BEIRUT — New Yorker magazine investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has sparked fresh debate with his latest article alleging that Washington’s new policy to confront Iran in the region sees it sending American money and other assistance to extremist Sunni groups, sometimes via the Lebanese and Saudi governments, in order to confront and weaken Hizbullah, Syria and Iran.

Do not pity or jeer Washington alone, for every single player in this tale — the United States, Hizbullah, the Lebanese government, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia — wriggles uncomfortably in the mess they collectively created through their shortsighted policies of recent years. I suspect this mirrors something much bigger: We are at a potentially historic moment when the modern Arab state order that was created by the Europeans in 1920 has started to fray at its edges and its core, perhaps in what we might call the Great Arab Unraveling.

Shattered Iraq is the immediate driver of this possible dissolution and reconfiguration of Arab states that had held together rather well for nearly four generations. It is only the most dramatic case of an Arab country that wrestles with its own coherence, legitimacy and viability. Lebanon and Palestine have struggled with statehood for half a century; Somalia has quietly dropped out of this game; Kuwait vanished and quickly reappeared; Yemen split, reunited, split, fought a war, and reunited; Sudan spins like a centrifuge, with national and tribal forces pushing away from a centralized state; Morocco and the Western Sahara dance gingerly around their logical association; and internal tensions plague other Arab countries to varying degrees.

A learned British friend reminded me this week of the mixed legacy of Euro-manufactured countries, in three states that were created at the Paris Peace Conference after World War I: Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia and Iraq. Not an inspiring record. The Anglo-American war to change the Iraqi regime has triggered wider regional tensions, by unleashing powerful and often antagonistic forces of ethnic, religious and tribal identities, most of which have formed their own militias. All militias thrive on Arab, Iranian and Western support. It is no surprise that Washington now may be indirectly assisting Sunni fundamentalist radicals of the ilk who attacked the United States in recent years. America, welcome to the Middle East. The Middle East is not Orange County, California, and the militias’ trucks with anti-tank rockets and other killing machines do not drive around with government-issued EZ Passes to get through checkpoints.

The United States obviously decided several months ago to shift into fallback position and plan B on Iraq. The surge in U.S. troops to Iran probably camouflages the American retreat to more defensible lines in the Arab world, where it can fight against Iran and its mostly Islamist, but also Syrian government, Baathist friends, allies, and surrogates. Washington and its friends are desperate to control the genie they unleashed in Iraq, but they are wrong to see the threat primarily as a Shiite-Iranian one. Those are core elements of the groups that fight the United States, Israel and some allied Arab regimes. It is more useful to recognize that the driving force for the anti-U.S. and anti-Israeli loose coalition of forces in the region is, precisely, U.S. and Israeli policies in the region.

The Middle East has suffered so much homegrown internal tyranny and sustained external assaults that it has become a dangerous pressure cooker, given that the majority of citizens live with enormous and still growing dissatisfactions in their economic, social, ethnic, religious or national lives. If the pressure is not relieved by allowing the region and its states to define themselves and their governance values, the whole pot will explode. I suspect we are witnessing both things happening together these days.

On the one hand, Islamist, ethnic, sectarian and tribal movements grow and flourish all over the Middle East — and are aided by Iran — in a dramatic example of collective self-assertion. On the other hand, massive external pressure, led by the United States, some Europeans, Israel, and some Arab governments, fights back, hoping to keep the lid on a region trying to define itself and liberate itself from the modern legacy of Anglo-American-Israeli armies.

The pervasive incoherence of this bizarre picture makes it perfectly routine for Arab monarchies to support Salafist terrorists, for Western democracies to ignore the results of Arab free elections, for Iranians and Arabs, and Shiites and Sunnis, to work hand in hand and also fight bitter wars, for Islamist and secular Arab revolutionaries to join forces, for freedom lovers in London and Washington to support seasoned Arab autocrats and the occasional loveable tyrant, for Western and Arab rule of law advocates to sponsor militias, and for Israel and the United States to perpetuate Israeli policies that exacerbate rather than calm security threats and vulnerabilities for all in the region.

Short-term panic, medium-term confusion and long-term directionlessness have long defined policies by Americans, British, Arabs, Israelis, and Iranians alike in this region. They have only become more obvious these days, as confrontation, defiance and war in the Middle East interact to signal the end of an era and the start of a new one. This spectacle, which includes but transcends the Great Arab Unraveling, is in its very early days. Harrowing things are yet come.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 28 February 2007
Word Count: 873
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DUBAI — I had the pleasure last week of spending a few days in Doha and Dubai, two booming Gulf emirates that contrast sharply with the tensions and occasional turbulence of my home in Beirut. Without exception, on this trip and during our daily lives throughout the Middle East, the one theme that continuously reasserts itself — especially in discussions among Arabs themselves — is: Why is this region so volatile, violent, unstable, prone to extremist rhetoric and actions, and riddled with instability and militarism?

