AMMAN — You know we’re in trouble when much public sentiment in the Arab world probably backs the Somali pirates who last week captured a Saudi Arabian supertanker carrying $100 million of crude oil. If there is a single incident that captures the strange dynamics that have defined our region for the past 50 years or so, this is it: The lawless brigands of a collapsed, poverty-stricken, and often violent state grab the paramount symbol of the modern Arab world — an oil tanker heading for the West — and the rest of the Arab world remains mostly silent and indifferent.

This week in Beirut and on a working visit to Jordan, I asked many people’s views on the hijacking of the Saudi oil tanker. I got three striking and frightening responses: mostly shrugs of the shoulder, some perfunctory expressions of distaste for criminal piracy, and an occasional wicked sense of glee by a few especially stressed people whose daily lives were becoming more and more a losing battle to make ends meet, and who experienced vicarious thrills in the daring deviance and lawlessness of the pirates.

Somali piracy has captured some international attention suddenly, because global sea-borne assets are now threatened, though the suffering and death of Somalis remain strangely invisible to the world.

The global response has been a colossal failure to understand what all this really means. Most comments I have heard focus on the need for greater security cooperation, a sort of “surge-at-sea” strategy to defeat the pirates militarily. This is probably a futile approach in the long run if it only focuses on defeating brazen criminality, without addressing the underlying causes of state collapse that gives birth to the piracy phenomenon in the first place.

The deeper symbolism and lessons to be grasped in the whole Somali piracy phenomenon reflect the modern history of the two poles of this latest incident — Somalia and Saudi Arabia. They nicely capture three dominant trends that have defined the modern Arab world in the past 50 years or so:

1. Wealthy oil-producing states and their Arab security-state allies that have spent trillions of dollars on state-building, without credibly achieving sustainable development, reliable security, or respect and influence around the world.

2. The sad history of low-income Arab countries that were born distorted thanks to the European colonial enterprise, and then suffered decades on end of home-grown dictatorships and incompetent governance, leading to total state collapse, as in Somalia.

3. The erratic performance of world powers in such cases, whether alternately supporting and attacking regimes in Somalia, willfully sending in foreign troops (including Ethiopian proxies most recently), or ignoring the consequences of such foreign intervention when the state collapses into chaos and criminality.

Somalia has not had a functioning government since 1991, when the former dictator Mohammad Siad Barre was ousted after 22 years in power, during which he alternated between Soviet and American support. Somali statehood since 1960 has been a dismal and failed affair, with the eight million Somalis now scattered among five different adjacent countries and territories — a typical post-colonial situation in this case reflecting the audacious handiwork of Italy and Great Britain.

Piracy, like terrorism, is an acquired habit; it mirrors a deeper malaise that is usually captured in the broad swaths of public opinion among ordinary men and women who reject the criminal deeds, but share the resentments, anger and fear that abound in their societies. The most important thing about the Somali pirates these days is not the loss of a few million dollars in ransom they have requested and sometimes secured (compared to trillions of dollars that have vaporized around global equity and real estate markets). The really frightening thing about Somali pirates is what they reveal about the disenchantment and despair in much of the Arab world.

These sentiments translate mostly into enormous popular disinterest about the fate of the hijacked ships, and occasional quiet satisfaction that somebody, somewhere in the Arab world is fighting back against a system of modern statehood, economic mismanagement and global politics that has been wickedly erratic in its performance. Once again — as in Yemen, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Sudan, Algeria and other distressed and occasionally fractured lands — Somalia and its troubles offers a window through which we can see the deeper distortions that plague the Arab world, and the consequent mass resentments that fuel its agitated citizens.

The Saudis will get back their tanker and its cargo of $100 million of crude oil, as they should. The other hijacked ships will also be released, some for paid ransom. The piracy will stop one day, as it must, when everyone involved in this amazing little drama — the Somalis themselves, the Arabs around them, the world’s trading and military powers — act on the basis that human beings have as much right to security and the protection of the rule of law as ships carrying oil, tanks, cars and tennis shoes.

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 © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 24 November 2008
Word Count: 818
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BEIRUT — A remarkable thing just happened in one of the leading Western democracies: A man of color was elected to a major leadership position in his society that had often discriminated against his people. I am not speaking about Barack Obama’s presidential victory. Perhaps as remarkable in the long run as Obama’s win was the selection last week of a Turkish immigrant’s son as the leader of the major political party in Germany.

Cem Ozdemir, 42, was elected Saturday as co-leader of the Green Party, capping a career in the German and European parliaments that started in 1994. In terms of breaking color and ethnic barriers, this equals or even tops the historic first elected American Black president, because the nature of European societies is so much less pluralistic and culturally-racially-ethnically less egalitarian than American society.

Full integration in Europe, and the political triumph of men and women of color, will be a much more difficult achievement than it has been in the United States, because the nature of the societies and the place of minorities in them are both very different from one another.

