BEIRUT — The spectacle of Iraqis negotiating intensively over their draft constitution during the past several months has been a very powerful one from the perspective of the wider Arab world. It is both a refreshing, hope-filled novelty, and a depressing re-run of old colonial habits. We should not lose sight of the significance of what is happening in Iraq, even though it is a consequence of a political dynamic that most of us in this region and around the world reject: an essentially unilateral American military expedition into the heart of Middle Eastern history, where the making and breaking of nation-states remains a disjointed joint venture of determined foreign powers and slightly dazzled natives.

The draft constitution will now be the new focal point for political contestation in Iraq, parallel to the combination of terrorism and anti-occupation resistance that are generally combined under the heading of “the insurgency.” It is clear, though, that the majority of Iraqis, including Sunnis, wants to continue the peaceful political quest for a new Iraqi governance system that is legitimate, because it would be rooted in the common accord of all Iraqis.

Will the draft constitution agreed to last week advance or retard this process? It will certainly force the continued search for an agreement on a new government structure, but not necessarily in a peaceful or smooth manner. More violence and discord are ahead, and perhaps civil war and a permanent fracturing of Iraq into smaller entities. What is certain now is that the Americans want to get out, the world wants them to get out, and the Iraqis want to be free and sovereign. So one way or another the coming year will see Iraq move more quickly towards self-rule and then full sovereignty, whether as one or several states.

How the constitutional process will impact on this unfolding trajectory requires analyzing the two separate levels of the matter if we are not to hopelessly confuse the truly historic from the merely seasonal in the colonial and neocolonial history of Iraq and the Middle East. One level is constitutional formality and punctilio: the precise words and principles of the written constitution. The other much more important level is national and communal identity, and the power used to manifest that identity: when a million Iraqis march in the street, what do they want and how will they go about getting it?

When the two levels of constitutionalism and national-communal identity coincide, the result is a stable, durable nation-state that peacefully and democratically resolves disputes on identity and power. Switzerland, Canada, the United States, Japan and many others come to mind. When constitutionalism, identity, and power do not coincide, the result is Somalia, or Cyprus, or Yemen, or civil war Lebanon. Like dozens of other countries that emerged from European colonial control in the 20th Century in a similarly flawed state, they suffer the odd condition of being defined by an incongruous combination of impressive constitutions and laws within an unstable statehood of recurring communal violence, imprecise national identity, and routinely contested domestic power relationships. Iraq today continues but also perhaps breaks this routine. It reflects a historical race between audacious American neo-colonialism and much denied Arab self-determination.

The latest example of all that is wrong with Washington’s approach is the way the American president managed the Iraqi constitutional process, using the same techniques with which he managed the last Republican Party convention. He had his man on the convention floor (the U.S. ambassador), his spin doctors worked overtime to give the global media good news, his political representatives lobbied and twisted arms behind the scenes for months to get the outcome he wanted, and at the critical moment he did what every successful domestic politician does: He worked the phones, calling the political heavyweights in Iraq to seal the deal.

The consequence is a draft constitution that reflects domestic American political timetables as much as it mirrors any Iraqi national consensus. The specific clauses and principles in the constitution include huge ambiguities and occasional contradictions that collectively make this a document that is more impressive as a declaration of an Iraqi national desire and determination to agree, than as a blueprint for actual governance. The key disagreements are about issues of overwhelming centrality to the very concept of a nation-state – control of national resources and finances, police power, local and central government powers, the role of religion, Arab or non-Arab identities, and other issues of equal importance.

This should quickly tell us that the debate about the constitution is really a deeper debate about whether Iraq – like all Arab countries – is a logical and viable nation-state. This hard question has confronted all Arab countries, and all of us in this region have evaded it. Iraq cannot evade it, because hordes of armed young Anglo-American lads and lassies wiped out the old and brutal state structure, and Iraqis are struggling to replace it with a new structure that makes more sense to them.

The stakes are very high in this process, because it revolves around a core dilemma that has plagued and confounded the entire Arab world throughout its modern history since the early 19th Century: How do we reconcile our many, ancient and powerful communal, ethnic, religious and tribal identities with the more modern idea of statehood? The ultimate prize here that has long eluded all the people of the Arab world is the ability to engage in a process of legitimate national self-determination, i.e., ordinary citizens of an Arab society defining their own national borders, government system, official languages, secular-religious balance, relations with neighbors and foreign powers, and other such core issues that make up a nation-state and define how its own citizens actually use their sovereign power.

Is this what is happening in Iraq today? I don’t think anybody really knows.

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

Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 03 September 2005
Word Count: 970
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BEIRUT — When a small Arab country detains five top security big cheeses before breakfast, you know something worth watching is going on. This happened Tuesday morning here in Beirut, when the police, in an unusual but widely welcomed fit of political and judicial self-assertion, detained five key former and current security chiefs, to question them about the assassination six months ago of the late prime minister, Rafik Hariri. This is a dramatic moment for Lebanon and its UN-run international investigation into the Hariri murder. Yet, as in so many other aspects of modern Arab political life, this is not only about Lebanon. It is also about the intersection of wider issues of Arab identity and sovereignty with foreign interests, which pertains to many Middle Eastern countries.

The arrests here happened while we were closely watching the political tug of war on the new Iraqi constitution this week, with Washington cajoling, prodding and fretting from afar. The events in these two countries should be monitored simultaneously, because they bring into sharper focus two important and common challenges that face most countries in the Middle East: What is the appropriate balance in our societies between the rule of law and the power of the gun? What is the legitimate role for foreign influence in sorting out our countries’ problems?

Lebanon and Iraq are important test cases in these respects. Both countries are trying to reconstruct their political systems, after decades of war, ideological distortions, economic bleeding, foreign interventions, and an immobilized domestic political culture. They do this while accommodating a very active, direct, and intrusive foreign political and military presence.
The dramatic development here occurred early Tuesday when Lebanese police, at the request of the U.N. investigation into the Hariri assassination, detained for questioning Maj. Gen. Jamil Sayyed, former chief of General Security; Maj. Gen. Ali Hajj, former director general of the Internal Security Forces; and Brig. Gen. Raymond Azar, former director general of military intelligence. Former pro-Syrian Lebanese MP Nasser Qandil and the incumbent commander of the Presidential Guards, Brig. Gen. Mustafa Hamdan, were also summoned to report to the U.N. investigation headed by German investigative prosecutor Detlev Mehlis.