The opportunity to engage in long conversations with learned people and a few slightly more suspect political types in the heady, hyper-growth atmosphere of the emirates of Dubai and Qatar also offers a useful perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the entire Arab region. Qatar and Dubai have planned and implemented impressive developmental programs that have started to catch the attention of the world for more than only their dramatic architecture or occasional eccentricities. The order, excitement and ongoing expansion of these cities contrast starkly with the ravages and tensions that define much of the rest of the Arab world.

We are all well aware of the problems of grief-stricken lands like Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Algeria, Yemen and Somalia, plagued by war, civil strife and perpetual stagnation. Even countries that are renowned for their stability and strict security, like Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia, suffer a combination of intermittent political violence and terror attacks, alongside pent-up domestic political and social tensions. The latest example was last week’s shootout between police and terrorists in Tunisia, which should only heighten our acknowledgement that even the most efficient police states ultimately generate their own forms of instability, insurrection and incoherence.

Why is this so? Why is the entire Arab world — even some Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain — susceptible to chronic tension that manifests itself in regular outbursts of terrorism or domestic strife? Simple and occasionally sinister minds in faraway lands would explain this by culture, religion or values, or by claiming that masses of ordinary Arabs have simply allowed their emotions to overcome them and thus have not permitted themselves to engage in the joys of modernity, democracy and liberty.

I think there is a better explanation, which will not please those far away who accuse us of blaming all our ailments on foreigners and history. I suspect that much of the Arab world is a chronic mess because it is the only region in the world that simultaneously suffers the debilitating consequences of two of the most wretched and wrenching forces in modern history: the distress and distortions of post-colonial societies the Europeans manufactured and then abandoned in the 20th Century, and the new stresses and dysfunctionalism of the neo-colonial policies the United States is spearheading in this region — and only in this region — in the wake of the Cold War and the advent of the post-9/11 “global war on terror”. For some reason, we in the Arab world must endure the worst of the 19th and 21st Centuries combined.

Only the Arab region in the entire world suffers the mass self-abuse of police states and soft autocracies that are the legacy of the post-colonial period in the 20th Century that brought into being the modern Arab political order, alongside the renewed abuse of foreign armies that march into the region today to repeat the state-making, regime-crafting mistakes of their imperial predecessors a century ago. The British, of course, get the prize here, having come into Iraq and other lands several times in the past century, and always with similarly negative consequences of chronic instability and national incoherence. Their shameful hallmark legacies are visible today in Palestine, Sudan, Iraq and other tortured lands. The Americans under George W. Bush seem to be learning the same awful game.

It is hard enough trying to sort out the lingering distortions and problematic legacies of 19th and 20th Century European colonialism, as some Arab societies are trying to do. It is impossible to attempt this, though, when these societies simultaneously are subjected again to military attacks, long-term occupations and strategies for regime change and social values reconfigurations by the American, British, Israeli and Micronesian political establishments. It is no wonder that our region is such a mess.

The single most important difference between this round of foreign assaults on the Arab world and the experience last century is that the natives are more aware, less willing to passively accept their fate, and more inclined to resist and fight back. This makes for a long period ahead of turmoil and confrontation, as we have witnessed in the past few years.

Will the Arab world be able one day soon to look forward to a century, even just a few decades, without foreign invasions, imperial conquests, colonial state-crafting, post-colonial police states, and neo-colonial threats, assaults and regime changes?

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 26 February 2007
Word Count: 806
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DOHA, Qatar — It is no surprise that at the annual meeting of the U.S.-Islamic World Forum here in Doha, sponsored by the Brookings Institution and the State of Qatar, the focus of discussion returns repeatedly to American policies throughout the Middle East. The heart of U.S.-Islamic World relations is the discord over the Middle East, but that issue also clouds wider perceptions of the United States around the entire Islamic world.

At this annual gathering of some 200 distinguished personalities from all walks of life, we experience two related phenomena: We reap the wisdom of scholars, analysts and pollsters who chart for us the broad trends — mostly deterioration — in American-Islamic perceptions, and simultaneously we get to watch Americans and Arabs show with their words why these two communities continue to express mutual hostility and fear.

The dynamic is uneven, but now mutual. For years the United States has used its military and diplomatic power to pursue its aims in the region, overthrowing regimes and trying to rearrange the political and social landscape. In September 2001, a band of killers from the Arab world attacked the United States, and Washington responded with armed fury. It waged a “global war on terror” that has achieved a few measurable successes, but sparked many more currents of concern and resistance around the Islamic and Arab worlds.

The statistical data from many reputable pollsters is consistent. One recent American survey of the Arab world (University of Maryland with Zogby International) shows that 78 percent of Arabs have a somewhat or very unfavorable view of the United States, while 72 percent of Arabs polled see the United States as the biggest state threat to them. A global survey of 40 Islamic communities by the American Gallup organization shows that Muslims admire American technology, freedom and democracy, but want more “respect” from Americans. Not surprisingly, the poll found that 57 percent of Americans, when asked what they admired most about Muslim societies, said “nothing” or “I don’t know.”

This is not a foundation for a mutually constructive relationship, and it shows very clearly every time Americans and Arabs/Muslims gather to talk, as happened in Doha last weekend. Private discussions among those who view themselves as adversaries or even fear each other tend to be useful, frank and satisfying; the public debate, however, verges ever more negatively on the insulting and the catastrophic. You only need listen to American officials speak publicly at such gatherings to understand why nearly four out of five Arabs have an unfavorable view of the United States and its policies.

