February 28, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor
Muslims Won’t Play Together
By EFRAIM KARSH
London
WE may scoff at the idea that the Olympic Games have anything to do with the “endeavor to place sport at the service of humanity and thereby to promote peace,” as the Olympic charter enshrines as its ideal. But at least nations across the world were able to put aside differences for two weeks of friendly competition in Vancouver.
A mundane achievement, perhaps, but it’s one that’s beyond the grasp of the Islamic world. The Islamic Solidarity Games, the Olympics of the Muslim world, which were to be held in Iran in April, have been called off by the Arab states because Tehran inscribed “Persian Gulf” on the tournament’s official logo and medals.
It’s a small but telling controversy. It puts the lie to the idea of the Islamic world as a bloc united by religious values that are hostile to the West. It also gives clues as to how the United States and its allies should handle two of their most urgent foreign policy matters: the Iranian nuclear program and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This is not the first time that Arabs have challenged the internationally accepted name of the waterway that separates Persia (or Iran, as it has been called since 1935) from the Arabian Peninsula. Pan-Arabist thought — which dominated Arab political life for most of the 20th century — insisted on the creation of a unified vast empire “from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arab Gulf,” provoking sharp confrontations with Iran since the late 1960s.
The Islamic regime in Tehran, which came to power in 1979 dismissing nationalism as an imperialist plot aimed at weakening the worldwide Muslim community (or umma), initially displayed less interest in the gulf’s Persian identity than in the spread of its Islamist message. “The Iranian revolution is not exclusively that of Iran, because Islam does not belong to any particular people,” insisted Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “The struggle will continue until the calls ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is the messenger of Allah’ are echoed all over the world.”
Yet like Stalin, who responded to the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 by urging his people to fight for the motherland rather than for the Communist ideals with which they had been indoctrinated, Khomeini reverted to nationalist rhetoric to rally his subjects after the Iraqi invasion of 1980. He also used the war to justify a string of military and diplomatic actions against the smaller Arab states like Qatar and Kuwait aimed at asserting Iran’s supremacy in the gulf.
In this history of a single body of water, one sees a perfect example of the so-called Islamic Paradox that dates from the seventh century. For although the Prophet Muhammad took great pains to underscore the equality of all believers regardless of ethnicity, categorically forbidding any fighting among the believers, his precepts have been constantly and blatantly violated.
It took a mere 24 years after the Prophet’s death for the head of the universal Islamic community, the caliph Uthman, to be murdered by political rivals. This opened the floodgates to incessant infighting within the House of Islam, which has never ceased. Likewise, there has been no overarching Islamic solidarity transcending the multitude of parochial loyalties — to one’s clan, tribe, village, family or nation. Thus, for example, not only do Arabs consider themselves superior to all other Muslims, but inhabitants of Hijaz, the northwestern part of the Arabian Peninsula and Islam’s birthplace, regard themselves the only true Arabs, and tend to be highly disparaging of all other Arabic-speaking communities.
Nor, for that matter, has the House of Islam ever formed a unified front vis-à-vis the House of War (as Muslims call the rest of the world). Even during the Crusades, the supposed height of the “clash of civilizations,” Christian and Muslim rulers freely collaborated across the religious divide, often finding themselves aligned with members of the rival religion against their co-religionists. While the legendary Saladin himself was busy eradicating the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, for example, he was closely aligned with the Byzantine Empire, the foremost representative of Christendom’s claim to universalism.
This pattern of pragmatic cooperation reached its peak during the 19th century, when the Ottoman Empire relied on Western economic and military support to survive. (The Charge of the Light Brigade of 1854 was, at its heart, part of a French-British effort to keep the Ottomans from falling under Russian hegemony.) It has also become a central feature of 20th- and 21st-century Middle Eastern politics.
Muslim and Arab rulers have always, in their intrigues, sought the support and protection of the “infidel” powers they so vilify. President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, the champion of pan-Arabism who had built his reputation on standing up to “Western imperialism,” imported more than 10,000 Soviet troops into Egypt when his “War of Attrition” against Israel in the late 1960s went sour.
Similarly, Ayatollah Khomeini bought weapons from even the “Great Satan,” the United States. Saddam Hussein used Western support to survive his war against Iran in the 1980s. And Osama bin Laden and the rest of the Afghan mujahedeen accepted weapons and money from the United States, with the Islamic state of Pakistan as the middleman, in their struggle against the Soviet occupation.
Yet, since it is far easier to unite people through a common hatred than through a shared loyalty, Islamic solidarity has been repeatedly invoked as an instrument for achieving the self-interested ends of those who proclaimed it. Little wonder the covenant of Hamas insists, “When our enemies usurp some Islamic lands, jihad becomes a duty binding on all Muslims.”
So, if the Muslim bloc is just as fractious as any other group of seemingly aligned nations, what does it mean for United States policy in the Islamic world?
For one, it should give us more impetus to take a harder line with Iran. Just as the Muslim governments couldn’t muster the minimum sense of commonality for holding an all-Islamic sports tournament, so they would be unlikely to rush to Iran’s aid in the event of sanctions, or even a military strike.
Beyond the customary lip service about Western imperialism and “Crusaderism,” most other Muslim countries would be quietly relieved to see the extremist regime checked. It’s worth noting that the two dominant Arab states, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, have been at the forefront of recent international efforts to contain Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
As for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, the idea that bringing peace between the two parties will bring about a flowering of cooperation in the region and take away one of Al Qaeda’s primary gripes against the West totally misreads history and present-day politics. Muslim states threaten Israel’s existence not so much out of concern for the Palestinians, but rather as part of a holy war to prevent the loss of a part of the House of Islam.
In these circumstances, one can only welcome the latest changes in the Obama administration’s Middle Eastern policy, which combine a tougher stance on Iran’s nuclear subterfuge with a less imperious approach to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s two-track plan — discussion with Tehran while at the same time lining up meaningful sanctions — is fine as far as it goes. But a military strike must remain a serious option: there is no peaceful way to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions, stemming as they do from its imperialist brand of national-Islamism.
Likewise, there is no way for the Obama administration to resolve the 100-year war between Arabs and Jews unless all sides are convinced that peace is in each of their best interests. Any agreement between Israel and the Palestinians is far less important than a regional agreement in which every Islamic nation can make peace with the idea of Jewish statehood in the House of Islam.
And that, depressingly, is going to be a lot harder to pull off than even the Islamic Solidarity Games.
Efraim Karsh, the head of Middle East and Mediterranean studies at King’s College London, is the author of "Islamic Imperialism: A History" and the forthcoming “Palestine Betrayed.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/opini ... nted=print
THE MIDDLE EAST
According to one Iranian Jamati member, the last visit was in 1960. There is a photo at: http://ismaili.net/foto/6000653l.htmlBiryani wrote:Does anybody know here with certainty when the last time was that His Highness the Aga Khan visited Iran, officially or un-officially? I would appreciate the information.
Hmm…Well, I read somewhere that Hazar Imam visited Iran…or possibly Iraq in 1990 and met important Ayatollahs (not necessarily from the ruling elites) and discussed geo-religious and political situation in the area…and these figures pledged their allegiance to Hazar Imam and received His blessings…
You know, Hazar Imam (AS) also had said recently in an interview that He has frequent communications/contacts with important figures in the region.
Anyways, I just wanted to confirm it with other sources…
You know, Hazar Imam (AS) also had said recently in an interview that He has frequent communications/contacts with important figures in the region.
Anyways, I just wanted to confirm it with other sources…
March 28, 2010
Op-Ed Columnist
Hobby or Necessity?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
If you think this latest Israeli-American flap was just the same-old-same-old tiff over settlements, then you’re clearly not paying attention — which is how I’d describe a lot of Israelis, Arabs and American Jews today.
This tiff actually reflects a tectonic shift that has taken place beneath the surface of Israel-U.S. relations. I’d summarize it like this: In the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for Israel — has gone from being a necessity to a hobby. And in the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for America — has gone from being a hobby to a necessity. Therein lies the problem.
The collapse of the Oslo peace process, combined with the unilateral Israeli pullouts from Lebanon and Gaza — which were followed not by peace but by rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas on Israel — decimated Israel’s peace camp and the political parties aligned with it.
At the same time, Israel’s erecting of a wall around the West Bank to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering Israel (there have been no successful attacks since 2006), along with the rise of the high-tech industry in Israel — which does a great deal of business digitally and over the Internet and is largely impervious to the day-to-day conflict — has meant that even without peace, Israel can enjoy a very peaceful existence and a rising standard of living.
To put it another way, the collapse of the peace process, combined with the rise of the wall, combined with the rise of the Web, has made peacemaking with Palestinians much less of a necessity for Israel and much more of a hobby. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot more Israelis seem to believe they really can have it all: a Jewish state, a democratic state and a state in all of the Land of Israel, including the West Bank — and peace.
Why not? Newsweek’s Dan Ephron wrote in the Jan. 11, 2010, issue: “An improved security situation, a feeling that acceptance by Arabs no longer matters much, and a growing disaffection from politics generally have, for many Israelis, called into question the basic calculus that has driven the peace process. Instead of pining for peace, they’re now asking: who needs it? ... Tourism hit a 10-year high in 2008. Astonishingly, the I.M.F. projected recently that Israel’s G.D.P. will grow faster in 2010 than that of most other developed countries. In short, Israelis are enjoying a peace dividend without a peace agreement.”
Now, in the same time period, America went from having only a small symbolic number of soldiers in the Middle East to running two wars there — in Iraq and Afghanistan — as well as a global struggle against violent Muslim extremists. With U.S. soldiers literally walking the Arab street — and, therefore, more in need than ever of Muslim good will to protect themselves and defeat Muslim extremists — Israeli-Palestinian peace has gone from being a post-cold-war hobby of U.S. diplomats to being a necessity.
Both Vice President Joe Biden and Gen. David Petraeus have been quoted recently as saying that the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict foments anti-U.S. sentiments, because of the perception that America usually sides with Israel, and these sentiments are exploited by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to generate anti-Americanism that complicates life for our soldiers in the region. I wouldn’t exaggerate this, but I would not dismiss it either.
The issue that should make peacemaking a necessity rather than a hobby for both the U.S. and Israel is confronting a nuclear Iran. Unfortunately, Israel sees the question of preventing Iran from going nuclear as overriding and separate from the Palestinian issue, while the U.S. sees them as integrated. At a time when the U.S. is trying to galvanize a global coalition to confront Iran, at a time when Iran uses the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict to embarrass pro-U.S. Arabs and extend its influence across the Muslim world, peace would be a strategic asset for America and Israel.
Ari Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, last week argued that Israel should adopt a more integrated view — which he calls a “Palestine-Iran-Palestine” strategy: Israel should take the initiative with an overture to the Palestinians, which would make progress on that front easier, which would strengthen the U.S. coalition against Iran, which could ultimately weaken Tehran and its allies, Hamas and Hezbollah, which would open the way for more progress on the Palestine-Israel front. He suggests that Israel reach an interim agreement with Palestinians on the West Bank or even consider a partial, unilateral withdrawal there.
“One way or another,” said Shavit, “Netanyahu should have made a genuine move on the Palestinian front that would have made genuine moves on the Iranian front possible, that would have made dealing with the core of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute possible at a later stage.”
Indeed, Jerusalem, settlements, peace, Iran — they’re all connected and pretending you can treat some as a hobby and one as a necessity is an illusion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opini ... ?th&emc=th
Op-Ed Columnist
Hobby or Necessity?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
If you think this latest Israeli-American flap was just the same-old-same-old tiff over settlements, then you’re clearly not paying attention — which is how I’d describe a lot of Israelis, Arabs and American Jews today.
This tiff actually reflects a tectonic shift that has taken place beneath the surface of Israel-U.S. relations. I’d summarize it like this: In the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for Israel — has gone from being a necessity to a hobby. And in the last decade, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process — for America — has gone from being a hobby to a necessity. Therein lies the problem.
The collapse of the Oslo peace process, combined with the unilateral Israeli pullouts from Lebanon and Gaza — which were followed not by peace but by rocket attacks by Hezbollah and Hamas on Israel — decimated Israel’s peace camp and the political parties aligned with it.
At the same time, Israel’s erecting of a wall around the West Bank to prevent Palestinian suicide bombers from entering Israel (there have been no successful attacks since 2006), along with the rise of the high-tech industry in Israel — which does a great deal of business digitally and over the Internet and is largely impervious to the day-to-day conflict — has meant that even without peace, Israel can enjoy a very peaceful existence and a rising standard of living.
To put it another way, the collapse of the peace process, combined with the rise of the wall, combined with the rise of the Web, has made peacemaking with Palestinians much less of a necessity for Israel and much more of a hobby. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot more Israelis seem to believe they really can have it all: a Jewish state, a democratic state and a state in all of the Land of Israel, including the West Bank — and peace.
Why not? Newsweek’s Dan Ephron wrote in the Jan. 11, 2010, issue: “An improved security situation, a feeling that acceptance by Arabs no longer matters much, and a growing disaffection from politics generally have, for many Israelis, called into question the basic calculus that has driven the peace process. Instead of pining for peace, they’re now asking: who needs it? ... Tourism hit a 10-year high in 2008. Astonishingly, the I.M.F. projected recently that Israel’s G.D.P. will grow faster in 2010 than that of most other developed countries. In short, Israelis are enjoying a peace dividend without a peace agreement.”
Now, in the same time period, America went from having only a small symbolic number of soldiers in the Middle East to running two wars there — in Iraq and Afghanistan — as well as a global struggle against violent Muslim extremists. With U.S. soldiers literally walking the Arab street — and, therefore, more in need than ever of Muslim good will to protect themselves and defeat Muslim extremists — Israeli-Palestinian peace has gone from being a post-cold-war hobby of U.S. diplomats to being a necessity.
Both Vice President Joe Biden and Gen. David Petraeus have been quoted recently as saying that the festering Israeli-Palestinian conflict foments anti-U.S. sentiments, because of the perception that America usually sides with Israel, and these sentiments are exploited by Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran to generate anti-Americanism that complicates life for our soldiers in the region. I wouldn’t exaggerate this, but I would not dismiss it either.
The issue that should make peacemaking a necessity rather than a hobby for both the U.S. and Israel is confronting a nuclear Iran. Unfortunately, Israel sees the question of preventing Iran from going nuclear as overriding and separate from the Palestinian issue, while the U.S. sees them as integrated. At a time when the U.S. is trying to galvanize a global coalition to confront Iran, at a time when Iran uses the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict to embarrass pro-U.S. Arabs and extend its influence across the Muslim world, peace would be a strategic asset for America and Israel.
Ari Shavit, a columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, last week argued that Israel should adopt a more integrated view — which he calls a “Palestine-Iran-Palestine” strategy: Israel should take the initiative with an overture to the Palestinians, which would make progress on that front easier, which would strengthen the U.S. coalition against Iran, which could ultimately weaken Tehran and its allies, Hamas and Hezbollah, which would open the way for more progress on the Palestine-Israel front. He suggests that Israel reach an interim agreement with Palestinians on the West Bank or even consider a partial, unilateral withdrawal there.
“One way or another,” said Shavit, “Netanyahu should have made a genuine move on the Palestinian front that would have made genuine moves on the Iranian front possible, that would have made dealing with the core of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute possible at a later stage.”
Indeed, Jerusalem, settlements, peace, Iran — they’re all connected and pretending you can treat some as a hobby and one as a necessity is an illusion.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/28/opini ... ?th&emc=th
May 14, 2010
A Web Smaller Than a Divide
By SINAN ANTOON
AT first glance, there’s a clear need for expanding the Web beyond the Latin alphabet, including in the Arabic-speaking world. According to the Madar Research Group, about 56 million Arabs, or 17 percent of the Arab world, use the Internet, and those numbers are expected to grow 50 percent over the next three years.
Many think that an Arabic-alphabet Web will bring millions online, helping to bridge the socio-economic divides that pervade the region.
But such hopes are overblown. Although there are still problems — encoding glitches and the lack of a standard Arabic keyboard — virtually any Arabic speaker who uses the Web has already adjusted to these challenges in his or her own way. And it’s no big deal: educated Arabs are exposed, in various degrees, to English and French in school.
The very idea of an “Arabic Web” is misleading. True, before the Icann announcement declared that Arabic characters could be used throughout domain names, U.R.L.’s had to be written at least in part in Latin script. But once one passes the Latin domain gate, the rest is all done in Arabic characters anyway.
Nowadays almost every computer can be made to write Arabic, or any other script, and there is plenty of Arabic software. Most late-model electronic devices are equipped with Arabic. I text with friends using Arabic on my iPhone. Many computer keyboards are now even made with Arabic letters printed on the keys.
And where there’s no readily available solution, Arabic Internet users have found a way to adjust. Many use the Latin script to transliterate messages in Arabic when there’s no conversion program or font set available. Phonetic spelling is common. For sounds that have no written equivalent in Latin script, they’ve gotten creative: for example, the number 3 is commonly used for the “ayn” sound and 7 stands in for the “ha,” because their shapes closely resemble the corresponding Arabic letters.
So what will happen? In the short term, of course, some additional users will move to the Web, especially as they take advantage of the new range of domain names. Over time, though, this will peter out, because, as in most of the world, the digital divide still tracks closely with the material and political divide. The haves are the ones using computers, and many of them are also the ones long accustomed to working with Latin script. The have-nots are unlikely to have the luxury of jumping online. Changing the alphabet used to form domain names won’t exactly attract millions of poor Arabs to the Internet.
We should all celebrate the diversity that comes with an Internet no longer tied to a single alphabet. But we should be realistic, too. The Web may be a revolutionary technology, but an Arabic Web is not about to spur an Internet revolution.