These security commanders served in the era when Syria dominated Lebanese political and security affairs. Many in Lebanon have accused Syria and Syrian-appointed Lebanese security officials of being directly or indirectly responsible for the murder of Hariri and the 20 others who died with him, and also of writer Samir Kassir, politician George Hawi, and other less prominent victims of recent mysterious explosions. Syria consistently denies the accusations. The world has mandated a professional investigation to discover the truth.

The detentions Tuesday were the first major move by the Lebanese police and courts since the February 14 Hariri murder. They are noteworthy because they are the first time in a generation of numerous assassinations of public and political figures that the state has moved decisively against suspects who are close to the seat of power in Lebanon or Syria. The significance and symbolism of this move cannot be exaggerated, in a modern Arab world where security organizations have ruled with unchallenged supremacy.

The detentions represent a major step forward in a march that started a year ago, in summer 2004, when a few brave Lebanese political figures openly challenged the Lebanese-Syrian leadership’s plan to extent the term of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. They also openly charged that the Lebanese and Syrian security services’ heavy-handed mismanagement of Lebanon was a national trauma that had to end. The Syrian withdrawal and the dismissal or resignation of most of these Lebanese security chiefs followed in quick succession, and now some of them are being questions as “suspects” in the murder, according to the Lebanese prime minister. Never before have Arab security sectors faced such a powerful political challenge.

It is rare, and refreshing, to witness such a case in the modern Arab world, where the rule of law and political accountability are openly challenging the more common modern Arab legacy of the rule of the gun. The news is both good and bad, though. It’s bad news that indigenous Arab political forces on their own cannot assert the rule of law over the power of guns, and that these resignations, detentions and questionings could only be done through the international investigation mandated by a UN resolution; but it’s good news that legitimate international interventions such as this can be used to investigate murder, and hopefully bring to justice those who are identified as the killers.

The foreign, mostly American, intervention in Iraq’s constitution-writing process is a very different kind of affair in its particulars, but not in its overall packaging and consequences. As Iraq and Lebanon, in different ways, try to rebuild their political governance systems, contentious domestic players in Baghdad and Beirut make equally selective use of foreign political forces. The mixture of indigenous warriors with foreign governments and armies is usually a dangerous one, and often ends badly. But domestic power grabs and foreign intervention alike have both become very common phenomena, given the volatile conditions in many Arab countries. Foreign powers invented and configured the modern Arab world, with very uneven results, and it’s no surprise that they are back to fix some of their more glaring messes.

It is very difficult to imagine major world and regional powers (the USA, France, Iran, Turkey, Egypt) staying out of local affairs in countries like Iraq, Lebanon, Syria and Palestine, for two reasons, one defensive and the other offensive. Defensively, they feel vulnerable because much of the modern Middle East has reached a state of political incoherence and security instability that also threatens foreign interests, mainly via mass political radicalization, terrorism, energy instability, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, illegal emigration, and criminal global gangs. Offensively, they see societies in dynamic transition after years of stultifying uniformity, and they want to maximize their own self-interest and national strategic gains.

How local Arabs and others in the Middle East use foreign intervention for legitimate goals looms increasingly large on the horizon of this region. This represents both a danger and an opportunity that must be studied very carefully.

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

Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 31 August 2005
Word Count: 1,023
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BEIRUT — A few weeks ago Al-Arabiyya television aired a short story about plans in Qatar to replace young camel jockeys with Swiss-made robots, starting next racing season. This switch would have several advantages, according to the report. It ends any problems with the inhumane exploitation of children and adolescents, given that many jockeys, chosen for their light weight, are less than 18 years of age. It also makes for faster camels, since the robotic jockeys would weigh less than 25 kilograms. A third advantage is that it would allow trainers to better manipulate the camels during the race, for they could send electronic signals to the robotic jockeys, who in turn pass them on to the camels.

What a clever idea, I thought. Here is a case of Arabs being high-tech, humane, efficient and cost-effective, all at the same time. Here was a dramatic example of Arabs embracing modernity, while simultaneously preserving our own traditions and values. I’ve only been to a few camel races in my life, but I place this high on my list of significant indigenous cultural traditions worth preserving. Not only is the spectacle of the race itself inherently thrilling — ask anyone who goes to a horse, greyhound, or automobile race anywhere in the world — but the particular drama of a half dozen camels in full flight is a very special spectacle to behold.

In my little book of wonderful and memorable things I have witnessed in life, racing camels rank right up there in the top ten with such other thrills as walking in Arab east Jerusalem at dawn, strolling along Beirut’s seaside Corniche at dusk, watching the Yankees defeat the Red Sox in baseball at Yankee Stadium on a warm August evening, crossing the Bosporus bridge into the European side of Istanbul on a full moon-lit evening, enjoying a meal of snails and frogs’ legs in a Paris bistro with friends in autumn, walking through the streets of any Indian city at any time of year, and other such thrills.

There is an ungainly beauty, a sort of reckless biological abandon and a collective violation of the laws of physics, to a pack of racing camels. The most impressive dimension of the racing camel is the contrast between the enormous physical exertion required to propel the large animal forward at a brisk speed, and the serenity that defines the face of the beast. I am not a connoisseur of camels, but a lifelong admirer nevertheless. Their serenity in the face of any situation, the steady munching of a large mouth that operates according to the same laws as cement mixers, the expressionless, contented face that must have inspired Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, is something I marvel at and respect.

These and other captivating aspects of the camel all come together and collectively reach their apex in the racing camel in action. So I am delighted and impressed to learn that the visual and temperamental thrill of camel races will be preserved and developed in Qatar. I will eagerly attend a camel race the next time I am in Qatar and will try to visit the Swiss company developing the robotic camel jockeys, to learn of their pioneering work, and perhaps also to learn more about the captivating psychology and biology of camels.

