to perceived threats against those societies from where the terrorists emerge. It is striking that in most cases of successful or failed terror attacks, the perpetrators or the organizations that send them to kill explain that they carry out their deed as a response to the deeds of others – such as Israel’s assault on Palestinians, the US and British armies in Iraq or Afghanistan, American drone attacks against militants in Yemen, or some other such issue. 
 
This fact has been well-documented by the pioneering work of Professor Robert Pape at the University of Chicago, whose analysis of over 500 “suicide” or “martyrdom” attacks around the world since 1980 indicates that, “what over 95 percent of all suicide terrorist attacks, around the world since 1980, have in common — from Lebanon, to Chechnya, to Sri Lanka, to Kashmir, to the West Bank — is not religion, but a specific strategic goal: to compel a modern democracy to withdraw combat forces from territory the terrorists view is their homeland, or prize greatly.” 
 
The unacceptable criminal nature of terror attacks against civilians in Arab, Western or South Asian cities is beyond question; they are totally intolerable and must be fought with all legitimate political, military and legal means. Yet if the starting point for fighting terror is only the terror attacks themselves and the societies from which they emanate, without fully acknowledging the wider cycle of political violence that also includes sustained aggressive policies by the United States, the United Kingdom, Israel, Arab governments and others in the region, we will only perpetuate the current insanity that I mentioned above: the simultaneous proliferation of terrorism, American armed forces, Israeli assassinations, and other elements of the full cycle of political violence in the Arab-Asian region. 
 
Tightening and sharpening the work of intelligence networks, as President Obama promised, will prevent some attacks, for sure, and should be done to protect innocent lives. But the likelihood of this removing the terror problem is nearly zero, for the terrorists will only shift the targets and means of their criminal deeds from more secure airplanes and airports to other more vulnerable and exposed targets, such as trains, boats, and municipal water, power, and transport systems. 
 
Mainstream American media coverage of terrorism, Yemen, and related issues is — with very few exceptions of quality analysis and reporting — a horror show of superficiality, selectivity and racist sensationalism. The latest culprits for the US media are “Muslim tele-evangelists,” as they are called. A few years ago, the culprits were the madrasas. Before that the culprits were the folks of Jazeera television. Before that they were Saudi-financed Salafists. Before that the problem was poverty and hopelessness. Before that it was Muslims who had trouble with “modernity.” Next month, the culprits will be someone else. When will this evasive nonsense ever stop, and when will mainstream American journalism executives grow up and act like adults, rather than adolescents, on this score?
 
The terror problem will persist among the strange and dangerous ways of radical Muslims in exotic mountainous lands, as long as American, Israeli and Arab state policies degrade and dehumanize normal people to the point where a few of them become abnormal criminals and terrorists. 
 
 
Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.
 
Copyright © 2010 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global
 
—————
Released: 11 January 2010
Word Count: 803
—————-
For rights and permissions, contact:
rights@agenceglobal.com, 1.336.686.9002 or 1.212.731.0757

From Yemen to Detroit: A Grim Year Ends

-

VILNIUS, Lithuania — In my desire to get a fresh perspective on the Middle East and also enjoy a white Christmas and New Year’s eve full of snow, my wife and I traveled to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, and succeeded in achieving both aims, along with seeing some dear old friends. The view of Vilnius in the snow is enchanting, but the view back towards the Middle East is frightening. An end-of-year glance around the region suggests that — hard as it may be to believe — political conditions have deteriorated to a large extent in many parts of our region, and very few countervailing improvements can also be noted.

While existing conflicts and tensions in Palestine-Israel, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and Lebanon continue to plague those lands and ripple out to neighbors, I have no doubt that the single most troublesome new development during the past year has been the escalation of the fighting in Yemen. Almost imperceptibly, with little international media coverage, Yemen has transformed itself into a place where three different political or military contests are underway: the government vs. the Houthis, some secessionists in the south, and a growing Al-Qaeda network. Meanwhile the Saudi Arabian and American armed forces are directly engaged in warfare against two of them — Houthis and Al-Qaeda — and the Iranian government is increasingly weighing in on the side of the Houthis.