The American system from the start always held out the promise of racial and ethnic equality and opportunity. It was only a matter of time — when, not whether — we would see a Black American president, because that land was forged politically in a spirit and promise of equality — regardless of the fact that for the initial centuries the equality was only for land- and slave-owning white males. Blacks have assumed almost every other major position in the United States in recent decades, including senators and congressmen and women, Supreme Court justices, cabinet ministers, secretaries of state, business and civic leaders, and heads of the armed forces.

The promise of equal opportunity has unfurled steadily in the past century for Blacks, Hispanics, women, Jews and others in the United States, who had been formerly discriminated against in institutional and — often legal — ways. Critical barriers were broken when Black men and women rose to the top of such traditionally White-dominated arenas as golf, tennis and professional baseball team managers — important symbolic markers in the culture of the United States, where sports plays a role similar to tribalism in the rest of the world. By reaching the highest summit in the land, Barack Obama dramatically capped a virtuous trend that had been going on for some time.

In Germany and most of Europe, the landscape is not so clear, the opportunity and the promise not so explicit. White Christian societies have absorbed men and women of color or from alien religions mainly through colonial conquest or the imperatives of importing low-wage, unskilled labor. No promise of equal rights, opportunity or citizenship-through-immigration historically beckons immigrants of color from lands to the south and east — even if the color is only a light olive hue.

Turks, Italians and Spaniards, for example, travel seasonally to northern Europe to work as “guest workers” in homes and factories, but are rarely given citizenship. They are attracted to jobs they do not have at home and appreciate the income and decent working conditions. Many leave their children and families in their countries of origin, and usually do not expect either citizenship or equality.

But a first generation has now seen its sons and daughters born and raised in Western Europe. Cem Ozdemir was born in southern Germany and raised and educated there in German schools. These now native children of Germany grasp that they, too, are in fact eligible for the bounty of equal rights and boundless opportunity in the lands that have inherited them — the lands of their birth.

These children of immigrants are not immigrants any more, but in a single generation have become natives and citizens. They participate in civic activities, sports, and elections, demanding their rights not as Turks or Muslims, but as German citizens who take their constitutional guarantees seriously.

Germany alone now has 2.6 million Turkish citizens or residents, accounting for 3 percent of the population. Some 660,000 have become citizens since 1972, but rarely have they risen to the top of their professions. That has now changed dramatically with a Turkish-German head of a major political party that stands a chance of sharing power in a coalition with Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. Federal elections are scheduled for next September.

In Germany, the Greens and the Christian Democrats already operate an efficient ruling coalition in Hamburg, making power-sharing at the national level more possible. A Muslim woman of Algerian origin is a cabinet minister in France — a similar sign of the slow but steady integration of citizens of Middle Eastern origin, usually Muslims, into European democracies.

This is exciting and historically profound, given the monotone, White Christian heritage of Europe that generally has not advertised itself as a nation that welcomed immigrants on a large scale. American and European democracies are showing their best faces these days.

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 © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 19 November 2008
Word Count: 819
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BEIRUT — US President-elect Barack Obama has much on his foreign policy plate and he will have to make some hard decisions about prioritizing the issues his team will address. The Middle East is likely to emerge quickly as a high priority area, given that many of the key concerns of the United States and the world directly emanate from, or are closely linked to, the Middle East, i.e., energy, terrorism, religious radicalism, illegal immigration, drugs, and non-proliferation of nuclear fuels, and weapons of mass destruction.

When the region’s many conflicts are boiled down to their essence, however, two core sources of tension account for most of the regional and global confrontations that plague the Middle East. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict — and its wider Arab-Israeli conflict– is one, and the other is the Iranian-American confrontation — with its wider Iranian-Western-Israeli tensions.

Obama’s foreign policy team would do well to review recent history in the Middle East to grasp how so many active conflicts or mere ideological confrontations can be traced back to these two quarrels. The rise of Hizbullah since the early 1980s, for example, is an example of how both of these conflicts can generate new political dynamics and even military confrontations if they are left to linger for years.

Hizbullah’s emergence as a powerful, but not universally loved, Lebanese-Shiite group also reflects the third consistent source of political tension and turbulence in the Middle East: the prevalence of Arab domestic political governance systems that are either grossly autocratic and dictatorial, or, as in Lebanon’s case, merely steadily dysfunctional. These three sources of tension reflect a fearsome combination of local and regional discontent and some global grievances related to how Western powers have behaved in the region for the past century or so.

Resolving the assorted legitimate grievances that underpin the ongoing conflicts requires first and foremost an honest, comprehensive assessment of precisely what the real problems are that need to be resolved. The people of the Middle East and foreign parties that have interests here (such as their armies, for starters) must first sort out hyperbole and diversionary ideological zealotry from the genuine disputes and core oppositions that are anchored in historical reality.