The novel idea of robots replacing live Arabs got me pondering the wider question of how to use digitized robots to resolve other challenges or dilemmas in the contemporary Arab world. If robotic camel jockeys work out well, would there be room to consider robots as more efficient, humane, and cost-effective replacements for other professions in our region that strives for modernity in so many ways? Some possibilities might be worth pondering.

Robots could certainly replace national leaders in some Arab countries, given the predictable, mechanical, repetitive manner in which most of our leaders behave. Robots mimic leaders in their common durability, able to keep operating for decades at a time without much maintenance or updating of their operating systems. Also, some Arab leaders are deeply influenced, perhaps even manipulated, from abroad, or from foreign embassies in their country. The technology used for robotic camel jockeys would work well in this case, as some foreign ambassadors, security chiefs, religious figures, corporate heads, or other national leaders could remotely control robotic Arab leaders, probably more efficiently than they do now. The money that is saved through digital manipulation of robotic Arab leaders from abroad could be used for a fund to promote electoral democracy in Arab lands, which brings me to my second idea.

We might explore having robots replace entire categories of voters in some Arab elections. I know this is slightly outlandish and controversial, but please hear me out. In about 85, maybe 87, percent of cases, the votes of Arab voters are well known ahead of time. In some cases, like Egypt, such predictability carries over into the next life, as dead people sometimes cast votes. Have no fear, though, the Swiss are smart enough to figure out how to develop digitized electoral transcendentalism. In other cases, like Saudi Arabia, half the population (women) does not vote. In places like Jordan and Lebanon, most people vote for their fellow tribal, ethnic or religious candidates, so their votes are very predictable.

So we can pretty accurately program robotic Arab voters before the fact and get the same results we do now with real people going to the polls. In some countries like Tunisia, this will generate an enormous cost saving, as robotic voters can be programmed to vote for the same leader in the next 4 elections, spanning the coming 20 years. The handlers of the robots can also give the winners a slightly smaller margin of victory every time — say 92 percent instead of 94 percent — to show the impact of democratic reforms and our collective march towards liberty.

These are just some preliminary thoughts that I hope will spur others to consider this idea more thoroughly. In the meantime, I will check out the robotic camel jockeys and report back in a future column.

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

Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 29 August 2005
Word Count: 1,021
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BEIRUT — What’s wrong with the Arabs? Why do so many Islamic societies spawn terrorists? Why are our societies so violent and unstable? What is needed to transform the societies of the Middle East, North Africa and west-central Asia into stable, prosperous countries?

These are the sorts of sweeping, big sticker questions that many people within the Middle East ask every day, looking simultaneously at internal factors as well as external causes of our many excesses. It was heartening and instructive for me earlier this week to have the privilege of sharing in a panel discussion with two of the clearest thinking, most articulate analysts in the Arab world – George Corm and Clovis Maksoud, both Lebanese — as we discussed the impact of the last three Arab Human Development Reports published by the United Nations Development Program (UNDP).

The issues they raised and the analytical suggestions they made deserve a wider hearing than the students and staff participating in a summer course on conflict-resolution organized in Lebanon by UNDP and Lebanese American University. I suspect their way of thinking correctly identifies the key challenges facing the Arab world, reflects the views of the vast majority of Arabs, and offers a practical, realistic route out of the Arab world’s current dilemma of stagnation, frustration and confrontation.

Corm, a professor of economics at St Joseph University in Beirut and a former Lebanese cabinet minister, makes the point that the Arab region undoubtedly needs real reform, but there is no consensus on the reasons for this. Is current and historical foreign interference the main problem, he asks? Domestic power distortions? Patriarchal social culture? Polarized societies fragmenting into smaller and smaller units based on ethnicity, religion and ideology? Hostility among Arab states and leaderships?

A combination of these and other reasons explains the burdensome, humiliating fact that the Arab region is the only part of the world where foreign armies today still regularly invade, occupy, and try to remake societies. More troubling is his observation that Arabs today face virtually the same challenge that confronted our societies around 150 years ago, in the late Ottoman period: why are Arab societies underdeveloped, and dominated by foreign influences, interests and forces?

Among the answers to his questions, Corm mentions the devastating impact of the Arab rentier economies that are not productive or creative, but live off “rent” derived from foreign payments or protection, or from oil and gas production. Rent economies make it impossible to develop liberal, democratic regimes, he says, and so must be replaced with job-creating, productive economies.

Arab nationalists never sufficiently focused on the economic dimension of nationalism, independence and statehood, he says, and Arab intellectuals today spend too much time responding to Western accusations and focus too much on day-to-day politics. Instead, our intellectuals and activists should ignore Samuel Huntington, Bernard Lewis and others of their ilk, and spend more time building our culture and society. We should especially draw on the rich but neglected Arab tradition of thinkers who have sought in the past century to prod reform, modernity, prosperity and genuine national sovereignty anchored in dignity.

The Arab people need and deserve a “second Nahda of Arab freedoms”, he says, referring to the broad intellectual, cultural, political and religious movement in parts of the Arab world around 1880-1920 that has been called the Arab Awakening or Renaissance, el-Nahda in Arabic. Our own continuous quest for modernity and liberalism can be compatible with key religious and cultural values. He defined modernity as that which allows you to promote prosperity, compete globally, defend yourself militarily, and defend the overall integrity of your society from foreign domination.

Clovis Maksoud, university professor, columnist, former Arab League ambassador and current director of the Center for the Study of the Global South at American University in Washington, D.C., approaches the same challenge through the eyes of the team that wrote the Arab Human Development Reports, of which he is a member.

“The Arabs are a wealthy nation of poor people,” he notes, who recklessly engage in either confrontation with the West or submission to it, with both options leading to self-destruction. We need to find a way to reconcile the legality of the modern Arab state system with the legitimacy of the wider Arab national idea, he says. The Arab Human Development Report offers an action-oriented analysis that aims to spark a dialogue between the Arab citizen, civil society and the state authorities.

One of our common weaknesses — very evident in Lebanon, he says — is that the individual Arab citizen does not have a direct relationship with his or her state except through the intermediation of ethnic, religious or tribal groups. The narrow identities and interests of sovereign states have come to dominate the two other important dimensions of people’s lives in the Arab region — their rights as citizens of a state, and their sense of belonging to a larger Arab national identity of some sort.