Sinan Antoon, an assistant professor of Arabic literature at New York University, is the author of the novel “I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opini ... ?th&emc=th
A Web Smaller Than a Divide
By SINAN ANTOON
AT first glance, there’s a clear need for expanding the Web beyond the Latin alphabet, including in the Arabic-speaking world. According to the Madar Research Group, about 56 million Arabs, or 17 percent of the Arab world, use the Internet, and those numbers are expected to grow 50 percent over the next three years.
Many think that an Arabic-alphabet Web will bring millions online, helping to bridge the socio-economic divides that pervade the region.
But such hopes are overblown. Although there are still problems — encoding glitches and the lack of a standard Arabic keyboard — virtually any Arabic speaker who uses the Web has already adjusted to these challenges in his or her own way. And it’s no big deal: educated Arabs are exposed, in various degrees, to English and French in school.
The very idea of an “Arabic Web” is misleading. True, before the Icann announcement declared that Arabic characters could be used throughout domain names, U.R.L.’s had to be written at least in part in Latin script. But once one passes the Latin domain gate, the rest is all done in Arabic characters anyway.
Nowadays almost every computer can be made to write Arabic, or any other script, and there is plenty of Arabic software. Most late-model electronic devices are equipped with Arabic. I text with friends using Arabic on my iPhone. Many computer keyboards are now even made with Arabic letters printed on the keys.
And where there’s no readily available solution, Arabic Internet users have found a way to adjust. Many use the Latin script to transliterate messages in Arabic when there’s no conversion program or font set available. Phonetic spelling is common. For sounds that have no written equivalent in Latin script, they’ve gotten creative: for example, the number 3 is commonly used for the “ayn” sound and 7 stands in for the “ha,” because their shapes closely resemble the corresponding Arabic letters.
So what will happen? In the short term, of course, some additional users will move to the Web, especially as they take advantage of the new range of domain names. Over time, though, this will peter out, because, as in most of the world, the digital divide still tracks closely with the material and political divide. The haves are the ones using computers, and many of them are also the ones long accustomed to working with Latin script. The have-nots are unlikely to have the luxury of jumping online. Changing the alphabet used to form domain names won’t exactly attract millions of poor Arabs to the Internet.
We should all celebrate the diversity that comes with an Internet no longer tied to a single alphabet. But we should be realistic, too. The Web may be a revolutionary technology, but an Arabic Web is not about to spur an Internet revolution.
Sinan Antoon, an assistant professor of Arabic literature at New York University, is the author of the novel “I`jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/16/opini ... ?th&emc=th
June 1, 2010
When Friends Fall Out
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
As a friend of both Turkey and Israel, it has been agonizing to watch the disastrous clash between Israeli naval commandos and a flotilla of “humanitarian” activists seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Personally, I think both Israel and Turkey have gotten out of balance lately, and it is America’s job to help both get back to the center — urgently.
I’ve long had a soft spot for Turkey. I once even argued that if the European Union wouldn’t admit Turkey, we should invite Turkey to join Nafta. Why? Because I think it really matters whether Turkey is a bridge or ditch between the Judeo-Christian West and the Arab and Muslim East. Turkey’s role in balancing and interpreting East and West is one of the critical pivot points that helps keep the world stable.
I also happened to be in Istanbul when the street outside one of the synagogues that was suicide-bombed there on Nov. 15, 2003, was reopened. Two things struck me: First, the chief rabbi of Turkey appeared at the ceremony, hand in hand with the top Muslim cleric of Istanbul and the local mayor, while crowds threw red carnations on them. Second, Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who comes from an Islamist party, paid a visit to the chief rabbi — the first time a Turkish prime minister had ever called on the chief rabbi in his office. Since then, I have seen Turkey play an important role mediating between Israel and Syria and voting just a month ago in favor of Israel joining the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
Therefore, it has been painful to hear the same Prime Minister Erdogan in recent years publicly lash out with ever-greater vehemence at Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza. Many see this as Turkey looking to ingratiate itself with the Muslim world after having been rebuffed by the European Union. I have no problem with Turkey or humanitarian groups loudly criticizing Israel. But I have a big problem when people get so agitated by Israel’s actions in Gaza but are unmoved by Syria’s involvement in the murder of the prime minister of Lebanon, by the Iranian regime’s killing of its own citizens demonstrating for the right to have their votes counted, by Muslim suicide bombers murdering nearly 100 Ahmadi Muslims in mosques in Pakistan on Friday and by pro-Hamas gunmen destroying a U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza because it wouldn’t force Islamic fundamentalism down the throats of children.
That concern for Gaza and Israel’s blockade is so out of balance with these other horrific cases in the region that it is not surprising Israelis dismiss it as motivated by hatred — not the advice of friends. Turkey has a unique role to play linking the East and West. If Turkey lurches too far East, it may become more popular on some Arab streets, but it would lose a lot of its strategic relevance and, more importantly, its historic role as a country that can be Muslim, modern, democratic — and with good relations with both Israel and the Arabs. Once this crisis passes, it needs to get back in balance.
Ditto Israel. There is no question that this flotilla was a setup. Israel’s intelligence failed to fully appreciate who was on board, and Israel’s leaders certainly failed to think more creatively about how to avoid the very violent confrontation that the blockade-busters wanted. At the same time, though, the Israeli partial blockade of Hamas and Gaza has been going on for some four years now. It is surely not all Israel’s fault, given the refusal of Hamas to recognize Israel or prior peace agreements, and its own repeated missile attacks on Israel.
But I sure know this: It is overwhelmingly in Israel’s interest to bring more diplomatic imagination and energy to ending this Gaza siege. How long is this going to go on? Are we going to have a whole new generation grow up in Gaza with Israel counting how many calories they each get? That surely can’t be in Israel’s interest. Israel has gotten so good at controlling the Palestinians that it could get comfortable with an arrangement that will not only erode its own moral fabric but increase its international isolation. It may be that Hamas will give Israel no other choice, but Israel could show a lot more initiative in determining if that is really so.
One of my oldest Israeli friends, Victor Friedman (no relation), an education professor from Zichron Yaacov, e-mailed me the following on Tuesday: “It’s time we started using our wits. If we used even a tiny fraction of the brain-power and resources we put into ‘defense’ into finding a way forward in terms of living with the Palestinians, we would have solved the problem long ago. The strategic situation has never been more opportune — the Arabs are scared of the Iranians, the Saudi peace plan is still on the table, and the Palestinians are beginning to act rationally. But we lack the leadership to help us make a real change.”
This is a critical moment. Two of America’s best friends are out of balance and infuriatingly at each other’s throats. We have got to move quickly to get them both back to the center before this spins out of control.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opini ... ?th&emc=th
*****
June 1, 2010
Israeli Force, Adrift on the Sea
By AMOS OZ
ARAD, Israel
FOR 2,000 years, the Jews knew the force of force only in the form of lashes to our own backs. For several decades now, we have been able to wield force ourselves — and this power has, again and again, intoxicated us.
In the period before Israel was founded, a large portion of the Jewish population in Palestine, especially members of the extremely nationalist Irgun group, thought that military force could be used to achieve any goal, to drive the British out of the country, and to repel the Arabs who opposed the creation of our state.
Luckily, during Israel’s early years, prime ministers like David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol knew very well that force has its limits and were careful to use it only as a last resort. But ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has been fixated on military force. To a man with a big hammer, says the proverb, every problem looks like a nail.
Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and Monday’s violent interception of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid there are the rank products of this mantra that what can’t be done by force can be done with even greater force. This view originates in the mistaken assumption that Hamas’s control of Gaza can be ended by force of arms or, in more general terms, that the Palestinian problem can be crushed instead of solved.
But Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea, a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force — not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one.
Thus, the only way for Israel to edge out Hamas would be to quickly reach an agreement with the Palestinians on the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as defined by the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Israel has to sign a peace agreement with President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah government in the West Bank — and by doing so, reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip. That latter conflict, in turn, can be resolved only by negotiating with Hamas or, more reasonably, by the integration of Fatah with Hamas.
Even if Israel seizes 100 more ships on their way to Gaza, even if Israel sends in troops to occupy the Gaza Strip 100 more times, no matter how often Israel deploys its military, police and covert power, force cannot solve the problem that we are not alone in this land, and the Palestinians are not alone in this land. We are not alone in Jerusalem and the Palestinians are not alone in Jerusalem. Until Israelis and Palestinians recognize the logical consequences of this simple fact, we will all live in a permanent state of siege — Gaza under an Israeli siege, Israel under an international and Arab siege.
I do not discount the importance of force. Woe to the country that discounts the efficacy of force. Without it Israel would not be able to survive a single day. But we cannot allow ourselves to forget for even a moment that force is effective only as a preventative — to prevent the destruction and conquest of Israel, to protect our lives and freedom. Every attempt to use force not as a preventive measure, not in self-defense, but instead as a means of smashing problems and squashing ideas, will lead to more disasters, just like the one we brought on ourselves in international waters, opposite Gaza’s shores.
Amos Oz is the author, most recently, of the novel “Rhyming Life and Death.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opini ... ?th&emc=th
When Friends Fall Out
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
As a friend of both Turkey and Israel, it has been agonizing to watch the disastrous clash between Israeli naval commandos and a flotilla of “humanitarian” activists seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Personally, I think both Israel and Turkey have gotten out of balance lately, and it is America’s job to help both get back to the center — urgently.
I’ve long had a soft spot for Turkey. I once even argued that if the European Union wouldn’t admit Turkey, we should invite Turkey to join Nafta. Why? Because I think it really matters whether Turkey is a bridge or ditch between the Judeo-Christian West and the Arab and Muslim East. Turkey’s role in balancing and interpreting East and West is one of the critical pivot points that helps keep the world stable.
I also happened to be in Istanbul when the street outside one of the synagogues that was suicide-bombed there on Nov. 15, 2003, was reopened. Two things struck me: First, the chief rabbi of Turkey appeared at the ceremony, hand in hand with the top Muslim cleric of Istanbul and the local mayor, while crowds threw red carnations on them. Second, Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who comes from an Islamist party, paid a visit to the chief rabbi — the first time a Turkish prime minister had ever called on the chief rabbi in his office. Since then, I have seen Turkey play an important role mediating between Israel and Syria and voting just a month ago in favor of Israel joining the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
Therefore, it has been painful to hear the same Prime Minister Erdogan in recent years publicly lash out with ever-greater vehemence at Israel over its treatment of the Palestinians in Gaza. Many see this as Turkey looking to ingratiate itself with the Muslim world after having been rebuffed by the European Union. I have no problem with Turkey or humanitarian groups loudly criticizing Israel. But I have a big problem when people get so agitated by Israel’s actions in Gaza but are unmoved by Syria’s involvement in the murder of the prime minister of Lebanon, by the Iranian regime’s killing of its own citizens demonstrating for the right to have their votes counted, by Muslim suicide bombers murdering nearly 100 Ahmadi Muslims in mosques in Pakistan on Friday and by pro-Hamas gunmen destroying a U.N.-sponsored summer camp in Gaza because it wouldn’t force Islamic fundamentalism down the throats of children.
That concern for Gaza and Israel’s blockade is so out of balance with these other horrific cases in the region that it is not surprising Israelis dismiss it as motivated by hatred — not the advice of friends. Turkey has a unique role to play linking the East and West. If Turkey lurches too far East, it may become more popular on some Arab streets, but it would lose a lot of its strategic relevance and, more importantly, its historic role as a country that can be Muslim, modern, democratic — and with good relations with both Israel and the Arabs. Once this crisis passes, it needs to get back in balance.
Ditto Israel. There is no question that this flotilla was a setup. Israel’s intelligence failed to fully appreciate who was on board, and Israel’s leaders certainly failed to think more creatively about how to avoid the very violent confrontation that the blockade-busters wanted. At the same time, though, the Israeli partial blockade of Hamas and Gaza has been going on for some four years now. It is surely not all Israel’s fault, given the refusal of Hamas to recognize Israel or prior peace agreements, and its own repeated missile attacks on Israel.
But I sure know this: It is overwhelmingly in Israel’s interest to bring more diplomatic imagination and energy to ending this Gaza siege. How long is this going to go on? Are we going to have a whole new generation grow up in Gaza with Israel counting how many calories they each get? That surely can’t be in Israel’s interest. Israel has gotten so good at controlling the Palestinians that it could get comfortable with an arrangement that will not only erode its own moral fabric but increase its international isolation. It may be that Hamas will give Israel no other choice, but Israel could show a lot more initiative in determining if that is really so.
One of my oldest Israeli friends, Victor Friedman (no relation), an education professor from Zichron Yaacov, e-mailed me the following on Tuesday: “It’s time we started using our wits. If we used even a tiny fraction of the brain-power and resources we put into ‘defense’ into finding a way forward in terms of living with the Palestinians, we would have solved the problem long ago. The strategic situation has never been more opportune — the Arabs are scared of the Iranians, the Saudi peace plan is still on the table, and the Palestinians are beginning to act rationally. But we lack the leadership to help us make a real change.”
This is a critical moment. Two of America’s best friends are out of balance and infuriatingly at each other’s throats. We have got to move quickly to get them both back to the center before this spins out of control.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opini ... ?th&emc=th
*****
June 1, 2010
Israeli Force, Adrift on the Sea
By AMOS OZ
ARAD, Israel
FOR 2,000 years, the Jews knew the force of force only in the form of lashes to our own backs. For several decades now, we have been able to wield force ourselves — and this power has, again and again, intoxicated us.
In the period before Israel was founded, a large portion of the Jewish population in Palestine, especially members of the extremely nationalist Irgun group, thought that military force could be used to achieve any goal, to drive the British out of the country, and to repel the Arabs who opposed the creation of our state.
Luckily, during Israel’s early years, prime ministers like David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol knew very well that force has its limits and were careful to use it only as a last resort. But ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has been fixated on military force. To a man with a big hammer, says the proverb, every problem looks like a nail.
Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and Monday’s violent interception of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid there are the rank products of this mantra that what can’t be done by force can be done with even greater force. This view originates in the mistaken assumption that Hamas’s control of Gaza can be ended by force of arms or, in more general terms, that the Palestinian problem can be crushed instead of solved.
But Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea, a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force — not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one.
Thus, the only way for Israel to edge out Hamas would be to quickly reach an agreement with the Palestinians on the establishment of an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as defined by the 1967 borders, with its capital in East Jerusalem. Israel has to sign a peace agreement with President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah government in the West Bank — and by doing so, reduce the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to a conflict between Israel and the Gaza Strip. That latter conflict, in turn, can be resolved only by negotiating with Hamas or, more reasonably, by the integration of Fatah with Hamas.
Even if Israel seizes 100 more ships on their way to Gaza, even if Israel sends in troops to occupy the Gaza Strip 100 more times, no matter how often Israel deploys its military, police and covert power, force cannot solve the problem that we are not alone in this land, and the Palestinians are not alone in this land. We are not alone in Jerusalem and the Palestinians are not alone in Jerusalem. Until Israelis and Palestinians recognize the logical consequences of this simple fact, we will all live in a permanent state of siege — Gaza under an Israeli siege, Israel under an international and Arab siege.
I do not discount the importance of force. Woe to the country that discounts the efficacy of force. Without it Israel would not be able to survive a single day. But we cannot allow ourselves to forget for even a moment that force is effective only as a preventative — to prevent the destruction and conquest of Israel, to protect our lives and freedom. Every attempt to use force not as a preventive measure, not in self-defense, but instead as a means of smashing problems and squashing ideas, will lead to more disasters, just like the one we brought on ourselves in international waters, opposite Gaza’s shores.
Amos Oz is the author, most recently, of the novel “Rhyming Life and Death.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/02/opini ... ?th&emc=th
June 18, 2010
Turkey’s Gain Is Iran’s Loss
By ELLIOT HEN-TOV and BERNARD HAYKEL
Princeton, N.J.
SINCE Israel’s deadly raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara last month, it’s been assumed that Iran would be the major beneficiary of the wave of global anti-Israeli sentiment. But things seem to be playing out much differently: Iran paradoxically stands to lose much influence as Turkey assumes a surprising new role as the modern, democratic and internationally respected nation willing to take on Israel and oppose America.
While many Americans may feel betrayed by the behavior of their longtime allies in Ankara, Washington actually stands to gain indirectly if a newly muscular Turkey can adopt a leadership role in the Sunni Arab world, which has been eagerly looking for a better advocate of its causes than Shiite, authoritarian Iran or the inept and flaccid Arab regimes of the Persian Gulf.
Turkey’s Islamist government has distilled every last bit of political benefit from the flotilla crisis, domestically and internationally. And if the Gaza blockade is abandoned or loosened, it will be easily portrayed as a victory for Turkish engagement on behalf of the Palestinians. Thus the fiery rhetoric of Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, appeals not only to his domestic constituency, but also to the broader Islamic world. It is also an attempt to redress what many in the Arab and Muslim worlds see as a historic imbalance in Turkey’s foreign policy in favor of Israel. Without having to match his words with action, Mr. Erdogan has amassed credentials to be the leading supporter of the Palestinian cause.
While most in the West seem to have overlooked this dynamic, Tehran has not. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used a regional summit meeting in Istanbul this month to deliver an inflammatory anti-Israel speech, yet it went virtually unnoticed among the chorus of international condemnations of Israel’s act. On June 12 Iran dispatched its own aid flotilla bound for Gaza, and offered to provide an escort by its Revolutionary Guards for other ships breaking the blockade.
Yet Hamas publicly rejected Iran’s escort proposal, and a new poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 43 percent of Palestinians ranked Turkey as their No. 1 foreign supporter, as opposed to just 6 percent for Iran.