Last year the inimitable Karen Hughes, U.S. Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy, gave a talk that could have won a prize for naïveté, arrogance, poor preaching, and insult all rolled into one. This year, the task of further lowering Arab-Islamic esteem of the U.S. government fell to Ambassador David Satterfield, the senior adviser and coordinator for Iraq in the U.S. Department of State.

The gist of his remarks was that the U.S. public and government have limited patience in Iraq, and it is up to Iraqis now to take change of their future by acting in a national rather than a sectarian fashion. He noted correctly that Iraq now represents a potential strategic threat to the entire region in the form of sectarian conflict, while saying that the United States could act mainly as a “catalyst” from now on as Iraqis took charge of their destiny. He also said that the challenge to Iraq and others comes from those terrorists and insurgents “who try to achieve their goals through the use of violence” — as if the United States primarily used Tootsie Rolls and iPods, not weapons, in its occupation of Iraq.

The potential destruction that might be unleashed around the Middle East — and possibly the world — from the unilateral American decision to go to war in Iraq is only now starting to become clear, as Satterfield noted. For the United States to say that its patience is limited and it can be a catalyst at best in the face of the furies and destruction it has unleashed by its war in Iraq is precisely the sort of neocolonial, self-serving double standard that causes so many people around the world to fear and resist it.

The issue of responsibility, impunity and accountability is rising higher on the list of priorities of people around the world who wish to end this cycle of fear and war that seems to define the United States and much of the Arab-Islamic world. Saddam Hussein and his Baathist thugs were finally held accountable and killed. Similar judicial processes, but with more legitimacy, are underway in Lebanon and Sudan.

One wonders: Are only Arabs and Muslims to be held accountable for their brutality and crimes? Or is it possible to ask that those in the United States, the UK, Israel, and other lands who have caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people also be held accountable to world public opinion and the rule of law? Only then can we hope to slow down and perhaps stop this terrible cycle of perpetual tyranny and war in our region, which is now closely associated with a penchant for mutual disdain and distrust among ordinary Americans, Arabs and Muslims.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 21 February 2007
Word Count: 879
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BEIRUT — The very sensible six-nation agreement reached with North Korea earlier this week to end its nuclear armaments program came at a time when more details were being circulated about an Iranian offer to the United States in Spring 2003, which addressed all bilateral issues that have chilled relations between Tehran and Washington. The contrast between the American-brokered deal reached with North Korea and the continuing saber-rattling going on with Iran is stark, and perhaps unnecessary.

The North Korean agreement was a sign of sensible American diplomacy, which contrasts sharply with the nonsensical approach that Washington has often used on major foreign policy issues. Too often, especially in the Middle East — most especially when exaggerated pro-Israeli interests influence its policy — Washington has tended to rely more on sanctions, threats and military force than on the reasonable deal-making that has been a routine, even core, element of diplomacy among nations for thousands of years.

The North Korean agreement — essentially ending North Korea’s nuclear arms program in return for energy, food, financial aid, and normalized relations — indicates that the United States is indeed capable of sensible decision-making on the basis of mutually beneficial and reasonable compromises. It confirms that useful results can emerge from diplomatically engaging and negotiating with a country and leadership that one dislikes, disdains or fears. It affirms again that such an outcome is more likely to occur when concerned neighbors are part of the process, as were South Korea, Japan, China and others in this case.

The North Korean precedent is very relevant to the Middle East because the United States is involved in a direct, perhaps escalating, confrontation with several important players in this region, namely Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and a series of other Islamist movements that reflect huge segments of public opinion. These are unsavory characters in Washington’s view, and should not be approached other than with ultimatums, threats, sanctions, military moves and the like.

Yet the policy of confrontation, encirclement and attack that the United States has pursued in much of the Middle East seems only to have made this region a more violent and unstable place. Where Washington does offer to engage and talk, it usually does so on the back of severe preconditions — such as Iran suspending its uranium enrichment program, or Hamas unilaterally recognizing Israel without any reciprocal Israeli gesture to the Palestinians. Such offers to talk, engage and negotiate are not serious, because they cannot possibly be accepted by those to whom they are made. They require the a priori acceptance of American-Israeli demands by Arabs or Iranians, instead of getting to such acceptance through the diplomatic process.

The Iranians, Palestinians, Syrians and others have a range of both sensible and unreasonable positions on a variety of issues, as does every party to any dispute anywhere in the world. Yet when one side in a dispute offers to talk without preconditions, and to explore how differences could be narrowed and agreement achieved, it would seem useful to call its bluff and explore what can be achieved through peaceful talks.

This is immediately relevant because powerful Iranians are once again making gestures towards the United States, this time in the person of former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was quoted Wednesday as saying that Tehran would remove obstacles blocking negotiations with Washington were the latter to show good will towards Iran — i.e., stop threatening to change its regime or attack it. Iran, under former President Mohammad Khatami, made a similar though more formal gesture to the United States in Spring 2003, in the form of a letter sent through the Swiss ambassador in Tehran to the Bush administration. Iran then specified its willingness to discuss issues including its nuclear program, support for militant Palestinians, and other regional issues of concern to the United States and the countries of the region. The Bush White House ignored that overture, as it has done with the latest Rafsanjani offer, at least in public.