He says that “the weakness of patrimonial Arab consciousness has given way to the strength of legal state sovereignty.” Consequently, Arab countries wave their flags vigorously, advocating “Jordan first”, “Lebanon first”, “Syria first” and “Egypt first”; yet their citizens steadily become increasingly angry with life conditions at home and the international double standards they suffer from Israel and the West.

“Anger is an invitation to dialogue,” he suggests, and one of the aims of the Arab Human Development Reports is to spark dialogue that can also plant the seeds of an Arab Renaissance.

George Corm brings the argument back to the historical legacy of an Arab region that wants to change, reform and modernize, but has always resisted doing so under foreign pressure or threat. Totally adopting or rejecting Western reform agendas is not useful, he says, and instead we need to spur a genuine Arab reform agenda for modernity and freedoms that primarily builds on our own values, analyses, and priority goals.

These are sensible and timely ideas, doubly significant because they are not unique or unusual; they reflect the richness of the debates that take place every day in homes, schools, coffee shops and offices throughout the Arab world. They also provide a powerful, appropriate antidote to the prevailing nonsense that we hear from quarters of the West, especially the United States, about clashes of civilization, the need for Islamic reformation, hatred of the West, the madrasa problem, or the inherent violence of Arab and Islamic culture.

The matter is much simpler, and should not be muddled by tangential intellectual fantasies or the silliness of confused, angry small town politicians from abroad: In the past century or so, citizenship and statehood in the Arab world have become mutually dysfunctional enterprises, due to a combination of local and foreign factors that must be treated simultaneously.

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

Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 21 August 2005
Word Count: 1,129
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BEIRUT — Politically, the Israeli evacuation and retreat from the Gaza Strip that started Monday is significant, and potentially historic. Morally, for the Israeli government and the settler-colonists, it is a pile of garbage, deception and lies. Sorting out the significant from the merely sinful in this situation is useful for discerning whether or not better days lie ahead.

The Israeli colonization of the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and other occupied Arab lands is a crime, by at least three compelling measures. It is explicitly prohibited in international law and the 4th Geneva Convention’s proscription of an occupying power moving its civilians into the lands it occupies. It is condemned by name in dozens of UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions. And it is rejected by the bilateral policies of the entire community of nations — the civilized world as it is called — that refuses to acknowledge Israeli sovereignty in the occupied lands.

Israeli settler-colonists are dangerous predators in territorial terms, and ugly anachronisms in historical terms. They represent the last, lingering link to a form of 19th century European colonialism that is now universally seen to be based on the racist principle that white Europeans could steal the lands of any other people in the world, because the darker natives in southern lands had lesser rights as human beings. There are very few active colonial enterprises left in the world these days. Israel’s is the most dramatic example of this movement that once included grotesque European assaults on India, South Africa, South America, Southeast Asia and North Africa.

Therefore, the widespread press depictions of the Gaza settlers’ “emotional pain” at being sent back to their own country of Israel lack both credibility and relevance. Forcing a thief to stop stealing is not an act that should be depicted as inflicting pain on the criminal, but rather as forcing the criminal to abide by the law.

It is outrageous and insulting that Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon would say, even as he was evacuating Gaza, that he prefers to keep it. He said in his televised speech Monday night: “It is no secret that I, like many others, believed and hoped that we would be able to hold onto [the settlements of] Netzarim and Kfar Darom forever. The changing reality in the country, the region, and the world required a different assessment and a change in [my] position.”

So, politically, in its unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and four small settlements in the northern West Bank, Israel is doing the right thing, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. This is why the move is unlikely to lead to a complete and successful Palestinian-Israeli or Arab-Israeli peace accord.

I am saddened but not surprised that Sharon says he is leaving Gaza because political and demographic realities have changed. It is a shame that so few voices in Israel or among the Jewish community around the world would come out and say in clear terms that Israel is leaving because occupation is illegal, morally wrong, and politically counterproductive, or that the Palestinians have the right to live in freedom, independence and national dignity. What a powerful message that would have been, and what a tremendous impetus for peaceful negotiations and ultimate relations with all the Arab people, had the Israeli government acknowledged that military occupation and moving civilians to colonize occupied lands bring neither peace nor submission from the Palestinians and other Arabs.

Just as there is a virtually unanimous international consensus on the illegal nature of the Israeli settler-colonies, so is there also global agreement that Israel must leave the territories occupied in 1967, negotiate a fair settlement of the refugee issue, share Jerusalem and coexist in peace alongside a sovereign, viable Palestinian state. The deep skepticism about both the impetus and the impact of the Gaza withdrawal reflects the perception, rooted in historical experience, that Israel is behaving only according to its sense of how to ensure its security through the use of its force, rather than through compliance with international law and the will of the community of nations.

There is something slightly politically devious about Israel’s withdrawal. It does not have the compelling ring of authenticity and honesty that characterized the white South Africans’ coming to terms with black majority rule, or Mikhael Gorbachev’s coming to grips with his people’s right to freedom and democracy. It seems to be an expedient, grudging, defensive, reluctant endeavor. It is the enterprise of a thief who decides to stop stealing in one part of town, only to steal more efficiently in other neighborhoods.

Nevertheless, its garbage morality aside, Israel’s realities of the day suggest that its unilateral withdrawal does have the potential to advance the long-stalled peace-making process. This move is significant in part because Israel is unilaterally withdrawing from occupied Arab lands, ending some of its settler-colonial excesses, and defining part of its border. These trends need to be encouraged on other fronts where Israel is occupying and colonizing Arab lands, and this is where the next steps to come will be so important.

If all concerned Arab, Israeli, and international parties work harder than before to make it clear that peace and security can only be achieved for all through a peaceful political process, rather than force of arms, we might see progress towards a fair, permanent peace accord. This requires that Israelis and Palestinians both abide by global law, rather than defy it with guns. The key to this is not a racist, colonial-era demand that the occupied, dispersed and blockaded Palestinians behave like nice children before they can hope to enjoy their human and national rights; the key is rather that Israelis and Palestinians who both respect the law and UN resolutions can expect simultaneously to live in peace and security.

