BEIRUT Lebanon — Ten years ago this week Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty that has survived the test of time and brought some meaningful benefits to both countries; yet its weaknesses also offer important lessons and insights into Arab-Israeli relations, and what is required for a comprehensive peace between Israel and all its neighbors.

On a visit to Jordan earlier this month I was reminded again that vast segments of the Jordanian population are uncomfortable with the peace treaty. Antagonism toward Israel is frequently expressed in those ways that are available to Jordanians to express themselves. In the mass media, occasional peaceful public demonstrations, and public opinion polls, Jordanians strongly criticize Israel for how it treats the Palestinians.

Here is probably the single most important lesson for any Arab country that is exploring making peace with Israel: Arab populations tend to judge Israel on the basis of Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians. Regardless of whether this is useful, fair or reasonable, the fact remains that Palestine is the lens through which Arabs see and deal with Israel. This in turn reflects two factors that resonate deeply throughout the Arab world, and have done so for over half a century now.

First, Israel’s occupation, subjugation, ethnic cleansing and forced exile of Palestinians represent a political and psychological wound that is felt in most Arab societies to some degree, along with the direct and indirect costs of the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict to other Arab societies. Second, Arabs widely associate Israeli behavior with American policies and aims in the Middle East. People throughout this region routinely criticize the United States’ actions in Iraq in the same breath in which they criticize Israeli policies in Palestine. In both cases, ordinary Arabs feel that Israel’s harsh treatment of the Palestinians — whether killing young boys and girls, uprooting thousands of olive trees, assassinating hundreds of local leaders, or building colonial settlements on vast tracts of confiscated Arab land — is a humiliation of all Arab societies that identify with the Palestinians.

In this context, for an Arab country to make peace with an Israeli state that continues to kill, colonize and terrorize Palestinians is seen as deeply shameful, highlighting one’s weakness in the face of Israeli and American dictates. Many Jordanians feel uncomfortable, even ashamed, of having an Israeli embassy in their capital city while Israel persists in its assault against Palestinian people, land and society.

Another problem is that many Jordanians feel that they were forced into making peace against their will, reflecting a very bitter sense of triple helplessness: the average Jordanian feels that he or she has no real say in how national policies are made, in the face of the three overriding political desires of the Jordanian, Israeli and American governments. Not surprisingly, this is a key criticism of the populist Islamist political movement in Jordan that accuses the Jordanian government of being undemocratic and of being subservient to Israeli and American goals.

Seen from the perspective of the Jordanian man and woman in the street, therefore, the peace treaty with Israel highlights a combination of negative, even shameful, realities of one’s weaknesses, vulnerability, and subservience to the overwhelming power of others. Many Jordanians and other Arabs see this as a degrading process that only accentuates their total helplessness, and the only way they can respond for the moment is to criticize Israel, the U.S., and the peace treaty with Israel.

Jordanians also complain that they have not felt the benefits of the peace treaty, which is a rather unfair criticism. In fact Jordanian society has benefited handsomely from the impact of the 1994 peace treaty, in the form of billions of dollars of American aid and a U.S. free trade agreement, crucial additional water supplies from Israel, tens of thousands of new job opportunities through the Qualified Industrial Zones linked to the Israeli and American economies, and a sense of comfort that Israeli official policy no longer sees Jordan as a neighbor of convenience that can be eliminated in order to make room for a Palestinian state. The peace agreement is one reason why Jordan has registered solid economic growth in recent years, and its tangible economic and other benefits should not be minimized due to the anger that defines its political reception in the country.

Nevertheless, this only emphasizes the point that ordinary Arabs will remain blind even to positive realities of life when it comes to dealing with Israel (and the United States in this case), and they will judge events almost totally through the prism of the Palestine issue. This is why Jordan’s King Abdullah II, feeling the anger against Israel among his people, recalled Jordan’s ambassador to Israel in 1990 and has not yet sent him back.

What can we conclude from the past ten years of Jordanian-Israeli peace? Mainly that governments have the power to conclude formal agreements, but only the citizens of a country have the capacity to put life and warmth into any such accords. One of the weaknesses of the Jordan-Israel peace accord was the obvious lack of popular consultation on the matter, with an unrepresentative Jordanian parliament rubber-stamping the agreement in the face of obvious and widespread skepticism among the citizenry. A more profound democratic consultative process within Jordan probably would have delayed the agreement for a time, but in the end would have led to a peace treaty that enjoyed more popular support.

It is also clear in retrospect that a majority of Jordanians wants a permanent peace agreement with Israel, and does not wish to remain in a perpetual state of war or tension. The same is true today in all Arab countries, whose leaderships would do well to learn the lessons of the Jordanian and Egyptian experiences of their two peace accords with Israel. Peace agreements can be signed by Arab governments very easily, regardless of the will or sentiments of their people; but genuine, lasting peace requires a process of people-to-people reconciliation that in turn must be based on resolving the root issues that divide them, starting with the Palestine issue. This has not happened among Arabs and Israelis, which is why the Jordanian and Egyptian peace treaties with Israel remain cold and sadly unfulfilled.
Rami G. Khouri is executive editor of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 13 October 2004
Word Count: 1,037 words
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WASHINGTON, D.C. — After last week’s terror attacks against resorts in the Egyptian Sinai Desert frequented by Israeli tourists, the Egyptian president repeated his call for an international conference to define terrorism and agree on an international strategy to fight it. While this may seem to be a slightly romantic idea, something clearly needs to be done to reverse the current global trajectory of terrorism, and, more importantly, the environment of anger, marginalization and humiliation from which terrorism emanates.

This is all the more evident when seen from the peculiar perspective of the United States, where the president’s claim that he is leading a long and hard global war against terror is deeply contradicted by the reality of a society that neither feels nor behaves like a country at war. Other than the heightened security checks at airports and government office complexes, there are few substantive signs in the United States of a serious attempt to understand and fight terrorism. There are, though, many symbolic gestures of patriotism and sincere flag-waving that reflect the depth of the anguish and shock that Americans suffered on September 11, 2001.