The fascinating question is: Why is the United States capable of rational compromises and large doses of healthy humility in a situation like North Korea, but not in the Middle East? No single issue can explain this. It is probably due to several factors, including powerful Israeli influences on US policy, oil and energy issues, the centrality of American-induced transformation of the Middle East in the neo-conservative agenda that drives Washington — as well as continued reactions to the trauma of 9/11 and persistent terror fears.

The irony, it would seem, is that the United States could achieve meaningful, lasting progress on all these fronts, and a few others that interest it, if it used an approach similar to the one that has achieved a breakthrough with North Korea. It has nothing to lose, and much to gain. So why does it not do so?

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 19 February 2007
Word Count: 803
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BEIRUT — 14 February marks the second anniversary of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. Tragically, but not surprisingly, it was foreshadowed the morning before by two bomb blasts that ripped apart commuter buses in the Bekfaya area northeast of Beirut, killing three civilians and wounding many others. This only heightens the intensity of the Hariri assassination commemorations, while further complicating the nature of the political confrontations that now define Lebanon and the region.

If we step back from the tensions and outbursts of violence that define Lebanon and the region, and try to see the larger trends that define the past two years, we would see three principal parties competing for power and strategic dominance in the Middle East. These are: traditional Middle Eastern security-dominated states like Syria, Egypt, Jordan, Iran and Fateh in Palestine; Islamist and militant movements that generally challenge these state powers (even while they work with them in cases, such as Hizbullah’s ties with Syria and Iran); and, foreign governments, mainly the United States, Israel and some part-time Europeans, who increasingly engage in the Middle East with their armies and diplomatic dictates. Advocates of democracy and the rule of law try to poke their head into this scene, with little success.

The Middle East seems like the world’s last frontier, a wide open terrain that is nationally confused, precarious in its security systems, culturally intense in its self-assertive Islamist reaction to secular and foreign failures, and ideologically up for grabs. As local and foreign forces compete intensely to control the landscape and define its ideology, new players enter the scene or expand their roles, such as Russia, China, the international business community, and the UN Security Council. In the past two years — as they have for half a century — these forces that compete to dominate and define the Middle East have converged on Lebanon in many forms: local political and sectarian foes, military battles with Israel, ideological face-offs with regional powers, the direct involvement of foreign armies and governments, and enhanced involvement by the United Nations and its peace-keeping forces.

What deserves the most attention on this second anniversary of Hariri’s murder, as bombings and killings continue to plague Lebanon and the entire region? I would say it is the status of the Lebanese-international tribunal that was mandated by the UN Security Council to try those who will be accused of the Hariri assassination. The historic central dynamic here is that the total, collective force of the international community, working through the legitimacy of the UN Security Council, is confronting head-on the tradition of modern Arab political violence, intimidation, terror and lawlessness. The tribunal, with the ongoing investigation into the Hariri and other murders, represents a serious international will to end the impunity that criminal assassins have enjoyed in the modern Arab world, especially when those killers are part of, or hired by, ruling regimes and security agencies.

The UN investigation into the Hariri murder initially pointed the finger towards Syria a year ago, and provided information that prompted the Beirut government to detain four top Lebanese security chiefs — itself an extraordinary development in modern Arab history that remains insufficiently appreciated. Syria has consistently declared its innocence, and has fought back politically and fervently, using every available means, including various allies in Lebanon.

Friends of Syria say it is leading the battle against American hegemonic aims to control the Middle East by using the UN investigation and international tribunal to bludgeon Arab foes, just as it used its army to change the regime in Baghdad. Foes of Syria accuse it of the serial killing of Lebanese public figures, and being willing to turn Lebanon into a desolate wasteland in the Damascus regime’s desperate, selfish bid to survive and dominate the Levant. Our best hope is that the final findings of the UN investigation this year will provide the solid evidence that might allow us to judge which of these views is closer to the truth.

In the meantime, the last two years suggest that street battles, vicious media confrontations, and even occasional wars will not significantly change the general balance of power in Lebanon or the region, where pro-Syrian/Iranian forces and pro-American forces are equally matched. The struggle over the Lebanese-international tribunal strikes me as the key contest that may change things in the long term, because it holds out the hope of punishing those who have killed with impunity and who, by doing so, have kept the Arab world in the stranglehold of its own violent political retardation. The Bekfaya bombings only heighten our revulsion at Arab political criminality, yet also add to the urgency of ending or containing it.

The Hariri murder tribunal is the first serious local and international attempt to counter the rule of the gangsters in the modern Arab world with the rule of law, and to replace criminal impunity with judicial accountability. Critics of the technical terms of the tribunal must be heard, and their legitimate objections must be met with reasonable modifications. The process must be seen through to completion, though, or the Arab world will face many more decades of death on the world’s last lawless frontier.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 14 February 2007
Word Count: 862
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BEIRUT — The most significant thing about the national unity government agreement signed February 8, by the Palestinian groups Hamas and Fateh in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, under Saudi auspices, is that it was signed in Mecca under Saudi auspices. It is probably more important for what it tells us about Saudi diplomatic stirrings than Palestinian-Israeli issues.

