BEIRUT — One of the frightening recent developments in Middle Eastern-Western relations has been the common feeling among many in this region that Europe has abandoned its centrist position and has moved closer to the American-Israeli one. This reflects Middle Eastern perceptions of European positions on several important issues: the Danish cartoons controversy, Iran’s nuclear industry, the election of Hamas in Palestine, the long delay in pushing for a ceasefire in Lebanon in July, and, especially in London, adopting the American tendency to exaggerate the “global war on terror” and to view every issue in the Middle East through that distorted lens.

European positions on Middle Eastern issues before 2005 tended to fall squarely in between Arab and Israeli sentiments, and usually offered a more sensible and nuanced policy approach to addressing key issues in the region, such as peace-making (the Venice Declaration) or democratization and economic development (the Barcelona Process). That impartiality seems to have eroded, as reflected in the strong popular anger and occasional violence against European symbols during the cartoons controversy.

What should Europe do now to redress the balance and restore — perhaps generate for the first time — an effective policy in the Middle East that can bring about real, sustainable change for the better?
I suggest six policy prescriptions:
1.  Be clear and outspoken on the issues. Europe’s strength in the past rested partly on the fact that it pointed out wrongdoings by all sides, even if it did not act decisively on the ground. The EU should revert to clear statements on right and wrong, legal and illegal, when any actor in the region behaves against the rule of law, UN resolutions or accepted international norms. Speaking out clearly provides the critical foundation of compliance with the law that is necessary for subsequent diplomatic intervention. This applies to states, militias, or foreign armies in the region.

2.  Remain impartial and fair. Europe should not allow itself to become an apologist for, or ally of, any of the warring parties in the region. It must be seen as the fair arbiter that looks out for the best interests and legitimate rights of all parties. That stance is critical for showing the way for the protagonists when they do eventually decide to give up the path of militancy or intransigence, and shift into a negotiating mode. By delineating, articulating and holding the diplomatic middle ground that respects the interests of all parties, Europe can improve the chances of the parties themselves moving in that direction.

3.  Hold all parties accountable in practical terms, not just rhetorically. Europe or individual member states should use available mechanisms — courts, enquiry commissions, investigative missions, special tribunals, media mock trials, and other such means — to hold accountable those states or non-state actors who act against prevailing legal and moral norms. Even symbolic actions will have an impact and perhaps show the errant parties that impunity is not an option in the long term.

4.  Actively engage on the ground. Emissaries, local representatives, and peace-making troops, among others, are much more useful in resolving conflicts in the Middle East than intra-European conferences in European capitals. The recent diplomatic work and subsequent expansion of international forces in south Lebanon to cement the ceasefire is a good example of how active involvement by bodies on the ground — civilian and military, from the UN or member states — achieves results that are elusive to diplomats and politicians in Western capitals only.

5.  Do not confuse different issues or get them hopelessly tangled. There are several simultaneous major issues that plague the Middle East, including the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Lebanon situation, Iraq’s problems, a low-intensity U.S.-Syria feud, a high-profile Iranian-American-European-IAEA contest, widespread domestic social and economic pressures, non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, a widening cycle of terrorism against local and foreign targets, and a broad desire to promote good governance and democracy in some form throughout the region. Some of these issues are linked, but many others are not. Europe — better than the United States or the directly involved Arab parties — is best placed to show both the assorted linkages that do exist among these issues as well as the distinct nature of most of them that requires focusing on them separately.

6.  Engage and entice, do not boycott or sanction. The neo-con-driven recent American tendency to use threats, force or sanctions to pressure sovereign states or significant non-state actors like Hamas and Hizbullah to change their policies has been a dismal failure. Similarly, the refusal to meet and talk with parties with whom one disagrees has proven both naïve and counterproductive. Europe should not get sucked into this emotional and simplistic approach that is so popular in the United States and Israel. Countries or political groups that are seen to be problematic must be engaged and enticed through serious negotiations to change their ways and comply with prevailing global norms of behavior.

But this gets us back to the issues of equity and balance mentioned above. Engagement and changes in policies and behavior will happen only if a single standard of morality and law is applied to Israelis, Arabs, Iranians, Pakistanis, Indians, Turks and others alike. If a double standard remains the norm (Israel, Pakistan, India can have a nuclear fuel cycle, but not Iran or any Arab country), Western and Israeli attempts to force a certain policy on Arabs and Iranians will only generate resistance and defiance.
Self-interest, and a certain legacy of elegance and efficacy, suggest that Europe is not only well placed, but also powerfully motivated, to revitalize a policy of decisive, law-based impartiality, clarity, inclusion and active engagement in the Middle East, in order to reverse the current growing cycle of tension and violence.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Daily Star newspaper in Beirut, a syndicated columnist, and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

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Released: 04 September 2006
Word Count: 951
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BEIRUT — There is something sad about a grown man playing children’s make-believe war games in a tree-house in grandpa’s back yard — which is how George W. Bush came across Thursday night in his speech on the importance of winning the war in Iraq in the global battle against terrorism. Rarely does a leader of a great country like the United States malign history, his people’s intelligence and the dignity of over a billion Muslims in one speech. But Bush did that Thursday night and will probably keep doing it for a while.

Terrorism is no joke or game, I know: The September 11, 2001, and subsequent attacks around the world were tragic and criminal deeds. Nobody has to tell us in the Middle East about terrorism’s evil, because we suffer its negative impact in two ways — as victims of terror for many decades, and also as the owners of the societies that give birth to so many terrorists.

