Features > May 22, 2006

Charting a Sane Course in the Middle East (cont’d)

Yezid, if the United States were able to play a more credible role in the issue of Palestine would it help them in other situations that they are dealing with in the region, whether with Iran or the fallout from the occupation of Iraq?

SAYIGH: The United States does need to radically alter its approach to the Israel/Palestine conflict and hopefully the peace process. But I don’t think that the United States is measured solely by its policy on Israel and Palestine. When you come to Iraq or Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, or any of the other parts of the Middle East where there are particular issues and important alliances with and involvement by the United States, there are local issues that for local people are at least as important. I don’t think that solving the Palestine problem will radically change everything.

The United States is stuck. We’ve heard mention of disengagement and so on, but I object to loose talk of disengagement for a very simple reason. America is a major industrial power and major global power, involved in the daily lives and daily affairs of government, security … every dimension of life of everyone in the Middle East and, in fact, Europe, Russia, or elsewhere. It’s not an option for the United States to be disengaged. It would be a pretence for the country to pretend that it has no view on what’s happening politically or strategically in the Middle East when, in every other respect, it’s massively engaged in energy policies, in markets, in liberalization of the economies, etc.

What the United States needs to do is to accept responsibility for its involvement. It can’t change authoritarian governments, but it can, I think, be more careful in who it allies itself with. And it needs to be more respectful of divergent opinions, not just in Europe, but also in the Middle East.

I don’t like Hamas. On the other hand, if they come to power through honest, fair elections and they win according to electoral rules designed by incumbent regimes, then frankly I don’t think we have much ground to oppose their coming to power. Now the United States can say, “We don’t want to aid the government that is run by Hamas unless it recognizes Israel and renounces violence.” Fair enough. What it shouldn’t do though is actively undermine the Palestinian economy in the hope of driving Palestinians against Hamas to bring down the government. That becomes direct engagement in a partisan conflict. I think that is a very good example of where the United States needs to draw a line.

HOLLIS: On the subject of Hamas, I don’t think there is going to be any choice for either the United States or the Europeans but to engage with Islamic governments. If we look at the brewing confrontation between the United States and Iran, there is one recourse that has not yet been tried by the United States, and that is to actually talk directly to the Iranians. Without this, there is no possibility for the United States to retain influence or be a force for good in the region.

Brian, let’s first acknowledge that, yes, terrorism is a problem. It’s killing the Americans. It’s killing Arabs. It’s killing people in Kashmir and in Pakistan and so on. Is part of grappling with this challenge being willing to talk to Hamas, being willing to talk to Iran?

KATULIS: A lot of people think that talking is a sign of weakness, but it could be viewed as a sign of strength. It’s been an absolute disaster on the part of the Bush Administration to refuse talk to the Iranian regime, with the notion that it’s somehow less legitimate than the North Korean regime, which is not elected and doesn’t even go through the pretense of having some form of election.

Over the last five years, the Bush administration has appeased some of the worst elements of the Iranian regime and unwittingly has empowered them by not dealing with the Iranian regime directly, instead choosing a policy of regime change and farming out our diplomacy to Russia and to our European friends.

Advancing the notion of democracy defined by elections in this narrow and naive way that the Bush administration has won’t do much to defeat Islamic extremism. You’ve had extremist organizations seize the reigns of power through democratic means.

The question is: How do we deal with those realities and help the people of the Middle East advance political rights and civil liberties in a real way? The Bush administration has been unable to move beyond its own paradigms of how it wants to view the world. We need to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish and hope and dream it might be.

Yezid, do you think that part of it is also learning to make a more nuanced differentiation between the use of terror as a weapon and fundamentalism as a political ideology that might have its place?

SAYIGH: Who doesn’t have fundamentalism? Christian fundamentalists in the United States believe in Armageddon and wish to accelerate Armageddon in order to bring about God’s will. We’ve got people who are very dangerous in almost every society on earth. For a start, I think we have to be very careful about applying these terms too easily.