If this is the beginning of a new era in which diplomatically dynamic Saudis and politically pragmatic Palestinians assert themselves more forcefully on the regional stage, we might be on the threshold of better days ahead for the Middle East. I would not bet the family savings on this, but neither would I ignore the potential that is there.

We need not expect this accord to jump start a new Arab-Israeli peace process, mainly because Israel and the United States — with Western Europe increasingly in tow — have not seriously explored real openings for a negotiated peace in the past decade. The most forceful move ever made by the four-member Quartet (United States, UN, EU and Russia) that is supposed to shepherd the peace-making process was to slap sanctions and tough demands on the Hamas-led Palestinian government — without ever making equal, parallel demands of Israel. As such, the Quartet looks more and more like a legitimizing cover for Israeli-American positions that have killed any chance of a peace process.

Israel and the United States are likely to repeat the Quartet’s three demands: that the Palestinian government explicitly renounce terrorism, honor all existing Palestinian agreements with Israel, and recognize Israel’s right to exist. These are reasonable and legitimate demands — but only if Israel is required to abide by the same rules. And this is not the case. The Quartet sanctions the Palestinians without demanding simultaneously that Israel stop its colonization of Arab lands, its expansion of settlements, and its routine killings and assassinations of Palestinians and Lebanese.

Here is a clue to a breakthrough for Israel, the United States and the West: Offer to the Palestinians as much as they demand the Palestinians give to Israel.

In this respect, the Palestinian accord in Mecca will not meet Israeli-American-Quartet demands, and is unlikely to advance peace talks. However it could mark a positive turning point if the Israeli-American-Quartet camp were to see peace-making as a win-win situation, in which progress happened on the back of mutual gains by both sides, rather than mainly enforcing the unilateral demands of Israel.

The Palestinian national unity government has offered Israel two significant but symbolic olive branches: respecting all previous Palestinian agreements (such as the Oslo accords and the PLO’s recognition of Israel’s right to exist) and respecting the Arab Summit’s 2002 peace plan, which offers Israel full peace in return for full withdrawal from occupied lands, and a negotiated resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue. This same Palestinian government, though, also recommitted itself to other Palestinian documents and Arab positions that make armed resistance against Israeli occupation both legitimate and noble. The future path defining Palestinian policy will largely reflect how Israel and the West respond to the Mecca agreement.

Those who truly seek peace should see this Palestinian gesture as an opening and an opportunity to explore serious means of negotiating a comprehensive, permanent peace agreement. Israel will make an important choice in the coming months: It will reciprocate the Palestinian-Saudi gesture in kind and make equally broad but well-intentioned declarations of an intent to coexist in peace and equality; or, it will hold fast to its ironclad policy of refusing any diplomatic probes and persisting in its colonization, strangulation, and military assaults on the Palestinians.

The important Saudi mediation for the Hamas-Fateh agreement comes at a time when Saudi Arabia is also actively engaged with Iran on defusing tensions related to Lebanon and to the larger standoff with the West and the UN on Tehran’s nuclear industry. Saudi Arabia affirmed its clout within the region in fostering the Palestinian unity accord, which Syria and Egypt both had tried but failed to do. If Saudi Arabia is more willing to use its considerable moral (religious) and financial power to help broker conflict resolutions in the Middle East, we should all welcome that. But we must also respond to Saudi gestures, rather than let them wither on the vine, as happened with the Saudis’ 2002 Arab-Israeli peace plan that Israel and the United States ignored.

It is important to recognize the significance of a diplomatically stirring Saudi Arabia that can have a positive impact in Iran, Syria, Palestine-Israel, and Lebanon, for starters. As in 2002, Saudis and Palestinians have made a sincere, constructive gesture for peaceful coexistence. A return gesture of equal magnitude could change history. Snubbing this Arab gesture would only exacerbate existing tensions and conflicts in the region, and probably push them towards levels of suffering and destruction that would make the past five years look like a picnic.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 12 February 2007
Word Count: 810
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BEIRUT — The one person whose photograph hangs in my office is the late Lebanese writer Samir Kassir. He was assassinated in 2005, but his ideas are more relevant than ever, as Lebanon, Palestine and the entire Arab world that defined his life embrace greater tension and violence practiced simultaneously by the state, opposition groups and foreign armies. The British publisher Verso has just put out an English translation of his small book, an extended essay really, entitled Being Arab.

Kassir’s enduring power reflects two core aspects of his life and work: his insistence on challenging the oppression and indignities that many Arabs suffered at the hands of their own regimes or foreign powers, while at the same time rejecting the tendency to wallow in a sense of victimization. Instead, he affirms faith in the modern Arab world’s capacity for national rejuvenation, cultural affirmation and humanistic progress.