So American flags are everywhere to be seen –- on college and professional athletes’ uniforms, breakfast cereal boxes, cars, and office windows. Many nationally televised sports events now regularly show American troops in Iraq or Afghanistan watching the game from their foreign bases. Few here in the U.S. seem to notice that the intensity of the young American soldiers abroad cheering for their sports teams is much greater and more obvious than the intensity of the average American citizen’s support for the mission of the American soldiers abroad. This is because the soldiers abroad know much more about, and identify with, the televised sports clash taking place on the football or baseball field than the average American citizen knows about or identifies with the mission of the American soldiers in distant countries.

The disconnect is clear to visitors from abroad, but seems strangely unacknowledged within the U.S. The reason appears relatively obvious as well. In the three years and a month since the September 11 attacks, the United States still has not come up with a clear strategy to fight terror. It has launched what it calls a global “war against terror,” but it has done so without undertaking a thorough analysis of the nature, causes and goals of the terror that has targeted it since the early 1990s.

Therefore it is no surprise that instead of “draining the swamp” in the Middle East and South Asia that sends terrorists abroad, Washington’s strategy, including invading and occupying Iraq, seems to have had exactly the opposite effect: it has widened and deepened the swamp of aggrieved people in the Middle East and Asia, significantly increased anti-American sentiment throughout the entire world, and led to a geographical diffusion of terror groups and attacks.

The most dangerous development since the U.S. started to respond to the September 11 attack, by using its military forces around the world, has been the ensuing environments in both the U.S. and the Middle East that have become accustomed to brutal military and terror attacks as an everyday occurrence. Even so, I was surprised last week to read about foreigners who were kidnapped and beheaded in Iraq –- in a small paragraph buried deep inside a story on page 18 of the Washington Post. The barbaric beheading of foreigners in Iraq has become routine and even secondary news in the United States, just as these despicable acts have become ordinary fare in Arab news media.

Instead of the war on terror fighting the evildoers in their own environments, as President Bush likes to claim is happening, the “swamp” of twisted morality and vengeful militarism has migrated from the Middle East and Asia to the United States. So, American society does not blink an eye –- or it even waves the flag more proudly and innocently –- when American warplanes routinely bomb civilian neighborhoods in Iraqi cities, or the Israeli air force sends missiles smashing into civilian urban areas in Gaza. Killing innocent civilians on a large scale is no longer newsworthy, or, even worse, is seen as appropriate vengeance.

What started out a dozen years ago as a narrowly focused, occasional anti-American terror campaign by small numbers of Arab and Asian militants who were largely beyond the mainstream of their societies has become today a much wider, more violent, and almost daily global cycle of terror and anti-terror with wide public backing. As the expanding network of terrorists and the U.S. military throughout the world now battle one another, hundreds of millions of ordinary citizens in both societies calmly watch the slaughter on television, some cheering, some waving flags, most of them quietly acquiescing as silent secondary accomplices in the global cycle of terror and violence. Three years and a month after September 11, vast masses of Arabs, Americans and Asians wallow in the swamp of their mutual dehumanization, and their desensitization to reciprocal brutality and suffering.

A major reason for this is that we have not seriously attempted to define the root causes of the terror that dehumanizes us. Therefore policies by both the U.S. and Middle Eastern governments tend to aggravate the problem, rather than mitigate it, because they continue to fuel the underlying sentiments of victimization, humiliation and resentment that motivate terrorists in the first place.

President Mubarak’s call for an international conference on terrorism may or may not be the right approach. It is clear, though, that the world needs to explore a better means of responding to the scourge of terror than the current American-led war on terror.

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

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 13 October 2004
Word Count: 942 words
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A series of recent developments in Iraq and the United States has suddenly propelled the war in Iraq into a more prominent place within the current American presidential election. The likely impact of this trend, as the situation appears today, would be to improve the prospects of the Democratic candidate John Kerry and weaken the position of President George W. Bush, in relative terms. More importantly, it signals the awakening of a slumbering giant — the common sense of ordinary Americans who resent being taken for a ride.

The reasons for the greater prominence of the Iraq war in the minds of the American electorate revolve around both Kerry’s recent performance and events on the ground in Iraq. The former include such factors as Kerry’s going on the attack against Bush on the issue of the president’s handling of the whole Iraq matter, and particularly making of this a litmus test of the president’s judgment and character. This reversed the trend of the previous month, when Bush’s attacks succeeded in making Kerry’s conduct in the Vietnam War three decades ago the big issue of the moment. Kerry has also prompted many Americans to associate the $200 billion Bush has spent on the Iraq war with massive amounts of money that otherwise were not spent on domestic American needs, including health care and education.

The ongoing change in Iraq’s place in the presidential election has also reflected the continued deaths of American soldiers almost on a daily basis, and the large-scale assaults by thousands of American troops in places like Samarra. Scenes of daily car bombings that kill scores of Iraqis, along with the recent beheadings of two kidnapped Americans in Iraq, serve to raise new questions about the effectiveness of Washington’s Iraq policy among segments of American society.

All of this was accentuated by the first of the three presidential debates last Thursday which focused on foreign policy issues. Opinion polls released in the days following that debate indicate that the American public generally saw Kerry as having done a better job in the debate than Bush. The cumulative evidence suggests that more and more Americans are questioning whether their country’s military involvement in Iraq is sustainable in the long run, given the rising tide of anti-American attacks in Iraq and the more focused political attacks against Bush at home on the issue of his handling of the war and its aftermath.

My impression during a visit to the U.S. this week and discussions with Americans who closely follow foreign policy issues is that President Bush’s vulnerabilities on the Iraq war issue are finally becoming more obvious — given the politically deadly combination of the rising tide of violence in Iraq, continuing American deaths and major spending costs there, and a Democratic presidential contender who has finally figured out how to attack the president on this issue.

