SAN FRANCISCO — Sometimes when you get away from your part of the world and view it from afar, the wider global perspective can make the dark spots appear less troublesome. Not so for the Arab world, I fear, as I view it this week from the west coast of the United States at the start of an extended academic visit here.

Seen from afar, the Arab world appears ever more troubled and troubling than it does from within; the really awful thing is that the trend seems to be towards more incoherence and violence in our region, not less. The situations in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq are the most troubling right now, as local communal tensions and incompetent governments are aggravated by foreign interventions and alliances, leading to still weaker central governments and greater risks of chronic political violence.

Yet these three troubled lands are not aberrations within a region of otherwise stable and coherent countries. They are only the most glaring examples of low-quality statehood in an Arab region where the concept of sovereign, stable and independent states remains thinly grafted on a deeper foundation of ethnic, tribal and religious identities. The ugly choice that seems to face most Arab citizens is to embrace security and stability in degrading modern police states where human dignity and freedom are banished from the land, or risk chaos and civil war where normalcy of any sort is a forlorn hope.

Three particular trends seem to define the broad deterioration in the previous half-century of relative stability and development. One is the continuing intervention of foreign armies and governments, often justifying itself by claiming to seek more stable societies, but usually only creating more instability and incoherence. Iraq and Afghanistan are the most glaring examples of this phenomenon, which has plagued the region for over two centuries — with no end in sight.

With the smaller oil-rich states remaining exceptions to the rule, a second trend is the waning of central government power in most Arab countries, alongside the weakening of a few strong regional powers that used to throw their weight around and intervene to resolve disputes in the neighborhood. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the two best examples of such countries that now seem to have little power to intervene constructively around the Middle East, as witnessed by their inability to improve conditions in Lebanon or Palestine, despite attempts to do so.

The third trend is the diffusion of centralized state power to a more complex array of actors in society, including armed militia, political groups, criminal gangs, tribal and religious leaders, corporate powers and charismatic individuals. The latest actor to join this line-up is the international military force, such as those in Lebanon and Afghanistan.

The cumulative impact of these three main trends is the slow degradation of the concept of centralized nation-states in the Arab region. This is probably an inevitable reflection of the fact that the modern Arab nation-state as we have known it since around World War One has not responded to the interests of two of its three primary constituencies: the Western powers who created or midwived these Arab countries, and their own Arab citizens, whose lives generally improved from the 1920s to the 1970s, but since the mid-1980s have seen political and economic conditions deteriorate on the whole.

The Arab state¹s third constituency — its self-appointed rulers — seem to be doing okay in most cases, as evidenced by ruling families, parties and political elites in some ³republics² that have remained in power for decades on end. The problem is that countries that primarily serve their own rulers are not very credible or sustainable entities; so we now witness the slow unraveling of some of these Arab countries that have proven to be politically brittle. They slowly transform into odd lands, defined by armed gangs, militias, or chronic stalemate.

The main problem in the Arab world is not terrorism or innate political violence; it is the incoherence of modern statehood in the manner and form that it has been grafted into this region during the past century. In principle, Arabs are perfectly able to manage statehood and its attributes, such as the rule of law, political representation, pluralism, and the peaceful contestation of power. But in practice most Arabs have not had an opportunity to practice these things in a governance system that they have defined and chosen, and within logical sovereign frontiers that they have drawn themselves.

The deadly and chronic combination of local tyrants, Arab-Israeli warfare, and Western military intervention over many decades has brought us to this sad situation today. We will flee our current terrible fate by reversing these trends of Western militarism, Israeli dictates and assaults, and Arab strongmen, rather than perpetuating them in the name of a false and elusive security that now threatens entire nation-states after having killed many human beings.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 10 October 2006
Word Count: 822
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BEIRUT — The difficulty of making progress on resolving internal political tensions in several Middle Eastern countries is directly linked to the parallel difficulty of making progress on resolving regional and global conflicts. We’ve seen all three levels — domestic, regional and international — stuck in stalemate these days in Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq, despite intense diplomatic and political activity to try and find solutions.

The core problem is that the five most crucial points of contention have no immediate resolution in sight: Lebanon’s government and Hizbullah’s arms, Iraq’s domestic order, Palestinian political power-sharing, Syria’s fate in the wake of the upcoming UN commission or enquiry’s report on the murder of the late Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri, and Iran’s nuclear industry.

These issues are all directly or indirectly linked to one another in some way, so we should not expect anything very different within individual countries in the region, unless some dramatic diplomatic initiative is launched. That could have happened this week, with U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visit to the Middle East, but she obviously decided to take the low road and the grocer’s route to conflict resolution. Her main diplomatic achievement, from what we can see, has been to secure an imprecise and limited Israeli agreement to open the border point between Gaza and Israel more often. This is mainly designed to alleviate pressure on Palestinian exports of fruits and vegetables, which are a key part of the battered Gaza economy.

This is a useful move for tomato and olive growers, but hardly a serious step towards conflict resolution. Rice also pledged to support the security forces of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who is locked in a bitter political struggle with the Hamas-led government that was elected earlier this year but was quickly boycotted and put under financial siege by the United States, Israel and Europe.