Kassir touched so many people because these sentiments are not the lone thoughts of a maverick Arab writer. Rather, this conviction of one’s worth and potential is a prevalent attitude in the heart of hundreds of millions of ordinary Arab men and women who, like him, refuse to submit to humiliation and powerlessness, and instead affirm their humanity and their rights as citizens.

The Arab people are “haunted by a sense of powerlessness” and widespread malaise, which he succinctly surveys in the sad condition of most Arab countries. He concludes that “the real crisis in the Arab world is the crisis of the state,” whose institutions lack credibility and whose internal unity is routinely challenged. Autocratic and vulnerable, Arab states offer their people cosmetic reforms and liberalization without any real change in government or policies, while relinquishing economic sovereignty and thus perpetuating foreign hegemony. The Arab world, Kassir laments, is the only “continent” where “the lack of democracy is allied to a foreign hegemony.”

The prevalent, almost reflexive, response in the region has comprised local Islamist movements that were born “in response to what were considered to be inefficient, iniquitous, or impious, governments, rather than a reaction to the culture of modernism.”

Kassir points out that Arab and Islamic cultures repeatedly generated, absorbed and accommodated a diversity of divergent systems of thought and identity. During the Renaissance the Muslim World “more than held its own against Europe,” until a technological gap opened up between the two societies in the second half of the 18th Century. The urban centers of the Arab and Middle Eastern Islamic world relentlessly copied and emulated many aspects of Europe, spurring the modernizing revolution the Arabs called the nahda.

That revolution failed for various reasons: superpower domination, the burden of Israel, Arab police states, and other maladies. Kassir calls us to restore this era to its proper place in Arab history, at least allowing us to reinterpret our current profound malaise as merely a moment in history that can be overcome and left behind. His writing and heart are full of hope, and riddled with pride, in the capacity of Arab-Islamic culture to revitalize its modernistic impulses with proven Western norms. He personally embodied that rich synthesis of Levantine and European identities and values, with his mixture of Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian and French identities and legacies.

He reviews how the nahda’s impulses for regeneration comprised a beacon for progress that failed on the political-national level shortly after World War I, but “lived on as an attitude and an outlook on the world,” manifested in art, poetry, theater, music, cinema, the role of women and other dimensions of life and culture. Yet this was all crushed by the onset of the Arab malaise in the last third of the 20th Century, when Israel defeated the Arabs, oil wealth prompted a new American hegemony and spread the backwardness of the energy-rich states, and new Arab regimes “wasted no time putting their societies behind bars.”

Radical Islamism or “Islamic nationalism” will not solve this dilemma, he says boldly, if it perpetuates a sense of Arab victimhood or explicitly sets out to differentiate itself from the universal. We must avoid the danger of wallowing so deeply in the Arab malaise that we replace it with something similar: “the culture of death which the union of fossilized Arab nationalism and political Islam calls resistance.”

He concludes: “We must replace Arabs’ customary assumption of victim status not by cultivating a logic of power or a spirit of revenge, but by recognizing the fact that, despite bringing defeats, the 20th Century has also brought benefits that can enable Arabs to participate in progress.”

Samir Kassir, even in death, radiates hope and self-confidence, anchored in that powerful, rich, irresistible combination of Arab-Islamic, Western and universalist values that still define most people in the Middle East. If you are perplexed by the turbulence of the Arab-Islamic Middle East, and seek signs of hope amidst the bombs, read this little book of big ideas.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 06 February 2007
Word Count: 814
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BEIRUT — Regardless of whether the United States’ current military surge and slight shift in tactics in Iraq succeeds or fails, Washington has clearly defined and started to implement its fallback plan in the Middle East: an across-the-board, active battle against Iran. The United States has unleashed or unsheathed all available military, diplomatic, economic, proxy, clandestine, and rhetorical means to hold the line against Tehran’s growing power in the region.

This is what is called a “full court press” in basketball strategy, where you aggressively harass and push against the opponent at all points on the court, hoping to slow down his momentum and fluster him into making mistakes. I have experienced the thrill of a full court press, but also recognize it as a desperate tactic, used when all else fails, and enjoying very mixed chances of success.

This is an understandable Middle Eastern strategy on Washington’s part, given its recent history of panic, mistakes, and its pro-Israeli-driven policy. Yet actively confronting Iran and its allies is another reckless throw of the dice, engineered by fading Neo-conservatives in Washington, who have transformed our region from an arena of traditional big power strategic confrontations to an ideological casino where a single superpower rolls the dice every few years — testing out half-baked new theories based on wild assumptions, a largely failed track record, and highly unpredictable odds. America’s Neo-con romantics were trouble enough for the Middle East; desperate, back-to-the-wall gamblers wagering on our future well-being are infinitely worse, and much more insulting.

Iran’s growing influence throughout the Middle East is due to several historical factors, most of which are beyond the control of Washington. They include:
• The end of the Cold War;
• Iran’s size, resources, and activist ideology;
• The overthrow of the Baathist regime in Iraq and the rise to power there of Iran-friendly Iraqi Shiite groups;
• The collective diplomatic incoherence of the Arab world;
• Over 5000 years of steady growth of Iranian nationalism, identity, and state power; and,
• the continuing self-assertion of Arab Shiites throughout the region who tend to have good relations with fellow Shiites in Iran.