Here in one package, at the end of this year we have all the major tension points of the contemporary Middle East converging in a single time and place — Al-Qaeda vs. everyone in the world, Iran vs. Arabs, the United States vs. Al-Qaeda, Shiites vs. Sunnis, rich Arabs vs. poor Arabs, and the failing centralized modern Arab security state vs. it indigenous tendency to disintegrate into tribal or regional units.

Just when we thought things could not get any worse in the Middle East, they do. This should not surprise anyone, because this has been the pattern for over three decades — ever since the combination of the 1967 war results and the advent of the oil boom in the early 1970s cemented the modern Arab security state order, Israeli colonial policies, direct American military involvement to protect the global energy reservoir, and the slow disintegration of Arab citizens’ expectations that they had rights provided to them by their state and government.

The fighting and ideological confrontations in Yemen are only the latest and most glaring examples of the wider underlying forces of tension that continue to plague the Middle East. The year now ending is not only a sad one that generates concern; it should also be a learning experience to help us probe why the Arab world persists as the only collectively turbulent and non-democratic region in the world. In that respect, 2009 highlights the three principal issues that drive the conflicts that continue to proliferate across the region.

In my view, these three vectors of turbulence and conflict are, in their order of importance:
1) the brittle states that define the modern Arab order, with their fundamental autocracy, occasional illegitimacies, prevalent corruption and mismanagement, and widespread mediocrity in meeting citizen needs;
2) the persistent direct or indirect interference of foreign powers, militarily, economically and politically; and,
3) the impact of the Arab-Israeli conflict on public opinion and state policies alike.

It is not mere coincidence that the year ended with an attempted attack on an American civilian airliner over Detroit, committed by a Nigerian former student in London who apparently prepared for his crime via links with an Al-Qaeda-related group in Yemen. The gravity of the attempted crime and the complex web of relationships that allowed it to reach implementation point cannot be explained by any single or simple reason, whether related to the psychology of a single young man, the foreign policy of a single country, or the pressures on citizens of any one Middle Eastern or African country.

The end of 2009 sees the United States actively involved in four wars — in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen. If this is not a wake-up call for Americans, I do not know what is. But it is a greater wake-up call for the people of the Arab world themselves, who remain fractured and in disarray due to their own domestic national incoherence and also the persistent need among many to actively resist American-Israeli policies and those of some allied conservative Arab governments.

This year ends with Yemen and Detroit beckoning us to try harder and act smarter in understanding the root causes of our wars, conflicts and profound irrationalities and excesses, reflected in our common savageries: Arabs oppressing and killing each other and trying to kill civilians in distant lands, Israelis colonizing and killing Arabs, or American armed forces attacking and killing simultaneously in four distant lands. Unraveling the madness starts with connecting the dots, because these are not isolated, unrelated dynamics.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

—————
Released: 30 December 2009
Word Count: 812
—————-

A Year Later: Gaza and Israel Both Under Siege

-

BEIRUT — A year after the Israeli attack on Gaza, a scorecard of “winners and losers” suggests that nobody won anything, but Israel has probably suffered political losses that it could not have envisioned when it decided to invade Gaza. I count seven main aims that Israel had in mind when it launched its war a year ago and tightened its siege of Gaza; one of them was achievable without a war, and the six others have not been achieved, or have turned things to Hamas’ and the Palestinians’ favor.

Here is my review of where things stand a year after the Gaza war:

1) Israel’s first aim was to stop the small projectiles fire that was directed at southern Israel from Gaza. Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups had twice stopped firing projectiles at Israel from Gaza in the two years before the war, according to the terms of truce accords that had been negotiated. The idea that a war was needed to stop the attacks is Zionist lying and deception at their worst, given that the attacks had been stopped through nonviolent agreements that saw Israel also cease its much more vicious and destructive attacks against Gaza.