For a first example, we can easily put aside the mutual accusations that the United States and Iran both wish to dominate the entire Middle East and both wish to pursue their hegemonic aspirations. Another area where there is a great dela of room for realism and accuracy to replace hysteria is in the role of Israeli interests in these wider relationships. Does the United States confront Iran these days because of genuine fears that Iran will harm American national interests — or mainly because Israeli fear of a nuclear Iran drives American policy?

In the same vein, why should the United States and Hamas be at loggerheads? They do not directly confront or threaten each other, and they should be able to coexist peacefully, were it not for the fact that Islamists like Hamas fight Israeli occupation and also challenge pro-American Arab regimes.

For decades now, we have argued these issues in a cat-and-mouse-like game of each side claiming that its own policies only aim to defend national interests and repel the other side’s aggression. That approach not only has gotten us nowhere, it has also exacerbated the cycle of confrontation that see the Middle East today dominated by angry and fearful populations, increasingly autocratic and security-led governments, foreign armies, terrorist groups, resistance movements, and political violence as an everyday reality in many countries.

The new American administration provides an opportunity for all concerned to reconsider our collective basic approach to conflict-resolution in the region, particularly in view of Barack Obama’s stated willingness to diplomatically engage rather than just sanction and threaten Iranians and other adversaries.

A critical first step is to sort out the genuine conflicts from the ideological rhetoric — the political posturing, electoral populism, and demagoguery.

Winding down the Iraq war and withdrawing American troops will be an important move — but only a marginal issue in the wider confrontations that are all rooted in pre-Iraq war dynamics. Those wider confrontations usually bring us back to the Arab-Israeli conflict and the Iranian-American-Israeli-Western confrontation. (The other major issue, transforming Arab autocrats into democrats, will take some time and will have to be driven by the Arab people themselves).

The past several decades have provided many valuable lessons in how to fail in resolving or toning down these two conflicts. It is important now to zero in on these two crises as core drivers of many of the region’s problems. But in so doing, we also must sort out the real causes of conflict from the manufactured stresses and imagined threats of the many ideological warriors on both sides who still plague and hamper us all.

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 © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 17 November 2008
Word Count: 803
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NEW YORK — Amidst the dancing, smiling and tears of joy in much of America, there is also deep awareness of how hard it will be for Barack Obama’s administration to fix the multiple messes at home and abroad that it inherits from George W. Bush. A key to success will be for Obama to recognize quickly that he stands before an opportunity similar to that which Bush had on September 12, 2001 — to harness massive, almost unquestioning, domestic and global support for the American president in facing a very serious threat in the wake of a traumatic experience.

The trauma of 9/11 was a criminal terror attack against the United States, while today it is a collapsing global economy and assorted international tensions. Heightened emotions — whether today’s joy or 9/11’s anger — should not be allowed to cause otherwise sensible people to make wrong decisions by misreading how they interact with the world.

George W. Bush and his band of zealots used the anger-based emotional high after 9/11 to simultaneously misdiagnose themselves, their enemies, their friends and their place in the world. Consequently, they pursued catastrophic domestic and foreign policies. Obama must beware such pitfalls. He and his senior officials must understand more accurately how the United States and the world actually interact, in good times or bad, in order to forge policies based on credible analyses that are free of self-congratulatory emotionalism or pride.

All Americans rightly enjoy this well deserved moment of celebratory joy, reflecting the political acumen, moral fortitude, and vibrant democracy that have given us a President Obama. Americans will need the renewed self-confidence in order to aim high to resolve the enormous problems and challenges ahead, and not to be intimidated by their own foibles or the crimes of foreign terrorists.

Americans have a self-satisfied glow on their faces because they have banished the demons of their native racism against their own Black citizens. They are admired because they demonstrated again the real power and genius of the democratic process, exercised in an environment of freedom.

Here is the essential point that Obama and his foreign policy officials must grasp quickly, and hold on to tightly: American democracy and related domestic values are not the same as American foreign policy. The world did not hate the United States for its freedom in 2001, and will not love it for its democracy in 2008. Let us banish these simplistic worldviews forever, and start anew. Now is the time to grasp the critical interaction among three separate things that are deeply intertwined — American values, American foreign policy, and the world’s views of the United States.

In Boston and New York this week, I have already read and heard some comments to the effect that many people around the world who criticize or even “hate” the United States will now change their mind, because they now see the real heart of America in action — opportunity, goodness, tolerance and genuine equality. This risks repeating in 2008-09 the same mistakes that fearful and confused Republicans made in 2001.

Those huge majorities of people around the world who criticize the United States do so primarily because of the impact of Washington’s foreign policy on their lives and societies. Not only are they not criticizing American values such as democracy; in fact they keep coming to the United States, often illegally, to live in a society defined by those values. They aspire to American-style democratic elections and anti-discrimination laws and policies in their own countries.