Simultaneity is critically important for peace, because only if both sides feel they are achieving their rights will they continue with peaceful means of conflict resolution. The Gaza withdrawal must be a sign that Israel is forsaking occupation as an instrument to ensure its own security, not that it is returning some Palestinian lands in order to hold on to others.

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

Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 17 August 2005
Word Count: 1,032
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BEIRUT — In the Worth Noting Department: in the past three weeks, the leaders of Iraq, Syria and Hizbullah have made official visits to Tehran, at a time when Iran is locked in an important diplomatic negotiation with the U.S. and Europe over its nuclear program. This is just one indicator that Iran, rather than Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, or Israel-Palestine, may be emerging as the center of gravity of broad ideological trends and populist emotions in this region, especially in terms of relations with the U.S. and other Western powers.

When its different strands are separated, the tug-of-war with the West over Iran’s nuclear industry seems to comprise three core issues. The first is Iran’s Byzantine-style Middle Eastern negotiating manner that is anchored in millennia of ancient statecraft and several recent centuries of unsatisfactory relations with American, European and Russian powers. The second is the American-driven Western pattern of arrogance, accusations and double standards vis-à-vis Arab and Islamic states that Iran challenges head-on, especially since the U.S. now seems befuddled in Iraq. The third is the implication of Iran developing a full fuel cycle for its nuclear industry for the fate of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT).

Iran, Syria and Hizbullah have emerged in the past few years — wisely or not is not clear yet — as the principal parties who defy American power in this region. This has been in part in response to Washington’s accusations against them in the fields of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, nuclear proliferation, and their policies in Lebanon and Palestine-Israel. Their anti-American defiance tends to be primarily rhetorical and political, because none of them is stupid enough to challenge the U.S. militarily, except possibly indirectly in Iraq.

Washington has used both the Iraq and Lebanon situations as instruments to pressure and mildly threaten Syria, with some success. Because Iraq is an evolving situation, local powers like Syria and Iran, with ancient memories (going back to the 2nd and 3rd Millennia BC) of how to engage foreign armies, are carefully calibrating their policies in view of America’s combined vulnerabilities, determination, power and perplexity in Iraq.

Both leaderships have a track record of engaging, delaying, challenging, waiting, and finally consummating deals with external powers that threaten them, as they are doing today with the U.S. and EU.

The very technical issue of implementing the NPT has become deeply entangled with the highly emotional and much bigger issue of who sets the rules in the Middle East. This is now a battle over honor as much as it is about centrifuges. Acknowledging these two parallel dimensions of the dispute, while meeting the legitimate needs of all parties, are the keys to a win-win resolution that is acceptable to all.

For Iran and others in this region, an overriding foreign policy priority is the need to affirm a sense of true sovereignty and national self-assertion, and to be treated equally with other countries. For Tehran this is very much about what it means to be an independent and sovereign state, and to be treated according to the same global laws and rules as, say, Israel, Pakistan, and India, whose nuclear industries and arms seem noticeably exempt from Washington’s proliferation worries.

Iran has been careful to work with International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors and monitoring systems while insisting on its right to operate a full nuclear fuel cycle and its plans to use such fuel for peaceful production of energy. Washington insists it will prevent Iran from developing a full nuclear fuel cycle or weapons, and Iran in turn replies with defiance. The U.S. and EU threaten to take Iran to the UN Security Council, but Iran seems prepared to call their bluff, perhaps confident that China and Russia would veto any sanctions resolutions, perhaps aware that the Iraq-entangled U.S. only has limited military options with Iran.

The importance of the European negotiations with Iran is that they potentially offer a valuable middle ground where the legitimate interests of all parties can be reconciled. The October 2003 and November 2004 European-Iranian agreements resulted in several important breakthroughs: a temporary suspension of Iranian nuclear fuel processing, uncovering more information about Iran’s nuclear facilities and activities, greater American and Russian diplomatic engagement behind the scenes, and important Euro-American offers to Iran in the fields of nuclear energy, technology, trade, political ties and security.

It should be clear by now that Iran, Syria, Hizbullah, and others who share their defiant attitude to the U.S., reflect important sentiments that probably define a majority of people in the Middle East. Perhaps the core sentiment is that people are fed up with being treated like colonial subjects who must calibrate their behavior to suit the interests of Washington, London, Paris and Tel Aviv, and who feel they are subjected to discriminatory behavior in the field of nuclear energy or implementing UN resolutions.

The Iran nuclear issue now brings together hot emotional sentiments and cold national interests that have swirled in the region for decades. Solving the matter peacefully probably requires an acknowledgement that this is as much about Iran’s nuclear ambitions and sovereign rights as it is about the United States projecting its power and trying to set rules in the Middle East and around the world. Reconciling these two sets of concerns will be difficult, but not impossible, if the operative impulse for such an attempt is anchored in humility and the rule of law, rather than intemperance, racist double-standards and revenge.

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

Copyright © 2005 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 10 August 2005
Word Count: 912
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BEIRUT — In rapid-fire succession, one Arab country after another in recent weeks has come face-to-face with that very delicate zone of national leadership where personality intersects with politics. These instances include the succession in Saudi Arabia after King Fahd’s death; Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh’s announcement that he would not run for another term after serving 15 years in office; Egyptian President Husni Mubarak’s announcement that he would run for a fifth consecutive term, after serving for 24 years in office; the formation of a patchwork new Lebanese government headed by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, after uncertainty about whether President Emile Lahoud would serve out his full Syrian-engineered three-year term extension; and, the violence and uncertainty in Sudan after the death in a helicopter crash of newly installed Vice President and former leader of the southern rebels John Garang.

These are only the current cases — in just the past two weeks! — of a phenomenon that has long and widely plagued the Arab world. Long-serving Arab leaders who administer autocratic, intolerant, and often violent, state structures are not just an issue of power-hungry individuals. They reflect a much deeper problem of underlying states and statehood structures that are either historical anomalies, or simply have not been managed very efficiently, humanely, or satisfactorily.

The result, painfully visible throughout the Arab Middle East, is countries whose fate is intimately identified with individual leaders. In some particularly egregious cases where the graph line of unending personalized leadership converges with that of increasingly stressed statehood — Mubarak, Saleh, Omar Hassan Al-Bashir in Sudan, Zeinelabedine bin Ali in Tunisia, and Muammar Gadhafi in Libya come to mind — we see most clearly the damage done by leaders who are neither meaningfully contestable nor accountable before their own people.