2) Israel’s second unaccomplished aim was to try and destroy much of Hamas’ military and political infrastructure, and weaken it as a movement to be reckoned with. Hamas remains firmly in control of governance in Gaza, and a major national and regional actor. The greatest irony is that Israel has intensified its negotiations with Hamas, through German intermediation, to release the Israeli war prisoner Gilad Shalit.

3) The third Israeli aim was to force a weakened and chastened Hamas to release Shalit on terms advantageous to Israel, but the opposite is happening now. Israel’s stepped-up negotiations to release Shalit only strengthen Hamas’ credentials as a movement that resists Israel and thus generates more respect and credibility for itself. The imminent prisoner exchange will be a tacit admission by Israel that its military tactics failed, and it must engage Hamas politically instead.

4) Israel’s fourth aim was to weaken Hamas’ standing in Palestinian society and strengthen the standing of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The war resulted in exactly the opposite effect: Abbas has been grievously weakened by his Fateh movement’s behavior during and after the war, to the point where he has had to admit that he will not run for re-election.

5) The fifth Israeli aim was to re-establish its deterrence power and political supremacy over the Palestinians and other Arabs, as it had tried to do in attacking Lebanon in 2006. Israel assumed that unleashing its massive military power to kill and maim thousands of civilians and destroy normal life would cause frightened and chastened Palestinians and fellow Arabs to comply meekly with Israeli demands. This has not happened. The Arabs even refused to make even symbolic gestures of coexistence to Israel when US President Barack Obama asked for these in exchange for an Israeli settlement freeze.

6) Israel’s sixth aim was to reassert its self-confident political posture and sense of supremacy in the international community. The exact opposite has happened in the past year, as reflected in five dynamics: The international movement to boycott and divest from Israeli investments has gained steam; Israel is increasingly ignominiously compared to Apartheid South Africa; the Goldstone Report by the UN Human Rights Council struck a severe blow to Israel’s sense of invincibility and exemption from complying with international law dictates; Israeli officials are more hesitant to travel abroad for fear of being detained and indicted for war crimes; and, hardline pro-Israeli lobby groups in the United States and Europe are increasingly being challenged and subjected to public scrutiny.

7) Israel has tightened its strangulation siege of Gaza, hoping to force the Palestinians to surrender. The opposite has happened. The most important new development during the last year has been the world’s repeated negative assessment of Israel’s behavior, and calls for international political action to rein in Zionist military and colonial excesses. The latest example of this was the report three days ago by 16 British humanitarian and human rights organizations (including Amnesty International, Oxfam International, and Christian Aid) asking the European Union to commit itself to ending the blockade of Gaza and to put its relations with Israel on hold to achieve this.

Israel militarily attacked and laid siege to Gaza, but a year after its war Israel now finds itself under political siege by much of the world. Some Israel political and military leaders should not only be investigated for war crimes; to judge by the balance sheet of Israel’s standing a year after it attacked Gaza, they should also be held accountable by the Israeli and Jewish people for massive political incompetence and outright stupidity.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

—————
Released: 26 December 2009
Word Count: 796
—————-

A Bad Decade

-

BEIRUT — The coming week will see the close of one of the most dramatic decades in recent global history, and much of the action — mostly for worse — has taken place in the Middle East region. A journalistic colleague from Europe asked me the other day whether I agreed that nothing much had changed in the Middle East since 2001, because the region continues to be dominated by autocratic and dictatorial leaders and the rippling tensions of the Arab-Israeli conflict persist.

I disagreed, suggesting that the events of Sept. 11, 2001 and their aftermath had brought about significant changes in the region, and mostly negative ones.