But they also see and feel a direct connection between their own autocratic or even dictatorial regimes and the support of the United States and other Western powers, sometimes going back 30 or 40 years. While admiring democratic freedoms, prosperity and stability inside the United States, they wonder why they and others suffer from an American power and policies that support dictatorships, and promote violence, instability and pauperization. American core values and foreign policy ideally should reflect the same principles, but in practice they often are two very different things.

Obama now has an extraordinary opportunity: to realign American domestic and foreign values, and thus to reconnect the United States with the world. He can build on the recently demonstrated uplifting and best traditions of America that have brought him to the White House.

The convergence between his country’s traditions and the developing world’s aspirations stands before him now like a three-point basketball shot that can seal his – and so many others’ — victory. It is a shot he is capable of making, if he dispassionately and accurately analyses his position, the playing field around him, and the real balance between his friends and foes.

This is a moment for Americans to dance with joy, but also to think straight about themselves and their foreign policy, and about the world out there that wants passionately to dance with them.

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 © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 10 November 2008
Word Count: 810
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BOSTON — I am writing this column Tuesday morning as Americans vote in their presidential election. Wednesday morning we should know who wins, and Americans can be proud of another quite spectacular exercise in electoral democracy.

Nowhere else in the world does a national leadership achieve incumbency by going through such intense, sustained — and at times silly — scrutiny by the media, local political and social institutions, and — most importantly of all — daily, direct contact with the voting public. Yet, there is a dark side to American political culture that we experience alongside its wondrous aspects, which the electoral campaign exposed in all its ugliness.

In America today, Arabs and Muslims are the last group of people that can be insulted and denigrated at will. Racism is the weak underbelly of American culture and life, the skeleton in the closet that keeps reappearing now and then in isolated incidents and occasional larger waves that roll across an embarrassed land. For all the great things we witnessed in the election, we also saw a cruel and evil slice of Americana that was manifested in attacks against Barack Obama that pointed out his real or imagined associations with Islam and Arabs.

Insinuating that Obama should be rejected because his middle name is Hussein, or because he is secretly Muslim or Arab, or because he has Arab friends like the Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi is bad enough. The worst part of this vicious and disgraceful side of American life is that very, very few people spoke up in public to say that being Arab or Muslim is not in itself an evil or a crime.

Gen. Colin Powell was the most prominent American who publicly said that being a Muslim and being an American are not contradictory. He should be commended for doing so, despite his legacy of political complicity and personal cowardice in being a useful and supporting prop for George W. Bush’s wasteful and destructive war in Iraq.

Colin Powell found his political courage late in life, but he found it, which cannot be said for most other American public figures.

When John McCain heard a supporter’s concern that maybe Obama was an Arab, his sinister reply was to quickly defend Obama as a good and decent man — not to say that being an Arab is perfectly ok and does not in itself signify anything pernicious or dangerous. McCain may have been a courageous American in war; he has proven to be a pitiful and spiteful American in politics.

His accusations against Obama’s association with Rashid Khalidi are the low point of his own campaign and perhaps of modern American politics. Anyone who knows Rashid Khalidi knows him to be a respected scholar, an American citizen who has been associated with two of the very best American universities — Chicago and Columbia — and a tireless advocate of a negotiated Palestinian-Israeli peace that gives both peoples equal rights in adjacent states.

Rashid Khalidi’s crime, it seems, is simply to have been born a Palestinian Arab, and to dare to know an American presidential candidate. Obama’s crime, it seems, according to the McCain-Palin worldview, is simply to speak to Palestinians.

The deeper hurtful reality this election campaign has revealed is that Arabs and Muslims are the new Jews and Blacks in America, because they are treated today in the same way that Jews and Blacks (then called Negroes) were treated throughout the early- and mid-20th Century.

Legal action, political agitation, and civic activism brought an end to the public vilification of Jews and Negroes in the United States — though racism and anti-Semitism continue to operate quietly in the hearts and minds of some Americans who refuse to see all their brothers and sisters as equal before God and the law.

It is neither legally possible nor politically acceptable today to treat Jews and Blacks in a racist, condescending manner in the United States, and that is now a considerable source of pride for Americans as a whole.

It is possible and permissible, though, to slander Arabs and Muslims in public — even by candidates for president and vice president. The reasons for this are complex, many, and evolving (the 9/11 attacks and oil dependency, for example, added a new dimension to anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism, but did not create the problem).

The new president will inherit this world where racism against Arabs and Muslims is the last permissible form of wholesale slander and denigration. This must be addressed through spirited collective activism in law, politics and society, so that Arabs and Muslims, like Jews and Blacks, can live like human beings in America, not like animals that can be caricatured, hounded, herded and hunted at will. The presidential campaign confirms much that Americans can be proud of today, along with some things that still cause them real shame.