Iraq on its own is not big enough issue in the eyes of the average American to cause a majority to vote for Kerry or against Bush. But as the pivot of a series of issues that do impact on the lives of ordinary Americans — economic prospects, the moral character of their president, widespread perceptions of continuing security threats, and their nation’s derision throughout most of the world _ the American adventure in Iraq looms more important in the presidential race than it did at any point during the past year.

The sad aspect of all this, though, is how thin and superficial is the foreign policy debate in the U.S. generally. The president and his political advisers have consistently played on the fears and aftershocks of Sept. 11 among the American public, and they have painted a dramatic but false picture of the world and America’s place in it. For the past three years, ordinary Americans who were shocked and bewildered by the attack against them on Sept. 11 have dealt with their very normal concerns largely by accepting both the analytical and emotional approaches that George Bush has offered them: the world has changed forever, dangerous and evil people plot widely to attack the U.S. and undermine freedom and Western civilization, and the only way to stop this is to go on the offensive and fight the terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of in New Jersey and Oklahoma.

The events of the past two weeks, with Kerry pulling even with Bush again in the opinion polls of likely voters, suggest that the Bush strategy of playing on the fears of ordinary Americans at home and waging war abroad is being questioned with some seriousness for the first time since Sept. 11. With a month to go before the presidential election, other factors will come into play and determine the winner. In the short run, though, something constructive may be taking place inside the United States, and it is a joy to watch: ordinary citizens are asking more probing questions about the true reasons for, and the full costs and consequences of, their country’s policy in Iraq. A democratic system that showed its flaws when it allowed emotionalism to dominate reason and reality in recent years now seems to be trying to redress that balance.

The common sense of the American people is a mighty force, and usually a benevolent one. It is a force that usually seeks to do good when the real choice between good and bad is on the table and clear — as may be happening at last this month.

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

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global

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Released: 6 October 2004
Word Count: 914 words
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BEIRUT Lebanon — Four years ago this week, the Palestinians erupted in a spontaneous uprising (intifada) against the Israeli occupation that had started in 1967. While Iraq and global terrorism have captured much of the world’s attention since 2001, the intifada and the wider Palestinian-Israeli struggle fester at the core of a concentric circle of conflicts and tensions that continue to spread menacingly from Palestine/Israel, to the wider Middle East, to the entire world. Focusing diplomatic and political energy on this core issue in the Middle East would pay substantial dividends in reducing tensions and active conflicts elsewhere in the region and the world.

As the intifada enters its fifth year this week, two new credible reports highlight the deteriorating situation for Palestinians and the political dynamics that must be addressed to get out of this worsening cycle. A well-documented report by the information clearinghouse of Palestinian non-governmental organizations, the Palestine Monitor, provides a chilling overview of the human and economic toll of occupation and resistance (4342 killed on both sides). Also, the respected independent research organization, the International Crisis Group (ICG), outlines the virtual chaos inside Palestinian political society in the West Bank, blaming this on both the Israeli occupation and indigenous Palestinian political paralysis. These two short but powerful reports make compelling reading, and deserve widespread consideration for what they portend if the current situation persists.

The Palestine Monitor report data shows that 1,008 Israeli and 3,334 Palestinians have been killed in the past four years, with 82% of the Palestinians killed being civilians –- an average of two-to-three Palestinians killed by Israeli soldiers, police or settlers every day. A total of 621 Palestinian children under the age of 17 have been killed by the Israeli occupation forces, of whom 411 were shot with live ammunition and 200 were shot in the head, face or neck. Another 10,000 Palestinian children have been injured.

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, the director of the Palestinian Health Development and Information Project, and a respected independent political democracy activist based in Ramallah who directs the Palestine Monitor, charged Monday that “the telling figures of head injuries among children obviously indicates that Israeli forces were shooting to kill. In fact the majority of Palestinianskilled have suffered injuries to the head and upper body.”

A total of 424 Palestinians have died in “extra-judicial executions” (targeted assassinations) by Israel, of whom 186 were bystanders or “unintended” victims, including 39 children and 26 women. Israel this week assassinated a Palestinian resistance leader based in Damascus, Syria, indicating one manner in which the Palestine conflict spreads to other lands.

A detailed breakdown of these and other statistics on the consequences of the last four years in Palestine is available at the website www.palestinemonitor.org. It includes alarming figures on widespread deterioration in health, economic and education conditions (e.g., Israeli forces have shelled or broken into 298 Palestinian schools), destruction of $1 billion worth of Palestinian infrastructure, severe water problems, and the negative consequences of Israel’s continued expansion of colonies/settlements and construction of its Apartheid-like “separation wall” around the West Bank.

The pain of occupation for Palestinians combines with a continuing quest for appropriate political responses, including non-violent resistance options and how to deal with the fact that Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” plan from Gaza ultimately offers the Palestinians a “state” on just 11 percent of historic Palestine (the Gaza Strip and some 40 percent of the West Bank).

The ICG report probes more deeply into the political governance dynamics of the West Bank, showing that the Palestinian crisis in decision-making stems from both the consequences of the Israeli occupation and domestic Palestinian factors (see www.icg.org). It states bluntly and accurately:

Although the occupation and the confrontation with Israel that is entering its fifth year provide the context, today’s Palestinian predicament is decidedly domestic. Recent power struggles, armed clashes, and demonstrations do not pit Palestinians against Israelis so much as Palestinians against each other; the chaos is a product not solely of Israel’s policies, but of Palestinian ones as well. The political system is close to breaking point, paralyzed and unable to make basic decisions the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been in virtually continuous crisis since the uprising began in September 2000.

As fragmentation has intensified, a growing number of primarily local actors have stepped into the breach: mayors and governors, kinship networks, political groups, and armed militias. Increasingly, however, they are also vehicles for narrower interests, which have repeatedly brought them into competition and conflict with one another. The result is growing chaos throughout the West Bank.

With continuing Israeli-Palestinian violence and political inaction in the places that count most – the PA, Israel, and the U.S.– the odds against decisive action are high. But the alternative is growing chaos and mayhem in the West Bank. The costs to Palestinians are obvious. But these should be no less clear to Israelis seeking security and to an international community that watches with alarm as one conflict in the Middle East feeds upon another, and as a dangerous blend of desperation, rage and violence steadily takes hold.