One problem is that the United States lumps all of the Middle East into one category. If you actually look at the region, it contains Israel, which is very different from most Arab states, which are very different from Iran, very different from Turkey. You’re dealing with very different countries.

And on top of that we speak of Islamic fundamentalism as if it’s one thing. In fact, most fundamentalists in the Middle East are people who are simply returning to the mosque, returning to belief in God, and more actively pursuing social and religious beliefs—just as born-again Christians do in the United States. Most of them are not involved in activist politics or in militant politics, let alone in violence.

A huge problem is the U.S. tendency to simplify matters into one overarching ideological framework. We had the Cold War, and there was the evil empire of the Soviet Union. National liberation movements from Indochina to Sub Saharan Africa, through the Middle East and Latin America were all seen as emanations of one single communist plot. Now we have something of the same sort: American academic, political analysts, media and lobbyists are gearing up to wage a new, overarching conflict with terrorism and political Islam.

The threat has been built up, inflated and exaggerated enormously, becoming the framework within which the United States determines whether or not to pursue democracy, whether or not to pursue human rights.

In reality, the overarching and overriding priority for U.S. policy toward places like Yemen, Egypt, Jordan, or Palestine is not human rights, is not democracy, is not good government or honest government. It’s security, specifically in combating terrorism. Who the terrorists are, what terrorism is, is not really well defined. We need local communities in Egypt, in Jordan, in Iraq and elsewhere to voluntarily take part in combating terrorist thinking and extremism. These are the real allies and this is where the United States really needs credibility and support. If all it does is resort to beefing up military and security agencies of governments of Egypt, Jordan or elsewhere, then I think it’s making a huge mistake.

What would be three initial steps that an American president could take that would begin, in a real pragmatic way, to tackle the challenge of terrorism?

SAYIGH: For a start, terrorism is a real threat, definitely, but it’s a threat to many actors, many governments, not just the United States. It requires, in the first instance, a policing and intelligence response because of the nature of the threat. It requires intelligence efforts, human intelligence above all else, as well as communication. It requires police work by local police forces, community support. That’s the front line.

Backing that are international alliances and coalitions across governments. But beyond that is the need to develop policies that acknowledge other people’s concerns and priorities even when the United States doesn’t necessarily agree with others. This sets the backdrop within which local communities and governments might be more willing to cooperate and to extend information where needed.

BEININ: I actually agree entirely with Yezid, except that I would reverse the order. I would just say that for any of that to have any chance to work, there has to be a radical revision of policy. So if the United States would announce a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, if it would announce that it’s going to pay reparations to Iraq for destroying their country, if it would announce an initiative to achieve an actual peace agreement between the Palestinians and Israel that would be perceived as having a modicum of justice in the Arab world, then all of these essentially tactical approaches to dealing with the threat of terrorism in a more effective way would have a much, much better chance of bearing fruit.

Rosemary, what do you think, especially since Europe has had a much longer experience with terrorism?

I’m slightly afraid that all this intelligence work—which I agree is where the focus has to be as opposed to on the use of military force—is leading to profiling and stereotyping and is re-igniting some social tensions in Europe. We’ve got to be careful about that. And also, we’ve got to be careful that the sharing of intelligence doesn’t give particular advantage to governments that we might otherwise consider dictatorial in the Middle East.

While acknowledging the intelligence role, we’ve got to consider ourselves as part of the problem, and therefore part of the solution. This is not about them and us, and the idea that if the Middle Eastern states would only become more like us, they wouldn’t breed terrorists. In Europe, they are homegrown, and that is because they don’t fit and they’re being made to feel that they don’t fit. So there’s got to be some introspection on the Western side.

Brian, isn’t this exactly what is then seen as being soft on terrorism?

KATULIS: I don’t think so, necessarily. There’s a growing lack of confidence in President Bush’s stewardship of national security and an argument to be made that he’s lost control of our country’s security and failed in his fundamental duty to protect Americans. Nearly five years after 9/11, the Bush administration remains stuck on a misguided strategy that doesn’t deal with the very real threats that are out there. There is a way to frame it from a progressive angle, which isn’t from a position of weakness, but one of strength.