Turkey has a strong hand here. Many leading Arab intellectuals have fretted over being caught between Iran’s revolutionary Shiism and Saudi Arabia’s austere and politically ineffectual Wahhabism. They now hope that a more liberal and enlightened Turkish Sunni Islam — reminiscent of past Ottoman glory — can lead the Arab world out of its mire.
You can get a sense of just how attractive Turkey’s leadership is among the Arab masses by reading the flood of recent negative articles about Ankara in the government-owned newspapers of the Arab states. This coverage impugns Mr. Erdogan’s motives, claiming he is latching on to the Palestinian issue because he is weak domestically, and dismisses Turkey’s ability to bring leadership to this quintessential “Arab cause.” They reek of panic over a new rival.
Turkey also gained from its failed effort, alongside Brazil, to hammer out a new deal on Iran’s nuclear program. The Muslim world appreciated Turkey’s standing up to the United States, and in the end Iran ended up with nothing but more United Nations sanctions.
In taking hold of the Palestinian card, Prime Minister Erdogan has potentially positioned Turkey as the central interlocutor between the Islamic/Arab world and Israel and the West, and been rewarded with tumultuous demonstrations lauding him in Ankara and Istanbul. Meanwhile, the streets of Tehran have been notably silent, with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s regime worried about public unrest during the one-year anniversary of last summer’s fraudulent elections.
Prime Minister Erdogan has many qualities that will help him gain the confidence of the Arab masses. He is not only a devout Sunni, but also the democratically elected leader of a dynamic and modern Muslim country with membership in the G-20 and NATO. His nation is already a major tourist and investment destination for Arabs, and the Middle East has long been flooded with Turkish products, from agriculture to TV programming.
With Turkey capturing the hearts, minds and wallets of Arabs, Iran will increasingly find it harder to carry out its agenda of destabilizing the region and the globe. For Americans, it may be hard to see the blessings in a rift with a longtime ally. But even if Turkey’s interests no longer fully align with ours, there is much to be gained from a Westernized, prosperous and democratic nation becoming the standard-bearer of the Islamic world.
Elliot Hen-Tov is a doctoral candidate and Bernard Haykel a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/opini ... ?th&emc=th
Turkey’s Gain Is Iran’s Loss
By ELLIOT HEN-TOV and BERNARD HAYKEL
Princeton, N.J.
SINCE Israel’s deadly raid on the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara last month, it’s been assumed that Iran would be the major beneficiary of the wave of global anti-Israeli sentiment. But things seem to be playing out much differently: Iran paradoxically stands to lose much influence as Turkey assumes a surprising new role as the modern, democratic and internationally respected nation willing to take on Israel and oppose America.
While many Americans may feel betrayed by the behavior of their longtime allies in Ankara, Washington actually stands to gain indirectly if a newly muscular Turkey can adopt a leadership role in the Sunni Arab world, which has been eagerly looking for a better advocate of its causes than Shiite, authoritarian Iran or the inept and flaccid Arab regimes of the Persian Gulf.
Turkey’s Islamist government has distilled every last bit of political benefit from the flotilla crisis, domestically and internationally. And if the Gaza blockade is abandoned or loosened, it will be easily portrayed as a victory for Turkish engagement on behalf of the Palestinians. Thus the fiery rhetoric of Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, appeals not only to his domestic constituency, but also to the broader Islamic world. It is also an attempt to redress what many in the Arab and Muslim worlds see as a historic imbalance in Turkey’s foreign policy in favor of Israel. Without having to match his words with action, Mr. Erdogan has amassed credentials to be the leading supporter of the Palestinian cause.
While most in the West seem to have overlooked this dynamic, Tehran has not. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad used a regional summit meeting in Istanbul this month to deliver an inflammatory anti-Israel speech, yet it went virtually unnoticed among the chorus of international condemnations of Israel’s act. On June 12 Iran dispatched its own aid flotilla bound for Gaza, and offered to provide an escort by its Revolutionary Guards for other ships breaking the blockade.
Yet Hamas publicly rejected Iran’s escort proposal, and a new poll by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research found that 43 percent of Palestinians ranked Turkey as their No. 1 foreign supporter, as opposed to just 6 percent for Iran.
Turkey has a strong hand here. Many leading Arab intellectuals have fretted over being caught between Iran’s revolutionary Shiism and Saudi Arabia’s austere and politically ineffectual Wahhabism. They now hope that a more liberal and enlightened Turkish Sunni Islam — reminiscent of past Ottoman glory — can lead the Arab world out of its mire.
You can get a sense of just how attractive Turkey’s leadership is among the Arab masses by reading the flood of recent negative articles about Ankara in the government-owned newspapers of the Arab states. This coverage impugns Mr. Erdogan’s motives, claiming he is latching on to the Palestinian issue because he is weak domestically, and dismisses Turkey’s ability to bring leadership to this quintessential “Arab cause.” They reek of panic over a new rival.
Turkey also gained from its failed effort, alongside Brazil, to hammer out a new deal on Iran’s nuclear program. The Muslim world appreciated Turkey’s standing up to the United States, and in the end Iran ended up with nothing but more United Nations sanctions.
In taking hold of the Palestinian card, Prime Minister Erdogan has potentially positioned Turkey as the central interlocutor between the Islamic/Arab world and Israel and the West, and been rewarded with tumultuous demonstrations lauding him in Ankara and Istanbul. Meanwhile, the streets of Tehran have been notably silent, with Mr. Ahmadinejad’s regime worried about public unrest during the one-year anniversary of last summer’s fraudulent elections.
Prime Minister Erdogan has many qualities that will help him gain the confidence of the Arab masses. He is not only a devout Sunni, but also the democratically elected leader of a dynamic and modern Muslim country with membership in the G-20 and NATO. His nation is already a major tourist and investment destination for Arabs, and the Middle East has long been flooded with Turkish products, from agriculture to TV programming.
With Turkey capturing the hearts, minds and wallets of Arabs, Iran will increasingly find it harder to carry out its agenda of destabilizing the region and the globe. For Americans, it may be hard to see the blessings in a rift with a longtime ally. But even if Turkey’s interests no longer fully align with ours, there is much to be gained from a Westernized, prosperous and democratic nation becoming the standard-bearer of the Islamic world.
Elliot Hen-Tov is a doctoral candidate and Bernard Haykel a professor of Near Eastern studies at Princeton.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/opini ... ?th&emc=th
July 5, 2010
Turning East, Turkey Asserts Economic Power
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
ISTANBUL — For decades, Turkey has been told it was not ready to join the European Union — that it was too backward economically to qualify for membership in the now 27-nation club.
That argument may no longer hold.
Today, Turkey is a fast-rising economic power, with a core of internationally competitive companies turning the youthful nation into an entrepreneurial hub, tapping cash-rich export markets in Russia and the Middle East while attracting billions of investment dollars in return.
For many in aging and debt-weary Europe, which will be lucky to eke out a little more than 1 percent growth this year, Turkey’s economic renaissance — last week it reported a stunning 11.4 percent expansion for the first quarter, second only to China — poses a completely new question: who needs the other one more — Europe or Turkey?
“The old powers are losing power, both economically and intellectually,” said Vural Ak, 42, the founder and chief executive of Intercity, the largest car leasing company in Turkey. “And Turkey is now strong enough to stand by itself.”
It is an astonishing transformation for an economy that just 10 years ago had a budget deficit of 16 percent of gross domestic product and inflation of 72 percent. It is one that lies at the root of the rise to power of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has combined social conservatism with fiscally cautious economic policies to make his Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., the most dominant political movement in Turkey since the early days of the republic.
So complete has this evolution been that Turkey is now closer to fulfilling the criteria for adopting the euro — if it ever does get into the European Union — than most of the troubled economies already in the euro zone. It is well under the 60 percent ceiling on government debt (49 percent of G.D.P.) and could well get its annual budget deficit below the 3 percent benchmark next year. That leaves the reduction of inflation, now running at 8 percent, as the only remaining major policy goal.
“This is a dream world,” said Husnu M. Ozyegin, who became the richest man in Turkey when he sold his bank, Finansbank, to the National Bank of Greece in 2006. Sitting on the rooftop of his five-star Swiss Hotel, he was looking at his BlackBerry, scrolling down the most recent credit-default spreads for euro zone countries. He still could not quite believe what he was seeing.
“Greece, 980. Italy, 194 and here is Turkey at 192,” he said with a grunt of satisfaction. “If you had told me 10 years ago that Turkey’s financial risk would equal that of Italy I would have said you were crazy.”
Having sold at the top to Greece, Mr. Ozyegin is now putting his money to work in the east. His new bank, Eurocredit, gets 35 percent of its profit from its Russian operations.
Mr. Ozyegin represents the old guard of Turkey’s business elite that has embraced the Erdogan government for its economic successes. Less well known but just as important to Turkey’s future development has been the rapid rise of socially conservative business leaders who, under the A.K.P., have seen their businesses thrive by tapping Turkey’s flourishing consumer and export markets.
Mr. Ak, the car leasing executive, exemplifies this new business elite of entrepreneurs. He drives a Ferrari to work, but he is also a practicing Muslim who does not drink and has no qualms in talking about his faith. He is not bound to the 20th-century secular consensus among the business, military and judicial elite that fought long and hard to keep Islam removed from public life.
On the wall behind his desk is a framed passage in Arabic from the Koran, and he recently financed an Islamic studies program just outside Washington at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., where Mr. Erdogan recently spoke.
Whether he is embracing Islam as a set of principles to govern his life or Israeli irrigation technology for his sideline almond and walnut growing business, Mr. Ak represents the flexible dynamism — both social and economic — that has allowed Turkey to expand the commercial ties with Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria that now underpin its ambition to become the dominant political actor in the region.
Other prominent members of this newer group of business executives are Mustafa Latif Topbas, the chairman and a founder of the discount-shopping chain BIM, the country’s fastest-growing retail chain, and Murat Ulker, who runs the chocolate and cookie manufacturer Yildiz Holding.
With around $11 billion in sales, Yildiz Holding supplies its branded food products not just to the Turkish market but to 110 markets globally. It has set up factories in Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine and now owns the Godiva brand.
The two billionaires have deep ties to the prime minister — Mr. Erdogan once owned a company that distributed Ulker-branded products, and Mr. Topbas is a close adviser — but the trade opportunities in this part of the world are plentiful enough that a boost from the government is now no longer needed.
In June, Turkish exports grew by 13 percent compared with the previous year, with much of the demand coming from countries on Turkey’s border or close to it, like Iraq, Iran and Russia. With their immature manufacturing bases, they are eager buyers of Turkish cookies, automobiles and flat-screen televisions.
This year, for example, the country’s flagship carrier, Turkish Airlines, will fly to as many cities in Iraq (three) as it does to France. Some of its fastest growing routes are to Libya, Syria and Russia, Turkey’s largest trading partner, where it flies to seven cities. That is second only to Germany, which has a large population of immigrant Turks.
In Iran, Turkish companies are building fertilizer plants, making diapers and female sanitary products. In Iraq, the Acarsan Group, based in the southeastern town of Gaziantep, just won a bid to build five hospitals. And Turkish construction companies have a collective order book of over $30 billion, second only to China.
On the flip side, the Azerbaijani government owns Turkey’s major petrochemicals company and Saudi Arabia has been a big investor in the country’s growing Islamic finance sector.
No one here disputes that these trends give Mr. Erdogan the legitimacy — both at home and abroad — to lash out at Israel and to cut deals with Iran over its nuclear energy, moves that have strained ties with its chief ally and longtime supporter, the United States. (Turkey has exported $1.6 billion worth of goods to Iran and Syria this year, $200 million more than to the United States.)
But some worry that the muscle flexing may have gone too far — perhaps the result of tightening election polls at home — and that the aggressive tone with Israel may jeopardize the defining tenet of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: peace at home, peace in the world.
“The foreign policy of Turkey is good if it brings self-pride,” said Ferda Yildiz, the chairman of Basari Holding, a conglomerate that itself is in negotiations with the Syrian government to set up a factory in Syria that would make electricity meters.
Even so, he warns that it would be a mistake to become too caught up in an eastward expansion if it comes at the expense of the country’s longstanding inclination to look to the West for innovation and inspiration.
“It takes centuries to make relations and minutes to destroy them,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/busin ... ?th&emc=th
Turning East, Turkey Asserts Economic Power
By LANDON THOMAS Jr.
ISTANBUL — For decades, Turkey has been told it was not ready to join the European Union — that it was too backward economically to qualify for membership in the now 27-nation club.
That argument may no longer hold.
Today, Turkey is a fast-rising economic power, with a core of internationally competitive companies turning the youthful nation into an entrepreneurial hub, tapping cash-rich export markets in Russia and the Middle East while attracting billions of investment dollars in return.
For many in aging and debt-weary Europe, which will be lucky to eke out a little more than 1 percent growth this year, Turkey’s economic renaissance — last week it reported a stunning 11.4 percent expansion for the first quarter, second only to China — poses a completely new question: who needs the other one more — Europe or Turkey?
“The old powers are losing power, both economically and intellectually,” said Vural Ak, 42, the founder and chief executive of Intercity, the largest car leasing company in Turkey. “And Turkey is now strong enough to stand by itself.”
It is an astonishing transformation for an economy that just 10 years ago had a budget deficit of 16 percent of gross domestic product and inflation of 72 percent. It is one that lies at the root of the rise to power of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has combined social conservatism with fiscally cautious economic policies to make his Justice and Development Party, or A.K.P., the most dominant political movement in Turkey since the early days of the republic.
So complete has this evolution been that Turkey is now closer to fulfilling the criteria for adopting the euro — if it ever does get into the European Union — than most of the troubled economies already in the euro zone. It is well under the 60 percent ceiling on government debt (49 percent of G.D.P.) and could well get its annual budget deficit below the 3 percent benchmark next year. That leaves the reduction of inflation, now running at 8 percent, as the only remaining major policy goal.
“This is a dream world,” said Husnu M. Ozyegin, who became the richest man in Turkey when he sold his bank, Finansbank, to the National Bank of Greece in 2006. Sitting on the rooftop of his five-star Swiss Hotel, he was looking at his BlackBerry, scrolling down the most recent credit-default spreads for euro zone countries. He still could not quite believe what he was seeing.
“Greece, 980. Italy, 194 and here is Turkey at 192,” he said with a grunt of satisfaction. “If you had told me 10 years ago that Turkey’s financial risk would equal that of Italy I would have said you were crazy.”
Having sold at the top to Greece, Mr. Ozyegin is now putting his money to work in the east. His new bank, Eurocredit, gets 35 percent of its profit from its Russian operations.
Mr. Ozyegin represents the old guard of Turkey’s business elite that has embraced the Erdogan government for its economic successes. Less well known but just as important to Turkey’s future development has been the rapid rise of socially conservative business leaders who, under the A.K.P., have seen their businesses thrive by tapping Turkey’s flourishing consumer and export markets.
Mr. Ak, the car leasing executive, exemplifies this new business elite of entrepreneurs. He drives a Ferrari to work, but he is also a practicing Muslim who does not drink and has no qualms in talking about his faith. He is not bound to the 20th-century secular consensus among the business, military and judicial elite that fought long and hard to keep Islam removed from public life.
On the wall behind his desk is a framed passage in Arabic from the Koran, and he recently financed an Islamic studies program just outside Washington at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., where Mr. Erdogan recently spoke.
Whether he is embracing Islam as a set of principles to govern his life or Israeli irrigation technology for his sideline almond and walnut growing business, Mr. Ak represents the flexible dynamism — both social and economic — that has allowed Turkey to expand the commercial ties with Israel, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Syria that now underpin its ambition to become the dominant political actor in the region.
Other prominent members of this newer group of business executives are Mustafa Latif Topbas, the chairman and a founder of the discount-shopping chain BIM, the country’s fastest-growing retail chain, and Murat Ulker, who runs the chocolate and cookie manufacturer Yildiz Holding.
With around $11 billion in sales, Yildiz Holding supplies its branded food products not just to the Turkish market but to 110 markets globally. It has set up factories in Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Ukraine and now owns the Godiva brand.
The two billionaires have deep ties to the prime minister — Mr. Erdogan once owned a company that distributed Ulker-branded products, and Mr. Topbas is a close adviser — but the trade opportunities in this part of the world are plentiful enough that a boost from the government is now no longer needed.
In June, Turkish exports grew by 13 percent compared with the previous year, with much of the demand coming from countries on Turkey’s border or close to it, like Iraq, Iran and Russia. With their immature manufacturing bases, they are eager buyers of Turkish cookies, automobiles and flat-screen televisions.
This year, for example, the country’s flagship carrier, Turkish Airlines, will fly to as many cities in Iraq (three) as it does to France. Some of its fastest growing routes are to Libya, Syria and Russia, Turkey’s largest trading partner, where it flies to seven cities. That is second only to Germany, which has a large population of immigrant Turks.
In Iran, Turkish companies are building fertilizer plants, making diapers and female sanitary products. In Iraq, the Acarsan Group, based in the southeastern town of Gaziantep, just won a bid to build five hospitals. And Turkish construction companies have a collective order book of over $30 billion, second only to China.
On the flip side, the Azerbaijani government owns Turkey’s major petrochemicals company and Saudi Arabia has been a big investor in the country’s growing Islamic finance sector.
No one here disputes that these trends give Mr. Erdogan the legitimacy — both at home and abroad — to lash out at Israel and to cut deals with Iran over its nuclear energy, moves that have strained ties with its chief ally and longtime supporter, the United States. (Turkey has exported $1.6 billion worth of goods to Iran and Syria this year, $200 million more than to the United States.)