It’s hard to think of a more inappropriate path to moving things forward throughout the Middle East than the approach being applied this week by the United States, which remains the only possible external mediator or facilitator that can realistically move the parties towards agreement. By continuing to shun or actively oppose those populist forces in the Arab-Iranian world that clearly have significant or majority support among the public, the United States pursues a policy that is guaranteed to fail.

More than that, it will probably also make things much worse if the United States and others start funding and arming political, security and militia groups that are actively engaged in domestic ideological struggles. Many sensible but bewildered people do not see much difference between Iran supporting and arming Hizbullah in Lebanon and the United States supporting and arming the Fateh security forces in Palestine, as both recipient groups are engaged in militant political activity and deep contests over the identity of their societies.

Baby steps being attempted by the United States and others in the region are a sign of the inability or unwillingness to do much more than that. There is a collective bankruptcy to American, official Arab and Israeli political approaches these days that is stunning for what it tells us about the prevailing ruling elites. Not only have they largely failed to address the issues that matter to the people — sovereignty, security, economic well-being, a sense of dignity in day-to-day life — but they have also managed to spread the consequences of their collective incompetence to cover most of this region.

A generation ago, this region was plagued primarily by the Arab-Israeli conflict and its ramifications. Today, political disputes and the causes of chronic violence are much more diverse, and manifest themselves in greater suffering by ordinary people who are the target of either official oppression and armed forces or the deeds of criminal bombers. This is why today it is impossible to get any movement in Lebanon, for example, until the status of the Syrian ruling regime is resolved, or until the Iranian-Western nuclear issue is resolved. The Palestinian and Iraqi situations similarly will not improve while countries like Syria and Iran remain locked in ideological battle with the U.S.-led West. The Iranian-Western nuclear standoff would be easier to resolve if the situations in Iraq and Palestine were better, and American and Israeli attitudes to Iran and assorted Arab political forces were less hostile.

It is not fair or reasonable to put all the blame for this situation at the door of the Americans, because the criminal neglect and incompetent management that brought us to this point are also shared by Israeli, Arab, Iranian and other leaders. The United States, though, is the party with the greatest ability to break this pattern of stalemate and mediocrity if it wishes to do so. The signs continue to be that it is not interested in exploring a grand bargain that tries to simultaneously address the main conflicts in the area. So we will remain mired in the peculiar world of global powers with the ability to change history but that prefer to act with the vision of small town grocers, while the rest of the interested parties in the Middle East slowly sink in their self-made marginality and irrelevance.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 06 October 2006
Word Count: 858
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BEIRUT — The heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad from where the American administration indirectly administers most things in Iraq seems to have caught the fancy of the administration in Washington — which seems to be repeating in the rest of the Middle East the isolation from its surroundings that it practices in Iraq. This is evident in this week’s trip to the region by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who appears to be pursuing a fanciful strategy based on unrealistic American hopes rather than actual realities in the region.

Being clueless about Middle Eastern realities has been an occasional American official hazard; making this a chronic recurrence and operating procedure seems really stupid. Rice and American diplomacy in general fail to grasp a central point about U.S. policies in the Middle East: Many of the problems she says she wants to solve are usually exacerbated by American policies, especially Washington’s extreme support for Israel rather than being even-handed in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
She now markets the nice-sounding but rather unrealistic idea that Washington can help the “moderates” in the Arab world work together against the “extremists.” Specifically, American officials speak about supporting “the GCC plus 2” (the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries plus Egypt and Jordan) against the extremists (Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hizbullah and other Islamist or nationalist movements who resist American-Israeli pressures, policies, armies and threats).

Rice’s approach will flop just as did the equally dreamy American idea in the 1980s when U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig sought to forge an American-Israeli-Saudi-Egyptian coalition to counter Soviet-backed leftists or Iranian-backed Islamists. Such naïve approaches fail because they cut against the grain of trends on the ground in the Middle East, where public opinion and some political leaderships now mobilize actively to resist American and Israeli ideas and to challenge Arab friends and surrogates of the United States.

There is indeed a new regional cold war taking place in the Middle East, pitting pro-Western leaderships against those forces who defy and resist U.S.-Israeli-led Western aims in this area. The ideological polarization that has taken place in recent years, however, is partly, perhaps largely, a consequence of Washington’s use of its army, diplomacy and economy to push for Israeli strategic aims and to go against the grain of majority sentiments in most Arab countries, i.e., by speaking of promoting democracy but largely supporting non-democratic Arab regimes, and by actively isolating and trying to bring down the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine instead of engaging it and nudging it and Israel towards mutually rewarding peace talks.

Washington looks very foolish or very naive talking about a plan to work with Arab moderate governments to check extremists, when its own policies have helped promote the extremism it now fears, and also weaken the impact and credibility of the so-called moderate Arabs it now seeks to bolster. The GCC, Egypt and Jordan do not have the collective credibility or clout to have much impact beyond their own Green Zones in their own capitals; for they — like the United States in Baghdad — often tend to be out of touch and out of step with public opinion in their own societies.

The Los Angeles Times ran an article a few days ago wondering whether King Abdullah II of Jordan would suffer the same fate as the late Shah of Iran and be overthrown by his own people, because he paid more attention to American concerns than those of his own countrymen and women. I think that prospect is unlikely, for the Hashemite monarchy has much more legitimacy and support in Jordan than the Shah’s ever did in Iran.