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 © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 05 November 2008
Word Count: 811
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BOSTON — The news a few days ago that the United States government is considering negotiations with elements of the Taliban in Afghanistan as part of a wider strategy to wind down the war in that country is stunning news, but not surprising.

It is not surprising because this follows a pattern we are witnessing throughout the Arab-Asian region: US-backed governments in half a dozen countries are losing their battles and political confrontations with Islamist-led indigenous oppositions, and must form national unity governments or explore other means of power-sharing.

And now we learn from American news reports in Washington, the United States itself is “actively considering talks with elements of the Taliban, the armed Islamist group that once ruled Afghanistan and sheltered al Qaeda, in a major policy shift that would have been unthinkable a few months ago,” as the Wall Street Journal put it.

The Bush administration explains this development by saying that engaging some elements of the Taliban — though not the Al-Qaeda-linked diehards — could contribute to reducing the level of fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan. This is an area where violence has increased and become more widespread. And at htis time, the US-led NATO troops continue to increase in number to over 45,000, and fuel a cycle of violence and war instead of ending it.

The idea of the Afghan government, with US support and involvement, reaching out to some Taliban elements is one draft recommendation in an ongoing administration assessment of US strategy in Afghanistan.

It is worth noting the wider context in which this is happening, because it may be an important new sign of sobering minds coming to terms with reality that may be affecting leaders in many countries in the Arab-Asian region.

This region needs and deserves more peaceful methods of resolving conflicts, after having been transformed in the past decade into a severe maelstrom of political violence, war, invasions, occupation, terrorism and resistance that have been practiced in various forms by local governments, opposition groups, and foreign armies alike.

The tentative American-Afghan move to engage the Taliban politically is actively supported by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, a welcomed sign that Washington is finally learning the value of seeing and resolving conflicts in their wider local and regional context.

We may well see something similar happen in Iraq, including American-Iranian-Saudi-Syrian contacts in the near future.

These kinds of developments can only happen when key players decide it is time to resolve conflicts by responding to the reasonable and legitimate demands of all sides, rather than trying to bludgeon one side into submission through military force. So it is no surprise to see political engagements and some cooperative agreements taking shape between US-supported governments and their Islamist allies (in places like Lebanon, Palestine, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Somalia), in the wake of unsuccessful attempts to “win” through military assault and/or terrorism.

Simultaneously negotiations, truce accords or prisoner exchanges are taking place on a semi-regular basis among Israel, Syria, Hamas, Hizbullah, and the PLO, suggesting that these warring foes also wish to explore negotiated rather than military resolutions of their conflicts.

At the same time, talks continue between Iran and the major Western countries that fear its (alleged) plans to develop nuclear weapons. The Iranians say they do not want weapons, only the right to develop a full nuclear fuel cycle for energy production, which they are allowed to do under existing international regulations and conventions. They have mastered much of the uranium enrichment technology, and they suspended enrichment once before in their negotiations with the Western powers and the UN. So they would seem to be ripe for a deal that allows them to manage their full fuel cycle without producing weapons, with intrusive international inspections to ensure this.

These very different issues — Iran’s nuclear assets, Arab-Israeli talks, US-Taliban feelers, unity governments and cease-fires in half a dozen Arab-Asian warring lands – seem totally unconnected. But in fact, they may form a coherent regional picture of political leaderships and militant movements that have fought each other to a draw, and are ripe for non-violent conflict resolution through power-sharing arrangements that are free of foreign military hegemony.

A pivotal moment is approaching in the coming nine months that will see elections for new leaderships in the United States, Israel, Palestine, and Iran — four of the key players in this picture of exhausted but stubborn warriors.

If wiser political leaders replace the broadly incompetent and the occasionally pathetic ones that now rule the United States, Israel, Palestine and Iran, and incumbent leaders in other relevant countries summon more wisdom and courage, they could trigger historic changes. They could move away from military invasion, occupation, resistance and terrorism as hallmarks of their wasteful and destructive ways, just as wiser leaders than ours did in Northern Ireland and South Africa in recent decades.

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 © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 03 November 2008
Word Count: 806
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BOSTON — If you’re keeping score of George W. Bush’s foreign military adventures, under “Somalia” you should probably chalk up another one for the Americans in the “loss” column. But the latest developments in Somalia are not only fascinating for what they tell us about the misconduct of American foreign policy in recent years.

Somalia seems to offer more intriguing evidence about how governments often must come to terms with militias, insurgent forces and other such informal armed groups in countries around the Arab-Asian region — and the roles these entities play where formal governments appears unable to deliver the basic requirements of statehood.

On October 26, in an agreement in Djibouti brokered by the United Nations, the Transitional Federal Government (TFG) of Somalia and the Alliance for the Re-Liberation of Somalia (ARS) agreed that the Ethiopian troops who invaded the country two years ago with American support would start to withdraw from the capital of Mogadishu as a prelude to leaving all of Somalia. The two sides also agreed that insurgent troops and the official armed forces would jointly police this battered country which is on the brink of a massive humanitarian disaster.