But some worry that the muscle flexing may have gone too far — perhaps the result of tightening election polls at home — and that the aggressive tone with Israel may jeopardize the defining tenet of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: peace at home, peace in the world.
“The foreign policy of Turkey is good if it brings self-pride,” said Ferda Yildiz, the chairman of Basari Holding, a conglomerate that itself is in negotiations with the Syrian government to set up a factory in Syria that would make electricity meters.
Even so, he warns that it would be a mistake to become too caught up in an eastward expansion if it comes at the expense of the country’s longstanding inclination to look to the West for innovation and inspiration.
“It takes centuries to make relations and minutes to destroy them,” he said.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/06/busin ... ?th&emc=th
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/world ... ?th&emc=th
July 24, 2010
Syrians’ New Ardor for a Turkey Looking Eastward
By DAN BILEFSKY
GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Well-heeled Syrians had already been coming to this ancient industrial city, drawn here by Louis Vuitton purses and storefront signs in Arabic. But local shop owners say Israel’s deadly raid on a Turkish-led flotilla to Gaza in May has solidified an already blossoming friendship between Syria and Turkey, the new hero of the Muslim world.
“People in Syria love Turkey because the country supports the Arab world, and they are fellow Muslims,” Zakria Shavek, 37, a driver for a Syrian transport company based in Gaziantep, said as he deposited a family of newly arrived shoppers from Aleppo, which competes with Damascus for the title of Syria’s largest city and is about a two-hour drive from here. “Our enemy in the world is Israel, so we also like Turkey because our enemy’s enemy is our friend.”
The monthly pilgrimages of tens of thousands of Syrians to this southeastern Turkish city — which intensified after the two countries removed visa requirements last September — are just the latest manifestation of the growing ties between Turkey and Syria, part of the Turkish government’s efforts to reach out to its neighbors by using economic and cultural links to help it become a regional leader.
Turkey’s shift toward the Muslim world — from the recent clash with Israel to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s description of Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful — has prompted concerns in the United States and Europe that Turkey, an important NATO ally, is turning its back on the West.
But in Turkey, where 70 percent of all exports go to Europe, businesspeople insist that the government’s policy of cultivating friendly ties with all neighbors reflects a canny and very Western capitalist impulse to offset dependence on stagnating European markets while cementing Turkey’s position as a vital economic and political bridge between east and west.
Indeed, most Arab states, including Syria, enthusiastically support Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, viewing Turkey as a vital intermediary to Western markets that might otherwise be off limits. At the political level, Turkey’s influence in the Middle East is also deeply enhanced by its strong Western ties — a fact recognized by Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, who shocked many in the Turkish capital this month by warning that the latest crisis between Israel and Turkey could undermine Ankara’s role as a mediator in the region.
Only 10 years ago, relations between Syria and Turkey were strained, with Turkey accusing Syria of sheltering Kurdish separatists and Syria lashing out at Turkey over water and territorial disputes. Syrians also harbored historical resentments of Ottoman subjugation, while many secular Turks, defined by the Western orientation of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, saw Syria as autocratic and backward.
With the recent elimination of border restrictions, however, Turkish exports of everything from tea to textiles to diapers are booming, along with a newfound ardor.
“Today, Arab countries that once resented us want to be like us, even if they are looking to Turks more than we are looking to them,” said Emin Berk, a Turk who is coordinator of the Turkey-Syria Trade Office here.
Trade between Turkey and Syria more than doubled from $795 million in 2006 to $1.6 billion in 2009, and is expected to reach $5 billion in the next three years. Last year the Middle East received nearly 20 percent of Turkey’s exports, about $19.2 billion worth of goods, compared with 12.5 percent in 2004. In Iran, Turkish companies are making products including fertilizer and sanitary products for women. Iran, in turn, is an important source of energy to Turkey.
Here in Gaziantep — whose past is so intertwined with Syria’s that it was part of Aleppo Province during the Ottoman Empire — the signs of the new honeymoon between Turkey and Syria are everywhere.
Every Friday, several thousand Syrians descend on the center of town. Lured by bargains and Western brands, most head immediately to the Sanko Park shopping mall, the largest in town, where their lavish shopping sprees have made them coveted customers. In the city’s bazaars, pistachio vendors summon passers-by in Arabic, while Arabic courses for Turkish businessmen are flourishing. Marriages between Turks and Syrians have become more common.
In Syria, meanwhile, where the alliance with secular Turkey represents a move away from its courtship with Iran, Turkey’s blend of conservative Islam and cosmopolitan democracy is increasingly viewed as a model in the younger generation. Turkish soap operas and films are attaining cult status, while “Made in Turkey” labels near the cachet of Paris or Milan.
On a recent day at the gleaming Sanko Park mall, Mays al-Hindawi Bayrak, a chic 27-year-old Syrian who was buying a Pierre Cardin shirt for her Turkish husband, observed that for Syrians, Turkey had become synonymous with European modernity. After Turkey recently lashed out at Israel, she said, her 21-year-old brother told the family he wanted to apply for Turkish citizenship.
“In the past, many Turks thought that all Arab women wear burqas and that all the men drive camels to work,” she said. “Now, we are getting to know each other better.”
Turkish businesspeople here say that regardless of whether the governing party’s politics is driving economics or the other way around, what matters is that the new openness to the east is enhancing the bottom line.
Cengiz Akinal, managing director of Akinal Bella, a large shoe manufacturer, said that the Islamic-inspired politics of the governing Justice and Development Party had helped ease relations with Arabic clients. The company, which exports a majority of its shoes to Europe, increased its exports to Syria by 40 percent last year.
Mr. Akinal, whose ancestors imported leather from Syria during the Ottoman Empire and produced shoes for the sultans, recently shifted part of the company’s manufacturing to Aleppo and Damascus, where monthly wages are about half those of Turkey. But he said Syria was still decades behind Turkey when it came to quality standards and technical know-how.
“Turkey may be 15 years behind Europe, but Syria is still 30 years behind Turkey,” he said.
Indeed, businesspeople say the shift toward the Middle East is forcing them to change the way they do business after decades of trying to cultivate Western European attitudes. Mr. Akinal noted, for example, that negotiations with Arabic corporate clients over price were reminiscent of a Middle Eastern bazaar rather than a boardroom.
“With Europeans, you can have a deal in a half an hour,” he said. “With Syrians, I sometimes spend the whole day bargaining.”
While most people here welcome the Syrian invasion, some Turks complained that the Syrians were pushing up the prices of everything from hotels to designer dresses. Others lamented that Syrians’ religious conservatism was out of place in secular Turkey.
“We are more liberal than they are, and it can sometimes be uncomfortable when the women arrive covered from head to toe and the men leer at you,” said Deniz, a Turkish teenager in ripped jeans and a T-shirt, who declined to give her last name for fear of antagonizing her Syrian boss.
July 24, 2010
Syrians’ New Ardor for a Turkey Looking Eastward
By DAN BILEFSKY
GAZIANTEP, Turkey — Well-heeled Syrians had already been coming to this ancient industrial city, drawn here by Louis Vuitton purses and storefront signs in Arabic. But local shop owners say Israel’s deadly raid on a Turkish-led flotilla to Gaza in May has solidified an already blossoming friendship between Syria and Turkey, the new hero of the Muslim world.
“People in Syria love Turkey because the country supports the Arab world, and they are fellow Muslims,” Zakria Shavek, 37, a driver for a Syrian transport company based in Gaziantep, said as he deposited a family of newly arrived shoppers from Aleppo, which competes with Damascus for the title of Syria’s largest city and is about a two-hour drive from here. “Our enemy in the world is Israel, so we also like Turkey because our enemy’s enemy is our friend.”
The monthly pilgrimages of tens of thousands of Syrians to this southeastern Turkish city — which intensified after the two countries removed visa requirements last September — are just the latest manifestation of the growing ties between Turkey and Syria, part of the Turkish government’s efforts to reach out to its neighbors by using economic and cultural links to help it become a regional leader.
Turkey’s shift toward the Muslim world — from the recent clash with Israel to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s description of Iran’s nuclear program as peaceful — has prompted concerns in the United States and Europe that Turkey, an important NATO ally, is turning its back on the West.
But in Turkey, where 70 percent of all exports go to Europe, businesspeople insist that the government’s policy of cultivating friendly ties with all neighbors reflects a canny and very Western capitalist impulse to offset dependence on stagnating European markets while cementing Turkey’s position as a vital economic and political bridge between east and west.
Indeed, most Arab states, including Syria, enthusiastically support Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, viewing Turkey as a vital intermediary to Western markets that might otherwise be off limits. At the political level, Turkey’s influence in the Middle East is also deeply enhanced by its strong Western ties — a fact recognized by Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, who shocked many in the Turkish capital this month by warning that the latest crisis between Israel and Turkey could undermine Ankara’s role as a mediator in the region.
Only 10 years ago, relations between Syria and Turkey were strained, with Turkey accusing Syria of sheltering Kurdish separatists and Syria lashing out at Turkey over water and territorial disputes. Syrians also harbored historical resentments of Ottoman subjugation, while many secular Turks, defined by the Western orientation of Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, saw Syria as autocratic and backward.
With the recent elimination of border restrictions, however, Turkish exports of everything from tea to textiles to diapers are booming, along with a newfound ardor.
“Today, Arab countries that once resented us want to be like us, even if they are looking to Turks more than we are looking to them,” said Emin Berk, a Turk who is coordinator of the Turkey-Syria Trade Office here.
Trade between Turkey and Syria more than doubled from $795 million in 2006 to $1.6 billion in 2009, and is expected to reach $5 billion in the next three years. Last year the Middle East received nearly 20 percent of Turkey’s exports, about $19.2 billion worth of goods, compared with 12.5 percent in 2004. In Iran, Turkish companies are making products including fertilizer and sanitary products for women. Iran, in turn, is an important source of energy to Turkey.
Here in Gaziantep — whose past is so intertwined with Syria’s that it was part of Aleppo Province during the Ottoman Empire — the signs of the new honeymoon between Turkey and Syria are everywhere.
Every Friday, several thousand Syrians descend on the center of town. Lured by bargains and Western brands, most head immediately to the Sanko Park shopping mall, the largest in town, where their lavish shopping sprees have made them coveted customers. In the city’s bazaars, pistachio vendors summon passers-by in Arabic, while Arabic courses for Turkish businessmen are flourishing. Marriages between Turks and Syrians have become more common.
In Syria, meanwhile, where the alliance with secular Turkey represents a move away from its courtship with Iran, Turkey’s blend of conservative Islam and cosmopolitan democracy is increasingly viewed as a model in the younger generation. Turkish soap operas and films are attaining cult status, while “Made in Turkey” labels near the cachet of Paris or Milan.
On a recent day at the gleaming Sanko Park mall, Mays al-Hindawi Bayrak, a chic 27-year-old Syrian who was buying a Pierre Cardin shirt for her Turkish husband, observed that for Syrians, Turkey had become synonymous with European modernity. After Turkey recently lashed out at Israel, she said, her 21-year-old brother told the family he wanted to apply for Turkish citizenship.
“In the past, many Turks thought that all Arab women wear burqas and that all the men drive camels to work,” she said. “Now, we are getting to know each other better.”
Turkish businesspeople here say that regardless of whether the governing party’s politics is driving economics or the other way around, what matters is that the new openness to the east is enhancing the bottom line.
Cengiz Akinal, managing director of Akinal Bella, a large shoe manufacturer, said that the Islamic-inspired politics of the governing Justice and Development Party had helped ease relations with Arabic clients. The company, which exports a majority of its shoes to Europe, increased its exports to Syria by 40 percent last year.
Mr. Akinal, whose ancestors imported leather from Syria during the Ottoman Empire and produced shoes for the sultans, recently shifted part of the company’s manufacturing to Aleppo and Damascus, where monthly wages are about half those of Turkey. But he said Syria was still decades behind Turkey when it came to quality standards and technical know-how.
“Turkey may be 15 years behind Europe, but Syria is still 30 years behind Turkey,” he said.
Indeed, businesspeople say the shift toward the Middle East is forcing them to change the way they do business after decades of trying to cultivate Western European attitudes. Mr. Akinal noted, for example, that negotiations with Arabic corporate clients over price were reminiscent of a Middle Eastern bazaar rather than a boardroom.
“With Europeans, you can have a deal in a half an hour,” he said. “With Syrians, I sometimes spend the whole day bargaining.”
While most people here welcome the Syrian invasion, some Turks complained that the Syrians were pushing up the prices of everything from hotels to designer dresses. Others lamented that Syrians’ religious conservatism was out of place in secular Turkey.
“We are more liberal than they are, and it can sometimes be uncomfortable when the women arrive covered from head to toe and the men leer at you,” said Deniz, a Turkish teenager in ripped jeans and a T-shirt, who declined to give her last name for fear of antagonizing her Syrian boss.
August 29, 2010
In Israel, Settling for Less
By GADI TAUB
Tel Aviv
WILL Israel remain a Zionist state? If so, what kind? These are the important questions in Israeli politics today, and will be looming over the direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority scheduled to begin Thursday in Washington.
The secular Zionist dream was fundamentally democratic. Its proponents, from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion, sought to apply the universal right of self-determination to the Jews, to set them free individually and collectively as a nation within a democratic state. (In fact, the Zionist movement had a functioning democratic parliament even before it had a state.)
This dream is now seriously threatened by the religious settlers’ movement, Orthodox Jews whose theological version of Zionism is radically different. Although these religious settlers are relatively few — around 130,000 of the total half-a-million settlers — their actions could spell the end of the Israel we have known.
The roots of the problem have been there from the birth of modern Zionism. The relations between Herzl’s movement and Jewish Orthodoxy were uneasy from the start. After all, the Zionist movement sought to achieve by human means what Jews for two millenniums considered to be God’s work alone: the gathering of the diaspora in the land of Israel. Most rabbis therefore shunned Herzl, but not all. Some joined the movement, even formed a party within it, based on a separation of religion and politics. For them, secular Zionism was primarily a solution to the earthly predicament of the Jews; it was not so theologically laden.
But over the following decades another form of religious Zionism came to precedence, inspired by the quasi-mystical writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, who was the chief rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate in the 1920s and ’30s. Kook saw secular Zionists as the unwitting agents of God’s providence, advancing redemption by returning Jews to their homeland.
His son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, later focused his father’s theological ideas around a single commandment: to settle all the land promised to the ancient Hebrews in the Bible. His disciples, energized by a burning messianic fervor, took Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 as confirmation of this theology and set out to fulfill its commandment. Religious enthusiasm made the movement subversive in a deep sense — adherents believed they had a divine obligation to build settlements and considered the authority of Israel’s democratic government conditional on its acceptance of what they declared to be God’s politics.
Although religious settlers often describe themselves as heirs of the early Zionist pioneers, they are anything but. Herzl’s vision was about liberating people, while theirs is about achieving a mystical reunion between the people of Israel and the land of Israel. Herzl’s view stemmed from the ideals of the Enlightenment and the tradition of democratic national liberation movements, dating back to the American and French Revolutions; religious settlers are steeped in blood-and-soil nationalism. Herzl never doubted that Israeli Arabs should have full and equal rights. For religious settlers, Arabs are an alien element in the organic unity of Jews and their land.
The consequences of these differences are huge. If the settlers achieve their manifest goal — making Israel’s hold on the territories permanent — it will mean the de facto annexation of a huge Arab population and will force a decision about their status. In Israel proper, the Arab minority represents about a fifth of its 7.2 million citizens, and they have full legal equality. But between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, there are roughly equal numbers of Arabs and Jews today.
Even if Israel annexed only the West Bank, it would more than double its Arab population. With birthrates in the territories far exceeding those of Arabs and Jews within Israel, Jews would soon enough be a minority. This would void the very idea of a Jewish democratic state.
Israel would have to choose between remaining democratic but not Jewish, or remaining Jewish by becoming non-democratic. Israel’s enemies have long maintained that Zionism is racism and that Israel is an apartheid state. If the settlers succeed, they will turn this lie into truth.
In fact, the former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, once the great patron of the settlers, was one of the first politicians on the right to accept that the settlers’ dream is hopeless. That is why he led Israel out of Gaza in 2005. But not all have followed him. The secular Israeli right has abandoned the idea of annexation but still favors settlement on short-term (and short-sighted) security grounds.
Preserving military rule over the territories, they believe, is necessary to keep terrorism in check, and the settlements demonstrate Israel’s resolve. Although the occupation and the suspension of Palestinian rights are officially temporary, the right wing aspires to keep Arabs indefinitely in quasi-colonial status. Given the Palestinians’ refusal to sign a peace deal with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s predecessors, many Israelis who oppose the settlements and occupation in principle have thrown up their hands and accepted this situation, too.
But the status quo cannot last — and Israelis and their supporters need to confront this fact. The most pressing problem with the settlements is not that they are obstacles to a final peace accord, which is how settlement critics have often framed the issue. The danger is that they will doom Zionism itself.
If the road to partition is blocked, Israel will be forced to choose between two terrible options: Jewish-dominated apartheid or non-Jewish democracy. If Israel opts for apartheid, as the settlers wish, Israel will betray the beliefs it was founded on, become a pariah state and provoke the Arab population to an understandable rebellion. If a non-Jewish democracy is formally established, it is sure to be dysfunctional. Fatah and Hamas haven’t been able to reconcile their differences peacefully and rule the territories — throwing a large Jewish population into the mix is surely not going to produce a healthy liberal democracy. Think Lebanon, not Switzerland.