Yet the underlying point is relevant, and applies to many Arab leaders: Middle Eastern governments will find themselves increasingly isolated and impotent if they prove to be more attentive to Washington’s strategic goals, Israel’s security concerns, or foreign investors’ competitive needs than to their own people’s political sentiments and sense of unfulfilled rights. The GCC plus 2 have actually tried to play constructive diplomatic roles in some of the region’s active crises, like Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon — but they have been a collective and glaring failure. Mobilizing them now with the backing of overt American support and implicit Israeli self-interest to counter Islamist and nationalist forces in the Arab world is the political equivalent of digging deeper to get out of a hole, or trying to douse a fire by throwing fuel on it.

The tides of extremism, violence and radicalism in the Middle East have always been the result of a deadly combination of five usually negative forces: home-grown emotional mass movements, irresponsible and often criminal national leaderships, stressful socio-economic conditions, brutal and predatory Israeli policies, and intrusive Western militarism (mostly by the United States in recent years, the Europeans before that). Virtually all five of these forces would be further fostered or exacerbated by a fresh American policy of mobilizing Arab “moderates” against “extremists.”

Rice’s attempt to do so will only prod a greater counter-reaction by large swaths of Arab, Iranian and Turkish public opinion against the United States, Israel and many Arab regimes.

Please, somebody give Dr. Rice a modern Middle East history book, or a walking tour of any Arab city outside its Green Zone.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 03 October 2006
Word Count: 872
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DUBAI — If you want to get a sense of which way the wind is blowing in a society, you should consult its youth or its best public opinion pollsters. Earlier this month, I had the chance to do both here in Dubai, and in the process learned about significant changing attitudes and new trends in the Arab region.

I participated in a seminar of 50 mid-level Dubai public sector officials, many in their 30s and 40s. Though not strictly youth, they embodied youth’s desire to soak up new knowledge and experiences, and to crystallize their personal and national identity, and their place in the world.

The venue of the gathering itself was noteworthy: the new Dubai School of Government, established in conjunction with the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, to provide top quality executive training and Master’s-level degrees to private and public sector students. This was a statement that Dubai, along with others like Qatar and Abu Dhabi, had embarked on development for excellence in human capabilities, finally transcending the earlier state-building emphases on infrastructure and basic human services.

Dubai’s indoor ski slope was intriguing to visit, I thought, but its Harvard-affiliated school of government, headed by the respected economic historian Dr. Tarik Youssef, was much more meaningful in the long run. Spending the day with the Emirati executives suggested to me that new winds were blowing in Gulf societies: Educated nationals were prepared to work and study to build meaningful societies, while also expressing strong political and emotional views on global and regional Arab-Islamic issues.

This third wave of Gulf nationals since statehood and the oil-fuelled boom is not only well educated, but is also undergoing life-long education. Its basic needs are amply met, but annoyingly, it often finds itself at the receiving end of the world’s mistrust or scornful envy. The new phenomenon in the Gulf is a nuanced sense of citizenship and identity that is not simplistically black or white in its sentiments or allegiances. It also does not hesitate to express itself in public.

To better understand this important evolution, by good fortune I was able at the same gathering to hear the respected American pollster John Zogby, who conducts regular public opinion polls in the Arab world. He shared his observations on recent trends he has identified from his annual polls in six countries that reflect the entire Arab region (Morocco, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, UAE and Saudi Arabia).

Two important points he made confirmed my feeling that significant change was underway in this region: An Arab middle class with global values is emerging, and Arab populations seem to be moving towards greater identification with their individual countries, rather than primarily expressing wider pan-Arab or pan-Islamic sentiments.

I chased him down after his lunch talk and asked him for more details of his findings. He said that in his annual polls in the four years 2001-2004, the majority across the region identified themselves in terms of their broad Arab or Islamic identity. The 2005 poll broke this trend, as a majority identified with its country. He theorizes — proof or disproof will emerge from subsequent surveys — that one reason for this change is “disappointment and disillusionment with the results of pan-Arab policies and attitudes, including a sense of humiliation, betrayal and anger at events in Iraq, Palestine and other parts of the Arab world.”

Younger Arabs, especially educated ones with good prospects in the globalized economy, simultaneously sense some positive changes in their own societies — a reason to be optimistic, leading to rising expectations. This reflects a significant difference in attitudes from previous years.

His polls also suggest that a middle class with globalized, modern values is emerging in some countries, particularly in the well-off Gulf states.

“There’s no question that especially among youth under the age of 30 we are seeing tectonic shifts in attitudes, expressed in a modern view of the world. We sense optimism, a need for personal fulfillment, rising expectations, job-related personal growth, a demand for better health, education and professional opportunities, along with continued strong identification with the family and stability,” he explained.

He gives one sign of this trend as the almost total absence of a gender gap in answers to the survey questions — even on most gender-related issues. Strong majorities in most Arab countries, for example, found it acceptable for women to work outside the home, with under-30-year-olds even more affirmative than their parents.

Zogby is now polling three Gulf states to ascertain more fully if a distinct middle class is indeed emerging, and to know more about its needs, values, aspirations and consequences.