Ordinary citizens in all Arab countries do not have a credible opportunity to choose their leaders and define their government’s policies; nor have they ever had a chance to ratify the basic geographical and political configuration of their countries. The enormous challenge that Iraq faces in writing a new constitution for all its citizens is common throughout this region: Who rules these countries? Who chooses and changes rulers? How can we have rulers and governance systems that fairly represent the wishes of the diverse citizenry?

Arab governance systems are brittle and vulnerable because they are being challenged by two powerful forces simultaneously: the historical legitimacy of the state itself is under pressure (due to both local and global trends), and current leaders and their policies are under pressure from their ever more angry and concerned citizens and subjects.

The first force — frayed historical legitimacy — strikes me as the most powerful and dangerous one, because, in fact, three different and overlapping legacies of statehood are being challenged simultaneously in the Arab world. This occurs in the violent dictatorships, the more humane and citizen-sensitive monarchies, and the happy-face, police-run republics that increasingly base their legitimacy on their ability to welcome foreign tourists and export inexpensive underwear.

The three shaky statehood legacies are the following:

1. The modern “nation-state” entered world history in Europe during the 16th -17th centuries, and was exported to the world through the colonial enterprise. This Euro-manufactured state system is evolving and weakening all around the world due to globalization and other forces; the evolving nature of sovereignty in Europe itself is the most dramatic example.
2. The second legacy, challenged in this region, is the modern Arab state, also mostly crafted by European hands, starting around 1920. The modern Arab state has been in existence for less than a century is deeply pressured by its own erratic ability to meet the basic needs of its citizens in security, identity, education, health, jobs and international competitiveness. (Iraq is fascinating today because it is the only case of a modern Arab state whose citizens are formally exploring the option of designing their own statehood structures and power configurations; but this is offset by this operation’s disputed legitimacy and lineage, given that it has been the consequence of Anglo-American armed assault that sought, intriguingly, both to preserve and change the Euro-made 1920s vintage Arab state.)
3. The third fraying legacy is the modern Arab security state, in which armed forces, police, intelligence services, and others with a formal mandate to use guns to protect the interests of citizens have tended rather to focus on protecting the interests of the incumbent regimes, often extended families and tribes. The frightening modern Arab security state was first hinted at by army-run Iraq starting in the 1930s, developed institutionally in Nasserite Egypt after 1952, and came into its own after the oil-fuelled regional boom in the mid-1970s. Most Arab citizens are fed up with the degrading humiliations they have endured at the hands of their contemporary Arab security states, and they seek more dignified, equitable governance systems that reflect the voices of ordinary people and respond to their rights and their reasonable needs.

All three of these historical state legacies are now challenged simultaneously throughout the Arab world. This is happening through peaceful and evolutionary forces of education, commerce and globalization, and through violent or political contestation of long-ruling elites and their privileges and powers.

We should keep in mind the important distinctions between state structures that are losing some of their historical relevance, and individual Arab leaders who are losing their current credibility or legitimacy. Sometimes these two forces converge, and sometimes they do not, but in any case they must be monitored in parallel.

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

Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 03 August 2005
Word Count: 918
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — The Irish Republican Army (IRA) announced 28 July, that it had ordered its forces to stop their violent resistance against Britain. This could have important implications for the quest for peace and stability throughout the Middle East, which in turn would help reduce the global terror problem.

I’ve spent my whole life hearing “Belfast to Beirut” used as a synonym for the senseless, destructive political violence that plagued both regions, and a symbol of our common inhumanity. So it’s nice, for a change, to sit in Beirut and hear good news again from Belfast.

It would be equally nice if all concerned in the West and the Middle East would muster the courage, humility and determination to apply some of the same principles of peace-making in Northern Ireland to the confrontations and conflicts in this region. This could apply in at least three important areas in the Middle East: domestic military conflicts or political tensions within countries (Iraq, Sudan, Lebanon, Algeria, Egypt, Palestine, and others); the Palestinian-Israeli and wider Arab-Israeli conflicts; and the standoff between the U.S., U.K. and some other Western states and leading Arab Islamist political and/or resistance groups (Hizbullah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and others).

I see three broad areas where Northern Ireland holds lessons for achieving a permanent, durable negotiated peace in the Middle East, based on my discussions with individuals who have engaged in negotiations in both areas. These are the need for: a) an honest, patient, fair third party mediator (the U.S. is the only option); b) decisive, courageous, self-confident leadership among the principal warring parties and mediators (we’re all graded in the D+/C- range on that one); and, c) an inclusive negotiating process that allows all legitimate parties to sit at the table and help craft a permanent peace accord (nowhere in sight on most counts).

Yet, occupation, subjugation, resistance, and terror are ending in Northern Ireland. This suggests — once again — that terror and political violence are sparked by historical realities, and they can be stopped by other acts of sensible history and wise diplomacy. In Northern Ireland, the violence is ending thanks to a sensible, patient, equitable and inclusive negotiation that has brought out the best in all the key players, including the republicans and unionists in Northern Ireland, and the British and American governments. They all deserve a tip of the cap to acknowledge their brave, sensible policies, after many years of obdurate violence and short-sighted stupidity.

To find out more about how the Northern Ireland experience could help us resolve conflicts in the Middle East, I consulted this week with a British expert in psychology, conflict resolution and group political dynamics who has worked in depth on such issues in both regions. Gabrielle Rifkind, a British group analyst, psychotherapist and specialist in conflict resolution, is founder of the Middle East Policy Initiative Forum in London and a human security consultant to the respected Oxford Research Group. What did she think was the main message that we should grasp from the happy turn of events in Northern Ireland?

“The most important message of Northern Ireland, and it was learned through bitter experience, is that you must include all the parties in the process — whether you like it or not, whatever their faith — you must get them all around the table and hear the different voices. You have to listen to begin with, and keep listening for as long as it takes. It’s a very long-term process before you can sign an agreement. The Good Friday Agreement took one day to sign, but it required a huge amount of preparation that involved groups of people that were all deaf, who didn’t know how to listen to each other. They had to learn about ways of engaging.”