The most important single policy change, which has impacted many other sectors, has been the normalization of foreign military powers entering the region and attacking at will, under the guise of responding to the 9/11 terror attack against the United States. American and British armies lead the way in Iraq and Afghanistan. The militarization and globalization of local tensions in Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia and Yemen in recent years reflect the latest phase of this process.

Parallel to Anglo-American militarization of the region has been deep Western acquiescence in Israel’s aggressive and deadly policies towards Palestinians and other Arabs. The two savage wars Israel launched against Lebanon and Gaza in 2006 and 2008 are central episodes in the new regional landscape of the past decade, which now includes Israel’s continuing siege of Gaza.

Western militarization in our region also translates into broad support for local autocrats and security-minded regimes that run roughshod over their people’s rights. This hardening of Arab security regimes and political dictatorships responds to short-term foreign aims, but betrays the hollowness of the Western (and occasional Arab) rhetoric about promoting democracy and human rights in the Middle East.

This American-led militarization of Middle Eastern policy reflects a deeper problem, which is the broad inability of the United States and other Western powers to develop a coherent policy towards the scourge of terrorism. As the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan now show, anti-American sentiments have increased among many people in those lands where American troops have attacked and stayed for years. The terrorism problem is also bigger today than it was in 2000, and more difficult to defeat, due to the proliferation and localization of terror groups that are often inspired by Al-Qaeda types but also motivated by the presence of foreign armies.

The natural military resistance against invading armies spills over to aggravate political threats to the integrity and stability in some countries, where the legitimacy and efficacy of the central state and its government may not resonate deeply with all citizens. Many Middle Eastern countries are now much more polarized than they were ten years ago, as tough security-minded governments tend to concentrate their controls on smaller areas of the country. The cumulative integrity and stability of Middle Eastern countries are less impressive now than they were a decade ago.

A third major change in the past decade has been the expanding influence of Iran throughout the region, which was seriously accelerated by the Anglo-American destruction of Iraq’s Baathist regime. Iran’s penetration of the Arab world has made it a major player in the region, and has helped shape a new regional Cold War that has sharply divided the Middle East into two ideological camps that occasionally battle each other militarily — either directly (Lebanon, Palestine) or through proxies (Yemen, Somalia, Iraq).

A fourth important development has been large-scale popular and political resistance to American-led policies that often include Israel and conservative Arab regimes. The massive use of American military power and political arm-twisting has triggered an equally meaningful response by once docile Arab, Iranian and Turkish populations that reject being victims of foreign militarism and neo-colonialism. Islamist groups like Hamas and Hizbullah tend to lead such forces, but others are also involved. This resistance helps define the regional Cold War. It has also triggered counter-resistance against it from many quarters of society that do not relish an Islamist-, Iranian- or Syrian-led Arab world — resulting, for example, in the Saad Hariri-led election victory in Lebanon last summer.

The fifth significant new factor in our region is the expansion of Turkish influence and contacts, which is mostly a positive development. Government policies and public opinion in Turkey both reflect key trends in the Arab world, including rejecting American and Israeli policies when these are seen to be inappropriate for Turkish national interests.

Our region has changed significantly in the past decade, mostly for the worse. This is a good time to reflect on the causes of our deterioration, so that we and our leaders do not collectively act like buffoons and simply perpetuate the mistakes that have defined our inauspicious start of this third millennium.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

—————
Released: 23 December 2009
Word Count: 796
—————-

The Democratic Value of Universal Accountability

-

BEIRUT — An important global dynamic today bridges the worlds of politics, morality and violence. Societies are grappling with the challenge of how to hold accountable the political leaders who are accused of various degrees of criminal behavior, including war crimes, torture — even genocide or crimes against humanity. The most outrageous cases are tried in special international tribunals or at the International Criminal Court. Other cases reflect more contested situations and raise critical issues of the universality of ethics and law.