“The under-30 Arabs collectively are this region’s first modern global citizens. They want to be heard and to make a difference. This is not your grandfather’s Arab world.”

My conclusion: Enjoy the bizarre ski slope in Dubai, but also look into the eyes and minds of the local skiers, who have something to say about ever evolving generations of Arabs.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 01 October 2006
Word Count: 828
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BEIRUT — When the finest American and international minds speak, we should listen carefully. Two important documents came to light this week that nicely capture the extreme poles of the current political condition of the Middle East — we either work hard for comprehensive peace touching on all the key disputes in the region, or we suffer the consequences of the existing conflicts and the spread of terror that they spawn.

The expanding terror problem was revealed in American press reports about a classified 30-page U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that says the Iraq war has become a primary recruitment vehicle for potential terrorists, whose numbers may be increasing faster than the effort to deter and defeat them. The report notes that the Iraq war has probably heightened rather than reduced the threat of terror attacks against the United States or other targets. This is partly because radical terror networks seem to have spread and decentralized, including the use of over 5000 radical Islamist web sites, leaving Al-Qaeda more as an inspiration than a direct manager of terror attacks.

The radicalizing impact of the Anglo-American-led war in Iraq is no surprise. Many people in the Middle East and elsewhere warned the U.S. and UK governments before the war that such a brazen bid to change Middle Eastern political realities through the instrument of Western armies would generate a strong counter-reaction, including a probable spike in terror. Washington and London concluded that the risks were worth taking, given the importance they attached to removing the former Baathist regime in Baghdad as a means of triggering similar changes in other Middle Eastern lands.

The American intelligence agencies’ analysis is important for two particular reasons. First, it is a remarkable example of the sort of self-critical honesty and transparency that are hallmarks of democratic systems. Critical as I am of the American policy in Iraq, I am a great admirer of an American governance system that examines its own policies so bluntly, giving the emperor the bad news when necessary. I know of nothing vaguely similar ever happening in any Arab country, where the prevailing tradition is for yes-men to tell the great leader that all is well in the realm due largely to his endless wisdom and munificence. If reckless and adventuresome militarism in Iraq is a sign of the worst of American political culture, speaking the unpleasant truth about this ongoing rash endeavor is a sign of the best American ways.

The second, more important, point is that many of the same dynamics that pertained to the Anglo-American desire to attack Iraq in early 2003 apply today to the situation with Iran. Serious accusations are made against Iran, and many evil motives and intentions are ascribed to its government, with little solid or indisputable evidence. The consequences of an Anglo-American-Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would probably be much worse than what we’ve witnessed in the wake of the Iraq assault. This is because political tensions are so much more intense in the region today than they were in 2003, Iran’s formidable capacity and reach, and the growing linkages between situations like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine-Israel.

This is why the other text released this week, by the International Crisis Group (ICG), is worth pondering and acting upon. ICG launched a new global advocacy initiative designed “to generate new political momentum for a comprehensive settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict,” with major funding for the initiative announced at the Clinton Global Initiative meeting in New York. Resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict would significantly reduce tensions in the region, and probably gradually weaken or decouple Iranian ties with Palestinian and Lebanese groups and Syria.

The ICG initiative includes:
* mobilizing respected ex-officials from the United States and other countries around a statement of support and concrete actions for a comprehensive settlement, and a new process to achieve it, following the input of several brainstorming sessions;
* convening a high-level group of former U.S. government officials to generate bipartisan support for the U.S. administration to engage fully in efforts to achieve a comprehensive resolution; and,
* producing a series of ICG reports and briefings on the Arab-Israeli conflict and individual countries, to provide information, analysis and guidance to policy-makers.

The last half decade has revealed the consequences of leaving the Middle East to drift in a sea of its own dysfunctional governments, stressed societies, indigenous autocracy and militancy, foreign invasions, and local occupations. We suffer today the heavy legacy of a deadly combination of local and foreign hegemons. The antidote requires a concerted effort to resolve the core, and oldest, dispute in the region — the Arab-Israeli conflict — according to established international legal principles and UN resolutions, which would make it easier to reduce tensions and resolve disputes in other parts of the Middle East.

This week reminds us of three essential elements needed for such a change in direction for the Middle East: ending Anglo-American neo-colonial military adventures, resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, and promoting more honest, open and accountable governance throughout the Middle East.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 26 September 2006
Word Count: 837
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NEW YORK — The controversy over Pope Benedict XVI’s remarks on Islam in a speech last week continues to simmer on a low fire. It could move towards a greater global backlash by angry Muslims against the Pope and Christianity itself, or it could fade away in light of his sincere but slightly clipped public expression of regret and sorrow. The issue reveals as much about the sensitivities of Muslims as it does about the insensitivities of non-Muslims.

The response to the Pope’s words around the world has been mixed, with scattered incidents of violence heavily overwhelmed by a sense of pain that has not been translated into acts of aggression or protest. The potential for sustained damage among Muslims and Western Christians remains strong, especially where political leaders would exploit this situation. The Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei this week charged that Pope Benedict’s words were “the latest link in the chain of a crusade against Islam started by America’s Bush.”