This is a fragile agreement and could collapse if some of the insurgent groups do not adhere to its ceasefire provisions. Yet the mere fact that the agreement was reached represents another setback for American-backed efforts to use proxy forces to fight against indigenous Islamist forces that have gained strength in many parts of the Arab-Asian region. This seems to be the sixth country in the past two years where United States-supported and -armed governments have had to come to terms with local Islamists who have either challenged the government or built parallel governance systems alongside the official ones.

In Lebanon, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Palestine and Somalia — to varying degrees, and in very different contexts — we have witnessed US-backed governments fight back against Islamist groups, and in some cases — due to defeat or merely fatigue and stalemate — make overtures to the opposition to find a modus vivendi that formalizes the role of the insurgents in running the state.

• In Afghanistan, the government has merely broached the idea of talking with the Taliban and has not gone so far as to strike a deal.
• In Lebanon, the Hizbullah-led opposition shares power in the cabinet.
• In Iraq, the United States and the Iraqi government bought off some Islamist and tribal insurgents in order to fight the more onerous Al-Qaeda killers.
• In Pakistan, the army fights some Taliban-friendly Islamists and tribalists, while most of the parliament prefers to talk and strike a deal that ends the domestic fighting and terror.
• In Palestine, Hamas defeated Fateh and now rules in Gaza until they return to a unity government soon, and Hamas also forced Israel to accept a cease-fire as a likely prelude to a prisoner exchange and a longer cease-fire.

Is there a pattern here, or just a string of bad luck for the Legions of Liberty of George Bush and Condi Rice? Perhaps, six instances in a row don’t make a pattern, but neither can these instances be dismissed as unfortunate bad luck for Washington.

A more reasonable assessment would suggest that indigenous forces fighting for what they believe to be their sovereignty and their liberation from foreign invaders or hegemons are more likely to succeed in the end because they tend to fight in their own communities and with greater intensity.

Some of these groups (the Taliban) are totalitarian thugs. Others are legitimate nationalists (Hamas and Hizbullah). And others fall in between. More interesting is the other half of the equation — the US-backed government forces that fight them, and that ultimately have to change course and strike a deal. The deal-making process is intriguing, partly because in most of these cases it has not worked very well. Its significance is not in the successes, but in the attempts to achieve peace and security through political bargains.

It is too early to tell what will happen in any or all of these cases. All of them, though, confirm yet again the futility of distant powers using foreign armies and local proxies as an instrument of imposing their will on local populations who are usually more inclined to make a deal than to engage in perpetual war.

If the transitional government and the insurgents in Somalia succeed in implementing the cease-fire and working out power-sharing arrangements, they would provide a rare example of how to do this after driving out the foreign forces.

Six consecutive examples of American-backed governments changing their policies and coming to terms with their insurgent foes may not be a pattern. We’ll leave that for the academics.

Let’s just agree that it is a fascinating sequence of six consecutive American-backed governments changing their policies and coming to terms with their insurgent foes.

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 © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 29 October 2008
Word Count: 818
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BOSTON — It’s hard to know whether the most appropriate reply to the sudden Israeli expressions of interest in the 2002 Arab peace plan should be “Hallelujah!” or “Who are they kidding?”

There are good reasons to read only massive insincerity in the Israeli position, but also room to ask if this is an opening the Arabs and all peace-loving people should explore with more vigor than doubt. The Arab response to Israel’s sudden discovery of the Arab peace plan should be well-studied, coordinated and realistic. Even if the Israelis are bluffing, we should call their bluff, most importantly by making sure that the core elements of the Arab peace plan remain on the table and unchanged in any significant way.

The Israeli expressions of interest in the Arab peace plan are hard to fathom in terms of their seriousness, motivation or intent. Israeli President Shimon Peres said last week during a visit to Egypt that the 2002 Arab peace initiative could bring peace to the Middle East.

“In tandem with the bilateral negotiations with the Palestinians, we need to promote the Arab peace initiative,” he told reporters, adding that the Saudi-initiated plan was correct in spirit, but “needs to be negotiated” further.

A few days earlier, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Israeli leaders were seriously considering the Arab peace plan, which he said he had discussed with Prime Minister-designate Tzipi Livni.

“There is definitely room to introduce a comprehensive Israeli plan to counter the Saudi plan that would be the basis for a discussion on overall regional peace,” he said in a radio interview.

Arab commentators have been scathing in their skepticism of the sudden Israeli interest in the Arab peace initiative that was first agreed during the 2002 Arab summit in Beirut, and reconfirmed several times since then. This is understandable, given that Israeli actions on the ground in recent years have been about fighting and killing Arabs and colonizing their land, especially in Palestine, rather than making peace.