This lesson has not been learned in the Middle East, she says, citing how the Palestinian-Israeli Camp David summit in 2000 tried to solve the conflict in a week or two, with a glaring “asymmetry of power that denies the process of seriously engaging in something much more complex, something that takes account of all the different groups.”

Even if we magically reach an agreement today in Israel and Palestine, she says, that would only be conflict management, not conflict resolution. All those groups who have been excluded and have not been part of the process will actually work in the end to undermine it. “It’s only by finding a way to give voice to all these groups, because they have a legitimacy and represent huge numbers of people; and, until we take them on board we are unlikely to resolve the conflict,” she argues.

Why did the British government finally engage politically with all the groups in Northern Ireland, including the IRA, whom it had fought for decades and branded as terrorists?

“Failure,” she replied quickly, “the failure of this whole idea in human nature that you can impose a solution on others. You have to engage people to reach a solution. We tried violence and it failed. We had Bloody Sunday, we used violence and repression, and we only got more violence. When (mediator and former U.S. Senator) George Mitchell was first invited into the process he quickly found out that the only way to advance was to include all the voices, and ultimately the British government engaged the IRA and the others.

“You have to engage people in the end. Even if your ideas are good, as may be the case with the United States today, trying to impose democracy and promote peace in the Middle East. Unless she engages people on the ground and listens to them and makes them feel like it’s their idea, and that it organically emerged from them, people won’t sign up for it. When there’s an asymmetry of power, telling other people about how they should behave will not succeed.”

The Northern Ireland experience, among others, she says, points the way to successful conflict resolution through patient, inclusive negotiations rather than a stronger party dictating demands or making threats.

“If you’re really serious about resolving conflicts, you do not come with solutions. You create conditions in which you can discuss the ideas you have about where you want to get. You create the environment in which people take ownership for the ideas themselves. This is antithetical to American and even many British government policies. There is a profound belief that Western society is more civilized and understands these things better, and therefore can tell other people how to be and how to behave, without owning up to the hypocrisy in all of that, or to how you in the Middle East see it in terms of the double dealing that is going on,” she says.

After 36 years of recent violent conflict, more than 3500 dead, and tens of thousands of others injured and stressed by the war in Northern Ireland, wisdom, realism and humility have prevailed over stupidity, romanticism, and arrogance.

Anybody in the Middle East watching all this?

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

Copyright © 2005 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 31 July 2005
Word Count: 1,170
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — The terror attacks in London and Egypt and Condoleezza Rice’s visit to the Arab region last week slightly diverted focus from events in Iraq. Nonetheless, Iraq remains the place to watch if you want to see all the key problems and opportunities that define the whole Middle East. How Iraqis resolve their major fault lines and national challenges will have a huge impact on trends throughout the region.

This is why it is so important for Iraq to move as fast as possible towards stability, security, sovereignty and viable statehood, which can only happen with a coherent withdrawal of American, British and other foreign forces that occupy, administer, and try to reshape the country. But a unilateral withdrawal of Anglo-American forces seems unlikely to happen soon, because of both issues of honor and practical impact. Leaving in the face of the current sustained resistance and terror attacks throughout the country would be an Anglo-American admission of defeat.

Defeat through withdrawal is not within the realm of the possible in the Blair-Bush world, where Marlboro Man marries Thomas Jefferson and John Locke, and a Divine, eternal wind disperses their children throughout the world to spread freedom and democracy — even if the kids sometimes have to move around the globe in F-16 bombers and Humvee troop carriers.

Such are the bizarre rules of the violent game that is played by democratically elected leaders in lands of liberty, where foreign policy in the Middle East particularly — unconstrained by the noble rules of the domestic realm — is fuelled by a tragic combination of arrogance, ignorance and ordnance. Iraq today is the result.

It is critically important for all concerned to grow up, and act like adults. The moment is treacherous for Iraq, the entire Middle East and much of the Western world. Contemporary Iraq and its consequences — both the vile despotism of the former Baath regime and the intellectual and political gangsterism of the Anglo-American-led war and its consequent spiral of random violence — are not restricted to the land of ancient Mesopotamia. Instability, fear, terror, uncertainty, disinvestments, and stagnation plague us all.

How to bring Iraq back to normalcy and decency, for its own people above all, is not mainly an issue of ensuring security or promoting democracy, as the cartoon-like mainstream of Anglo-American foreign policy and mass media would have it. Beyond the needed security, Iraq reflects ugly but urgent Arab realities. The removal of Iraq’s “bad guy” Baathist regime in 2003 suddenly exposed underlying fault lines, tensions and fractures that plague all other Arab societies, where they remain shamefully unaddressed.

Iraq and this whole region are challenged to deal with a series of dichotomies that must be defined, and balances that must be agreed upon, by the local population, whether those people see themselves as citizens of a sovereign state, members of a tribe, adherents of a faith, carriers of a certain ethnicity, or just residents of a neighborhood or region.

Some of the key unanswered questions and undefined balances that must be resolved by all Arabs, not by foreign viceroys or colonels, are the following:
* the balance between:

* secularism and religiosity;
* democracy and stability;
* Arabism and other ethnicities;
* central state power in the capital and the self-rule demands of outlying
provinces;
* Sunni and Shi’a Islams;
* Islam and other faiths;
* state authority and individual citizen rights;
* indigenous sovereignty and the interests of foreign military powers;
* self-contained national Iraqi interests and the parallel, related interests
of neighboring powers;
* the rights of men and women as prescribed by religion, tribalism, local
tradition and constitutionalism;
* a commitment to Arab national issues and responding to Israeli-Zionist
demands;
* collective security and personal freedoms;
* the forces of the free market and the guiding hand of the state;
* corrupt officials and transparent, accountable governance;
* the force of local militia, friendly thugs and institutionalized political
gangs, and the rule of law; and,
* the citizen as the source of authority and the citizen as passive
subject.

In the current circumstances of foreign military control, Iraqis cannot realistically hope to address any of these vital issues. The critical first step needed now is to figure out how to end the foreign military presence without plunging the country into further chaos, criminality and violence. I think a way is possible: an Anglo-American-Iraqi agreement to announce that foreign troops will start leaving Iraq on August 30, without necessarily naming the final date of total departure right away.