We also need to update the way that we fight this battle of ideas. The Bush administration has relied on a Cold War approach to getting America’s voice into the debate. They’ve established irrelevant news outlets like Radio Sawa and Al-Hurra television, which haven’t done anything to get our voice in the policy debates out there. We need to recognize that there’s been a significant change in the global media, particularly in the Middle East, and we need to engage in that debate smartly.

The one thing that a lot of people in America miss is that audiences in the Middle East are incredibly sophisticated and have grown even more sophisticated with the advance of regional media like Al Jazeera and Al Harbia. The Bush administration’s approach is to criticize these new media outlets and try to put the Arab media genie back into the bottle. My approach would be to engage these outlets and say, “There are a lot of things that the U.S. can be proud of and stand for, and we can be a force for good.”

I think markets work, and free markets of information can help people obtain the information and ideas that they need to advance their own interests.

What about the way we talk about terrorism at home?

KATULIS: There’s a lot more space to say, “Look, there’s a way to advance freedom and democracy in a part of the world that hasn’t seen much of that, but do it in a way that’s constructive. Do it in a way that actually affirms the need for stability—where stability is not a code word for dictatorships and authoritarianism.

Maybe I’m too optimistic, but if you look at discontent at home with oil at $72 a barrel and gas prices so high, a lot of people are saying, “What have we gotten as a result of these policies?”

If we were to build a roadmap for the Middle East and try and do things right, as so many of you have suggested, what kind of pragmatic goals can we set for ourselves?

KATULIS: In the Gulf region, we need to fundamentally rethink whether or not we need such an extensive military presence. It’s insane to me that we don’t have, or have not supported, some form of regional security cooperation between the actors in the region. Europe has NATO, the Western hemisphere has the OAS, and Africa the African Union.

We need to set a clear timeline for our troops to depart from Iraq. But in what other ways do we mitigate the risk of the eventual draw-down of our troop presence there—in a way that actually affirms the need for stability and progress in the region? We need to start planting some seeds to help actors in the region do a little bit more for themselves to achieve that stability and progress.

HOLLIS: I would want policies that take the heat out of the extremist platform and demonstrate that there are other ways to achieve some of the social, economic and political good that there’s clearly an appetite for in the region. One way to do that would be much more civil society contact.

The second thing I would be interested in is whether we could change our understanding of the issues for the region by promoting regional discussions, inclusive of security. Yes, a regional security structure would be terrific, but also a regional structure to address the environmental and ecological problems.

Lastly, I would want the walls that divide the states in terms of citizenship to be more flexible. In the European Union you can hold a passport in one place, you can have a house in another, and you can have a job in a third. Were [Palestinians] able to live in one place, do business in another, and have a Palestinian passport that meant something, then you wouldn’t have to accommodate all the Palestinians and therefore the solution in the West Bank and Gaza.

BEININ: I’d like to see several things that I think are doable. First, a real commitment to economic development. That means getting off the dogmatic horse of the Washington consensus, neoliberal International Monetary Fund approach to development and taking a look at things that have worked better, that target local communities, that target women, and that actually empower people rather than large corporations.

Second, I think we can promote democracy without intervening in governments and trying to change regimes. There are lots of organizations in the Middle East—civil society organizations, NGOs, human rights organizations—who would gladly be our partners if they perceived us to be serious about promoting democracy.

Finally, we have to move as quickly as we can towards extricating ourselves from Iraq and towards contributing massively to rebuilding the country. And we have to have a radical revision of our policy towards Palestine and Israel and, in concert with other international actors, move towards a resolution of the conflict.

Yezid, you get the last word.

SAYIGH: In that case, we’ve heard all the possible wishes and I just wish we could all believe that any of them would come true. I’m just going to add a couple of predictions.