Sounds to me like a natural regional power that one should coexist with on the basis of shared rules, rather than mutual threats.

Washington’s designation of Iran as a troublemaker and danger to the United States, Israel, and Arab states is couched in the usual American combination of vague threats, dismissive assumptions, unproven accusations and cartoon-like bad-guy denigration.

The charges against Iran disturbingly mirror those in 2002-03 against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. One hopes that the Democrats, the Congress as a whole, and especially the American mass media and religious institutions would not roll over and play dead this time around, but instead demand from the Bush administration credible evidence against Iran, especially if any military action is planned.

Solid, proven evidence would trigger legitimate responses to Iran, and much of the world would probably join in — but only if real proof were presented, rather than Bush’s pre-millennialist ideologo-babble anchored in Israeli penchants for attack and post-9/11 sustained American anger and confusion. We don’t need more of these ugly policy drivers that sent the United States into a criminal, destructive mess in Iraq, and helped push the Middle East to its current state of spreading national fragmentation, political polarization, power contestation and social explosion.

The United States should be awarded a Cosmic Prize for Chutzpah and Chicanery for charging Iran with meddling in Iraq and threatening American lives when the United States invaded Iraq, removed the former state structure, killed tens of thousands of people, unleashed ethnic-religious discord there, and allowed Iran to emerge effortlessly as the dominant regional power. What does the Bush administration take us for, simpletons and idiots? Are all the people of this region supposed only to silently applaud American military aggression, diplomatic adventurism, and Frankenstein-like national experiments with Arab dummies? No wonder that huge majorities of Middle Easterners criticize American policies, and even feel threatened by them.

If we are asked to assault Iran mainly in order to comply with American and Israeli hysteria, the likely response from most quarters in the Arab world, Iran, Turkey and others nearby will be to resist and defy the United States and Israel, and also to fight them when possible, politically or militarily. This is the stage we are at now, as much of public opinion in the region rejects the American-Israeli position, while many Arab governments seek protection under Washington’s wing.

This is a recipe for continued violence and instability throughout the region. We should not play stupid and act surprised by the further collapse of regimes, states and societies in the years ahead. This will occur if current trends persist, in the context of an overarching American-Iranian face-off that includes battles among local proxies, as we witness now in Lebanon and Palestine.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 02 February 2007
Word Count: 808
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Boston — The United States broadly as a whole — citizens, government, media and academia — has had a difficult time coming to grips with the terrorism phenomenon that struck its shores so traumatically on September 11, 2001. A two-week journey throughout the United States this month suggests that the pendulum is not shifting decisively towards better or worse analysis, but rather that American society in general is polarizing on this issue.

Some Americans have generated some first-class analysis on why various groups around the world use terrorism more frequently as a means of political expression, resistance or offensive warfare. Other quarters of American society — especially popular media and politicians — have slipped into panic and racism mode. They focus almost exclusively on terror committed by Arab-Islamist groups, and wildly tar all Islamist political groups as mortal threats that have stealthily penetrated American society, without differentiating between criminal terror, legitimate resistance and peaceful political action.

The worst news is in the public arena — at airport and center-city bookshops, in the mass media, in conversations with officials and ordinary people. Here the prevalent image is of evil Islamic and Arab terrorists who work hard to undermine and destroy American and Western civilization, or “the civilized world,” (contrasted to the ‘barbaric’ Arab-Islamic realm).

The proliferation of books and television specials with this theme is particularly worrying. They build expansive, frightening scenarios on the basis of small facts or the deeds of a handful of individuals. Of course, there are individuals and some very small groups of Arabs and Muslims who speak evil of the United States, and a few of them have attacked American targets. Rather than being treated as the exceptions to the rule of rather passive, non-violent Arabs and Muslims, who make up the vast majorities of our societies, these handfuls of freaks and criminals are exaggerated into a global conspiracy that is a direct, immediate, mortal threat to the United States.

Such scare-tactics journalism and political nonsense allow otherwise reasonable people and rational institutions to dwell in a manufactured world of fear, ignorance, hysteria and racism. This is not new. The same ugly side of American culture did this in the early 20th Century, when the target of their ignorance and hatred was the Jews, who were portrayed as planning to control American society and then the world.

The good news in the United States is that more thoughtful individuals and institutions have started to generate some high quality, accurate research and analysis about terror groups. I was fortunate to absorb some of this at a two-day conference last week at the Fares Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies at Tufts University. Excellent papers were presented by a range of mostly American scholars and analysts, including Robert Pape, Peter Bergen, Fawaz Gerges, Steve Simon, Mia Bloom, Ian Lustick, Richard Shultz, John Esposito, Ayesha Jalal, Sumantra Bose, As’ad Abukhalil, Hisham Melhem, and others. I mention many of the authors simply to highlight the availability in the United States of so many good, honest scholars and journalists who grapple with this important issue.

The main conclusion of their presentations is precisely that there is no single theme or causal reason that explains the different kinds of terrorism that assorted groups employ all around the world. Nuanced, comprehensive and fact-based analyses of the individual, social and strategic motivations of terrorists provide a clear picture of a movie that is made up of many individual frames. Understanding the individual frames allows us to make sense of the entire movie.