In truth, both options — and indeed all “one-state solutions” — lead to the same end: civil war. That is why the settlement problem should be at the top of everyone’s agenda, beginning with Israel’s. The religious settlement movement is not just secular Zionism’s ideological adversary, it is a danger to its very existence. Terrorism is a hazard, but it cannot destroy Herzl’s Zionist vision. More settlements and continued occupation can.
Gadi Taub, an assistant professor of communications and public policy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is the author of “The Settlers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/opini ... ?th&emc=th
In Israel, Settling for Less
By GADI TAUB
Tel Aviv
WILL Israel remain a Zionist state? If so, what kind? These are the important questions in Israeli politics today, and will be looming over the direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority scheduled to begin Thursday in Washington.
The secular Zionist dream was fundamentally democratic. Its proponents, from Theodor Herzl to David Ben-Gurion, sought to apply the universal right of self-determination to the Jews, to set them free individually and collectively as a nation within a democratic state. (In fact, the Zionist movement had a functioning democratic parliament even before it had a state.)
This dream is now seriously threatened by the religious settlers’ movement, Orthodox Jews whose theological version of Zionism is radically different. Although these religious settlers are relatively few — around 130,000 of the total half-a-million settlers — their actions could spell the end of the Israel we have known.
The roots of the problem have been there from the birth of modern Zionism. The relations between Herzl’s movement and Jewish Orthodoxy were uneasy from the start. After all, the Zionist movement sought to achieve by human means what Jews for two millenniums considered to be God’s work alone: the gathering of the diaspora in the land of Israel. Most rabbis therefore shunned Herzl, but not all. Some joined the movement, even formed a party within it, based on a separation of religion and politics. For them, secular Zionism was primarily a solution to the earthly predicament of the Jews; it was not so theologically laden.
But over the following decades another form of religious Zionism came to precedence, inspired by the quasi-mystical writings of Abraham Isaac Kook, who was the chief rabbi of Palestine under the British Mandate in the 1920s and ’30s. Kook saw secular Zionists as the unwitting agents of God’s providence, advancing redemption by returning Jews to their homeland.
His son, Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, later focused his father’s theological ideas around a single commandment: to settle all the land promised to the ancient Hebrews in the Bible. His disciples, energized by a burning messianic fervor, took Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 as confirmation of this theology and set out to fulfill its commandment. Religious enthusiasm made the movement subversive in a deep sense — adherents believed they had a divine obligation to build settlements and considered the authority of Israel’s democratic government conditional on its acceptance of what they declared to be God’s politics.
Although religious settlers often describe themselves as heirs of the early Zionist pioneers, they are anything but. Herzl’s vision was about liberating people, while theirs is about achieving a mystical reunion between the people of Israel and the land of Israel. Herzl’s view stemmed from the ideals of the Enlightenment and the tradition of democratic national liberation movements, dating back to the American and French Revolutions; religious settlers are steeped in blood-and-soil nationalism. Herzl never doubted that Israeli Arabs should have full and equal rights. For religious settlers, Arabs are an alien element in the organic unity of Jews and their land.
The consequences of these differences are huge. If the settlers achieve their manifest goal — making Israel’s hold on the territories permanent — it will mean the de facto annexation of a huge Arab population and will force a decision about their status. In Israel proper, the Arab minority represents about a fifth of its 7.2 million citizens, and they have full legal equality. But between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, there are roughly equal numbers of Arabs and Jews today.
Even if Israel annexed only the West Bank, it would more than double its Arab population. With birthrates in the territories far exceeding those of Arabs and Jews within Israel, Jews would soon enough be a minority. This would void the very idea of a Jewish democratic state.
Israel would have to choose between remaining democratic but not Jewish, or remaining Jewish by becoming non-democratic. Israel’s enemies have long maintained that Zionism is racism and that Israel is an apartheid state. If the settlers succeed, they will turn this lie into truth.
In fact, the former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, once the great patron of the settlers, was one of the first politicians on the right to accept that the settlers’ dream is hopeless. That is why he led Israel out of Gaza in 2005. But not all have followed him. The secular Israeli right has abandoned the idea of annexation but still favors settlement on short-term (and short-sighted) security grounds.
Preserving military rule over the territories, they believe, is necessary to keep terrorism in check, and the settlements demonstrate Israel’s resolve. Although the occupation and the suspension of Palestinian rights are officially temporary, the right wing aspires to keep Arabs indefinitely in quasi-colonial status. Given the Palestinians’ refusal to sign a peace deal with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s predecessors, many Israelis who oppose the settlements and occupation in principle have thrown up their hands and accepted this situation, too.
But the status quo cannot last — and Israelis and their supporters need to confront this fact. The most pressing problem with the settlements is not that they are obstacles to a final peace accord, which is how settlement critics have often framed the issue. The danger is that they will doom Zionism itself.
If the road to partition is blocked, Israel will be forced to choose between two terrible options: Jewish-dominated apartheid or non-Jewish democracy. If Israel opts for apartheid, as the settlers wish, Israel will betray the beliefs it was founded on, become a pariah state and provoke the Arab population to an understandable rebellion. If a non-Jewish democracy is formally established, it is sure to be dysfunctional. Fatah and Hamas haven’t been able to reconcile their differences peacefully and rule the territories — throwing a large Jewish population into the mix is surely not going to produce a healthy liberal democracy. Think Lebanon, not Switzerland.
In truth, both options — and indeed all “one-state solutions” — lead to the same end: civil war. That is why the settlement problem should be at the top of everyone’s agenda, beginning with Israel’s. The religious settlement movement is not just secular Zionism’s ideological adversary, it is a danger to its very existence. Terrorism is a hazard, but it cannot destroy Herzl’s Zionist vision. More settlements and continued occupation can.
Gadi Taub, an assistant professor of communications and public policy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, is the author of “The Settlers.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/opini ... ?th&emc=th
Vatican synod addresses Christian exodus in Middle East
By Tom Heneghan, Reuters
October 8, 2010
Vatican leaders are working to improve Islamic-Catholic cooperation in the Middle East.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, AFP-Getty Images, Reuters
With Christianity dwindling in its Middle Eastern birthplace, Pope Benedict has convened Catholic bishops from the region to debate how to save its minority communities and promote harmony with their Muslim neighbours.
For two weeks starting Sunday, the bishops will discuss problems for the faithful ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and strife in Iraq to radical Islamism, economic crisis and the divisions among the region's many Christian churches.
They come from local churches affiliated with the Vatican, but the relentless exodus of all Christians -- Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants -- has prompted them to take a broad look at the challenges facing all followers of Jesus there.
Christians made up around 20 per cent of the region's population a century ago, but now account for about five per cent and falling.
"If this phenomenon continues, Christianity in the Middle East will disappear," said Rev. Samir Khalil Samir, a Beirut-based Egyptian Jesuit who helped draw up the working documents for the Oct. 10-24 synod at the Vatican.
"This is not an unreal hypothesis -- Turkey went from 20 per cent Christian in the early 20th century to 0.2 per cent now," he said. The Christian exodus since the U.S.-led 2003 invasion "could bleed the Church in Iraq dry."
Instead of simply appealing for more aid to Catholics in the region, the experts who prepared the synod call for sweeping social changes to bring forth democratic secular states, interfaith co-operation and a rollback of advancing Islamism.
"At issue is the renewal of Arab society," said Samir, who stressed most Christians and Muslims there are fellow Arabs.
The synod document urges the sometimes competing Catholic churches to work with each other and with other Christians to make their voice heard in Middle Eastern society.
Its advice to open to other churches and faiths, simplify their ancient liturgies and introduce more Arabic into their services echoes the Second Vatican Council reforms that worldwide Roman Catholicism launched in the 1960s.
Highlighting this openness, the synod has invited an Iranian ayatollah, a Lebanese Muslim and a rabbi from Jerusalem to attend the proceedings and address the 250 participants.
The document pins most of the blame for the Christian exodus on political tensions in the region: "Today, emigration is particularly prevalent because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the resulting instability throughout the region."
The region's Christians have also been weakened by age-old splits. The Catholics are divided into Latin Catholic, Coptic, Maronite, Chaldean, Armenian, Syrian and Greek Melkite churches -- and they are outnumbered by various Orthodox churches.
As Samir summed it up: "If we can do something with other Christians, it is better than doing it alone. If we Christians can do something with the Muslims, that is even better."
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... iebarracks
By Tom Heneghan, Reuters
October 8, 2010
Vatican leaders are working to improve Islamic-Catholic cooperation in the Middle East.
Photograph by: Herald Archive, AFP-Getty Images, Reuters
With Christianity dwindling in its Middle Eastern birthplace, Pope Benedict has convened Catholic bishops from the region to debate how to save its minority communities and promote harmony with their Muslim neighbours.
For two weeks starting Sunday, the bishops will discuss problems for the faithful ranging from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and strife in Iraq to radical Islamism, economic crisis and the divisions among the region's many Christian churches.
They come from local churches affiliated with the Vatican, but the relentless exodus of all Christians -- Catholics, Orthodox and Protestants -- has prompted them to take a broad look at the challenges facing all followers of Jesus there.
Christians made up around 20 per cent of the region's population a century ago, but now account for about five per cent and falling.
"If this phenomenon continues, Christianity in the Middle East will disappear," said Rev. Samir Khalil Samir, a Beirut-based Egyptian Jesuit who helped draw up the working documents for the Oct. 10-24 synod at the Vatican.
"This is not an unreal hypothesis -- Turkey went from 20 per cent Christian in the early 20th century to 0.2 per cent now," he said. The Christian exodus since the U.S.-led 2003 invasion "could bleed the Church in Iraq dry."
Instead of simply appealing for more aid to Catholics in the region, the experts who prepared the synod call for sweeping social changes to bring forth democratic secular states, interfaith co-operation and a rollback of advancing Islamism.
"At issue is the renewal of Arab society," said Samir, who stressed most Christians and Muslims there are fellow Arabs.
The synod document urges the sometimes competing Catholic churches to work with each other and with other Christians to make their voice heard in Middle Eastern society.
Its advice to open to other churches and faiths, simplify their ancient liturgies and introduce more Arabic into their services echoes the Second Vatican Council reforms that worldwide Roman Catholicism launched in the 1960s.
Highlighting this openness, the synod has invited an Iranian ayatollah, a Lebanese Muslim and a rabbi from Jerusalem to attend the proceedings and address the 250 participants.
The document pins most of the blame for the Christian exodus on political tensions in the region: "Today, emigration is particularly prevalent because of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the resulting instability throughout the region."
The region's Christians have also been weakened by age-old splits. The Catholics are divided into Latin Catholic, Coptic, Maronite, Chaldean, Armenian, Syrian and Greek Melkite churches -- and they are outnumbered by various Orthodox churches.
As Samir summed it up: "If we can do something with other Christians, it is better than doing it alone. If we Christians can do something with the Muslims, that is even better."
http://www.calgaryherald.com/story_prin ... iebarracks
October 13, 2010
What Oman Can Teach Us
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
MUSCAT, Oman
As the United States relies on firepower to try to crush extremism in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, it might instead consider the lesson of the remarkable Arab country of Oman.
Just 40 years ago, Oman was one of the most hidebound societies in the world. There was no television, and radios were banned as the work of the devil. There were no Omani diplomats abroad, and the sultan kept his country in almost complete isolation.
Oman, a country about the size of Kansas, had just six miles of paved road, and the majority of the population was illiterate and fiercely tribal. The country had a measly three schools serving 909 pupils — all boys in primary grades. Not one girl in Oman was in school.
Oman’s capital city, Muscat, nestled among rocky hills in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula, was surrounded by a traditional wall. At dusk, the authorities would fire a cannon and then close the city’s gates for the night. Anyone seen walking outside without a torch at night was subject to being shot.
Oman was historically similar to its neighbor, Yemen, which now has become an incubator for Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. But, in 1970, Oman left that fundamentalist track: the sultan’s son deposed his father and started a stunning modernization built around education for boys and girls alike.
Visit Oman today, and it is a contemporary country with highways, sleek new airports, satellite TV dishes and a range of public and private universities. Children start studying English and computers in the first grade. Boys and girls alike are expected to finish high school at least.
It’s peaceful and pro-Western, without the widespread fundamentalism and terrorism that afflict Yemen. Granted, Yemen may be the most beautiful country in the Arab world, but my hunch is that many of the young Westerners who study Arabic there will end up relocating to Oman because of the tranquility here.
It’s particularly striking how the role of women has been transformed. One 18-year-old university student I spoke to, Rihab Ahmed al-Rhabi, told me (in fluent English) of her interest in entrepreneurship. She also told me, affectionately, about her grandmother who is illiterate, was married at age 9 and bore 10 children.
As for Ms. Rhabi, she mentioned that she doesn’t want to bog herself down with a husband anytime soon. Otherwise, what if her husband didn’t want her to study abroad? And when she does eventually marry, she mused, one child would be about right.
Ms. Rhabi was a member of the Omani all-girls team that won the gold medal in an entrepreneurship competition across the Arab world last year. The contest was organized by Injaz, a superb organization that goes into schools around the Arab world to train young people in starting and running small businesses.
The stand-out young entrepreneurs in Oman today are mostly female: 9 of the 11 finalists in this year’s Oman entrepreneurship contest were all-girl teams. The winning team bowled me over. The members started as high school juniors by forming a company to publish children’s picture books in Arabic. They raised capital, conducted market research, designed and wrote the books and oversaw marketing and distribution.
“We’re now looking at publishing e-books,” explained Ameera Tariq, a high school senior and a member of the board of directors of the team’s book company. Maybe one of the customers for a future electronic picture book will be her grandmother, who was married at the age of 12 and has never learned to read.
In short, one of the lessons of Oman is that one of the best and most cost-effective ways to tame extremism is to promote education for all.
Many researchers have found links between rising education and reduced conflict. One study published in 2006, for example, suggested that a doubling of primary school enrollment in a poor country was associated with halving the risk of civil war. Another found that raising the average educational attainment in a country by a single grade could significantly reduce the risk of conflict.
Sorry if this emphasis on education sounds like a cliché. It’s widely acknowledged in theory, and President Obama pledged as a candidate that he would start a $2 billion global education fund. But nothing has come of it. Instead, he’s spending 50 times as much this year alone on American troops in Afghanistan — even though military solutions don’t have as good a record in trouble spots as education does.
The pattern seems widespread: Everybody gives lip service to education, but nobody funds it.
For me, the lesson of Oman has to do with my next stops on this trip: Afghanistan and Pakistan. If we want to see them recast as peaceful societies, then let’s try investing less in bombs and more in schools.
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
Gail Collins is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/14/opini ... &th&emc=th
What Oman Can Teach Us
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
MUSCAT, Oman
As the United States relies on firepower to try to crush extremism in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, it might instead consider the lesson of the remarkable Arab country of Oman.
Just 40 years ago, Oman was one of the most hidebound societies in the world. There was no television, and radios were banned as the work of the devil. There were no Omani diplomats abroad, and the sultan kept his country in almost complete isolation.
Oman, a country about the size of Kansas, had just six miles of paved road, and the majority of the population was illiterate and fiercely tribal. The country had a measly three schools serving 909 pupils — all boys in primary grades. Not one girl in Oman was in school.
Oman’s capital city, Muscat, nestled among rocky hills in the desert of the Arabian Peninsula, was surrounded by a traditional wall. At dusk, the authorities would fire a cannon and then close the city’s gates for the night. Anyone seen walking outside without a torch at night was subject to being shot.
Oman was historically similar to its neighbor, Yemen, which now has become an incubator for Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. But, in 1970, Oman left that fundamentalist track: the sultan’s son deposed his father and started a stunning modernization built around education for boys and girls alike.
Visit Oman today, and it is a contemporary country with highways, sleek new airports, satellite TV dishes and a range of public and private universities. Children start studying English and computers in the first grade. Boys and girls alike are expected to finish high school at least.
It’s peaceful and pro-Western, without the widespread fundamentalism and terrorism that afflict Yemen. Granted, Yemen may be the most beautiful country in the Arab world, but my hunch is that many of the young Westerners who study Arabic there will end up relocating to Oman because of the tranquility here.
It’s particularly striking how the role of women has been transformed. One 18-year-old university student I spoke to, Rihab Ahmed al-Rhabi, told me (in fluent English) of her interest in entrepreneurship. She also told me, affectionately, about her grandmother who is illiterate, was married at age 9 and bore 10 children.
As for Ms. Rhabi, she mentioned that she doesn’t want to bog herself down with a husband anytime soon. Otherwise, what if her husband didn’t want her to study abroad? And when she does eventually marry, she mused, one child would be about right.
Ms. Rhabi was a member of the Omani all-girls team that won the gold medal in an entrepreneurship competition across the Arab world last year. The contest was organized by Injaz, a superb organization that goes into schools around the Arab world to train young people in starting and running small businesses.
The stand-out young entrepreneurs in Oman today are mostly female: 9 of the 11 finalists in this year’s Oman entrepreneurship contest were all-girl teams. The winning team bowled me over. The members started as high school juniors by forming a company to publish children’s picture books in Arabic. They raised capital, conducted market research, designed and wrote the books and oversaw marketing and distribution.
“We’re now looking at publishing e-books,” explained Ameera Tariq, a high school senior and a member of the board of directors of the team’s book company. Maybe one of the customers for a future electronic picture book will be her grandmother, who was married at the age of 12 and has never learned to read.
In short, one of the lessons of Oman is that one of the best and most cost-effective ways to tame extremism is to promote education for all.
Many researchers have found links between rising education and reduced conflict. One study published in 2006, for example, suggested that a doubling of primary school enrollment in a poor country was associated with halving the risk of civil war. Another found that raising the average educational attainment in a country by a single grade could significantly reduce the risk of conflict.