Yet Bush’s response to terror remains hobbled by three constraints: misdiagnosing the causes and aims of terror; waging a “global war on terror” that has only expanded the problem by giving terrorists new reasons to cause havoc; and, exaggerating the nature and extent of the terror threat to Americans and the world — primarily for domestic political purposes.

The cumulative consequences of such an approach have been devastating in various ways: to Bush’s own political standing at home, the United States’ credibility and clout around he world, and the continued threat of terror around the world. The shortcomings of Bush’s anti-terror approach are very clear five years after the September 11 attack, yet he keeps promoting historically inaccurate and morally deviant approaches to the problem that only make the problem worse in many cases.

The president’s speech Thursday night was most compelling for its capacity to say nothing new — that he has not said repeatedly in the past three years — while adding new layers of misinterpretation and diversionary confusion that he sells to the American public on the basis of emotionalism, patriotism and nostalgia. His main thesis sums up his shameful misanalysis: “The war we fight today is more than a military conflict. It is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century.”

Really? The decisive ideological struggle of the 21st Century is launched by a small band of criminal deviants like Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri from caves in Afghanistan, who play on the lost minds and restless psyches of young mainly Arab and Pakistani men already angered by conditions in their societies? The terror problem is one that some good quality American high school guidance counselors could probably diagnose accurately, if given a chance to do so without the distorting dictates of domestic politics.

I can think of a lot more credible candidates for this century’s decisive ideological struggle, including fighting poverty, expanding equitable global trading patterns, promoting good governance and the rule of law around the world, giving ordinary people everywhere a sense of being treated with dignity and justice, safeguarding the global environment, and a few others.

Bush is wrong about the real threat from terror and has been wrong since he first had to deal with the impact of September 11: It is neither a global ideological movement, nor does it plan to take the battle to the streets of Peoria and Memphis. His idea that different sorts of Islamic extremism and militancy form “a worldwide network of radicals that use terror to kill those who stand in the way of their totalitarian ideology” is also a gross exaggeration and simplification, but one that fits comfortably into the neo-conservative-driven Republican White House view of the world (and their electoral imperative in the United States).

Bush also does a disservice to the world and insults his own people’s intelligence by mixing together into one ideological movement what is in reality a range of very different movements, inspired by different local and global causes. By linking Iraq, the recent Israel-Hizbullah war, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and Syrian policies as elements in a single threat that must be fought by America’s freedom agenda, he generates a common threat that does not exist as a single, coordinated adversary. This is one reason why Bush is having such a hard time with his foreign policies achieving any goals in the Middle East, or reducing the threat of terror attacks.

He also perpetuates his misreading of the problem with his continuous insult to over a billion Muslims around the world by glibly and repeatedly speaking of Islam, fascism and terror in the same breath. This constant demonizing of an entire religion that promotes piety, peace and justice as its core values is only creating conditions that generate new terrorists among the ranks of wayward and fearful young men living in Arab-Asian societies — young men whose distorted and freak politics are due, in many cases, to the impact of decades of American policies.

George W. Bush is responding to the terror of what started as a small band of miscreants with a shameful form of intellectual terror that has empowered them to recruit and expand. It is tragically sad when a man who should know better behaves like an adolescent and fights make-believe enemies in tree-house environments.

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 September 2006
Word Count: 872
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BEIRUT — The Arab world’s two leading self-styled “Islamic resistance movements” — Hizbullah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine — seem to be moving in different directions, but there are lessons to be learned from both. The main one is that armed resistance is primarily a means for these groups. Their ultimate goal is a national order that reflects their society’s valid concerns on political legitimacy, sovereignty, ideology and social values. Above all, their success reflects their ability to respond to the real needs of their constituents, rather than to promote any sort of ideal Islamic society or espouse revolutionary rhetoric and wage perpetual war.

As Hizbullah holds its own in Lebanon and the region, it also finds itself preoccupied with the challenges of shifting its center of gravity — or at least its international image — from guns to governance. After achieving the two striking feats of driving the Israeli army out of south Lebanon in 2000 and fighting it to a draw in 2006, it has no room left for military endeavors, and nothing more to prove on the battlefield.

It asserted itself in recent years by defying five parties: a weak Lebanese central government, other Lebanese political groups, Israel, the United States, and the dominant regimes in the Arab world. In return, these forces have now physically and politically hemmed it in: The Israeli army will destroy all Lebanon after the next provocation, the Lebanese government has moved 15,000 soldiers to the south, the UN Security Council dispatched another 15,000 international peace-keepers, and Lebanese and Arab political leaders call on Hizbullah to engage and integrate fully in the national governance and security system.

History suggests that fighting resistance wars to liberate one’s occupied land is much more straightforward than making a subsequent transition to political responsibility. Hizbullah’s most important test is just starting: It must erase the haze of its own inscrutability, remove the ambiguity of its relations with Iran and Syria, and slay the demons of mistrust that plague its relations with many key players, especially in Lebanon. It can do this and retain its integrity and impact, but only if it applies the same serious operating principles to the political realm that it has applied in recent years militarily, socially and in terms of its sheer focus, courage and efficiency.