For those who have followed events in Israel/Palestine for years, there are no surprises here, as we monitor the persistence of four simultaneous dynamics: the Israeli occupation with its expansion of colonial settlements and construction of the Apartheid wall, Palestinian armed and peaceful resistance, a gradual breakdown in internal Palestinian society, and collective incompetence and irresponsibility on the part of the Palestinian, Israeli, American and Arab leaders whose countries directly suffer the consequences of these ugly trends.

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

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 30 September 2004
Word Count: 919 words
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Syria and the United States are like two exhausted, ageing boxers who have little energy left in them and are preoccupied by dozens of other priorities, but they cannot resist a good punch-up when they see the ideological fire in each other’s eye. This is partly history (this is essentially the last political frontier of the Cold War) and partly ideology and personality, with frenzied neocons in Washington and true-believer Arab Nationalist Baathists in Damascus biologically unable to pass up an eyeball-to-eyeball showdown.

The Syrian-American relationship is worth monitoring closely as it moves into dynamic mode, as it has this month. The American romantics in Washington pressure Syria to change as part of their desire to reform, modernize, democratize and save the Arab world, and Syria resists American pressure in order to wear the mantle of Middle Eastern defiance of the imperial West and defender of Arab dignity and rights. This is a terrain that lends itself to war — or, preferably, to a good old fashioned deal.

So we should perk our ears and scratch our heads in a serious attempt to figure out what is going on when the Syrian ambassador in Washington announces, as he did Monday, that Syrian troops in Lebanon this week will begin a redeployment and partial pullback towards the Syrian border. The Bush administration has eyed Syria suspiciously for years, accusing it of denying Lebanese sovereignty, assisting “terrorist” groups like Hamas and Hizbullah, developing weapons of mass destruction, and, most recently, allowing arms and militants to cross its border with Iraq. A U.S. Congressional bill threatened and then imposed some mild sanctions on Syria earlier this year. The confrontation intensified earlier this month when Syria used its dominance of Lebanese politics to push through a three-year extension of Lebanese President Emile Lahoud’s term, against the wishes of most Lebanese.

The U.S. and France replied by teaming up to sponsor and pass UN Security Council Resolution 1559 demanding that Syria respect Lebanon’s sovereignty and withdraw its troops from Lebanon. An American official delegation that visited Syria last week made it clear that Damascus had to comply with the UN resolution or else face escalating U.S. and international pressure. The UN secretary general will report back to the Security Council next month on Syrian compliance with the resolution, thus formally placing the Syrian leadership in the crosshairs of international monitoring. Even many Arab countries, including the powerful Gulf Cooperation Council oil producers, advised Syria to respect Lebanese sovereignty more diligently. An American technical team in Damascus this week is working with Syria on some of the issues the U.S. has raised, including alleged laundering of money through Syrian banks for _terrorist_ activities.

Why would Syria blatantly force an extension of the Lebanese presidential term, and bring upon itself the formal international censure and ongoing scrutiny of the UN Security Council, when it could have enjoyed a newly elected Lebanese president who was perfectly acceptable to it?  Did Syria panic, act clumsily, and misread Lebanese, Mideast and world opinion?

I suspect that Syria’s recent actions and the global response they generated may have left the Syrian leadership in a stronger rather than a weaker position. In the past decade since the end of the Cold War, and the effective end of the military dimension of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Syria has steadily lost much of the regional and international clout it had enjoyed during the previous three decades. Its direct impact had gradually become restricted to its own soil, Lebanon, and some lingering linkages with Palestinian resistance groups, Hizbullah and Iran.

At the same time, the dynamics among every major aspect of Syrian national life point to an urgent need for change and modernization. The economy, the demographics of a young population, technology, relations with Europe and the U.S., domestic politics, relations with neighbors Turkey and Iraq, the stalled peace process with Israel, and even hydrology and the environment all demand significant, rapid change in present policies. Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, like other young Arab leaders who assumed power in recent years, quickly grasped the urgency of change and modernization, but has acted only in some sectors. He initiated some sound changes in the economy and in key regional ties (especially with Turkey), expressed his willingness to resume legitimate peace talks with Israel, but done little in terms of domestic political reform or relations with the U.S. and Europe.

Since the post-Sept. 11 American diplomatic and military onslaught against the Middle East, in the past two years Damascus has faced the most brutal fate that could be inflicted upon such an ideological regime — quasi-isolation and marginalization. Recent events, though, have dramatically changed Syria’s regional and global posture and its diplomatic positioning. American and European delegations visit Damascus regularly to talk and deal. The Syrian leadership is back in the position where it has always been most comfortable: it sits at the pivot of several simultaneous, interlinked, and often tense diplomatic dynamics with multiple interlocutors that matter(the U.S., EU, Turkey) on issues such as Palestine, Israel, Lebanon, Hizbullah, Hamas, Iraq, the war on terror, economic and political reform, the UN Security Council_s role, and allegations of seeking weapons of mass destruction.

The road is open for Damascus to translate its more favorable new diplomatic positioning into policies that could generate real benefits for all concerned, starting with Syria and Lebanon, but extending to Iraq, the U.S., Israel, Palestine, and the Europeans. Syria has always been a dynamic negotiator and deal-maker, not an intransigent or hesitant bluffer. It makes deals, though, based on win-win arrangements, in which typically it secures the strengthening and perpetuation of its domestic political system — one of the last Soviet-style centralized states in the world — in return for offering something meaningful and reasonable in return. In the past decade or so, Syria has had little to trade diplomatically, because it did not adjust quickly enough to the post-Cold War era.

Today, it sits in the middle of a veritable diplomatic bazaar, flush with commodities to give and take, and interested buyers and sellers with whom to deal honorably. This is an important opportunity for Syria, the entire region, and the U.S. to leave behind the rigid, reactionary, militant policies of the past, and instead to forge into new terrain where legitimate diplomatic agreements could benefit all parties equally. If the Damascus leadership gauges this opportunity correctly, and responds appropriately, it can launch a new era of democratic domestic change and growth, combined with regional peace and stability, that would quickly see Syria regain its traditional historical role as a central economic actor, political player, and cultural pace-setter for the entire Middle East.