I have been in the United States as this controversy unfolded, where the prevalent view of the matter seems closer to perplexity than anything else. People here and in most other Western countries are slightly surprised by the fact that the Pope’s quotation of a medieval Christian emperor would cause so much anger, and that the Pope’s apology did not end the matter.

The explanation rests largely in the central place of religion in the life of most Muslims, where faith is not only about worship of the Divine but often spills over to play many other roles it does not assume in the West. The fact that the Pope’s quote was critical of the Prophet Mohammad also explains much of the anger, given the prophet’s revered status.

The Pope’s comments came in that part of his lecture where he referred to a discussion of Christianity and Islam between a 14th-century Byzantine Christian emperor, Manuel II Paleologus, and an unnamed Persian scholar. The Pope said, referring to Paleologus: “He said, I quote, ‘Show me just what Mohammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'”

The Pope also mentioned the Islamic concept of jihad as “holy war,” adding that violence in the name of religion is against God’s nature and to reason.

These are indeed deeply insulting ideas to Muslims, even if they were used in a context in which the Pope did not mean to cause offense and, in fact, sought, as he later said in his apology, to promote frank and sincere dialogue, in a spirit of mutual respect. The Pope is obviously a greater theologian than he is a practitioner of political and cultural sensitivities. Maybe he just needs better public relations advisers.

If this issue passes away soon, as the Danish cartoons controversy eventually did at the start of this year, we should all learn from it. The single most important lesson from both cases strikes me as relating to the place and role of religion in people’s public and personal lives. The anger that Muslims often express when their faith or prophet are insulted goes beyond their reverence for their religion, touching another important element that Western leaders and ordinary people need to appreciate more clearly. It is that religion replaces many of the attributes of statehood in societies where the role, credibility and legitimacy of the state are often thin.

The sad fact of modern history is that the post-colonial European retreat from many Islamic societies left behind convoluted nations that mostly did not correspond to ethnic and demographic realities. For reasons that historians will long debate, many Islamic countries have suffered economic stress and political autocracy, leading to the sort of extremism and militancy that we witness today in many parts of the Middle East and Asia.

The harsh reality is that in many Islamic societies, ordinary people find themselves living in police states, gangster states, failed states, or occupied or sanctioned states. In such abnormal conditions of chronic distress, tension, deprivation and vulnerability, religion emerges as the central instrument of protection in personal and public life. Religion provides identity, a system of justice, hope, and communal solidarity and the sense of security that it brings with it.

So when the leading Christian figure of the entire world chooses to refer to an obscure Medieval Byzantine emperor’s remarks disparaging Islam and the Prophet Mohammad, one can understand why some Muslims would be deeply angered, even threatened. The Pope should be better advised on Muslim sensitivities. How would he react if the world’s top Muslim religious leaders recommended screening the DaVinci Code movie in all schools?

If the Pope’s slur against Islam was unintentional, which I believe was the case, he should have made a more explicit and forceful apology. Religion for many Muslims who live in dysfunctional countries remains the central organizing and defining principle of their lives. It should not be treated lightly, especially if we truly aim to promote sincere dialogue in a spirit of respect.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 19 September 2006
Word Count: 845
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BEIRUT — Sometimes wishful thinking dominates rational hard work. This is probably what is going on with the expectation that a Palestinian national unity government will be formed any day now, comprising Hamas, Fateh and some technocrats and respected independents. This has already generated speculation about the possibility of breaking the diplomatic stalemate with Israel, and ending the American-European-Israeli boycott and economic sanctions against the present Hamas-led government.

We should be clear about what this process is all about. It is emphatically not a self-generated Palestinian national step forward on the road to a coherent, consensus policy on domestic governance or relations with Israel. That is unfortunate, because the Palestinians need, and are capable of, defining their national priorities, agreeing on policies to achieve their goals, and mobilizing public opinion to either negotiate peace with Israel or resist it effectively. This is not what is happening, unfortunately.

Rather, the national unity government being contemplated is a show of Palestinian weakness, vulnerability and irresoluteness. It is largely a desperate response to the Israeli-American-European financial embargo that is slowly starving the Palestinians. To avoid death by strangulation and malnutrition, the Palestinians must practice diplomatic submission and subservience to Israel-American positions. In return for a resumption of financial aid and normal diplomatic contacts, the Palestinians must meet the three conditions that were set after the Hamas election victory in January. The Middle East “Quartet” — the US, EU, UN and Russia — established those conditions as recognition of Israel’s right to exist, renunciation of violence, and recognition of previous peace accords with the Israelis.

These are reasonable and logical demands; but, they are made unreasonable and illogical by being unilaterally imposed on the Palestinians in a context of siege and starvation warfare. The Palestinians are responding in a way that will not work. They are trying to meet the three demands indirectly, by implication and insinuation, while not meeting them explicitly. The Palestinian government’s agreed national political platform affirms the 2002 Arab Summit peace plan. This plan offers recognition and coexistence to Israel, if it returns all lands occupied in 1967 and resolves the Palestine refugee issue on the basis of UN resolutions. Israel and the United States have always ignored and disdained the 2002 Arab offer, yet the Palestinians suddenly expect it to open doors. Starvation-induced desperation is an ugly sight.