The parallel lessons from Palestine are instructive and sobering. The Palestinian national resistance movement against Zionism and Western powers since the 1930s has passed through erratic stages of success and failure. The Fateh-dominated PLO made some major political achievements regionally and globally in the 1970s and 80s, only to sink into a sad cycle of complacency, corruption and incompetence after 1990. This ultimately led to its own marginalization, and the political and physical destruction of many aspects of Palestinian society.

Three key responses to this institutional mediocrity and political failure were the rise of Hamas and smaller Islamist groups, the waging of two grassroots and largely spontaneous popular intifadas against Israeli occupation, and the fragmentation of society into local political-military wards, militias and gangs. Hamas’ success in resisting Israel militarily ultimately helped drive Israel out of Gaza; it achieved parallel political success in winning local and national elections in 2005-2006.

Its overall trajectory, however, has been more difficult than Hizbullah’s. This is mainly because it has been fought simultaneously by a brutal Israeli military and political assault, Fateh and other Arab governments that fear its ilk, and the United States and Europe who have sanctioned and tried to break it. Yet it has also performed poorly in many cases, unable to build on the credibility and legitimacy that it had achieved since its founding less than two decades ago.

A respected member of Hamas in Gaza has now publicly admonished his fellow ruling Islamists and other Palestinians for their failures, charging that, “Gaza is suffering under the yoke of anarchy and the swords of thugs,” and since Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza a year ago, “life became a nightmare and an intolerable burden.”

These sentiments were published in an article Sunday by Ghazi Hamad, a former Hamas newspaper editor and the spokesman for the current Hamas government. He urged Palestinians to examine their own performance and not blame Israel for all their problems and failures, though he also seemed to place most of the blame on assorted Fateh-linked armed groups in Gaza. His most important point was his insistence on “self-criticism and self-evaluation,” instead of the habit of “blaming our mistakes on others.”

Hamas has been through tough moments before, including repeated assassinations of its leaders, mass deportations and jailings of its members, and the current political and economic boycott of Israel, the United States and Europe. In light of the lessons of Hizbullah’s performance in Lebanon, Hamas must now adjust quickly or risk the same doomed, but self-inflicted, fate as Fateh and the PLO.

As Ghazi Hamad aptly challenged it and Palestinian society to do, it needs to examine its own ways in order to achieve success by being more accountable to its constituents, rather than faithful to fiery or emotional slogans. The performance of Hizbullah and Hamas in the months ahead are worth monitoring, for they will impact greatly on political trends throughout the Arab world.

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: 29 August 2006
Word Count: 867
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BEIRUT — For much of my adult life, I have found that doing crossword puzzles and reading United Nations Security Council resolutions are two very effective ways to keep the mind alert and functioning at a reasonable level of utility. The recent UNSC Resolution 1701, passed two weeks ago to bring an end to the fighting between Israel and Hizbullah, will go down in UN lore as a masterpiece of deliberate and constructive diplomatic fluidity, and a gold medal winner among mind and word games. That’s precisely why it was agreed on, passed unanimously, and is being slowly implemented. For it reflects what professional diplomats do best: Construct win-win arrangements that all sides can sell to their people as great national triumphs.

The resolution provides a historic opportunity to address this dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict in a manner that augurs well for a possible revival of attempts to restart a comprehensive approach to Arab-Israeli peace-making. This is why it is so important to make this resolution work. UNSC Resolution 1701 is important in a wider context because of four crucial elements:

* It applies the rule of law as the basic criterion for conflict resolution. This is a most welcomed change from the recent unruly ways of zealots in Washington, Israel, and, increasingly, in London, who prefer to change conditions in the Middle East by using a combination of their equally powerful arrogance and armies. Yet, importantly, it also puts brakes on those amongst us in the Arab-Iranian Middle East whose proclivity to unilateral and often demagogic militancy has been one of the recurring catastrophes of our age. Police states and gangster politics in either the Middle East or the West must be countered by applying the rule of law as the determinant of political behavior and the use of force.

* It reflects negotiated positions and concerns of all the key players, excluding none. The UN forum is valuable not just for the fine meals and useful conversation in the delegates’ dining room overlooking the East River, but also for forcing a multilateral approach to dealing with issues that bilateral or unilateral ways do not achieve. A big problem we suffer in the region now is that some of the key players and intermittent rascals — the United States, UK, Israel, Hizbullah, Iran, Syria, Hamas — often do not speak to each other, let alone negotiate their differences. Bombast and bombs become the preferred vocabulary of interaction in such cases. This resolution breaks the pattern of boycotting key players, and includes Hizbullah in its wording and scope, which provides an approach that can be repeated regionally.

* It treats all parties relatively, but not fully, equally and fairly, by including all the crucial issues for both sides and by renegotiating to make it more acceptable to both sides. All the key issues for Lebanon and Israel are mentioned in the text in some manner, including prisoners, the occupied Shabaa farms, cross-border raids, Lebanese government authority in the south, an expanded international force to ensure the peace, a full and speedy Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, and stopping foreign armament of Hizbullah or other non-governmental armed groups in Lebanon. The embarrassingly pro-Israeli first draft of the resolution was changed after forceful collective Arab diplomatic intervention and a spirited posture by the Lebanese government — both rare and welcomed events that elicited some flexibility from the other side.