Sorry if this emphasis on education sounds like a cliché. It’s widely acknowledged in theory, and President Obama pledged as a candidate that he would start a $2 billion global education fund. But nothing has come of it. Instead, he’s spending 50 times as much this year alone on American troops in Afghanistan — even though military solutions don’t have as good a record in trouble spots as education does.
The pattern seems widespread: Everybody gives lip service to education, but nobody funds it.
For me, the lesson of Oman has to do with my next stops on this trip: Afghanistan and Pakistan. If we want to see them recast as peaceful societies, then let’s try investing less in bombs and more in schools.
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
Gail Collins is off today.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/14/opini ... &th&emc=th
November 26, 2010
Building Museums, and a Fresh Arab Identity
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Interactive Multi Media Feature: Architects Take On Museums in Doha and Abu Dhabi
I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel discuss their work in the Persian Gulf.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010 ... =ab1#gehry
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — It is an audacious experiment: two small, oil-rich countries in the Middle East are using architecture and art to reshape their national identities virtually overnight, and in the process to redeem the tarnished image of Arabs abroad while showing the way toward a modern society within the boundaries of Islam.
Here, on a barren island on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, workers have dug the foundations for three colossal museums: an $800 million Frank Gehry-designed branch of the Guggenheim 12 times the size of its New York flagship; a half-billion-dollar outpost of the Louvre by Jean Nouvel; and a showcase for national history by Foster & Partners, the design for which was unveiled on Thursday. And plans are moving ahead for yet another museum, about maritime history, to be designed by Tadao Ando.
Nearly 200 miles across the Persian Gulf, Doha, the capital of Qatar, has been mapping out its own extravagant cultural vision. A Museum of Islamic Art, a bone-white I. M. Pei-designed temple, opened in 2008 and dazzled the international museum establishment. In December the government will open a museum of modern Arab art with a collection that spans the mid-19th-century to the present. Construction has just begun on a museum of Qatari history, also by Mr. Nouvel, and the design for a museum of Orientalist art by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron is to be made public next year.
To a critic traveling through the region, the speed at which museums are being built in Abu Dhabi — and the international brand names attached to some of them — conjured culture-flavored versions of the overwrought real-estate spectacles that famously shaped its fellow emirate, Dubai. By contrast, Doha’s vision seemed a more calculated attempt to find a balance between modernization and Islam.
But in both cases leaders also see their construction sprees as part of sweeping efforts to retool their societies for a post-Sept. 11, post-oil world. Their goal is not only to build a more positive image of the Middle East at a time when anti-Islamic sentiment continues to build across Europe and the United States, but also to create a kind of latter-day Silk Road, one on which their countries are powerful cultural and economic hinges between the West and rising powers like India and China.
And they are betting that they can do this without alienating significant parts of the Arab world, which may see in these undertakings the same kind of Western-oriented cosmopolitanism that flourished in places like Cairo and Tehran not so long ago, and that helped fuel the rise of militant fundamentalism.
Building a New Narrative
A little over a half-century ago Abu Dhabi was a Bedouin village with no literary or scientific traditions to speak of, no urban history. Its few thousand inhabitants, mostly poor and illiterate, survived largely on animal herding, fishing and pearl diving.
After oil production began here in the 1960s, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, who founded the country by bringing several emirates together under Abu Dhabi’s leadership in the early 1970s, made deals with Western oil companies that financed the area’s first paved roads, hospitals and schools. The emirates became a kind of Switzerland of the Middle East, a haven of calm and prosperity surrounded by big, aggressive neighbors, Iran and Iraq to the north and Saudi Arabia to the west.
But by the time Sheik Zayed’s descendants began coming to power in the 1990s, that low-key approach felt out of date. Globalism was the catchword of the moment, and the construction boom in neighboring Dubai was demonstrating, despite its later bust, how completely a city could transform itself in just a few years.
As important, reliance on economic ties with the West began to seem imprudent after Sept. 11, as Western governments scrutinized all sorts of Arab financial dealings with increasing intensity, and even travel to the West became a sometimes degrading experience for Arabs.
In 2005 Sheikh Zayed’s son and heir, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, approached Thomas Krens, who was the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, with the idea of creating a new branch of the Guggenheim Museum — a Middle Eastern version of what Mr. Krens and Mr. Gehry had accomplished a decade earlier in Bilbao, Spain. But the sheik’s ambitions were never so small: within a few years the proposed site of the project, Saadiyat Island, a 10-square-mile development zone just north of Abu Dhabi’s urban center, was being planned as a miniature city built around culture and leisure, with some of the most recognizable names from the creative world.
Abu Dhabi’s blockbuster deal with the Louvre was signed in 2007; another deal, with the British Museum, to design exhibitions for Foster & Partners’ Zayed National Museum, was signed two years later. The maritime museum by Mr. Ando and a performing arts center by Zaha Hadid are still being planned. These cultural megaprojects will be joined by a campus of New York University on Saadiyat Island’s southern shore and, in a location to be determined, a four-million-square-foot development for media companies and film studios meant partly to provide job training and opportunities for young Emiratis.
Sheik Khalifa and his government want all this to instill national pride in a new generation of Emiratis while providing citizens with tools, both intellectual and psychological, for living in a global society. The idea, several people told me on a recent visit, is to tell a new story, one that breaks with a long history of regional decline, including the recent upheavals caused by militant fundamentalism, and to re-establish a semblance of cultural parity with the West.
“There are religious extremists everywhere in the Middle East — even here,” said an Arab consultant who has worked on several developments and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired. The sheik, this person said, believes the cosmopolitan influences of the projects may help “open up the minds of these younger Emiratis before they go down that road.”
Of all the projects, the Louvre outpost seems the most natural fit with Abu Dhabi’s globalist aspirations. On top of a generous construction budget, the government is paying France $1.3 billion, mainly to establish an art-borrowing agreement that will ensure that it gets the pick of the Louvre’s encyclopedic collections, as well as art from several other museums. The range and depth of those collections will allow the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which is being marketed as a “universal museum,” to show off the cultural achievements of civilizations from every corner of the world.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/arts/ ... nes&emc=a2
******
Iraq’s Troubles Drive Out Refugees Who Came Back
By JOHN LELAND
BAGHDAD — A second exodus has begun here, of Iraqis who returned after fleeing the carnage of the height of the war, but now find that violence and the nation’s severe lack of jobs are pulling them away from home once again.
Since the American invasion in 2003, refugees have been a measure of the country’s precarious condition, flooding outward during periods of violence and trickling back as Iraq seemed to stabilize. This new migration shows how far the nation remains from being stable and secure.
Abu Maream left Iraq after a mortar round killed his brother-in-law in 2005. Amar al-Obeidi left when insurgents threatened to kill him and raided his shops. Hazim Hadi Mohammed al-Tameemi left because the doctors who treated his wife’s ovarian cancer had fled the country.
All three joined the flow of refugees who returned as violence here ebbed. But now they want to leave again.
“The only thing that’s stopping me is I don’t have the money,” said Mr. Maream, who gave only a partial name — literally, father of Maream — because he feared reprisal from extremists in his neighborhood. “We are Iraqis in name only.”
Nearly 100,000 refugees have returned since 2008, out of more than two million who left since the invasion, according to the Iraqi government and the United Nations high commissioner for refugees.
But as they return, pulled by improved security in Iraq or pushed by a lack of work abroad, many are finding that their homeland is still not ready — their houses are gone or occupied, their neighborhoods unsafe, their opportunities minimal.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/world ... nes&emc=a2
Building Museums, and a Fresh Arab Identity
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Interactive Multi Media Feature: Architects Take On Museums in Doha and Abu Dhabi
I.M. Pei, Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and Jean Nouvel discuss their work in the Persian Gulf.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010 ... =ab1#gehry
ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — It is an audacious experiment: two small, oil-rich countries in the Middle East are using architecture and art to reshape their national identities virtually overnight, and in the process to redeem the tarnished image of Arabs abroad while showing the way toward a modern society within the boundaries of Islam.
Here, on a barren island on the outskirts of Abu Dhabi, workers have dug the foundations for three colossal museums: an $800 million Frank Gehry-designed branch of the Guggenheim 12 times the size of its New York flagship; a half-billion-dollar outpost of the Louvre by Jean Nouvel; and a showcase for national history by Foster & Partners, the design for which was unveiled on Thursday. And plans are moving ahead for yet another museum, about maritime history, to be designed by Tadao Ando.
Nearly 200 miles across the Persian Gulf, Doha, the capital of Qatar, has been mapping out its own extravagant cultural vision. A Museum of Islamic Art, a bone-white I. M. Pei-designed temple, opened in 2008 and dazzled the international museum establishment. In December the government will open a museum of modern Arab art with a collection that spans the mid-19th-century to the present. Construction has just begun on a museum of Qatari history, also by Mr. Nouvel, and the design for a museum of Orientalist art by the Swiss firm Herzog & de Meuron is to be made public next year.
To a critic traveling through the region, the speed at which museums are being built in Abu Dhabi — and the international brand names attached to some of them — conjured culture-flavored versions of the overwrought real-estate spectacles that famously shaped its fellow emirate, Dubai. By contrast, Doha’s vision seemed a more calculated attempt to find a balance between modernization and Islam.
But in both cases leaders also see their construction sprees as part of sweeping efforts to retool their societies for a post-Sept. 11, post-oil world. Their goal is not only to build a more positive image of the Middle East at a time when anti-Islamic sentiment continues to build across Europe and the United States, but also to create a kind of latter-day Silk Road, one on which their countries are powerful cultural and economic hinges between the West and rising powers like India and China.
And they are betting that they can do this without alienating significant parts of the Arab world, which may see in these undertakings the same kind of Western-oriented cosmopolitanism that flourished in places like Cairo and Tehran not so long ago, and that helped fuel the rise of militant fundamentalism.
Building a New Narrative
A little over a half-century ago Abu Dhabi was a Bedouin village with no literary or scientific traditions to speak of, no urban history. Its few thousand inhabitants, mostly poor and illiterate, survived largely on animal herding, fishing and pearl diving.
After oil production began here in the 1960s, Sheik Zayed bin Sultan al-Nahayan, who founded the country by bringing several emirates together under Abu Dhabi’s leadership in the early 1970s, made deals with Western oil companies that financed the area’s first paved roads, hospitals and schools. The emirates became a kind of Switzerland of the Middle East, a haven of calm and prosperity surrounded by big, aggressive neighbors, Iran and Iraq to the north and Saudi Arabia to the west.
But by the time Sheik Zayed’s descendants began coming to power in the 1990s, that low-key approach felt out of date. Globalism was the catchword of the moment, and the construction boom in neighboring Dubai was demonstrating, despite its later bust, how completely a city could transform itself in just a few years.
As important, reliance on economic ties with the West began to seem imprudent after Sept. 11, as Western governments scrutinized all sorts of Arab financial dealings with increasing intensity, and even travel to the West became a sometimes degrading experience for Arabs.
In 2005 Sheikh Zayed’s son and heir, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al-Nahayan, approached Thomas Krens, who was the director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in New York, with the idea of creating a new branch of the Guggenheim Museum — a Middle Eastern version of what Mr. Krens and Mr. Gehry had accomplished a decade earlier in Bilbao, Spain. But the sheik’s ambitions were never so small: within a few years the proposed site of the project, Saadiyat Island, a 10-square-mile development zone just north of Abu Dhabi’s urban center, was being planned as a miniature city built around culture and leisure, with some of the most recognizable names from the creative world.
Abu Dhabi’s blockbuster deal with the Louvre was signed in 2007; another deal, with the British Museum, to design exhibitions for Foster & Partners’ Zayed National Museum, was signed two years later. The maritime museum by Mr. Ando and a performing arts center by Zaha Hadid are still being planned. These cultural megaprojects will be joined by a campus of New York University on Saadiyat Island’s southern shore and, in a location to be determined, a four-million-square-foot development for media companies and film studios meant partly to provide job training and opportunities for young Emiratis.
Sheik Khalifa and his government want all this to instill national pride in a new generation of Emiratis while providing citizens with tools, both intellectual and psychological, for living in a global society. The idea, several people told me on a recent visit, is to tell a new story, one that breaks with a long history of regional decline, including the recent upheavals caused by militant fundamentalism, and to re-establish a semblance of cultural parity with the West.
“There are religious extremists everywhere in the Middle East — even here,” said an Arab consultant who has worked on several developments and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of being fired. The sheik, this person said, believes the cosmopolitan influences of the projects may help “open up the minds of these younger Emiratis before they go down that road.”
Of all the projects, the Louvre outpost seems the most natural fit with Abu Dhabi’s globalist aspirations. On top of a generous construction budget, the government is paying France $1.3 billion, mainly to establish an art-borrowing agreement that will ensure that it gets the pick of the Louvre’s encyclopedic collections, as well as art from several other museums. The range and depth of those collections will allow the Louvre Abu Dhabi, which is being marketed as a “universal museum,” to show off the cultural achievements of civilizations from every corner of the world.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/arts/ ... nes&emc=a2
******
Iraq’s Troubles Drive Out Refugees Who Came Back
By JOHN LELAND
BAGHDAD — A second exodus has begun here, of Iraqis who returned after fleeing the carnage of the height of the war, but now find that violence and the nation’s severe lack of jobs are pulling them away from home once again.
Since the American invasion in 2003, refugees have been a measure of the country’s precarious condition, flooding outward during periods of violence and trickling back as Iraq seemed to stabilize. This new migration shows how far the nation remains from being stable and secure.
Abu Maream left Iraq after a mortar round killed his brother-in-law in 2005. Amar al-Obeidi left when insurgents threatened to kill him and raided his shops. Hazim Hadi Mohammed al-Tameemi left because the doctors who treated his wife’s ovarian cancer had fled the country.
All three joined the flow of refugees who returned as violence here ebbed. But now they want to leave again.
“The only thing that’s stopping me is I don’t have the money,” said Mr. Maream, who gave only a partial name — literally, father of Maream — because he feared reprisal from extremists in his neighborhood. “We are Iraqis in name only.”
Nearly 100,000 refugees have returned since 2008, out of more than two million who left since the invasion, according to the Iraqi government and the United Nations high commissioner for refugees.
But as they return, pulled by improved security in Iraq or pushed by a lack of work abroad, many are finding that their homeland is still not ready — their houses are gone or occupied, their neighborhoods unsafe, their opportunities minimal.
More....
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/world ... nes&emc=a2
January 17, 2011
The Arab Gdansk
By ROGER COHEN
LONDON — Is Tunis the Arab Gdansk? Big things start small. In Poland, the firing in 1980 of Anna Walentynowicz, a shipyard worker, led to strikes and the formation of the grassroots Solidarity movement that set in motion the unraveling of the Soviet empire. Walentynowicz, who was killed in a plane crash last year, once told me all they sought at the outset was “better money, improved work safety, a free trade union and my job back.”
All Mohamed Bouazizi wanted was a job, some means to eke out a living. Like many of Tunisia’s university graduates, he found himself unemployed while the coterie of the now-ousted president binged on the nation’s riches and titillated themselves with large felines. When police shut down Bouazizi’s informal vegetable stall in the central town of Sidi Bouzid, he killed himself. His self-immolation a month ago ignited an Arab uprising.
Now, the Tunisian dictator of 23 years, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, has fled to the mother lode of regional absolutism, Saudi Arabia, driven out by new social media and old-fashioned rage. Protesters communicating on Facebook and irked by what WikiLeaks had revealed of the Ben Ali family’s Caligula-like indulgence were roused to shatter the security state of yet another Arab despot.
The unseating through popular revolt of an Arab strongman is something new: It has already caused ripples from Amman to Cairo, from the Gulf to Tripoli — and it will cause more. Unseating through U.S. invasion — Iraq — did not work; it could never be a source of Arab pride. A homegrown uprising can.
This signal event, of still uncertain outcome, is long overdue. Arab regimes, many of them U.S. allies, have lost touch with young populations. Their ossified, repressive, nepotistic, corrupt systems have proved blind to the awakening stirred by satellite TV networks, Facebook posts, tweets, Web videos and bloggers.
They have proved skilled only at provoking guffaws at their regular “elections” and fostering the rise of extreme Islamism among populations left with no refuge but religion. Their “stability” has been sustained at the price of paralysis. It has depended on a readiness to terrorize and torture. These Arab holdovers, moribund as the waxworks at Madame Tussauds, are ripe for transformation, the anciens régimes of 2011.
The U.S. responsibility for this Arab failure has been significant: America has preferred the stable despot to the Islamist risk of democracy (despite the fact that the only likely remedy to the seductive illusion of political Islamism is the responsibility of government). It is now imperative that the Obama administration and the European Union stand behind Tunisia’s democratic forces.
Just what those are is still murky in the Tunisian flux. But Obama made a good start — much better than his dilatory response to the Iranian uprising of 2009 and much better than France’s tiptoeing — by applauding the “brave and determined struggle” of Tunisians for their rights.
America and its allies, especially France, should do all they can to ensure this bravery does not end in some new iteration of despotism. Anything less than prompt free and fair elections organized by a national unity government should be rebuffed. What the Arab world needs above all is accountability, transparency and modernity in its governance, of the kind that encourages personal responsibility.
Last month, after a visit to Beirut, I wrote a column called “The captive Arab mind” about the psychological cost of repression in the region: the reflex of blaming others, the perception of conspiracies everywhere and the paralyzing fear of acting or thinking for oneself. Tunis can be Act One in the liberation of the Arab mind.
That will also require the West to cast aside tired thinking. You can’t be a little bit democratic any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. Holding free elections in Tunisia requires the lifting of the ban on Islamist parties.