This waste of time and massive deception deceives nobody. It neither responds to the Quartet demands nor offers any hope of a diplomatic breakthrough to a negotiated peace. It is not even sure to resume financial aid to the Palestinians, as the ongoing United States-Israel-Europe debate reveals. As a forced response to inhuman strangulation by the US-Israel, the Palestinian national unity government only perpetuates a low quality American-Israeli-Palestinian tradition of dancing around the tough decisions that need to be made, without grasping them. This always turns into a dance of death on both sides, as we witness today.

The main problem with this process is that it remains a unilateral one — with Israel imposing its position on the Palestinians by force, and the United States and Europe siding with Israel. The three reasonable demands made of the Palestinians are one-way dictates, which become divisive rather than constructive. The Palestinians have a right to know what they get in return for meeting these three demands, such as parallel Israeli compliance with international norms of reasonable conduct. This includes Israel’s uprooting rogue colonies and settlements, ending expansion of official colonial-settler communities, stopping land expropriations, releasing jailed officials, and ending assassinations of Palestinian militants and civilians. Now that’s a deal worth considering, were it ever to be offered.

Instead, the Palestinians are offered only a possible resumption of some financial aid, and a meeting between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. It’s hard to think of a more dysfunctional and unpromising diplomatic process than this. Olmert and Abbas are among the world’s least credible political leaders. If there were a Nobel Prize for Missed Historic Political Opportunities, they should share it. They and all that they represent have had countless opportunities in the past decade to make progress, and they have consistently, spectacularly failed to do so.

Adding forced capitulation and new levels of ambiguity to the already limp legacy of Palestinian national leadership behavior will only generate new forms of political frustration and tension; these will ultimately express themselves in unpredictable manifestations of contestation, resistance and perhaps violence. Israeli-American attempts to punish, strangle, starve, boycott, jail, kill, bankrupt and generally humiliate the Palestinians into submission and surrender will fail, as surely as the sun will rise in the east tomorrow. Bringing the elected Hamas leadership into this cycle of false hopes and slightly delusional expectations will only add Hamas to the list of discredited political amateurs.
The only diplomatic process that will succeed has never been seriously attempted: demanding equal and simultaneous concessions from Israelis and Palestinians, on key issues of statehood, recognition, coexistence, and renunciation of violence. Trying to circumvent this moral, historical and political imperative of addressing Palestinian and Israeli national rights equally, and in parallel, is a colossal waste of time, and painful to watch — yet again.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 18 September 2006
Word Count: 874
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BEIRUT — One of the dizzying dimensions of Middle East-related diplomacy in recent years has been the roller-coaster ride of the United Nations’ performance and perception in this region. The issue is important because the UN has recently become much more directly involved in several important conflicts in the Middle East.
Several immediate issues engage the UN Security Council in the Middle East these days, including Lebanese-Syrian and Lebanese-Israeli matters, the expanded UN troops presence in south Lebanon, Iran’s nuclear technology development plans, Darfur, and perhaps the Arab-Israeli conflict once again.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan recently toured the region, spoke to all parties and boycotted none, and coordinated and mediated closely among all key parties, especially the United States, Lebanon, Israel, Syria and Iran. By achieving the end of fighting in Lebanon and Israel, and the Israeli siege of Lebanon, the UN reaffirmed the value and efficacy of honest diplomacy as a method of conflict management and resolution.
This UN performance, however, is less impressive than its contentious involvement in Iraq since 1991. To delve deeper into this issue, I consulted with a respected Canadian diplomat who has just published a detailed, analytical book analyzing the UN Security Council’s performance in Iraq. David M. Malone, a Canadian scholar-diplomat and former ambassador to the UN, currently represents Canada in India. His book, The International Struggle Over Iraq: Politics in the UN Security Council, 1980-2005, was published this month by Oxford University Press.

Avoiding the politics- and media-driven ideological assaults that characterize much of the public discussion of the UN these days, this scholarly book analyzes the flow of events to build towards conclusions on how the Security Council can do better in the future, especially on the design and administration of large undertakings such as weapons inspections and the Oil-for-Food Program in Iraq.

When I contacted Malone in New Delhi, he suggested that the case of Iraq in the Security Council since 1980 “shows the council at its best — in response to Iraqi aggression against Kuwait in 1990-91 — and at its worst, subsequently often divided over Iraq strategy, culminating in its deadlock of March 2003. The UK and USA responded to the deadlock by overthrowing Saddam Hussein without an explicit council mandate to do so, in a move pregnant with consequence for Iraq and the region.”

He describes Security Council decision-making as tending to be reactive rather than preventative, as the Lebanon case revealed again, and as such it is often highly improvisational and “expedient,” in the words of former senior UN official Sir Kieran Prendergast. Often it is weak, Malone said, such as “the council’s pathetic response to Iraq’s unprovoked attack against Iran in 1980, when it failed to brand Iraq clearly as the aggressor.”

Tehran has never forgotten this betrayal, he suggests, and may be influenced by it still in its current demands for certain guarantees and clarifications from the international community related to its nuclear industry plans. Ultimately, though, the council in 1987 developed a strategy to end the Iraq-Iraq war.