* It includes robust international military involvement to implement the resolution, signifying both its political legitimacy and an intent to apply its terms. This is the most contentious and complex part of the resolution, because the precise mandate of the international troops under UN command is disputed. Israel, the United States and others in Lebanon and abroad want Hizbullah to be relieved of its weapons quickly, while the prevalent view in Lebanon, including in the government, is that Hizbullah’s armed/disarmed status will be addressed for sure, but after the security and sovereignty issues with Israel are resolved. The letter of the resolution demands that Hizbullah and Israel stop using weapons against each other, which is happening and is likely to continue. The spirit of the resolution expects that weapons in Lebanon will only be in the hands and control of the Lebanese government and armed forces. This must happen one day in the near future, when the government in Beirut feels that Israel no longer threatens, occupies or attacks Lebanon.

It is vital that Resolution 1701 be implemented quickly, efficiently, equitably and fully, for the sake of Lebanon and Israel, but also for the wider region. Its ground-breaking nature could provide an important vision of how to move more ambitiously to resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict in full. That would also blunt some of the local tension, resentment and militarism that are exploited by parties further afield, such as the United States and Iran. Here’s my vote of confidence for those whose long lunches along the East River in New York result in constructive outcomes in the form of new resolutions that both test the riddle-solving portions of my brain and make it more likely that the rest of me won’t get blown up in another missile war in the coming months.

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: 25 August 2006
Word Count: 860
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BEIRUT — I visited the southern suburbs of Beirut yesterday for the first time since Israel had bombed its core to smithereens. It was impressive to watch the clean-up and reconstruction work underway by Hizbullah, the government and scores of local and international non-governmental organizations. Tens of thousands of people walking through the rubble exhibited pride and achievement of having withstood the attacks and seeing Hizbullah fight Israel to a draw.

But I also had mixed feelings as I watched Hizbullah give cash payments of $10,000 and more for families to get through the next year, whose homes were destroyed. I wondered: What if the war had not happened and Hizbullah had given $10,000 to each of the estimated 15,000 eligible families for some other use — to buy computer systems, encyclopedias, and poetry books, and to send thousands of deserving students to university?

But the world does not work like that. Israel’s massive attack against civilian and Hizbullah military targets throughout Lebanon is one sign of irrationality — laced with barbarism — that often defines political decisions in this part of the world. Hizbullah’s response had been honed by a quarter of a century of fighting off Israeli attacks, occupations and threats. Its three thousand missiles and rockets fired into northern Israel caused some material and human damage, but sent a powerful political message that resonates throughout the region: Israel’s military is not invincible, and can be stymied with determined planning and courageous resistance.

That’s correct, but then what? Another war? Better bomb shelters? More accurate missiles? Another 25,000 homes destroyed in Lebanon and Israel? As long as the battle is waged in Lebanon, public opinion in the Arab world, and among governments in Syria, Iran and a few other places, is prepared to fight Israel to the death. Israel, with explicit American diplomatic support and military re-supply lines, is prepared to destroy Lebanon. Period. These are uninviting prospects. We deserve better options.

This was a war that Hizbullah could wage only one time, to prove its capabilities and political will, which it did rather emphatically. If it happens again, though, Lebanon will be destroyed, literally burned by Israeli fire. Hizbullah would not be destroyed, and it will regroup and fight again, perhaps with more destructive power that penetrates deeper into Israel. But Lebanon would become a wasteland, a biblical desolation. Like Sodom and Gomorrah in Genesis, Lebanon would be burned and left to smolder as an eternal reminder to all generations to come of the utter devastation that people or states can expect if they challenge the divine wrath by threatening Israel’s security or defying Washington too often.

Israel believes it can live with such a scenario as the price of its own security and survival. It would willingly wage such war over and over again, against Syria and perhaps Iran, possibly in collusion with the United States. Some in Washington relish such destruction and chaos in Arab and Islamic lands, feeling that only a sustained frontal assault on the prevailing Arab political culture can break the mould that has defined many of our violent lands in modern times.

Afghanistan and Iraq are examples of this approach. Palestine is halfway there. Lebanon is a candidate for political oblivion, and has just had its warning. The message of Israel’s attack and siege of Beirut is simple: Those who thought they could transform the Paris of the Middle East into its Hanoi would only end up seeing it turned into Mogadishu, the shattered capital of a failed and wayward Somali state, fought over by alternating gangs and warlords.

Hizbullah cannot wage this war again, and must now shift to building on the gains it has made, through political engagement inside Lebanon and around the region. It has not signaled the direction or tone of its political plans, but the signs of the past three weeks indicate that it will reorient its energies to domestic Lebanese politics — if Lebanon, Israel, the United States and others allow it to do so. I see no other interpretation of the four significant decisions Hizbullah has made since early August: accepting Prime Minister Siniora’s 7-point peace plan; accepting the Lebanese government decision to send the army to the southern border region; accepting UN Security Council Resolution 1701 and its call for a beefed up UN force in southern Lebanon; and, energetically repopulating and rebuilding the mainly Shiite civilian areas that had been bombed and evacuated during the war.

Hizbullah will claim, with some credibility, that it has forced Israel and the international community to address the issues that matter to Lebanon, such as Shabaa Farms, prisoners, and cross-border attacks. The UN-mandated political process in Resolution 1701 offers a route to resolve those issues. It could, if successful, even reinvigorate a regional conflict-resolution process that is anchored in law and driven by negotiations, rather than by irrationalism, barbarism and desolation.