Two cases last week in the United States and Israel are interesting in this respect, because these two countries remind us twice a week — and more often in war time and on patriotic national holidays — that they are democracies whose values should be spread around the world. Well, the world at the receiving end of their moral munificence frequently asks an important question to which it has yet to receive a clear answer:

Are the United States and Israel subject to the same standards of accountability for their behavior as everyone else in the world, or do they operate at a higher plane of impunity when it comes to using violence to kill, torture, and invade or occupy other peoples?

The relevant Israeli case saw Kadima Party leader Tzipi Livni cancel a trip to London because an arrest warrant had been issued for her by pro-Palestinian activists. They accused her of war crimes and crimes against humanity for her alleged role during Israel’s military assault on Gaza one year ago, when she was foreign minister. They want her to stand trial on charges that her decisions led to the deaths of over 750 Palestinian civilians.

Livni’s cancellation follows a similar case two months ago, when Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon did not travel to London on the advice of legal experts in his government, who warned him that he could possibly find himself arrested and put on trial for his part in a 2002 Israeli bombing raid against Gaza that killed 15 people (when he was armed forces chief of staff). Some Palestinians petitioned a court in London in September to arrest Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak for his role in the Gaza war, but that court decided that Barak enjoyed diplomatic immunity.

The fact that senior Israeli officials think twice about traveling abroad for fear of being indicted on war crimes charges is a positive development — if they are given a fair trial, and if the same standards of criminal culpability are used to assess the behavior of leaders in all other countries.

In the United States, courts similarly are weighing whether officials can or should be held accountable for their actions during the George W. Bush administration in cases of alleged torture and mistreatment of prisoners that the US captured during the “global war on terror.”

A US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco this week considered a case that claimed five victims of “extraordinary rendition” and torture were criminally mistreated. The court will decide whether to allow a full trial to take place, or accept arguments of the Bush and Obama administrations that the executive branch can stop any such legal cases on the basis of “national security” concerns.

Critics of the US government’s behavior argue that the courts are the last resort for limiting or ending the government’s use of kidnapping, secret detention, abuse and torture to address national security issues. Accountability, they argue, not impunity, is the appropriate response in this case. Various court levels in the United States offer slightly different responses. The Supreme Court seemed to support the government last week when it let stand a federal appeals court ruling that had dismissed a lawsuit by four British citizens at the Guantánamo Bay prison who accused the US government of wrongly arresting, detaining and mistreating them.

This line of thinking suggests that “enhanced interrogation techniques” can be used when the government feels the need to do so in the battle against terrorism. The charges accused the US government of using procedures like prolonged sleep and food deprivation, forcing prisoners into stress positions, sexual humiliation, death threats, simulated drowning (water-boarding), repeated beatings, extremes of hot and cold, forced nakedness, interrogations at gun point, menacing with unmuzzled dogs, and religious and racial harassment — actions that have been clearly documented in congressional reports and Justice Department memos. The issue is whether they are acceptable behavior, or criminal actions for which the officials who ordered them should be held accountable.

If strong, aggressive military powers like the United States and Israel remain above the law, then the law becomes meaningless for everyone else. Holding the US and Israel accountable like everyone else, according to a single, equitable standard of justice and behavior, is the best way to spread the democratic values they otherwise disdain when they claim to be immune from such accountability.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

—————
Released: 21 December 2009
Word Count: 807
—————-

Blaming the Goldstone Report

-

BEIRUT — A brief news item in the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) a few days ago made depressing reading. It was entitled: “State Department blames Goldstone for stalled peace talks.”

“Wow!” I thought to myself, has it really come down to this? The United States and Israel, who do not hesitate to toot their horn about their democratic credentials, now blame the stalled Arab-Israeli peace-making process on the publication of the report on the potential war crimes of the Gaza war issued in September by the UN Human Rights Council enquiry commission headed by Judge Richard Goldstone?

It is hard to think of a more distorted and backwards brand of political morality than this American-Israeli view of the Goldstone report, which most of the world sees as a historic breakthrough in the elusive quest to apply international norms of accountability to the savagery that has come to define Arab-Israeli warfare.