All those who deal with Damascus today should also grasp that many more mutual benefits emanate from an honorable win-win agreement made in a bazaar than from a unilateral war or regime change policy cooked up in the confused minds of faraway American ideologues who still do not understand the critical diplomatic concepts of honor, history or mutually beneficial transactional politics.

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

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 21 September 2004
Word Count: 1171 words
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It was not inevitable, but this is how it turned out: three years after September 11, when Arab terrorists used commercial planes to attack the U.S., the American army is using its planes to attack individual houses in Fallujah, Iraq.

For the past five days, American planes have bombed targets in Fallujah, routinely killing 15, 20 or 30 people at a time. The U.S. Marines carrying out the attack say they are killing members of the Al-Qaeda-related terror group headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, while Iraqis on the ground say many of the dead are civilians, including women and children.

President George W. Bush argues that Iraq is the front line in the “war against terror.” If this is true, which most of the world doubts, then we have two large problems on our hands, and not only the terror problem that erupted on Sept. 11: the war against terror is not being won, and terrorist networks and incidents are expanding steadily around the world.

The single most common emotion that describes the prevalent attitudes towards terror and anti-terror in the U.S. and the Arab-Asian region is probably hysteria. George Bush and his ice-hearted Republican political strategists have crassly exploited the shock, fear and bewilderment that gripped Americans on Sept. 11, and turned the U.S. into an hysterical arena defined by a peculiar combination of exaggerated jingoism and militarism as the appropriate response to a constant perceived threat. The Arab-Asian region that spawns much global terror suffers a parallel hysteria, manifested in slightly different ways among three sectors of society: the bombers and killers are more active than ever, against innocent civilians in most cases; government authorities use police powers more forcefully to stamp out terror, with very mixed results; and the vast masses of the public have essentially suspended their humanity, and shelved their emotions and basic values, neither condemning the terrorists very clearly nor supporting their governments or the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Otherwise rational people everywhere have been transformed into agents of emotional and political fury, using and accepting severe violence as an inevitable consequence of our times. The political iconography in both worlds is frightening: an American president who brandishes his fighter jets, and Arab-Islamic terrorists who brandish long knives for cutting off heads of foreigners. And so, perhaps inevitably, we find ourselves again following events in Fallujah.

This Iraqi city west of Baghdad, like Najaf a month ago, is this week’s symbol of hysteria’s crazed consequences for both Iraqis and Americans. The American army surrounded and bombed Fallujah in April killing hundreds of Iraqis, but then pulled back when the cost in public opinion terms around the Middle East and the world seemed too high. Now the U.S. Marines are attacking again, but in a very different political context marked by many more daily attacks against the U.S. occupation army and Iraqi government targets.

One reason for the stepped up attacks against the U.S. and Iraqi governing forces is the backlash from the April attacks in Fallujah, and other American attacks since then against other Iraqi cities. With every American military assault against Iraqis defending their homeland, more Iraqis emerge from the experience hardened, angry, and determined to kill Americans. In other words, they’re hysterical, willing to fight to the death, wanting only to hurt or humiliate the United States and its partners in occupation.

This is a strange and bitter place to find ourselves three years after the Sept. 11 attacks that were seen by people everywhere as a horrendous and unjustifiable crime against Americans and the world. George W. Bush’s militantly hysterical foreign policy that claims to fight terror in fact has been a major global catalyst and recruiting agent for terror. Najaf, Fallujah, Ramadi, Baaquba and other Iraqi towns did not exist in the American political or popular imagination three years ago. Today, many citizens in those towns only wish to haunt, terrorize and kill Americans, and militants from other countries join them as well. In this respect, Osama bin Laden has lured George Bush into a trap.

How did we get from the crimes of Sept. 11 to the shared hysteria of Fallujah? One of the disappointments of the past three years, in my view, has been the low priority given to assessing the nature and efficacy of the American-led war against terror. Such an effort that impacts on the entire world cannot be left to the inhumanly calculating political operatives of the Bush White House and the Republican Party. The United States needs and deserves the world’s help in responding more effectively and rationally to the attacks of Sept. 11.

As important as how we got to Fallujah is how we get out of it, what to do next to stop and reverse the growing global terror industry. It is morally and politically unacceptable for the world to watch on television as Donald Rumsfeld and Osama Bin Laden slug it out in a duel of two crazed gladiators, perhaps eventually killing each other but certainly inflicting immense casualties on innocent people in their respective societies.
As we enter into the fourth year since the Sept. 11 attacks, all of us in the U.S. and the Arab world are challenged to acknowledge that Fallujah and all it represents is not the answer to that fateful day’s terror against the U.S. There must be a better answer, and it can only be found through a closer consultative political partnership between Washington and the rest of the world.  One that would replaced hysteria by rationality, and militarism by sound political and economic foreign policy.

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

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 14 September 2004
Word Count: 943 words
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Last week’s hostage-taking terror attack against a school in Beslan, Russia, has left over 350 dead, almost half of them children.  It was the culmination of a deadly two weeks that saw more than 500 people killed in terror attacks in Russia, including two downed commercial planes and a subway bombing in Moscow. The shocking moral depravity of the attack against schoolchildren — on their first day of the new academic year, no less, a moment of hope, new clothes, new friends — may spark a pivotal new phase in the diffused and confused global “war against terror.” How the Russians, Americans, Europeans and, most importantly, we Middle Easterners act now could well determine if terrorism worsens or is gradually contained.

The fact that nine or ten of the terrorists were identified as “Arabs,” and that Chechen and perhaps other women were among the terrorists who struck in Russia, reflects a continuing qualitative leap in the terrorism business around the world. I say “terrorism business” deliberately, because this phenomenon behaves according to the supply-and-demand laws of the marketplace. Terrorism has expanded in response to increased demand for it in the marketplace of disfigured human ideas, sentiments and perceptions — and suppliers like Osama bin Laden, the Chechen rebels, and others have stepped in to provide the supply.