We will soon find out if those who fought so fiercely on both sides are equally good at learning the lessons of their combat, and moving us all towards a future that looks more like Paris than Mogadishu.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 22 August 2006
Word Count: 848
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BEIRUT — We have a very simple choice before us now in the Middle East: We can get serious about working together to give all the people of this region a chance to live normal lives in peace and security; or, we can all act silly in the ways of provincial chieftains, as many public figures in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Israel and the United States have done in recent days since the Hizbullah-Israel fighting stopped August 14.

The chances of achieving a region-wide peace in the Middle East are slim to nonexistent right now, because the key non-Arab players are focusing on the wrong issues. They are trying to manage or eliminate the symptoms of our region’s tensions instead of addressing the root causes. Hizbullah and Iran are among the best examples of this.

Israel and the United States are obsessed with disarming Hizbullah and confronting Iran. But a quarter of a century ago neither of these issues existed. How Hizbullah and Iran became so problematic is worth recalling. Until 1979 Iran under the Shah was a close ally and friend of the US and Israel, and Hizbullah was not even born. What happened in the three decades from the mid-70s to today? Many things. The most consistent one was that we all allowed the Arab-Israeli conflict to fester unresolved. Its bitterness kept seeping out from its Palestine-Israel core to corrode many other dimensions of the region.

The constant clashes and occasional wars between Israel and Lebanon since the late 1960s derived heavily from the unresolved Palestinian-Israeli conflict that started with the 1948 war. The Islamic revolutionary zeal since Iran’s 1979 revolution found effective expression in its close association with Hizbullah, which Iranian Revolutionary Guards were instrumental in establishing and training. Tehran’s assistance to Hamas today follows a similar pattern. A non-Arab power like Iran exploits the resentment against Israel and the United States throughout the Arab world to make political inroads into Arab regions. If the Arab-Israeli conflict had been resolved decades ago, Iran would not have this opportunity.

Hizbullah and its arms has many people working backwards. While American-Israeli-led effort to disarm Hizbullah aims mainly to protect Israel, the fact is that Hizbullah has developed its military capability primarily in response to a need to protect Lebanon from repeated Israeli attacks and occupations in the past four decades. (Lebanese calls to disarm Hizbullah are motivated more by a desire to prevent the party from bringing on more ruin from Israeli attacks, or to prevent it from taking over the country’s political system and aligning it with Syria and Iran.)

The way to end Hizbullah’s status as the only non-state armed group in Lebanon is to rewind the reel, and go to the heart of the problem that caused Hizbullah to develop its formidable military capabilities in the first place. If we solve the Arab-Israeli conflict in a fair manner according to UN resolutions, we would eliminate two critical political forces that now nourish Hizbullah’s armed defiance: the Israeli threat to Lebanon, and the ability of Syria and Iran to exploit the ongoing conflict with Israel by working through Lebanon.

Iran has its own reasons, including some valid ones, for developing a full nuclear fuel cycle, though the potential atomic weapons capability that derives from this is more problematic. Iran’s political meddling in Lebanon and other Arab lands is another issue. Yet it is linked umbilically to the assertion of Islamist identity, Shiite empowerment, anti-Western defiance and domestic challenges to autocratic Arab regimes — four dynamics that often have been associated with, and exacerbated by, the festering Arab-Israeli conflict.

Israel’s persistent attempts to secure its place in this region by military force have always generated a greater Arab will to fight it, now also supported by Iran. Local attempts to secure its borders — occupations, surrogate armies, cross-border attacks, separation walls, massive punishment and humiliation of civilian populations – have not worked for Israel, and only generate more determined and capable resistance like Hizbullah. Israel will also fail in its desire to subcontract its security to foreign or regional states, as it is attempting to do through the international force in south Lebanon, or by having Turkey prevent arms shipments to Hizbullah from Iran.

Every major tough issue in this region — Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, Iran, terrorism, radicalism, armed resistance groups — is somehow linked to the consequences of the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The politicians and government leaders who dominate this region, or engage it from Western capitals, all look like either rank amateurs or intemperate brutes as they flail at symptoms instead of grappling with the core issue that has seen this region spin off into ever greater circles of violence since the 1970s.

A comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace agreement is achievable from the Arab side, to judge by the repeated re-offering of the 2002 Arab summit peace proposal. Israel, the United States and others from that world must quickly decide if they too can become sensible and work for a comprehensive peace as the most effective way to reduce and then reverse the cycles of resentment, radicalism and resistance that now define much of the Arab-Islamic Middle East.

Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 18 August 2006
Word Count: 854
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BEIRUT — As I watched Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah making his frequent television addresses in recent weeks, particularly his Monday night one, after the fighting had stopped earlier that day, he seemed to take on the veneer of a national leader rather than the head of one group in Lebanon’s rich mosaic of political parties. In tone and content, his remarks seemed like those that a president or prime minister should be making while addressing the nation after a terrible month of destruction and human suffering. His prominence is one of the important political repercussions of this war.

The intense interest of some politicians, foreign leaders and many journalists in “when and how Hizbullah will be disarmed” is understandable. Israel, the United States, others in Europe and in some quarters of Lebanon have stressed this issue for many months well before the war. But this focus is too narrow to be a useful peg for a full analysis of the political implications of this war. Hizbullah’s arms should be assessed in the wider domestic, regional and international context in which they exist and operate.