A report issued this week by the World Bank is a timely reminder of how Israel’s policies sharply contradict its words. The report says that the West Bank’s economy is suffering from a severe and debilitating lack of investment largely due to Israeli restrictions on movement, and despite increased international aid. The 48-page report issued on October 23, states that massive foreign aid “has succeeded in doing little more than slowing down the deterioration of the economy, despite ever larger volumes.”

It notes that Palestinian per capita gross domestic product in 2007 was 40 percent lower than its peak in 1999, and that investment “dropped to precariously low levels,” with virtually no new public investment in the last two years. It points to the fragmentation of the West Bank into “a multitude of enclaves, with a regime of movement restrictions between them,” as a main reason for the economic deterioration.

“The physical access restrictions are the most visible, with 38 percent of the land area reserved by the government of Israel to serve settlements and security objectives,” states the report.

Key constraints include the expanding population of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem (totaling 461,000 people), violence by settlers against Palestinians that creates a “permanent state of insecurity,” the increasing number of Israeli walls, roadblocks, and checkpoints, and Israeli restrictions on Palestinians’ access to their own land and water.

So what should we believe, the statements of largely discredited Israeli leaders, or the actions of the Israeli government on the ground? Actions certainly speak louder than words, but words also have significance. After all, the Arab peace plan itself is a bunch of words, and we expect Israeli to respond to it.

We should not get lost or sidetracked in the many possible reasons why some Israelis may have suddenly woken up to the importance of the Arab peace plan. Their motives are interesting for their own psychological self-assessment. From our perspective in the Arab world, it is more important to keep challenging the Israelis to respond to the Arab peace plan seriously, which they have not done for the past seven years.

One of the reasons that most peace-making attempts in recent years have failed is that they reflected the balance of power on the ground — which remains in Israel’s favor — rather than being built on a foundation of accepted international law or norms that would treat both sides as equals who should enjoy the same rights of statehood, sovereignty and security. This seems to be the sort of situation that cries out for a serious, impartial external mediator who can bring together two parties who may be sending strong signals to each other.

Both sides speak of making peace, but neither side has made clear its willingness to make the tough concessions necessary to achieve their most cherished rights and goals.

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 © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 27 October 2008
Word Count: 808
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BOSTON — One of the most fascinating developments in the Middle East these days is the attempt by the US and Iraqi governments to negotiate an agreement defining the status of American troops in Iraq, including a target date for all US troops to leave by 2011. A critical issue still being negotiated is the liability and legal jurisdiction for American troops that stay in the country.

This is important not only in the narrow sense of the legal status of American troops in Iraq, but also for wider issues related to relations between major Western powers and weaker Arab countries. In many respects, this is a moment of historical clarification and adjustment in the wake of over a century in which Western powers moved their armies around the Arab world at will, making and breaking Arab countries and political leaderships in the Arab world and Iran.

The wider issue at stake beyond American soldiers in Iraq is the effective end of the colonial era mentality that put Western troops and officials above the law, and kept indigenous Arab and Iranian national interests subservient to the greater colonial dictates of powers like England, France and, today, the United States.

The agreement being hammered out has generated some fresh concern and open opposition from various Iraqi groups, including Muqtada Sadr’s religious-nationalists, some of the Shiites in the ruling coalition, and even some Sunni groups who are generally seen to be keen on maintaining an American presence to protect them.

The complexity of sealing the agreement reflects these wider historical issues, but also the changing nature of the soldiering profession. The American armed forces now subcontract many noncombat duties to commercial companies, such as transport, food supplies, security for officials or other kinds of logistics. The current draft of the agreement says that private American security companies and other such contractors would be subject to the Iraqi legal system in criminal cases, a major Iraqi demand that the Americans appear to have accepted as inevitable.

On the other hand, American soldiers themselves would continue to be immune from the provisions of Iraqi justice, except in cases of serious or premeditated felonies committed when they were not on duty. The Iraqi government wants full legal jurisdiction over American troops, but the United States resists this. A compromise is likely to be worked out.

Other tricky issues include the right of Iraqis to search imported American supplies, whether the Iraqi government would have the right to extend the American military presence in the country beyond 2011, and whether the United States would have the right to form a committee to review suspected crimes of soldiers in order to determine if they should be tried in Iraqi courts.

These technicalities capture the bigger picture very nicely, and the Iraqis negotiating this matter should be encouraged to stand their ground and work out an agreement that sets a precedent for others in the Middle East or even around the world. The United States invaded Iraq in 2003, with a view to launching a new political order in the Middle East in which indigenous democracies worked closely with the US and other allies to promote stability and security — worthy goals in the abstract, indeed, but flawed because of the inappropriate Anglo-American decision to achieve them through war.

Ironically, as the United States prepares to start withdrawing from Iraq, it will leave behind a political and legal agreement with the Iraqi government that establishes new limits on the ability of American and other Western troops to move around the region at will and with total impunity.