The scale, frequency and nature of terror against civilians have all worsened in the past decade. The Russian attacks reflect the increasingly inhuman targeting of civilians and transnational cooperation among like-minded terrorists. As an angry and rattled Vladimir Putin plans tough measures, it would be a terrible shame if Russia’s response only ends up perpetuating the broadly ineffective, heavily military-based anti-terror policies favored by the United States since September 2001, and by Israel since the 1970s. Rather, deeper Russian involvement in anti-terror campaigns should be a catalyst for the entire world to make a serious effort — perhaps the first ever in recent history — to address the scourge of terrorism in a more realistic and effective manner.

If we want to achieve results and not just feel-good revenge, we might start by acknowledging three important but uncomfortable facts.

First, the Arab-Asian region of the world, predominantly Islamic, is the heartland and major wellspring of the spectacular global terror attacks of recent years. The reasons for this must be addressed more intelligently and dispassionately by the people of this region above all, who are collectively degraded by the barbarism that emanates from their societies. Most Arabs identified strongly and willingly with the image of gun-wielding Palestinian or Lebanese guerrillas fighting against Israeli occupation troops; but all of us today are dehumanized and brutalized by the images of Arabs kidnapping and beheading foreign hostages. We must ask, and know, how and why our societies made this ugly trek. The most important and recurring historical root cause of terror in, and from, the Arab-Asian region is the home-grown sense of indignity, humiliation, denial, and degradation that has increasingly plagued many of our young men and women. Israel, the U.S. and other external factors have aggravated this problem, but its root causes are overwhelmingly local and indigenous. Because our own Arab leaderships and societies have not sufficiently come to grips with this, the United States and Great Britain have sent their armies to do it for us — with their incalculably faulty analyses and self-defeating policies that imprison some terrorists but give birth to many other new ones, as we witness in Iraq today.

The second fact is that terror is a global phenomenon that also emanates from other, non-Islamic regions in the world, with most small-scale attacks in recent decades occurring in places like South America and South Asia, not linked to the Arab or Islamic Middle East. We can only stop terror if we accurately understand how its component parts emerged from their particular local environments, rather than wildly imagining a single, global Islamist militant ideology that is fuelled by hatred for America. Global terrorism has emerged over decades, due to many historical and emotional causes that can be documented and analyzed, and therefore can be redressed or prevented. Realistic and patient anti-terror policies must methodically address the different local root causes of terror, in order to take away the demand side of the business.

Finally, prevailing American and Israeli policy of fighting terror militarily, which is increasingly adopted by Arab and other governments, has had only limited successes, because it largely fails to address these root causes that push otherwise normal young men and women to end their lives in suicide missions. You cannot deter a person who wishes to kill himself or herself by threatening to kill them. Terror that largely reflects prevailing social, political and economic forces can only be fought on those same terrains, and not primarily in the military arena. The British experience in Northern Ireland is perhaps the best current example of how an intelligent, inclusive political response effectively brought an end to the terror that harsh police and military methods on their own could not stop.

These are not easy lessons to absorb. Let us hope that Moscow’s expected heightened participation in the war on terror sparks that which has been missing from the world scene for some years: a sensible international campaign, with active Arab-Islamic participation, to fight terror effectively by systematically identifying and redressing its actual, rather than its imagined, causes. Threats, imprisonment, and military assaults will not end terror. That requires taking away the demand for terror that continues to grow in the hearts and minds of young men and women who tragically seek death as a means to affirm the value of their otherwise worthless lives.

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

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 7 September 2004
Word Count: 942 words
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BEIRUT, Lebanon — Hundreds of millions of Arabs are pained to wake up every morning and learn of more inhuman, incomprehensible behavior by different actors in the Middle East. Iraq and Palestine epitomize the problems and distortions that make this violent region so dangerous for its own citizens and for foreign armies and individuals alike.

The reality throughout most of our lands is defined by troubling, persistent trends:

* citizens who cannot choose their governments, or who vote for their leaders in farcical elections where outcomes can be predicted years in advance;

* recurring civil wars and internal violence among political, ethnic, religious or socio-economic groups that have never worked out a national compact that defines power-sharing rules or citizenship rights and obligations;

* ethnic cleansing and refugee flows that make the Middle East the world’s single biggest producer of refugees;

* rich and poor governments alike that spend a quarter of their national budgets on guns and security, without any meaningful civilian oversight or accountability — or real security for state or citizen;

* constitutions, laws, and judicial systems that are routinely ignored, or changed at the snap of a finger when personal political power or economic interests are at stake, making a mockery of the rule of law;

* massive imbalances among and within countries, in wealth, natural resources, and basic human needs;

* a terrifying suppression of fundamental moral values and human decency by hundreds of millions of Arabs who often no longer even attempt to condemn the vulgarities that permeate our lands — torture, kidnappings, beheadings, humiliation, occupation, murder, urban terror, imprisonment without trial, and Arab and foreign tanks and helicopter gunships bombing local holy shrines in Iraq and Palestine;

* foreign military occupations, interventions, and threats that only aggravate our indigenous ailments;

* and we are all to blame for this ugly picture of what we have become.

Governments, terrorists, foreign and regional occupiers, sponsored and freelance militias, local thugs, high class official criminals, aspiring street gang leaders, ageing presidents, religious demagogues, a massively numbed citizenry, and various others in the Middle East all play their part in these shameful trends that define the last two generations, and five decades, of our history.

These cumulative problems have spawned this region’s ultimate moral blight: the development of a small but active terrorism industry that attacks targets at home and around the world. As the terrorists become more active and gruesome in their butchery, the vast majority of Arabs watch it all on television without uttering much more than a perfunctory, and therefore meaningless, condemnation.