That context has been clarified by this war, which inflicted severe human and material damage on the two countries. Now its political ripples will be felt throughout the Middle East, and perhaps further afield. One of these is the prominence of non-state actors, such as Hizbullah, that act with more efficacy and, in some cases, more legitimacy than some governments in the Arab world.

The significant political fact is not only that such an organization has become very powerful in tandem with the formal Lebanese institutions of state, but also that it has in part provoked and single-handedly fought a war with a neighboring state — and emerged in rather good shape.

So, Nasrallah speaks to the nation after the fighting stops.

This has serious implications for the whole region, which I expect we will now witness in the form of sharper political polarization, already seen in Lebanon. This polarization will take several forms. The first is rising tension and greater competition in the Arab world between official governments and the non-state actors who have stepped into the void of credibility and impact that many Arab state institutions have forfeited in recent decades. Other like-minded movements in the Arab world will seek to emulate Hizbullah’s organizational and political prowess.

A parallel polarization that has crystallized in the past year, and has been a theme of some recent Nasrallah speeches, is between countries and political forces within the region that wage a regional cold war for the political identity of the Middle East. Syria and Iran, along with groups like Hizbullah, Hamas, the Moslem Brotherhood and others, are actively challenging the more conservative, often pro-Western states such as Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and Egypt. This contest will simmer for many years.

This is closely linked to a wider contest focused around American-led pressure on Iran to stop its plans to develop a full nuclear fuel cycle. The wider struggle beyond nuclear capability and Iran is about the ideological, social and economic orientation of the Middle East region. The Iranian-Syrian-Hizbullah-led camp sees itself fighting back against Israeli and American hegemony in the region, while the United States, closely allied with Israel, for its part speaks openly about creating a “new” Middle East of societies closely linked to Western values and interests.

Israel and its role in the region is integral to these strata of polarization, all of which intersect sharply in Lebanon — especially in Hizbullah’s multiple roles as a political party, anti-occupation resistance group, and Islamist movement that sees itself as part of a wider regional identity.

The brutality of the mutual attacks against mostly civilian urban centers during the war should be seen as a harbinger of the political intensity the region will witness in the years ahead. This may reveal itself sooner than we wish in the American-Iranian confrontation at the UN Security Council — while tensions and polarization define most other political trends in the region: internal Lebanese and Israeli politics, Israeli-Palestinian relations, and internal politics in Arab countries whose Islamist and other opposition movements will be emboldened by Hizbullah’s experience.

The strength and assertiveness of the Islamist movements — whether through military confrontation like Hizbullah or winning elections as in many other cases — is a sign that majorities of Arab citizens are not content to remain docile and dejected in the state of subjugation and defeat that has defined them for decades.

Israel and the United States have shown they are prepared to destroy an entire country to assert their interests if not also their dominance in this region. And many Arab states watched all this on television, and sent relief supplies when Israel gave them permission to do so.

This convergence of worldviews and behavior does not augur well for a stable, peaceful Middle East. What we just witnessed in Lebanon and Israel may have been a terrible foretaste of larger furies to come, unless more rational minds prevail and work to ensure, once and for all, the equal rights of Arabs, Israelis, Iranians and all others in this region.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 15 August 2006
Word Count: 854
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BEIRUT — Talk about wake-up calls. The arrest of 21 people in England who allegedly planned to blow up numerous airplanes over the Atlantic Ocean is about as dramatic and dangerous as it gets in the wake-up call department. Something is driving average young men to plan and execute deeds of brutal, almost unimaginable, inhumanity, targeting innocent civilians in the West who have nothing to do with whatever conflict may be at hand here.

Good police work prevented this alleged plot. Other such operations will take place, though, because whatever is driving these killers remains an active catalyst to their criminality. The likelihood is that the next wave of attacks will be directed at softer targets, where large numbers of civilians gather in a relatively relaxed security atmosphere, such as urban mass transit or sports, shopping and theater venues. Terror is a growth industry, because the fuel of cruel policies and human discontent that powers it remains so plentiful.

More important than good police work to prevent attacks is to take away the political, personal and other factors that prompt such extremism from hijacking the minds of otherwise ordinary young men. On that front, it seems that the prevalent political policies of Arab, Israeli, American and British leaders are contributing to terrorism, rather than thwarting it.

It is high time that people of influence in all these societies recognize that their civilians are being terrorized because opinion-molders in these societies have allowed themselves to be politically terrorized into ignoring the obvious links between conditions in Arab societies and the growth and spread of terror. There can be no doubt that events in the Arab world contribute significantly to turning middle class men into world class monsters.

The two most important cases are Palestine and Lebanon. Here is where Anglo-American-Israeli policies combine with the prevalent absence of serious Arab political leadership and responsibility to leave masses of ordinary Arabs feeling helpless and vulnerable. They see, feel and must somehow react to the mass suffering, death, displacement, pauperization and dehumanization that are now transmitted around the world on television.

The Israeli atrocities in Lebanon are merely the latest example of this modern legacy, but Israel’s American-supported assault on the Palestinians is just as brutal, and much older. A new report issued Thursday shows that 170 Palestinians were killed in the occupied Gaza Strip in the latest Israeli military offensive between June 27 and August 8, with 151 individuals killed in July alone. This is the single largest monthly death toll in the occupied Gaza Strip since October 2004, when 166 Palestinians were killed. More significantly, the report by the Palestinian Monitoring Group reveals that 138 of the 170 Palestinians killed were civilians, and 25 per cent of civilian fatalities were children. Another 506 Palestinians were injured during that period.