The JTS report noted:

The Goldstone report drove the Israelis and Palestinians apart, a U.S. State Department official said. The aside by Assistant U.S. Secretary of State P.J. Crowley in a briefing for reporters Tuesday was the clearest signal of U.S. frustration with the United Nations Human Rights Council report into last winter’s Gaza war, authored by South African Justice Richard Goldstone, that recommended war crimes charges against Israel and Hamas.

“It’s not a failure, because the process isn’t over,” Crowley said of Palestinian-Israel talks. “The process is ongoing. But clearly, in the aftermath of the Goldstone report, we’ve seen this fairly substantial gap emerge, and we’re seeing what we can do to move both sides closer to a decision to enter into negotiations.”

After its publication in September, Israel insisted on quashing the report as a precondition for going forward with the peace process; the Palestinian Authority has insisted it be addressed.

If the US position truly is that the fairly substantial gap in peacemaking has emerged “in the aftermath of the Goldstone report,” then we have three enormous problems on hand that are certain to doom any prospect of serious peace negotiations in the near future. Instead, we are much more likely to witness a new round of warfare, though it is difficult to know where that will be (the likely prospects are Gaza, the West Bank, Israel, Lebanon and Iran).

The three problems are the illusions that peacemaking is actually going on and has stalled; that the Goldstone Report is an obstacle to peacemaking; and that — in this instance, at least — the United States is an impartial mediator that seeks the best interests of Israelis and Arabs by trying to promote negotiations on the basis of prevailing international law and norms.

The Goldstone Report is a challenging document for all concerned, no doubt, but the attempt to align the conduct of states at war with agreed international ethical standards always is. The report is important because it provides several essential and constructive elements that have been missing from recent Arab-Israeli peace-making attempts, and are glaringly absent from the American desire to shape diplomatic mediation in its own image and interests. These elements are:

• An impartial assessment of the conduct of both warring parties in the Gaza war by a respected third party;
• Assessing both warring parties’ conduct simultaneously against the same standards of established international humanitarian law and human rights law;
• Demanding that those who wage war indiscriminately be held accountable and not be allowed to kill and maim with impunity;
• Proposing escalating mechanisms of accountability to end impunity through established international forums if the parties do not seriously investigate the charges against them.

Such a balanced attempt to use the rule of law as a means to blunt the scourge of war, siege and terror against civilians is admirable, and should be promoted as vigorously as possible, especially if the process is anchored in international legitimacy and conducted by respected men and women. The United States and Israel appear sick as they keep attacking the Goldstone Report as the purported reason for the breakdown of the peace negotiations, when the reality is that these negotiations have been going nowhere for decades under the weight of continued Israeli colonization of Arab lands that remains impervious to any Arab or international pressure.

The United States and Israel do not seem to care if their position runs against the grain of the rest of the world’s thinking. They seem comfortable smashing the global commitment to the rule of law, in order to protect the American-Israeli penchant for military supremacy as the only law that matters. For two countries that work overtime to market their democratic credentials, it seems hypocritical at best, and criminal at worst, to lead such a frenzied assault on the first serious and credible attempt in modern history to hold Israelis and Palestinians equally accountable for their conduct in war.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

—————
Released: 16 December 2009
Word Count: 804
—————-

Norway’s Ethical Leadership

-

BEIRUT — While US President Barack Obama has not been able to secure a total freeze of Israeli settlements, several European governments and the European Union (EU) collectively have undertaken a series of measures related to Israeli colonization policies in the occupied West Bank that are worth noting. The increasing focus on the criminality of Israel’s colonization in some Western countries may represent a new point of pressure that — like the international boycott of South Africa — could ultimately push Israel to a more responsible and realistic political response to the criticisms of its colonialism.