Our blight is two-fold: the terrorists whose deeds demean our cultures and countries, and we Arab citizens who watch the bombers at work, our silence reflecting a twisted sort of passive acquiescence that borders dangerously on accepting terrorism as the inevitable revenge of our dehumanized masses. Our last defense against barbarism — our strong human and moral values — are now also dangerously threatened by our quiet acceptance of both foreign colonialism and native Arab terror as fixtures in our landscapes.

All this has been aggravated by the response from Washington. Simplistic leaders like President George W. Bush and his ilk have reacted to this region’s terrorism with a misguided double-barreled strategic policy: faulty analysis of the root causes of our violence, and militaristic counter-attacks that have only made things worse. The romantic American war to liberate Iraq and make it an example for Arab democracy has, in the short run, only highlighted the five core crises that I believe plague the contemporary Arab world. Those who wish to repair our fractured, violent societies — and stop the terror train — should grasp and address these crises that brought us here.

The five fundamental problems that define and plague this region are inter-related, and have developed over decades of erratic statehood. They must be addressed seriously, systematically, patiently, and as an integrated whole.

The five are:

1. A crisis of sustainable human development: early progress in expanding basic services has been replaced since 1980 by stagnation and disparity in many sectors, including water, jobs, nutrition, education, and health.

2. A crisis of sensible and stable statehood: few Arab countries are immune from civil war, rebellions, border conflicts, terror, and widespread emigration impulses.

3. A crisis of citizenship rights: public power is exercised by small groups of unelected, unaccountable people who use force at will, leaving the ordinary citizen unclear about his or her place or rights in society.

4. A crisis of identities: the modern state, pan-Arabism, Islam, other religions, tribalism, ethnicity, regional affiliations, gangsterism, commercialism, democracy, resistance, terrorism, and other transnationalisms all compete for authenticity and supremacy, spawning allegiance and identity confusions at the personal, communal and national levels.

5. A crisis of coexistence with Israel, other regional powers (Turkey, Iran), and Western powers (mainly the U.S. today), without a consensus on whether these are friends or foes, or both.

All five of these basic crises — human needs, statehood, citizenship, identity, and inter-state relations — are powerfully echoed in Najaf. The two-week-old confrontation there between the American-Iraqi interim government and Moqtada al-Sadr and his ragtag band of followers is about modern Arab history as much as it is about the future development of Iraq. But how Iraq and other Arab lands evolve will depend heavily on how their own people — rather than sophomoric ideologues in Washington, frenzied generals in Tel Aviv, or vulnerable and dependent Arab leaderships — come to grips with these five chronic regional crises. I will explore these five crises in more depth in next week’s column.

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

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 25 August 2004
Word Count: 951 words
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BEIRUT Lebanon The relative silence of the Arab world has been one of the striking dimensions of the tragic events in the Darfur region of western Sudan in the past 18 months. Up to 50,000 people may have died and over a million have been made refugees there, as a result of attacks by Arab militias. The international consensus was reflected in the recent UN Security Council resolution giving the Sudanese government one month to disarm the militias and restore security. Human rights groups and governments in the West have described events in Darfur as “ethnic cleansing” and even “genocide”, while the Sudanese government rejects these accusations and claims that no more than 5000 people have died in the region.

Based on documentation by credible international human rights groups and the UN itself, the world finally moved to stop the human suffering in Darfur when the United States and the UN took the lead to act in June. Throughout the past 18 months, as the tragedy has unfolded in Darfur, the Arab world has been conspicuously absent from the debate. While a few voices in the region have spoken out for decisive diplomacy to restore security and calm in Darfur, many other voices in the media and among government officials have taken a much more relaxed stance, even accusing the US of meddling in the region to secure future oil interests.

The Arab silence on this issue probably is not specific to Darfur or Sudan, but rather reflects a wider malaise that has long plagued our region: Arab governments tend to stay out of each other’s way when any one of them is accused of wrongdoing, and most Arab citizens have been numbed into helplessness in the face of public atrocities or criminal activity in their societies.
The modern history of the Arab world over the past 50 years has been defined by two broad trajectories that are intimately related: the concentration of economic and military power in the hands of small numbers of people who form the governing power elites, and that governing elite’s steady provision of basic services and job opportunities to the citizenry. As the average citizen experiences a relatively consistent improvement in basic life conditions (water, electricity, telephones, hospitals, schools, jobs) he or she tends to leave the government alone in its conduct of other political policies – including violent or predatory actions against one’s own citizens.

This basic governing contract explains much of the silence and acquiescence by otherwise decent Arabs people in the face of atrocities or criminal activity carried out by fellow citizens, or even by their own government. Darfur in Sudan is only the latest in a string of violent domestic episodes within Arab countries that have been largely ignored by other Arab countries. The long and depressing list includes rebellions, civil wars, repression and other forms of violence in key Arab countries like Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Sudan, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, and Libya.

Because most Arab governments use violence as a policy instrument – legitimately to secure public order, they would argue – the consequence is that Arab governments turn a blind eye to the violence practiced by their fellow governors. This is a strange sort of professional courtesy among fellow autocrats and security state managers who rationalize it by saying that Arab states do not interfere in the domestic affairs of other states. Therefore, Colin Powell and Kofi Annan visit Darfur and call world attention to its plight before Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa or any Arab foreign minister considers making the same trip.

Most ordinary Arab citizens do not speak out against the atrocities in Sudan or other Arab countries because their modern history has taught them that they have neither the right nor the ability to impact on the policies of their own government, let alone other Arab governments. The Arab citizenry collectively has been numbed into a sad state of helplessness and docility in the face of government policies, especially in the field of domestic security and foreign policy. We watch Darfur today like we watched Algeria, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Egypt and Jordan in decades past – as pained but powerless spectators.

Darfur troubles us all, but moves few to action in the Arab world. Darfur is very far away for most Arab citizens, and pains closer to home are more urgent — whether the pain of inequity, corruption and economic stress in one’s own country, the impact of Israeli occupation policies in Palestine and neighboring states, or the American war machine in Iraq. We grieve in our hearts for the suffering of Sudanese nationals in Darfur, but as individual Arab citizens we can do little to change facts in faraway lands – because we can do equally little to change realities in our own neighborhoods in Beirut, Amman, Rabat, Damascus, Riyadh or Cairo.