How the legal jurisdiction issue is resolved in Iraq may help determine whether Western armies have total impunity to do anything they wish, cause tremendous and perhaps lasting damage throughout the Middle East, and then leave without any lasting consequences for them. In the colonial days, this was the case. Soldiers must not be above the law, but the politicians who sent them on their aggressive mission must also be held accountable somehow to decent standards of both law and morality.

Today, we need to find out if the colonial period has ended or not. If the US and Iraqi governments work out an agreement that allows American troops, subcontractors and modern mercenaries to remain above the law of the land in Iraq, we will all suffer for years to come. Americans and perhaps other Western powers will continue to undertake outrageous military adventures that leave the Middle East in much worse shape than it was before they attacked, including in such sectors as ethnic and sectarian strife, terrorism, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, refugee flows, general security, and economic stress.

Impunity is a bad idea, for children, petty criminals, and corporate thieves — as well as for countries and their armies.

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 © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 22 October 2008
Word Count: 802
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BOSTON — The global financial crisis has overshadowed all other issues in the American presidential election campaign that is now in its last weeks. This includes several important Middle Eastern issues that had attracted much attention in the past two years. This is a temporary phase, because at least four distinct Middle Eastern issues will re-emerge on the international stage early next year: Iraq, Iran, Arab-Israeli peace-making, and the indictments to be presented in the international investigation of the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and other Lebanese public figures.

Each of these four issues on its own is potentially divisive and can lead to renewed political tensions or serious military action involving local actors as well as foreign powers. It is striking to see, during a visit to the United States this month, how little attention the Middle East receives in the public arena. These issues certainly will soon rear their heads again, because the underlying forces that drive them remain active.

The one issue that remains seriously moribund is Arab-Israeli peacemaking, for three critical reasons. The Palestinians are badly divided and cannot possible negotiate a credible peace agreement. The Israelis are equally fluid in their own national leadership. The United States, which remains the critical external mediator in the long run, has made it absolutely clear in the past several decades that its diplomatic involvement rests on a foundation of pro-Israeli interests and dictates rather than on trying to broker a fair deal.

The long-term impact of the festering Arab-Israeli conflict on other issues in the Middle East continues to be actively debated. My own sense is that nearly explicit American support for Israeli colonization policies and disdain for UN resolutions and the norms of international law have had a radicalizing effect throughout the Middle East, in the Arab world and Iran alike. The growth and strength of Hizbullah and Hamas, for example, are directly linked to the perpetuation of the status quo in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The pro-Israeli tilt of the US government is a reality that will continue for many years to come. Only occasionally does the American government go against Israel’s wishes, mainly because elected politicians have learned through bitter experience (e.g., Charles Percy, Paul Findley and others) that challenging Israel in public or merely calling for an even-handed position by the United States means losing your next election. This reflects the ability of well-organized pro-Israel groups to pressure politicians by using votes, campaign funding, media impact, and the threats of labeling politicians anti-Israel, which translates into anti-Semitic in the American political lexicon.

Consequently, as this presidential election reconfirms, candidates stumble over each other in a frenzied dash to show how much they support and love Israel — with barely a word about the rights of Palestinians or the relevance of international law or UN resolutions. This is not likely to change soon, as we were reminded October 17, in an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that listed all the Jewish Americans who are so influential in the current campaign.

The article, entitled Members of the tribe: 36 Jews who have shaped the 2008 U.S. election, explained how: “…the Jewish vote remains a key element in battleground states, and, playing a wide variety of roles, Jews have helped to shape the campaigns.”

It listed 36 Jews who have significant and direct influence on the candidates or their parties. (Had such an article been published in an American, Arab or European newspaper, it would have been slammed as anti-Semitic provocation for mentioning the influence of Jewish Americans.)

It seems reasonable to conclude that nothing will change in the United States in the near future when it comes to Washington’s diplomatic posture vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict.

Which brings us back to the wider picture in the Middle East, and how the Arab-Israeli conflict intersects with the other big issues in the region. The next American administration will have to decide quickly if it wants to continue on the same path that the last several presidents have pursued — giving us the current violent and fragmenting condition of the Middle East in which the United States is deeply involved militarily — or whether it might take a fresh look at a different approach that might respond to core Arab and Israeli demands and rights while allowing other hot spots in the region to cool down.

This will not be discussed during the American presidential campaign, given the obligatory pro-Israeli tilt and its impact on issues like Iran, Lebanon, Hizbullah, Iraq and Syria. After the election, though, real options will have to be considered, which will once again test the common sense and diplomatic wisdom of Arabs, Israelis, Iranians, Americans and others who have joined hands in recent decades to send the Middle East into an endless and expanding spiral of anger, fear, extremism and violence.

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 © 2008 Rami G. Khouri – distributed by Agence Global

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Released: 20 October 2008
Word Count: 810
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