One has to do with Iraq and Iran. I really don’t see that the United States has any happy options in Iraq. The situation is almost beyond repair. Unless America somehow makes an implicit deal with Iran, it’s probable that in a three- to five-year period there’s not going to be any modicum of stability in Iraq that would allow the United States to pull out without leaving a total mess behind—a mess that would totally and fundamentally discredit and undermine any future prospect for effective U.S. intervention of any type in the region. That’s one concern.

The second is that when it comes to Israel and Palestine, the current U.S. policy is not going to change in time. I think we are heading toward a real mess in Palestine if Hamas is totally isolated and brought down. This will break the Palestinian government, break the political system, break the local economy, all which are extremely fragile. And we will be left with a humanitarian crisis on our hands, ironically, one that has been engineered by U.S. and Western policies. By the end of the Bush presidency, we will not have the Palestinian state we were promised several times. We will not have a peace deal.

This, I think, is what the United States will be left with.

Editor’s note: This is an expanded version of the roundtable discussion that appeared in the June 2006 print edition of In These Times.

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• Reader Comments

  http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/01/18/scandal/index.html

  http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/01/18/scandal/index.html

  http://www.npr.org/templates/topics/topic.php?topicId=1010

  WE will get out of iraq when we get a new president.

  Posted by brian28 on May 23, 2006 at 3:30 PM

  As for the illegal, immoral occupation of Palestine, if we keep yakking about it long enough, there will be nothing left to dispute, which is obviously the plan.

  Posted by opeluboy on May 23, 2006 at 5:22 PM

  An interesting discussion with several useful observations and suggestions. I also found it interesting that some of the things being criticized were evidenced in the words of the participants. Understanding and objectivity seem to be universal traits.

  Perhaps most important there is agreement among the group that the terrorist threat is real and more than a U.S. problem. Certainly multinational cooperation is needed if we are to avoid a global conflict.

  There seemed to be a consensus that democracy should be promoted, but a naive expectation that it is universally desired.

  Viewing the region as a whole rather than piecemeal would be a new approach — getting politicians to think “big” would be miraculous.

  The specific comments on the Iraq situation is quite candid, “I really don’t see that the United States has any happy options in Iraq. The situation is almost beyond repair.

  Unless we admit to a failed approach and can enlist more support from other countries, there will not be a way to put a lid on the internal strife and insurgent agitators. Until then how can any form of stable governing proceed? Bosnia/Kosovo could be a useful pattern.

  What to call all this. “War on Terror” is too all encompassing and vague. “Islamic fundamentalism” was rejected. The later use of “religious extremist” seems better.
  
  All fundamentalists, however, are not created equal. There is far less likelihood (post crusades) for Christians to call for killing solely based on religious differences.  In fact just the opposite is expressed Biblically — “love your enemy” — is a basic theme.  Here again I would avoid fundamentalist and opt for extremist as the defining adjective.

  “American academic, political analysts, media and lobbyists are gearing up to wage a new, overarching conflict with terrorism and political Islam.”

  Yes, the events of the past couple of decades have a tendency to arouse people — change “...conflict with terrorism and political Islam,” to vicious extremists and I’ll vote for that.

  The price/availability of oil is only mentioned as a passing comment — I believe this is a major factor in all of this conflict. There are people in both East and West for whom this is the driving issue. Greed is a universal language.

  Would the oil rich of the Mideast be any more agreeable to abandoning petroleum based energy than Texans? I doubt it.

  Posted by whattheheck on May 24, 2006 at 8:06 AM

  Correction: Should read…

  “Understanding and objectivity seem to be universally missing traits.”

  Posted by whattheheck on May 24, 2006 at 10:21 AM

  http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/19/AR20050919018 859.html

  http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=9006

  http://www.ibnlive.com/news/war-goes-pop-protest-music-rocks-us/11326-2.html

  http://www.suntimes.com/output/elect/cst-nws-sweet242.html

  Posted by brian28 on May 24, 2006 at 5:37 PM

• extended discussion >>>Continued...

  Discussions with more than 5 comments are continued on our special discussion page to encourage continuity and ease of use. There are currently 7 posts.

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