A few chapters review in some depth the highly improvisational, often careless, way in which the Security Council established subsidiary machinery to administer weapons inspections, humanitarian relief to counterbalance economic sanctions (the ill-starred although largely effective Oil-for-Food program) and to compensate those who had suffered losses because of Iraq’s attack on Kuwait.” Malone feels that the UN Compensation Commission and initial weapons inspections programs worked well — until in some cases the permanent members divided over basic Iraq strategy. The subsequent weapons monitoring operation in Iraq, UNMOVIC, was more carefully designed to promote impartiality, but foundered on a lack of consensus among the five permanent members of the council.

The study says the Oil-for-Food program shows the council in several of its characteristic modes: well intentioned in humanitarian terms, but not necessarily hard-headed. The council winked at massive sanctions busting by several neighboring states with which the five permanent council members entertained good relations, while pretending to be serious about enforcement.

The Paul Volcker-led inquiry made clear that corporate corruption relating to the program and Saddam Hussein’s subversion of it were much more extensive than the limited bureaucratic graft and ineptness that inquiry documented.

What are the implications and lessons of his extensive analysis of the UN Security Council’s operations in Iraq?

“If the Council again establishes for the UN ambitious administrative goals involving large sums of money, it must do a much better, more professional job of design and oversight. The Secretariat will also need to improve its professionalism.

“Most importantly, unity among the five permanent members is critical for the attainment of ambitious objectives, and requires extensive compromise among the permanent powers,” he told me.

Once signs of serious division can be detected, as was the case with France’s defection as early as 1995 and 1996 from the strategy favored by London and Washington, the likelihood of a geo-strategic train-wreck increases greatly. That is why the five permanent members’ unity on Iran to date has been so important, he concluded.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 12 September 2006
Word Count: 833
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BEIRUT — The fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attack on the United States and its aftermath is generating much analysis and discussion throughout the world, but most of it is sadly incomplete. We hear of many ways in which the world has changed since 9/11: Terrorism is worse today; the world is fighting terror groups more efficiently; American-led militarism has generated a strong counter-wave of anti-American resistance; and, freedom and democracy are promoted abroad while their core operative values are eroded in the United States and England.

These are not useful analytical approaches, because 9/11 has been elevated to a place of pivotal global history that is not supported by its true dimensions when measured on a worldwide scale. This week’s remembrances should remind us to remain discerning in separating issues of deep national trauma in any single country from trends of truly global and historical significance for all countries.

In this respect, the American-led war on Iraq was probably more historically significant than the 9/11 attack itself, though it was also a response to 9/11. There is an irritating chicken-and-egg element to this issue. In remembering 9/11, we should keep in mind a simple but crucial question: Did Al-Qaeda-like terror trigger Anglo-American militarism (“the global war on terror”) or did Anglo-American unilateralism and triumphalism provide the political and psychological nourishment that helped feed the growth of Al-Qaeda and its twisted worldview? The corollary question is: How much of the current wave of Islamist political militancy in the Middle East is a response to Anglo-American-Israeli militarism, and how much is a home-grown form of activism or extremism?

We must go beyond seeing 9/11 as a single, barbaric event whose perpetrators must be fought with all available means. We should analyze it as part of a wider process, in a deeper historical context. Remember that Al-Qaeda terrorists once tried to blow up the World Trade Center years before they succeeded. This is a strong reminder of the older cycle of tension, assault, anger and retribution between some Qaeda-type terrorists and some elements of Western state and society.

That cycle goes back to the early 1990s, a decade before 9/11 happened. This is why the much more meaningful date we should ponder in terms of world-changing history was the collapse of Communism and the Soviet Union and its empire in 1989-1990. That triumph of Anglo-American-led Western capitalism, freedom, democracy and militarism contributed to three key trends in the Middle East since 1990, within which 9/11 is more accurately analyzed.

First, this region remained strangely impervious to democratic change, allowing autocratic regimes to reinforce their grip at a time when the rest of the world was democratizing. Second, the end of the Cold War loosened ideological ties that had kept the Middle East frozen, and thus allowed some regimes and non-state groups to pursue new adventures that had not been possible in Cold War days (Iraq into Kuwait, Syria out of Lebanon, U.S.-U.K. into Iraq). Third, the Anglo-America-Israeli worldview that relies so heavily on belligerent force of arms dominated policy-making in the Middle East, bringing in the current era of pre-emptive regime change.

Since 1990, the Middle East has remained mired in a legacy of local and global extremism, terror, and military violence. The Anglo-American-Israeli politicians who seek to define the Middle East for the rest of the world have simplistically framed this trajectory of violence as a straightforward war against terror that was triggered by the odious crime of 9/11. The reality is not so simple. It is, rather, that 9/11 was a particularly criminal and inhuman act along a continuum of anti-American attacks by a relatively small band of terrorists whose passions did not resonate deeply among Arab public opinion — which is why they operated from the remote mountain valleys of Afghanistan, rather than from the cities of the Levant and Arabia.