This would immediately trigger those imperative developments that have proved so elusive to date: a legitimate and truly sovereign Iraqi political system and leadership, faster agreement among all Iraqis on their national political configuration and power-sharing structures, more assertive and effective security services, and collective actions by the state and ordinary citizens to end the insurgency, resistance and terror.

Neither Washington’s marketing hucksters from Madison Avenue nor the children of James Madison himself are needed to teach Iraqis about democracy and freedom in this context. For democracy and freedom — noble as they are — are not the most immediate priority issues, nor even the medium-term urgencies, for most people in this region, whose states are fractured, societies are violent, regimes are distant and corrupt, rights are ravaged, and future prospects are dim and grim. Those priorities, rather, focus on sovereignty and dignity first, which cannot happen under foreign guns.

The U.S. and U.K. should quickly agree with the current semi-legitimate Iraqi government on the start date for withdrawing foreign troops, adding that the complete withdrawal will be negotiated with the Iraqi government that will be elected in the next six months, after the new Iraqi constitution is written. Such a move would radically change the entire equation and prospects in Iraq, give Iraqis compelling incentives to agree to the constitution and hold meaningful elections for a new governance system, and propel a brisk shift away from foreign rule to national dignity.

It would cut short the killings and suffering of this ugly neocolonial, neoconservative Anglo-American foreign adventure. It would finally give the Iraqi people the incentive to be legitimately sovereign and in control of their own fate, and, yes and yes again, to be free — especially free of the intemperate, malignant violence of foreign armies.

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

Copyright © 2005 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 27 July 2005
Word Count: 1,055
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — Following the two consecutive transit system attacks in London earlier this month, the deadly bombings in Sharm esh-Sheikh, Egypt, Saturday represent a particularly dangerous turn in what has become a global terror scourge. They must spark a qualitatively different, and more effective, political and police response than the one that has prevailed to date in recent years.

It would be irresponsible, incompetent and morally vacuous leadership, verging on criminal negligence, for Egyptian, British, American or any other national leaders simply to say that security will be ensured, the terrorists will be beaten, we will go on with our lives, and we will preserve our values. Someone should tell the emperors that they are collectively wearing no clothes, and that continuing their policies will only perpetuate and exacerbate the global terror problem, rather than defeat it.

The Sharm esh-Sheikh bombings are particularly troubling, and politically significant, for several reasons. The most important one is that they affirm the depth, resiliency and determination of those terrorists who practice such savagery in the face of a very powerful and even more fierce and determined Arab state. The political iconography here is profound.

The Egyptian state has fought a ferocious battle against Islamist militants and terrorists since the early 1990s, and by the late 1990s had largely defeated them, but at a very high price. Thousands of suspects have been put in jail and remain there, and the fragile security achieved has brought with it the militarization of the state and its institutions. The almost absolute control of state and society has required the banning, neutralization or humiliating marginalization of all other possible civil political forces that could peacefully politically contest the ruling power of the combine of the armed forces and President Husni Mubarak’s eternally incumbent National Democratic Party.

So now the ruling Egyptian elite is challenged by two homegrown forces at once. It is challenged peacefully by its own civil society and political opposition that have launched a growing campaign to retire Mubarak after his 24 years of rule. It is also challenged violently by a brazen, self-assertive new generation of Egyptian terrorists allied to Osama Bin Laden’s Al-Qaeda network, who now attack the symbols of the Egyptian state head-on. This is in-your-face terrorism, by small groups of men who are not afraid of one of the mightiest Arab states that has been unable to respond to the challenge through any means other than police force, which only generates more angry, humiliated young men who become terrorists.

Sharm esh-Sheikh is not just a sparkling Red Sea tourist resort. It is the icon of everything Egypt wants to be in the region and the world. Sharm esh-Sheikh is where Egypt routinely hosts Arab-Arab and Arab-Israeli summits, global anti-terror summits with American presidents and other Western leaders, and other emergency gatherings of very important people. It is the showcase of Egyptian modernity, foreign investment, tourism expansion, foreign currency earnings, sound planning, and, above all, strict security ensured by the state and its hundreds of thousands of armed soldiers and police.

The Taba bombings some months ago in the northern part of the same Sinai Peninsula triggered a significant increase in security in all Sinai, along with the jailing of hundreds of suspects. Yet the terrorists Saturday still challenged the Egyptian state in its crown jewel, and bombed it almost at will. Someone should please tell the great leaders of the mighty Arabs and the Free World that the moral depravity and criminality of this terror deed is fully matched by its political audacity and symbolism; to condemn the crime without grasping its political implications, and underlying causes, would be the height of amateurism by any political leader.

But this is what Blair, Bush, Mubarak and most other leaders seem to be doing, stressing motives of religious extremism, distorted education, social alienation, poverty, historical yearnings, psychological traumas, mystical impulses, and cultural angst as the primary causal detonators of suicide bombers. The leaders do not sufficiently acknowledge the complex, cumulative political processes and legacies that drive ordinary young men to become suicidal terrorists. The path from common citizen to criminal bomber is paved primarily with the consequences of the policies of many Arab, Western, Israeli and other governments, and not primarily the frailties or inclinations of individual human beings.

The combination of the London and Sharm esh-Sheikh bombings in such close proximity to one another also highlights the dangerous new trend of terror groups and movements decentralizing and localizing all over the world, while simultaneously using more lethal techniques and materials. Harder to track down and eliminate, these neighborhood killers also are not afraid to directly challenge the great and powerful states that are their nemeses, such as the U.S., England and Egypt, among others.

Sharm esh-Sheikh highlights all this in a frightening way.

Gravely, we have probably now passed the tipping point in the business of producing or deterring terrorists: the policies of the U.S., U.K. and most Arab governments now are promoting and fostering more terrorists than they are killing, capturing or deterring. The American- and British-led global war on terror, with its purported fulcrum in Iraq, may have started to produce a new generation of skilled, wily and localized killers operating throughout the world. Including Saturday in Sharm esh-Sheikh.

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

Copyright © 2005 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 25 July 2005
Word Count: 876
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