The more troubling consequence is that small groups of bombers and terrorists have exploited this state of Arab helplessness and numbed public political consciousness, seeking public support for their militancy. Thus large numbers of ordinary, decent Arab citizens instinctively reject the atrocities against fellow Arabs in Darfur, but do not speak out or act to stop them; and equally large numbers of Arabs – majorities in some troubled lands, the polls tell us – similarly do not speak out when Arab terrorists bomb Arab, American or other targets.

A troubled Arab citizenry’s silent acquiescence in violence, and passivity in the face of homegrown atrocity, is today the single most important, widespread symptom of the malaise that plagues this region. It would be a terrible mistake to misdiagnose the Arab silence on Darfur as reflecting some Arab, Islamic or Middle Eastern cultural acceptance of violence. This is, rather, a troubling sign of Arab mass dehumanization and political pacification at the public level, which are largely our own fault due to our acceptance of poor governance and distorted Arab power structures over a period of decades.

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

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri

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Released: 11 August 2004
Word Count: 985 words
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BEIRUT, Lebanon- The issue of Arab political reform has generated much discussion recently in the Middle East and abroad, along with numerous agendas and proposals for action. Yet the Arab reform debate within this region lacks credibility because it is directed by individual leaders who have held power for decades. Therefore, I offer a modest proposal: that individual Arab presidents remain in power for no longer than four consecutive terms, or a single human generation (25 years), whichever comes first.

This is not a facetious or sarcastic proposal, but a considered and serious one. It is dictated in particular by the reality in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya, whose three current presidents – Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi, Tunisia’s Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak – have been in power for a total of 65 years and still counting. The purely political and historical in Arab leadership balances on the threshold of the eternal – to our collective detriment.

President Mubarak in Egypt assumed office in October 1981, has been “elected” to four consecutive six-year terms, and his National Democratic Party has routinely won over 75 percent of seats in parliament.

President Ben Ali in Tunisia took over the presidency in a bloodless coup in November 1987, has been “elected” for three consecutive five-year terms (the last time, in October 1999, with 99 percent of the vote), and two years ago held a referendum that changed the constitution to allow him to run for more than three terms. His Democratic Constitutional Assembly Party won 92 percent of the votes in the May 2000 municipal elections.

President Gadhafi in Libya, who took power in a military coup in 1969, largely defies historical analysis, because every few years he changes his own title and position, the country’s governance system and ideological orientation, and his relations with neighbors and other states in the region. The current power elite with him has ruled for 25 years – a full generation.

I have never personally met nor have any claim against these three leaders. I appreciate the good things that they have done for their countries, in security, stability and economic growth. But it is clear that no matter how decent, patriotic and caring a president may be, the perpetual incumbency of individuals and their narrow circle of supporters has done more harm than good in the modern Arab security state. It is time to honor those who have served selflessly for decades, and to ponder alternatives to the prevailing tradition of Arab presidents-for-life.

I raise this issue now because in the coming year the Egyptian and Tunisian presidents are expected to run again for a new presidential term. I urge them to think again, and to show their highest possible form of patriotism by announcing that they will reject the call of their masses who love them dearly to run for another term. Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gadhafi should make modern history by instituting a vital democratic practice – presidential term limits.

My suggestion for them collectively to renounce serving another term is not primarily a criticism of their persons. Rather it is a call for implementing a precious principle that has always been key to successful democracies (as the respected Lebanese law professor and democracy activist Chibli Mallat rightly reminds us): the routine and peaceful rotation of executive power.

This is not an issue of ideology, but rather of biology: human beings who enjoy unchecked and unaccountable power for decades at a time inevitably slip into a pattern of distorted decision-making that exaggerates their own sense of wisdom and infallibility. It narrows the band of people who design national policies, and who benefit from them. Even the most honest and enlightened leader in the world should be rotated after a certain period of time. Perpetual power and unaccountable incumbency inevitably breed a combination of artificial, know-it-all self-confidence that usually spills over into arrogance and intolerance of other opinions.

Our creator did not program our human flesh and genes for life-long rule. Perhaps that is why in the holy books of Islam, Christianity and Judaism, the most common dictate for human behavior, after the love of God, is humility and kindness to one’s fellow human beings. This is also why proven democracies in the past two centuries have all instituted presidential term limits. Where the Divine and the temporal converge, Arab leaders should dare to go. Now would be a good time to start this noble march.

Mubarak, Ben Ali and Gadhafi have all spoken about the need to reform their political systems, as have all Arab leaders. These three North African leaders are deeply beloved and appreciated by their people, to judge by the amazing repeated re-election victories they have notched up in the past quarter century, usually with victory margins of over 90 percent. This unremitting, intense love of the people for their wise and caring leaders is astounding, often defying rational analysis. I suggest, though, that if these three leaders want to reciprocate the love and loyalty of their people, their most effective move would be to refuse to serve another term. They should announce their adoption of presidential term limits as their personal contribution to implementing the first steps to genuine Arab political reform. Great, historic, and very durable leaders, as these men seem to be, do not only speak the language of reform – they put it into action.

I know that reform has to be homegrown and gradual in the Arab world, which is why I recommend that we ease into this, and not overdo it. I do not want to propose something drastic and unreasonable, like asking Arab presidents to serve for only two or three terms, or just 20 years. This is why I suggest we adopt a limit of four consecutive presidential terms, or 25 consecutive years (each year being no more than 365 days, and impervious to constitutional amendments), whichever comes first. That would mean that Mubarak should not run again because he is finishing his fourth term, but it allows Ben Ali in Tunisia to serve one more term, for a total of 20 years as president. Gadhafi has ruled for 25 years, which seems a decent amount of time to implement one’s policies, and serve one’s beloved people.

Just a modest proposal to ponder from a humble citizen who loves the Arab people as much as their leaders do.

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

Copyright © 2004 Rami G. Khouri

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Released: 4 August 2004
Word Count: 1,060 words
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