Three separate incidents lead me to suggest this:

• The Norwegian government decided to withdraw its investments from an Israeli firm that is involved in construction of Israel’s Apartheid wall (or separation barrier, as it is more euphemistically called) in the West Bank.

• The Swedes drafted a resolution to the EU last week affirming East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state, which was watered down to a call by the EU to Palestinians and Israelis to share the city.

• The British government decided last week to change food labeling guidelines to indicate if goods originate from Palestinian producers or Israeli settlements and colonies.

The Norwegian decision is the most powerful because of its decisiveness, ethical clarity, and political self-confidence. Norway announced in September that its national pension fund would no longer invest in the Israeli company Elbit Systems because the fund’s council on ethics believed that such an investment “constitutes an unacceptable risk of contribution to serious violations of fundamental ethical norms as a result of the company’s integral involvement in Israel’s construction of a separation barrier on occupied territory” in the West Bank. The company provides a surveillance system for use in the Apartheid Wall.

“We do not wish to fund companies that so directly contribute to violations of international humanitarian law,” Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen said, explaining the Norwegian decision. “The surveillance system has been specially designed in close collaboration with the buyer and has no other applications.”

How refreshing! A respectable Western country actually puts its money where its mouth is, by using ethical guidelines to define its investments, and is not afraid to stand up to the sort of political blackmail and pressure that Israel and its goons in Washington and London typically apply to intimidate those governments from pursuing ethical foreign policies.

The council on ethics was established in 2004, “to issue recommendations on the exclusion of one or more companies from the investment universe where there is deemed to exist a considerable risk of contributing to actions or omissions that involve: Gross or systematic violation of human rights, such as murder, torture, deprivation of liberty, forced labor, the worst forms of child labor and other forms of child exploitation; gross violations of individual rights in war or conflict situations; severe environmental degradation; gross corruption, or other particularly serious violations of fundamental ethical norms.”

The fund held around $6 million worth of Elbit shares and sold them just before announcing the decision to divest.

Norway’s fellow Europeans fall short of its moral clarity and political self-confidence, but nevertheless they are making small but meaningful steps in that direction — which should worry Israel. The latest move was the decision by the British government to have food labels distinguish goods from Palestinians in the occupied territories from goods produced in Israeli settlements — rather than merely stating that the source is “Israel” or the “West Bank.” The government said it opposed boycotting Israeli goods, but took this move because it sees the settlements as an obstacle to peace.

The British decision is a step forward, though it is disappointing that the British government will not take a more forceful position on the clear illegality in international law of Israel’s colonies. Great Britain could have struck a doubly redemptive blow for itself and its muddy historical legacy, given that it was a premier pioneer in both its own colonial empire spread around the world and the Zionist enterprise that colonized the land of Palestine which had been 95 percent Arab a century ago.

The third noteworthy move is similarly significant but not overwhelmingly so — the EU’s statement that Palestinians and Israelis should share Jerusalem. The original Swedish draft asserting Arab East Jerusalem as occupied land and the capital of a future Palestinian state would have been the more forceful, ethical and politically courageous thing to do, but it seems that this is rarely the European way these days.

Nevertheless, these and other smaller steps are worth noting because they all tend to acknowledge the illegal or problematic nature of Israeli policies, which is likely to increase the pressure on Israel to change those policies, just as happened in South Africa a few decades ago.

Rami G. Khouri is Editor-at-large of The Daily Star, and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut, in Beirut, Lebanon.

Copyright © 2009 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

—————
Released: 14 December 2009
Word Count: 799
—————-

Syndication Services

Agence Global (AG) is a specialist news, opinion and feature syndication agency.

Rights & Permissions

Email us or call us 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for rights and permission to publish our clients’ material. One of our representatives will respond in less than 30 minutes over 80% of the time.

Social Media

Advisories

Editors may ask their representative for inclusion in daily advisories. Sign up to get advisories on the content that fits your publishing needs, at rates that fit your budget.