Dealing with the Middle East as it is — rather than indulging in the “Green Zone politics” of imaginary worlds — demands recognition that facile terrorist designations for broad movements like Hezbollah are self-defeating and inadequate. Peace in Northern Ireland would have been impossible if Sinn Fein’s links to violent resistance had proved an impassable barrier to negotiations with it.
Western double-standards in the supposed interest of Arab stability have proved a recipe for radicalization. The West should honor Tunisian bravery with some of its own. Dynasties rusting on their thrones are not the answer to Arab disquiet.
Nor is democracy a one-way street. It is about give-and-take, not irreversible power grabs. Political Islam betrayed its liberating banner in Tehran by replacing secular repression — the shah’s — with theocratic. Iran has proved more dynamic than its Arab neighbors because the Islamic Republic has at times felt obliged to reflect the “republic” in its name — but only under an unelected supreme leader. Islamist parties must commit to democracy rather than exploit democracy for despotic ends.
Nine years separated Walentynowicz’s firing from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bouazizi’s suicide proclaimed that the shelf life of Arab despots can be no longer than that. Little Tunisia is a clarion call for a regional awakening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opini ... emc=tha212
The Arab Gdansk
By ROGER COHEN
LONDON — Is Tunis the Arab Gdansk? Big things start small. In Poland, the firing in 1980 of Anna Walentynowicz, a shipyard worker, led to strikes and the formation of the grassroots Solidarity movement that set in motion the unraveling of the Soviet empire. Walentynowicz, who was killed in a plane crash last year, once told me all they sought at the outset was “better money, improved work safety, a free trade union and my job back.”
All Mohamed Bouazizi wanted was a job, some means to eke out a living. Like many of Tunisia’s university graduates, he found himself unemployed while the coterie of the now-ousted president binged on the nation’s riches and titillated themselves with large felines. When police shut down Bouazizi’s informal vegetable stall in the central town of Sidi Bouzid, he killed himself. His self-immolation a month ago ignited an Arab uprising.
Now, the Tunisian dictator of 23 years, Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali, has fled to the mother lode of regional absolutism, Saudi Arabia, driven out by new social media and old-fashioned rage. Protesters communicating on Facebook and irked by what WikiLeaks had revealed of the Ben Ali family’s Caligula-like indulgence were roused to shatter the security state of yet another Arab despot.
The unseating through popular revolt of an Arab strongman is something new: It has already caused ripples from Amman to Cairo, from the Gulf to Tripoli — and it will cause more. Unseating through U.S. invasion — Iraq — did not work; it could never be a source of Arab pride. A homegrown uprising can.
This signal event, of still uncertain outcome, is long overdue. Arab regimes, many of them U.S. allies, have lost touch with young populations. Their ossified, repressive, nepotistic, corrupt systems have proved blind to the awakening stirred by satellite TV networks, Facebook posts, tweets, Web videos and bloggers.
They have proved skilled only at provoking guffaws at their regular “elections” and fostering the rise of extreme Islamism among populations left with no refuge but religion. Their “stability” has been sustained at the price of paralysis. It has depended on a readiness to terrorize and torture. These Arab holdovers, moribund as the waxworks at Madame Tussauds, are ripe for transformation, the anciens régimes of 2011.
The U.S. responsibility for this Arab failure has been significant: America has preferred the stable despot to the Islamist risk of democracy (despite the fact that the only likely remedy to the seductive illusion of political Islamism is the responsibility of government). It is now imperative that the Obama administration and the European Union stand behind Tunisia’s democratic forces.
Just what those are is still murky in the Tunisian flux. But Obama made a good start — much better than his dilatory response to the Iranian uprising of 2009 and much better than France’s tiptoeing — by applauding the “brave and determined struggle” of Tunisians for their rights.
America and its allies, especially France, should do all they can to ensure this bravery does not end in some new iteration of despotism. Anything less than prompt free and fair elections organized by a national unity government should be rebuffed. What the Arab world needs above all is accountability, transparency and modernity in its governance, of the kind that encourages personal responsibility.
Last month, after a visit to Beirut, I wrote a column called “The captive Arab mind” about the psychological cost of repression in the region: the reflex of blaming others, the perception of conspiracies everywhere and the paralyzing fear of acting or thinking for oneself. Tunis can be Act One in the liberation of the Arab mind.
That will also require the West to cast aside tired thinking. You can’t be a little bit democratic any more than you can be a little bit pregnant. Holding free elections in Tunisia requires the lifting of the ban on Islamist parties.
Dealing with the Middle East as it is — rather than indulging in the “Green Zone politics” of imaginary worlds — demands recognition that facile terrorist designations for broad movements like Hezbollah are self-defeating and inadequate. Peace in Northern Ireland would have been impossible if Sinn Fein’s links to violent resistance had proved an impassable barrier to negotiations with it.
Western double-standards in the supposed interest of Arab stability have proved a recipe for radicalization. The West should honor Tunisian bravery with some of its own. Dynasties rusting on their thrones are not the answer to Arab disquiet.
Nor is democracy a one-way street. It is about give-and-take, not irreversible power grabs. Political Islam betrayed its liberating banner in Tehran by replacing secular repression — the shah’s — with theocratic. Iran has proved more dynamic than its Arab neighbors because the Islamic Republic has at times felt obliged to reflect the “republic” in its name — but only under an unelected supreme leader. Islamist parties must commit to democracy rather than exploit democracy for despotic ends.
Nine years separated Walentynowicz’s firing from the fall of the Berlin Wall. Bouazizi’s suicide proclaimed that the shelf life of Arab despots can be no longer than that. Little Tunisia is a clarion call for a regional awakening.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/18/opini ... emc=tha212
January 31, 2011
Exit the Israel Alibi
By ROGER COHEN
LONDON — One way to measure the immense distance traveled by Arabs over the past month is to note the one big subject they are not talking about: Israel.
For too long, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the great diversion, exploited by feckless Arab autocrats to distract impoverished populations. None of these Arab leaders ever bothered to visit the West Bank. That did not stop them embracing the justice of the Palestinian cause even as they trampled on justice at home.
Now, Arabs are thinking about their own injustices. With great courage, they are saying “Enough!”
The big shift is in the captive Arab mind. It is an immense journey from a culture of victimhood to one of self-empowerment, from a culture of conspiracy to one of construction. It is a long road from rage to responsibility, from humiliation to action.
The Muslim suicide bomber aims fury at a perceived outside enemy. Self-immolation, the spark to this great pan-Arab uprising, betrays similar desperation, but directed inward. The outer scapegoat is replaced as the target by the inner Arab culprit.
Change won’t come overnight, and won’t be without pain, but Arabs have embarked on it — and the United States must support them without equivocation. Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, is finished: It is only a matter of time. No wonder the Obama administration is calling for an “orderly transition.”
Sure, there is risk. There always is in change. But nothing in the Arab genome says democracy, liberty and plain decency are unattainable.
Remember, Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack, came from Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. The vast majority of Atta’s henchmen came from another U.S.-backed Arab autocracy, Saudi Arabia. They did not come from Iran. They did not come from Lebanon — or Gaza.
President George W. Bush was right in 2003: “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.” And Condoleezza Rice was right to note that the U.S. promotion of “stability” — read autocracy — had allowed “a very malignant, meaning cancerous, form of extremism to grow up underneath.”
Bush and Rice were also, however, the authors of the Iraq invasion. This destroyed their credibility on Arab liberation. Their Middle East democracy agenda went nowhere. But, self-generated, it remains the right goal.
A 2008 study by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center found that 60 percent of Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters were of Saudi or Libyan origin: the handiwork of those alibi-seeking Arab despots again.
I spoke of risk. Egypt is not Tunisia, it’s the epicenter of the Arab world, self-styled “mother of the world,” a supporter of U.S. interests, a big nation that has made a cold peace with Israel. The direction it now takes will be pivotal to the region.
The arguments of those who say, “Better the devil you know” are already clear. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel-prize-winning Egyptian opposition leader, has immense stature but no organization. The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamist Israel haters, will fill any void. Look at what Arab democracy brings: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and chaos in Iraq! You want that in Egyptian guise?
These arguments are facile, as Tunisia, with its very un-Islamic revolution, has just demonstrated, and Turkish democracy shows, and Egyptian restraint suggests. They only perpetuate Middle Eastern dysfunction. They ignore America’s sway over Egypt’s Army as a critical moderating force — and ElBaradei’s rapid emergence as unifier.
Yes, Iraqi democracy is messy, but will prove healthier than Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. A Hezbollah-backed prime minister just came to power in Lebanon, but through a constitutional process — and life goes on. The Palestinian stab at democracy has proved divisive but also produced in the West Bank precisely the move from a culture of victimhood and paralysis that other Arabs are now following.
Indeed, with its fast-growing economy and institution-building the West Bank is an example to the dawning Arab world — and would be more so if Israel helped rather than blocked and hindered.
Nothing good can get built on the false foundation of Arab absolutism with its decades of waste: That’s the irrefutable argument for change.
Images of Cairo 2011 plunge me back to Tehran 2009, when another repressive Muslim — but not Arab — nation stood on a razor’s edge. Henry Precht, an author and former U.S. diplomat, has pointed out some differences: 40 percent of Egyptians make less than $2 a day while such poverty is less widespread in Iran; Iranian women are far more present in universities; literacy is higher in Iran, the fertility rate lower. As Precht writes, “Iranian politics, though badly flawed, offers more elements of democracy than Egypt’s.”
These are perhaps some indices of why the Islamic Republic proved more resilient than Mubarak’s Egypt seems today. Still, Iran’s paranoid rulers will shudder at Egyptian people power.
A representative Egyptian government — the one whose birth pangs I believe we are witnessing — will talk about Israel one day and may be less pliant to America’s will. But it would carry a vital message for Arabs and Jews: Victimhood is self-defeating and paralyzing — and can be overcome.
You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/opini ... nted=print
Exit the Israel Alibi
By ROGER COHEN
LONDON — One way to measure the immense distance traveled by Arabs over the past month is to note the one big subject they are not talking about: Israel.
For too long, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the great diversion, exploited by feckless Arab autocrats to distract impoverished populations. None of these Arab leaders ever bothered to visit the West Bank. That did not stop them embracing the justice of the Palestinian cause even as they trampled on justice at home.
Now, Arabs are thinking about their own injustices. With great courage, they are saying “Enough!”
The big shift is in the captive Arab mind. It is an immense journey from a culture of victimhood to one of self-empowerment, from a culture of conspiracy to one of construction. It is a long road from rage to responsibility, from humiliation to action.
The Muslim suicide bomber aims fury at a perceived outside enemy. Self-immolation, the spark to this great pan-Arab uprising, betrays similar desperation, but directed inward. The outer scapegoat is replaced as the target by the inner Arab culprit.
Change won’t come overnight, and won’t be without pain, but Arabs have embarked on it — and the United States must support them without equivocation. Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, is finished: It is only a matter of time. No wonder the Obama administration is calling for an “orderly transition.”
Sure, there is risk. There always is in change. But nothing in the Arab genome says democracy, liberty and plain decency are unattainable.
Remember, Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 attack, came from Hosni Mubarak’s Egypt. The vast majority of Atta’s henchmen came from another U.S.-backed Arab autocracy, Saudi Arabia. They did not come from Iran. They did not come from Lebanon — or Gaza.
President George W. Bush was right in 2003: “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export.” And Condoleezza Rice was right to note that the U.S. promotion of “stability” — read autocracy — had allowed “a very malignant, meaning cancerous, form of extremism to grow up underneath.”
Bush and Rice were also, however, the authors of the Iraq invasion. This destroyed their credibility on Arab liberation. Their Middle East democracy agenda went nowhere. But, self-generated, it remains the right goal.
A 2008 study by West Point’s Combating Terrorism Center found that 60 percent of Al Qaeda in Iraq fighters were of Saudi or Libyan origin: the handiwork of those alibi-seeking Arab despots again.
I spoke of risk. Egypt is not Tunisia, it’s the epicenter of the Arab world, self-styled “mother of the world,” a supporter of U.S. interests, a big nation that has made a cold peace with Israel. The direction it now takes will be pivotal to the region.
The arguments of those who say, “Better the devil you know” are already clear. Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel-prize-winning Egyptian opposition leader, has immense stature but no organization. The Muslim Brotherhood, Islamist Israel haters, will fill any void. Look at what Arab democracy brings: Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon and chaos in Iraq! You want that in Egyptian guise?
These arguments are facile, as Tunisia, with its very un-Islamic revolution, has just demonstrated, and Turkish democracy shows, and Egyptian restraint suggests. They only perpetuate Middle Eastern dysfunction. They ignore America’s sway over Egypt’s Army as a critical moderating force — and ElBaradei’s rapid emergence as unifier.
Yes, Iraqi democracy is messy, but will prove healthier than Saddam Hussein’s tyranny. A Hezbollah-backed prime minister just came to power in Lebanon, but through a constitutional process — and life goes on. The Palestinian stab at democracy has proved divisive but also produced in the West Bank precisely the move from a culture of victimhood and paralysis that other Arabs are now following.
Indeed, with its fast-growing economy and institution-building the West Bank is an example to the dawning Arab world — and would be more so if Israel helped rather than blocked and hindered.
Nothing good can get built on the false foundation of Arab absolutism with its decades of waste: That’s the irrefutable argument for change.
Images of Cairo 2011 plunge me back to Tehran 2009, when another repressive Muslim — but not Arab — nation stood on a razor’s edge. Henry Precht, an author and former U.S. diplomat, has pointed out some differences: 40 percent of Egyptians make less than $2 a day while such poverty is less widespread in Iran; Iranian women are far more present in universities; literacy is higher in Iran, the fertility rate lower. As Precht writes, “Iranian politics, though badly flawed, offers more elements of democracy than Egypt’s.”
These are perhaps some indices of why the Islamic Republic proved more resilient than Mubarak’s Egypt seems today. Still, Iran’s paranoid rulers will shudder at Egyptian people power.
A representative Egyptian government — the one whose birth pangs I believe we are witnessing — will talk about Israel one day and may be less pliant to America’s will. But it would carry a vital message for Arabs and Jews: Victimhood is self-defeating and paralyzing — and can be overcome.
You can follow Roger Cohen on Twitter at twitter.com/nytimescohen.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/01/opini ... nted=print
Iran and Egypt, Twin Outsiders of the Muslim World
by MOHAMAD KORRANI
04 Feb 2011 17:451 Comment
15ceuqa.jpgA resonant history of influence and inspiration suggests it is now the turn of the Iranian people, and soon.
[ comment ] Tahseen Bashir, the late Egyptian intellectual and erudite diplomat, once said that Egypt and Iran are the only two real countries in the region, and the rest are simply "tribes with flags."
The cataclysmic events in Egypt have got Iranians thinking, Will the same eventually happen in Iran?
This question is new neither to Iranians nor Egyptians. A close look at the history of the two nations reveals enough precedents to suggest that Iran will one way or another follow, or rather, sooner or later respond significantly to the events in Egypt.
The two nations share an important legacy. They were both sites of grand and ancient empires before the Islamic conquest. The resulting "empire consciousness" always set them apart from the Muslim epicenter. Though they were vanquished militarily, they never acquiesced to the superiority of the Bedouin culture. It is not by chance that the first challenge to the Abbasid Empire emanating from the Arabian Peninsula was in the form of the Fatimid state in Egypt with Ismailism as its official religion.
The intellectual dialogue between Fatimid Egypt and Iranians was vast and multifaceted and Iranians responded by starting their own Ismaili movement. It failed politically but succeeded culturally, producing some of the grandest works of Iranian literature and thought like the Safarnama (Book of Travels) of Nasser Khosrow, the History of Beyhaghi, and the philosophy of Avicenna.
The Ismaili cultural movement in turn laid the groundwork for the rise of Shiism in Iran, which eventually led to the formation of the first native Iranian state after the Arab conquest, the Safavid Empire.
The Fatimid Empire of Egypt and the Safavid Empire of Iran shared two important bequests: Both were outsiders in the Muslim world pushing against the mainstream "orthodox Islamic party line," represented by the Abbasid and Ottoman empires, and both were heirs to profound intellectual movements within the Islamic world.
The next close encounter between Egypt and Iran was in the nineteenth and early twentieth century when the Asiatic empires of yore collapsed under the challenge of modernity at a time when the two civilizations were experimenting with nation building.
First, Egypt under Mohammed Ali Pasha began founding a modern state through the establishment of a professional bureaucracy, civil code of laws, secular judiciary, modern educational system, and public works. Similar to Fatimid times, Egypt became a hub for Iranian intellectual expatriates. They took the modern ideas they encountered there and exported them home though various means such as the Cairo-based Persian-language newspaper Sorraya (Pleiades), which played an important part in Iran's Constitutional Revolution.
Mohamed Ali's reforms and state-building efforts deeply affected Egyptian society and later became the blueprint for Turkey's Kemal Ataturk and Iran's Reza Shah Pahlavi. The shared path of the two modernizing dynasties was highlighted by an intermarriage between Princess Fawzia of Egypt and Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the future Shah.
The post-World War II era and the rise of nationalism in the region similarly impacted the two countries. Iran's move to nationalize its oil industry in 1951 served as a model for the 1952 Officers' Coup in Egypt and Gamal Abdel Nasser never failed to name Mohammad Mosaddegh as his role model. After Mosaddegh was deposed in a western-backed coup, Iran switched course after 1953 and followed the Egypt/Mohammed Ali development model while Egypt pursued the Iran/Mosaddegh model, putting the two countries at odds for 20 years.
Subsequent to the failure of Nasserism in Egypt, evidenced by its military defeat in 1967, the country reverted to the Mohammed Ali, pro-Western model that had been retained as the state model throughout the Pahlavi period in Iran. That led to the eventual rapprochement of the two countries and a strong alliance and friendship between the two heads of state, the Shah and Anwar Sadat.