This sort of sustained, institutionalized Israeli assault on mostly defenseless Palestinians is mirrored in a more vulgar way by Israel’s aerial bombardment of entire civilian neighborhoods in Lebanon, including reported plans to literally bulldoze entire villages across a zone in south Lebanon along the border with Israel. When this sort of thing goes on decade after decade, and the initial response from the American president and British prime minister is to give Israel more time and diplomatic room to kill Arabs and destroy their societies in Palestine and Lebanon, something snaps in the minds of millions of ordinary men and women throughout the Arab world who simply cannot endure this chronic abuse for decades on end without reacting.

Well, that reaction now clearly includes the madness and crime of terror against civilians by small groups of men. Much larger numbers of ordinary people do not embrace terror, but rather cheer on and support those who politically or even militarily challenge Israel, Arab regimes, the United States and the UK, in arenas that include Iraq these days.

The issue is not whether Israel has a right to defend itself — of course it does, as does every sovereign state and group of human beings anywhere — but rather the fact that Israel tries to defend itself by ignoring its own role in provoking the battle, and by treating Arabs like sub-species of animals who can be beaten, killed, displaced and humiliated year after year.

The fact that Israel now simultaneously brutalizes entire civilian populations in Lebanon and Israel, largely with Anglo-American acquiescence if not active approval, does not go unnoticed by other Arabs, Muslims, Asians, Europeans, Americans and decent human beings everywhere. We can expect the inhumanity they see on television every day to result ultimately in two things: extreme reactions of terror against the West by a few enraged young men, and a willingness by political leaders everywhere to consider whether present policies may be fomenting rather than reducing terror.

We’ve had the spike in terror and greater resistance against Israel, the Anglo-Americans, and Arab regimes. But we have yet to see responsible political leaders here or there grasp the simple truth that ordinary men and women in this region have known for decades: Bad policies that chronically brutalize ordinary people in the Arab world inevitably transform some of those ravaged people into senseless death and revenge machines that only want to brutalize in return.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 11 August 2006
Word Count: 869
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BEIRUT — After four weeks of violent but inconclusive warfare, there were almost as many diplomats as missiles flying overhead in Beirut in the last few days, signaling a shift from fighting to negotiating, as the war’s true dimensions and stakes suddenly become more evident. This is not one war, but five, and in the political arena they will all be fought simultaneously.

On the surface, the situation seems clear. Israel and Hizbullah have effectively fought each other to a draw, despite Israel’s huge advantage in military power and its savage will to pummel all of Lebanon. Destroying Lebanon and slowly eroding Hizbullah’s capacity to fire missiles would entail a very high political cost for all concerned, and so diplomacy must take over now.

The first draft of the UN resolution to end the war agreed by the French and Americans is significant but flawed. It is significant because it mentions all the key issues that are important for both sides and that have not been resolved through war: occupied lands, cross-border attacks, return of prisoners, mutual respect of sovereignty and the 1949 armistice line.

The resolution is flawed because it favors Israel on all the key issues: It says Hizbullah started the conflict; it demands unconditional return of onlyIsraeli prisoners; it allows Israel to keep attacking and does not demand immediate Israel withdraw from south Lebanon, or subsequent Israeli withdrawal from the Shabaa Farms area that Lebanon says is Lebanese land; and, it demands an international force in south Lebanon and disarmament of Hizbullah before all of Lebanon’s legitimate demands are met.

The Lebanese government decision Monday to send 15,000 troops to the south — once Israel withdraws — will spur movement towards a more balanced resolution. This is an important signal that Lebanon and Hizbullah are prepared to respond to reasonable and legitimate demands by the international community, but only if Lebanese demands are met simultaneously.

Still, the problem is that a cease-fire and political resolutions on this front solve only one of our five wars around here. The other four wars are:
* the coming internal battles inside Lebanon to define the country’s future character and orientation;
* the continuing antagonism between Israel and regional players like the Palestinians, Syria, Iran and probably a majority of Arab public opinion;
* the struggle for legitimacy and leadership between established Arab regimes and powerful non-state actors like Hizbullah and Hamas; and,
* the global tug-of-war over the soul and identity of the Middle East, symbolized by the tensions between the United States-Israel-United Kingdom-led camp and the Iran-Syria-Hizbullah-Hamas-led camp.

Most of the key actors in this conflict see themselves fighting these five wars simultaneously, even though Lebanon-Israel is the only active battleground. Lebanon and Israel should be able to resolve their bilateral disputes as easily as Jordan and Egypt resolved theirs with Israel. But a weak Lebanese government in recent decades has precluded such a step because of Syrian dominance of Lebanon, repeated Israeli attacks and occupations in Lebanon, the rise of Hizbullah, and the Lebanese sect-based consensual governance system that inherently breeds a weak central government.

Israel has repeatedly used its military power in the past 40 years to stop attacks against it from south Lebanon, always to no avail. Hizbullah’s impressive performance to keep fighting and attacking during the past month suggests that a historic turning point has been reached: In a narrow but ferocious engagement, an Arab force has militarily fought Israel to a draw, and thus perhaps neutralized Israel’s historical reliance on its military deterrence to impose its will on its neighbors. This may be why Israel is attacking civilian installations throughout Lebanon, making a wasteland of the country: a lesson to anyone else who might consider challenging it militarily. This strategy probably will not work either, because savagery, like occupation, only begets resistance and defiance.