To understand 9/11 in its full meaning and consequence today, we must be more historical, comprehensive, and linear: We should start around 1990; trace the rise of these small, isolated criminal terrorist bands; grasp why they could not appeal to Arab publics in the way that Hamas, Hizbullah and Moslem Brotherhood groups have done; see the symbiotic interaction between their deeds and the fury of Anglo-American-Israeli militarism in the region; and follow the larger story of countries and political systems in the Middle East that remain stressed and distorted because of the cruel combination of their own extremism and chronic foreign military interference.

Al-Qaeda was spawned by this ugly legacy, and contributed to making it even uglier in recent years, in part through the dynamics surrounding 9/11. To date, we have four high water marks of the modern sickness of militarism that demeans and often destroys our societies: 9/11, the Anglo-American war in Iraq, and the Israeli wars on Gaza and Lebanon. If these and related issues are not understood as part of a single historical process, they will not be understood at all. In that case, all we will experience this week of remembering 9/11 is an overload of analytical and emotional entertainment that is politically meaningless because it is so narrowly constructed and perceived — until we are jolted by the next attack, the next war or the next regime change.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 09 September 2006
Word Count: 874
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BEIRUT — Lebanon is in the peculiar situation of having to rebuild after the 34-day war between Hizbullah and Israel while it is still in the process of rebuilding after the 15-year-long civil war of 1975-89. Will this time around be different, and not lead to another war in a few years? Will the political balance between Lebanon’s 18 officially recognized confessional and sectarian groups regain sufficient equilibrium and stability to drive a long-term economic revival anchored in serious political reform?

To find out, I went to the person who has literally written the book on this subject. By coincidence, as the latest war broke out I was finishing a recently published book about war and economics in Lebanon by Dr. Samir Makdisi, the respected Lebanese economist and American University of Beirut professor, who also served as minister of national economy in 1992.

I asked him if this summer’s war had caused him to reconsider any of his conclusions from the civil war experience. He said that this war, and the political events that had preceded it, only reconfirmed the central thesis of his book: Balancing the needs of all citizens in Lebanon’s multi-confessional system requires serious political reforms that can generate better governance and a new political culture. And these, in turn, would allow Lebanon to tackle the significant challenges it faces in fields like environmental degradation, debt, unemployment, corruption, public sector inefficiency, and shortcomings in urban and rural planning, to name only the most obvious.

Makdisi’s book, The Lessons of Lebanon: the economics of war and development (I.B.Tauris, London and New York, 2004) provides a valuable combination of political and economic analyses of Lebanon before, during and after the civil war years. The dual focus on technical issues of finance, trade, regulatory systems, exchange rates and growth, alongside the larger social and political context of Lebanon in the half century from the 1950s to 2000 is especially useful now — because Lebanon’s post-war capacity to overcome adversity again relies heavily on progress on both the economic and political fronts.

Makdisi’s prognosis is mixed. In his book, he notes that local sectarianism and constant foreign influences were two reasons why Lebanon’s central government never achieved the sort of diligence that is so evident in the private sector and civil society in this country. After the civil war, these factors led to “the absence of a coherent long-term national policy that focused on the public good.”

“Whatever its merits,” he wrote, “the finely tuned sharing of political power among Lebanon’s religious communities is inherently discriminatory.” He called the political system a “constrained” democracy that is imbued with potential instability. This inherently unstable system always required external hands to stabilize it, the most recent one being Syria until last year.

The consequence of such a system is “an unstable political equilibrium” that will continue to prevail unless its underlying reasons are properly addressed. Among the consequences of this, he wrote a few years ago, are two things we have since witnessed in recent years: Many talented young Lebanese will leave the country to find work abroad; and, a system that swings between stable and unstable periods will always need external hands to balance it.

The post-Taif era “has not witnessed the creation of genuine political stability or, for that matter, better governance,” he wrote, presciently adding, “open national dialogue on how to resolve major political and economic issues学hich seeks broad political consensus has not been a Lebanese tradition.”

I asked him if the national dialogue that was launched earlier this year by the speaker of parliament, Nebih Berri, corrected this flawed legacy. He replied that the dialogue may not have made major gains because it was conducted by leaders who had vested interests in the “consociational democracy” system as it has long operated — sharing the spoils among sectarian groups according to established patterns of weight and influence.

The national dialogue will succeed only when it does what the Europeans did in the 1980s — bring in others in society (private sector leaders, academics, technocrats, activists) whose expertise can help generate a truly new system that is at once more stable, equitable, prosperous and sustainable.

The events of the past two years confirm many of the key points Makdisi makes in his book. These are more relevant than ever today, as Lebanon once again faces the reality that successfully rebuilding economically demands a parallel political reconfiguration.

“One lesson of this year’s war,” he told me, “is that Lebanon cannot be totally at the mercy of outside powers, whether from the east or the west, or else we risk inviting civil war again. We must work for a new political understanding that acknowledges the dangers of external interference. Iraq sadly is a good example of what can happen when solutions are imposed from the outside.”

What should the Lebanese do now, as rebuilding defines the land once again? He replies: “Our response should be a greater effort to manage our readjusted sectarian and confessional system in the short run, so that in the long run it moves towards a truly secular, liberal, and democratic political system. Such a system must safeguard the rights of all citizens equally, and not sacrifice the public interest for private interests.”

Sensible thoughts, from a seasoned son of the land itself.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ｩ2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 05 September 2006
Word Count: 880
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