Terrorists are variously motivated by many different issues that often mesh together in varying patterns across the world — in sharp contrast to the simplistic, one-dimensional, quasi-racist gibberish about America-hating, hostile Islamic terrorists that dominates popular and political culture in the United States.

Some of the motivations of terror groups that emerged from the Tufts conference were: foreign military occupation of their homeland, domestic political repression and humiliation, revenge, religious interpretations, social prestige and status, alienation at home and in Western societies, aggressive foreign policies of Western powers, “civil war” within Islamic societies, charismatic leaders like Osama Bin Laden who mobilize their followers, assorted temporal political concerns that are perceived through the lens of religious obligations, issues of lack of dignity and hope for a better future, and weaving together national, historical and emotional narratives while appealing to domestic, regional and global audiences simultaneously.

The more honest debate about America’s actions in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East seems now to be joined in places by a deeper, more analytical examination of why terrorism has expanded around the world. Let’s hope the policy-makers in the United States, Russia, Israel, the Arab world, and Europe read and absorb some of this material, so that we can start to wind down the terror cycle that has only grown in recent years.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 30 January 2007
Word Count: 801
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BOSTON — Just as it was half a century ago, Lebanon is once again a pioneer and pacesetter in the Arab World, though this time the direction of movement may be towards destruction and incomprehensible violence. For years, Beirut and Lebanon prided themselves on being called the Paris and Switzerland of the Middle East, reflecting their dynamic, freewheeling leisure activities, liberal culture, human talent in banking, education and engineering, and their open, welcoming capital that accommodated exiled politicians from all parts of this very ideological region.

This week, those who rule Lebanon and Beirut seem to be saying that they are also capable of being the Mogadishu and Afghanistan of the Middle East, characterized by inter-communal warfare and collapse of law and order, brought on by the irresponsibility that all sides have practiced in bringing the country back to the brink of inter-communal clashes.

The street clashes in Beirut and other parts of the country Tuesday and Thursday have left over half a dozen dead and several hundred injured, a night curfew in Beirut, and heightened fears that the situation could spiral out of control into full-fledged sectarian warfare. This occurs, paradoxically or deliberately, during the week that many countries in the world met at the Paris 3 gathering, and pledged over $7 billion to assist Lebanon in its economic recovery program.

The tragedy of the current clashes throughout the country among groups of angry politicized youth and spontaneous neighborhood and sectarian gangs is that neither side is totally right or wrong. The opposition led by Hizbullah and the Free Patriotic Movement has already been widely blamed for escalating tensions to their current dangerous level, and is more likely than the government side to lose politically if things persist in the current direction of tension and clashes.

Hizbullah has already elicited criticisms by many Lebanese that it recklessly triggered the Israeli war that destroyed much in Lebanon last summer and set back its economy many years. It is now also widely accused of pushing its legitimate demands beyond reasonable limits, and acting more like a tyrant on a rampage than a respected and powerful opposition that operates through the existing political and constitutional system.

Hizbullah and its smaller partners in the opposition are correct to point out that the ruling political elite that has dominated Lebanon for the past two decades has irresponsibly raised the national debt to some $41 billion, and is taking on more debt through the Paris 3 mechanism. They are correct to demand more integrity, efficiency and rationality in state policies, less corruption and nepotism, and a more effective defense system. They also raise some reasonable concerns about aspects of the tribunal being established to try those who will be accused of killing the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

These are relevant issues that require serious political debate and resolution, which Hizbullah and its junior partners should have forced through the political structures that exist, such as the parliament, the cabinet, the judicial system or the national dialogue. Instead, they detracted from the validity of many of their grievances and concerns by pushing their street protests to the point of widespread disruption of life and weakening of the economy. Their tactics, and the response they triggered from pro-government groups, also stoked the flames of sectarianism, unleashing the hazard of groups of young men with guns and sticks roaming the streets of the capital looking to fight or destroy cars and property.

There is nothing special about Lebanon’s current predicament in terms of the wider Arab region. It is just another Arab state that has suffered the tensions inherent in a situation where the central government and institutions of statehood are weak and inefficient, and most citizens turn instead to their religious, tribal or ethnic identities. The problem is compounded by support from external forces — Iran and Syria behind Hizbullah, and the United States and France behind the Fouad Siniora-Saad Hariri government — which creates deep suspicions among the Lebanese themselves.

Lebanon’s strong external support, as demonstrated in the Paris 3 pledges, should be a blessing for the country, and the structural reforms in state finances that will be enacted as part of this process should also benefit all Lebanese. There is a chance that this will not happen now, which could plunge the country into years of low-intensity conflict and simmering tensions — well below the level of the 1975-1990 civil war, but enough to keep Lebanon mired in perpetual mediocrity and stagnation.

The stakes are very high, and very clear. Lebanon is at an ominous moment of reckoning, and sadly its fate might be determined by the vagaries of gangs of angry and fearful young men with sticks and guns. The modern Arab state is tested once again, and is not doing very well.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

Copyright ©2007 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 26 January 2007
Word Count: 796
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