Hizbullah will emerge stronger politically from the cease-fire diplomacy if Israel is forced to comply with the key Lebanese demands of exchanging prisoners, leaving Sheba Farms, and stopping cross-border flights and attacks, in return for no more attacks against Israel from Lebanon. If and when Israel is no longer a threat to Lebanon, Hizbullah will no longer need to remain an armed resistance movement beyond the control of the government.

Israel and the United States now focus their energy on preventing Hizbullah from emerging from this war strengthened politically — because a stronger Hizbullah with widespread support in the Arab world and Iran would make the Israeli-American position in the other four wars immeasurably more difficult. Hizbullah in Lebanon is the embodiment of all five wars, which is why it must be defeated forever in Israel-American eyes, as well as those of many Lebanese and other Arabs who mistrust Hizbullah and fear its local and regional aims.

The last month suggests that destroying Hizbullah is not easy, which is why the political battles now shaping up will be so important. They will see the five wars in this region being fought simultaneously, unlike this one-front Lebanese-Israeli clash.

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 08 August 2006
Word Count: 830
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BEIRUT — As I listened carefully to George W. Bush and Tony Blair during the past week, Israeli bombs were dropping all around us in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon. I had become slightly concerned that their enthusiastic plans for my freedom and democracy in the Middle East were becoming incongruously riddled with wars, private militias, terror plagues, and crumbling societies. Then when I learned that the American secretaries of state and defense agreed to help train Lebanon’s army — I really got worried.

I say this because I am not impressed when I look around our region and assess the pros and cons of the Bush-Blair policy of promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East as an antidote to terrorism and dictatorship. Their “forward strategy of freedom” approach is mostly a calamity to date. The last thing we need is a new chapter in its growing book of horrors.

I should add that I agree with the Bush-Blair concept of promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East, which I and many others here have devoted most of our adult lives to achieving. Yet their militaristic, aggressive approach that is umbilically linked to Israeli priorities is proving to be messy and counter-productive. Instead of promoting free and democratic societies that are peace-loving and prosperous, Bush-Blair are midwiving the birth of new failed states, narco-states, militia-based statelets, and terror havens.
Consider just one day this week — one day, Thursday, August 3 — and look around Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon — the four countries where Anglo-American policies have used military force and diplomatic muscle to push for a new order based on free elections and democratic governance. All four are in the throes of severe cycles of violence, and partial disintegration. Their central governments enjoy only thin impact and legitimacy, and are widely challenged by political militias, sectarian and ethnic groups, and ordinary criminals. Here’s a quick snapshot of events Thursday, a day in the life of the Bush-Blair freedom strategy:
* In Washington, the general who commands American forces in the Middle East frankly warned a Senate committee that sectarian violence in Iraq, especially in Baghdad, had become so severe that all of Iraq was in danger of sliding into civil war. The UN had reported a few days earlier that an average of more than 100 civilians per day were killed in Iraq last month. Two bombs exploded in a Baghdad soccer stadium that day, killing 12 people. A senior British diplomat in Baghdad told Blair in a private memo that “the prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.”

* In Palestine, Israeli troops again raided southern Gaza with tanks and aerial bombardments, killing seven Palestinians. In just over a month, Israel has killed at least 158 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, while Palestinians continue to fire rockets into Israel and still hold a captured Israeli soldier.
* In Afghanistan, a suicide bomber blew up his car in the center of a small-town bazaar in the south of the country, killing 21 civilians. Hours earlier, 4 NATO soldiers were killed and 10 wounded in two attacks in the same area.
* In Lebanon, Israel bombed many targets and pursued a ground invasion, while Hizbullah fired scores of rockets at Israeli towns, with dozens killed and injured on both sides.

All of this, remember, is the harvest of just one day in Bush-Blair’s march to freedom in the Middle East. On that Thursday, Blair in London again stressed the same theme he and Bush touted last week: The United States and Britain were committed to fighting for a “vision of the Middle East based on democracy, liberty and the rule of law,” to transform the Middle East in order to prevent future terror attacks such as those that had ravaged the United States and London in 2001 and 2005.

The government systems in these four countries certainly needed changing and improving. Homegrown legacies of warlords, private militias, criminality, corruption, and brutal abuse of power were slowly turning these countries, or parts of them, into freak societies that were as unattractive to their own citizens as they were potentially dangerous to the rest of the world. Yet Anglo-American policies seem only to perpetuate new forms of violence, corruption, and mass suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon.

Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that traditional autocratic Middle East governance systems and the Anglo-Americans’ militarily-installed instant freedom antidote are both unattractive options for the vast majority of decent human beings in the Middle East. This majority just wants to live normal, uneventful, peaceful lives, rather than be perpetual subjects for novel and sometimes grotesque experiments in governance dreamed up by local despots and Western warriors alike — as Thursday’s one-day balance sheet suggests.

More Anglo-American plans to train more Arab armies are likely to make the problem worse, not better. How about if we simply agree to implement all UN resolutions simultaneously, in Israel and Arab countries, thereby restoring legitimacy to governments and security to countries, and eliminating the need for ethnic militias, resistance movements, missile wars, and Anglo-American invasion forces?

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 04 August 2006
Word Count: 873
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