In the late 1920s, the Islamic cultural authenticity movement had begun in Egypt with the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, which played an important role in the empowerment of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Similar to the 12th-century relationship between the Fatimids of Egypt and the Ismailis in Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo helped form secret cells in Iran that culminated in the formation of the Fedayeen of Islam, an antimodernist, militant terrorist sect. Though few in number, the Fedayeen had a formative impact on the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Iran and played a crucial role in the success of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the subsequent absolute clerical domination of the state.
Ironically, the relationship between Mosaddegh and Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Fedayeen of Islam led to inverse outcomes in Iran and Egypt. As Nasser rode to success in Egypt, riding high on a populist movement that started in Iran, the Fedayeen triumphed in Iran fired by the ideas of a group that sprang up in Egypt. Today, the Muslim Brotherhood has shifted ideologically toward a liberal Muslim viewpoint similar to Mehdi Bazargan's anti-Shah freedom movement in pre-revolutionary Iran or Turkey's Refah (Welfare) Party, while the Fedayeen ideology has been further radicalized.
The current epochal development in Egypt -- the swift and unexpected rise of a strong multiclass, nonviolent, nonideological, leaderless, organic movement calling for basic necessities and civil liberties -- is a virtual replica of what occurred in Iran in response to the fraudulent 2009 elections. Egyptians took to the streets for the same reasons that Iranians revolted in 2009, similarly employing the Internet -- Facebook and Twitter, in particular -- to mobilize dissent: a keystroke movement. Once again and true to the dichotomous yet wedded history of the two nations, the Iranian model appears to have gained political ground in Egypt.
Considering the linked history of the two nations and the unusually symmetrical exchanges between these two cultural centers of the Islamic world, there is no doubt that the ball is now in Iran's court. The question is therefore not whether but when will Iran follow Egypt and in what manner.
Members of Tehran's political elite from every shade of the ideological rainbow have been quick to claim credit for events in Egypt, attaching it to their respective political agendas within the confines of the prevailing theocracy. What they appear not to be perceiving is that the flood of unprecedented numbers of young men and women onto the streets of Cairo and Tehran thirsty and hungry, impatient and restless for change, is not just another chapter in Islamic ideological discourse but the inauguration of a completely new era.
These young people have no memory of the Islamic revolution or nativist nationalism or third worldist socialism. Their existence, their weight, and their inalienable civil rights are organic, overt, incontestable, realistic, and do not fit any preordained ideological narrative. They will build their future very swiftly, through the prism of modernity and in the mirror of democracy. It will only be then that the Muslim world will be truly integrated with the modern world -- or, as happened 800 years ago, the periphery will become the center.
The author writes under a pen name.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... urce=feeds#
by MOHAMAD KORRANI
04 Feb 2011 17:451 Comment
15ceuqa.jpgA resonant history of influence and inspiration suggests it is now the turn of the Iranian people, and soon.
[ comment ] Tahseen Bashir, the late Egyptian intellectual and erudite diplomat, once said that Egypt and Iran are the only two real countries in the region, and the rest are simply "tribes with flags."
The cataclysmic events in Egypt have got Iranians thinking, Will the same eventually happen in Iran?
This question is new neither to Iranians nor Egyptians. A close look at the history of the two nations reveals enough precedents to suggest that Iran will one way or another follow, or rather, sooner or later respond significantly to the events in Egypt.
The two nations share an important legacy. They were both sites of grand and ancient empires before the Islamic conquest. The resulting "empire consciousness" always set them apart from the Muslim epicenter. Though they were vanquished militarily, they never acquiesced to the superiority of the Bedouin culture. It is not by chance that the first challenge to the Abbasid Empire emanating from the Arabian Peninsula was in the form of the Fatimid state in Egypt with Ismailism as its official religion.
The intellectual dialogue between Fatimid Egypt and Iranians was vast and multifaceted and Iranians responded by starting their own Ismaili movement. It failed politically but succeeded culturally, producing some of the grandest works of Iranian literature and thought like the Safarnama (Book of Travels) of Nasser Khosrow, the History of Beyhaghi, and the philosophy of Avicenna.
The Ismaili cultural movement in turn laid the groundwork for the rise of Shiism in Iran, which eventually led to the formation of the first native Iranian state after the Arab conquest, the Safavid Empire.
The Fatimid Empire of Egypt and the Safavid Empire of Iran shared two important bequests: Both were outsiders in the Muslim world pushing against the mainstream "orthodox Islamic party line," represented by the Abbasid and Ottoman empires, and both were heirs to profound intellectual movements within the Islamic world.
The next close encounter between Egypt and Iran was in the nineteenth and early twentieth century when the Asiatic empires of yore collapsed under the challenge of modernity at a time when the two civilizations were experimenting with nation building.
First, Egypt under Mohammed Ali Pasha began founding a modern state through the establishment of a professional bureaucracy, civil code of laws, secular judiciary, modern educational system, and public works. Similar to Fatimid times, Egypt became a hub for Iranian intellectual expatriates. They took the modern ideas they encountered there and exported them home though various means such as the Cairo-based Persian-language newspaper Sorraya (Pleiades), which played an important part in Iran's Constitutional Revolution.
Mohamed Ali's reforms and state-building efforts deeply affected Egyptian society and later became the blueprint for Turkey's Kemal Ataturk and Iran's Reza Shah Pahlavi. The shared path of the two modernizing dynasties was highlighted by an intermarriage between Princess Fawzia of Egypt and Crown Prince Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the future Shah.
The post-World War II era and the rise of nationalism in the region similarly impacted the two countries. Iran's move to nationalize its oil industry in 1951 served as a model for the 1952 Officers' Coup in Egypt and Gamal Abdel Nasser never failed to name Mohammad Mosaddegh as his role model. After Mosaddegh was deposed in a western-backed coup, Iran switched course after 1953 and followed the Egypt/Mohammed Ali development model while Egypt pursued the Iran/Mosaddegh model, putting the two countries at odds for 20 years.
Subsequent to the failure of Nasserism in Egypt, evidenced by its military defeat in 1967, the country reverted to the Mohammed Ali, pro-Western model that had been retained as the state model throughout the Pahlavi period in Iran. That led to the eventual rapprochement of the two countries and a strong alliance and friendship between the two heads of state, the Shah and Anwar Sadat.
In the late 1920s, the Islamic cultural authenticity movement had begun in Egypt with the formation of the Muslim Brotherhood, which played an important role in the empowerment of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Similar to the 12th-century relationship between the Fatimids of Egypt and the Ismailis in Iran, the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo helped form secret cells in Iran that culminated in the formation of the Fedayeen of Islam, an antimodernist, militant terrorist sect. Though few in number, the Fedayeen had a formative impact on the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Iran and played a crucial role in the success of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the subsequent absolute clerical domination of the state.
Ironically, the relationship between Mosaddegh and Nasser and the Muslim Brotherhood and the Fedayeen of Islam led to inverse outcomes in Iran and Egypt. As Nasser rode to success in Egypt, riding high on a populist movement that started in Iran, the Fedayeen triumphed in Iran fired by the ideas of a group that sprang up in Egypt. Today, the Muslim Brotherhood has shifted ideologically toward a liberal Muslim viewpoint similar to Mehdi Bazargan's anti-Shah freedom movement in pre-revolutionary Iran or Turkey's Refah (Welfare) Party, while the Fedayeen ideology has been further radicalized.
The current epochal development in Egypt -- the swift and unexpected rise of a strong multiclass, nonviolent, nonideological, leaderless, organic movement calling for basic necessities and civil liberties -- is a virtual replica of what occurred in Iran in response to the fraudulent 2009 elections. Egyptians took to the streets for the same reasons that Iranians revolted in 2009, similarly employing the Internet -- Facebook and Twitter, in particular -- to mobilize dissent: a keystroke movement. Once again and true to the dichotomous yet wedded history of the two nations, the Iranian model appears to have gained political ground in Egypt.
Considering the linked history of the two nations and the unusually symmetrical exchanges between these two cultural centers of the Islamic world, there is no doubt that the ball is now in Iran's court. The question is therefore not whether but when will Iran follow Egypt and in what manner.
Members of Tehran's political elite from every shade of the ideological rainbow have been quick to claim credit for events in Egypt, attaching it to their respective political agendas within the confines of the prevailing theocracy. What they appear not to be perceiving is that the flood of unprecedented numbers of young men and women onto the streets of Cairo and Tehran thirsty and hungry, impatient and restless for change, is not just another chapter in Islamic ideological discourse but the inauguration of a completely new era.
These young people have no memory of the Islamic revolution or nativist nationalism or third worldist socialism. Their existence, their weight, and their inalienable civil rights are organic, overt, incontestable, realistic, and do not fit any preordained ideological narrative. They will build their future very swiftly, through the prism of modernity and in the mirror of democracy. It will only be then that the Muslim world will be truly integrated with the modern world -- or, as happened 800 years ago, the periphery will become the center.
The author writes under a pen name.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline ... urce=feeds#
February 5, 2011
China, Twitter and 20-Year-Olds vs. the Pyramids
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Amman, Jordan
Anyone who’s long followed the Middle East knows that the six most dangerous words after any cataclysmic event in this region are: “Things will never be the same.” After all, this region absorbed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Google without a ripple.
But traveling through Israel, the West Bank and Jordan to measure the shock waves from Egypt, I’m convinced that the forces that were upholding the status quo here for so long — oil, autocracy, the distraction of Israel, and a fear of the chaos that could come with change — have finally met an engine of change that is even more powerful: China, Twitter and 20-year-olds.
Of course, China per se is not fueling the revolt here — but China and the whole Asian-led developing world’s rising consumption of meat, corn, sugar, wheat and oil certainly is. The rise in food and gasoline prices that slammed into this region in the last six months clearly sharpened discontent with the illegitimate regimes — particularly among the young, poor and unemployed.
This is why every government out here is now rushing to increase subsidies and boost wages — even without knowing how to pay for it, or worse, taking it from capital budgets to build schools and infrastructure. King Abdullah II of Jordan just gave every soldier and civil servant a $30-a-month pay raise, along with new food and gasoline subsidies. Kuwait’s government last week announced a “gift” of about $3,500 to each of Kuwait’s 1.1 million citizens and about $850 million in food subsidies.
But China is a challenge for Egypt and Jordan in other ways. Several years ago, I wrote about Egyptian entrepreneurs who were importing traditional lanterns for Ramadan — with microchips in them that played Egyptian folk songs — from China. When China can make Egyptian Ramadan toys more cheaply and appealingly than low-wage Egyptians, you know there is problem of competitiveness.
Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia today are overflowing with the most frustrated cohort in the world — “the educated unemployables.” They have college degrees on paper but really don’t have the skills to make them globally competitive. I was just in Singapore. Its government is obsessed with things as small as how to better teach fractions to third graders. That has not been Hosni Mubarak’s obsession.
I look at the young protesters who gathered in downtown Amman today, and the thousands who gathered in Egypt and Tunis, and my heart aches for them. So much human potential, but they have no idea how far behind they are — or maybe they do and that’s why they’re revolting. Egypt’s government has wasted the last 30 years — i.e., their whole lives — plying them with the soft bigotry of low expectations: “Be patient. Egypt moves at its own pace, like the Nile.” Well, great. Singapore also moves at its own pace, like the Internet.
The Arab world has 100 million young people today between the ages of 15 and 29, many of them males who do not have the education to get a good job, buy an apartment and get married. That is trouble. Add in rising food prices, and the diffusion of Twitter, Facebook and texting, which finally gives them a voice to talk back to their leaders and directly to each other, and you have a very powerful change engine.
I have not been to Jordan for a while, but my ears are ringing today with complaints about corruption, frustration with the king and queen, and disgust at the enormous gaps between rich and poor. King Abdullah, who sacked his cabinet last week and promised real reform and real political parties, has his work cut out for him. And given some of the blogs that my friends here have shared with me from the biggest local Web site, Ammonnews.net, the people are not going to settle for the same-old, same-old. They say so directly now, dropping the old pretense of signing antigovernment blog posts as “Mohammed living in Sweden.”
Jordan is not going to blow up — today. The country is balanced between East Bank Bedouin tribes and West Bank Palestinians, who fought a civil war in 1970. “There is no way that the East Bankers would join with the Palestinians to topple the Hashemite monarchy,” a retired Jordanian general remarked to me. But this balance also makes reform difficult. The East Bankers overwhelmingly staff the army and government jobs. They prefer the welfare state, and hate both “privatization” and what they call “the digitals,” the young Jordanian techies pushing for reform. The Palestinians dominate commerce but also greatly value the stability the Hashemite monarchy provides.
Egypt was definitely a wake-up call for Jordan’s monarchy. The king’s challenge going forward is to convince his people that “their voices are going to be louder in the voting booth than in the street,” said Salah Eddin al-Bashir, a member of Jordan’s Senate.
As for Cairo, I think the real story in Egypt today is the 1952 revolution, led from the top by the military, versus the 2011 revolution, led from below by the people. The Egyptian Army has become a huge patronage system, with business interests and vast perks for its leaders. For Egypt to have a happy ending, the army has to give up some of its power and set up a fair political transition process that gives the Egyptian center the space to build precisely what Mubarak refused to permit — legitimate, independent, modernizing, secular parties — that can compete in free elections against the Muslim Brotherhood, now the only authentic party.
If that happens, I am not the least bit worried about the Muslim Brotherhoods in Jordan or Egypt hijacking the future. Actually, they should be worried. The Brotherhoods have had it easy in a way. They had no legitimate secular political opponents. The regimes prevented that so they could tell the world it is either “us or the Islamists.” As a result, I think, the Islamists have gotten intellectually lazy. All they had to say was “Islam is the answer” or “Hosni Mubarak is a Zionist” and they could win 20 percent of the vote. Now, if Egypt and Jordan can build a new politics, the Muslim Brotherhood will, for the first time, have real competition from the moderate center in both countries — and they know it.
“If leaders don’t think in new ways, there are vacancies for them in museums,” said Zaki Bani Rsheid, political director of Jordan’s Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm. When I asked Rsheid if his own party was up for this competition, he stopped speaking in Arabic and said to me in English, with a little twinkle in his eye: “Yes we can.”
I hope so, and I also hope that events in Egypt and Jordan finally create a chance for legitimate modern Arab democratic parties to test him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opini ... emc=tha212
China, Twitter and 20-Year-Olds vs. the Pyramids
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Amman, Jordan
Anyone who’s long followed the Middle East knows that the six most dangerous words after any cataclysmic event in this region are: “Things will never be the same.” After all, this region absorbed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of Google without a ripple.
But traveling through Israel, the West Bank and Jordan to measure the shock waves from Egypt, I’m convinced that the forces that were upholding the status quo here for so long — oil, autocracy, the distraction of Israel, and a fear of the chaos that could come with change — have finally met an engine of change that is even more powerful: China, Twitter and 20-year-olds.
Of course, China per se is not fueling the revolt here — but China and the whole Asian-led developing world’s rising consumption of meat, corn, sugar, wheat and oil certainly is. The rise in food and gasoline prices that slammed into this region in the last six months clearly sharpened discontent with the illegitimate regimes — particularly among the young, poor and unemployed.
This is why every government out here is now rushing to increase subsidies and boost wages — even without knowing how to pay for it, or worse, taking it from capital budgets to build schools and infrastructure. King Abdullah II of Jordan just gave every soldier and civil servant a $30-a-month pay raise, along with new food and gasoline subsidies. Kuwait’s government last week announced a “gift” of about $3,500 to each of Kuwait’s 1.1 million citizens and about $850 million in food subsidies.
But China is a challenge for Egypt and Jordan in other ways. Several years ago, I wrote about Egyptian entrepreneurs who were importing traditional lanterns for Ramadan — with microchips in them that played Egyptian folk songs — from China. When China can make Egyptian Ramadan toys more cheaply and appealingly than low-wage Egyptians, you know there is problem of competitiveness.
Egypt, Jordan, Yemen, Tunisia today are overflowing with the most frustrated cohort in the world — “the educated unemployables.” They have college degrees on paper but really don’t have the skills to make them globally competitive. I was just in Singapore. Its government is obsessed with things as small as how to better teach fractions to third graders. That has not been Hosni Mubarak’s obsession.
I look at the young protesters who gathered in downtown Amman today, and the thousands who gathered in Egypt and Tunis, and my heart aches for them. So much human potential, but they have no idea how far behind they are — or maybe they do and that’s why they’re revolting. Egypt’s government has wasted the last 30 years — i.e., their whole lives — plying them with the soft bigotry of low expectations: “Be patient. Egypt moves at its own pace, like the Nile.” Well, great. Singapore also moves at its own pace, like the Internet.
The Arab world has 100 million young people today between the ages of 15 and 29, many of them males who do not have the education to get a good job, buy an apartment and get married. That is trouble. Add in rising food prices, and the diffusion of Twitter, Facebook and texting, which finally gives them a voice to talk back to their leaders and directly to each other, and you have a very powerful change engine.
I have not been to Jordan for a while, but my ears are ringing today with complaints about corruption, frustration with the king and queen, and disgust at the enormous gaps between rich and poor. King Abdullah, who sacked his cabinet last week and promised real reform and real political parties, has his work cut out for him. And given some of the blogs that my friends here have shared with me from the biggest local Web site, Ammonnews.net, the people are not going to settle for the same-old, same-old. They say so directly now, dropping the old pretense of signing antigovernment blog posts as “Mohammed living in Sweden.”
Jordan is not going to blow up — today. The country is balanced between East Bank Bedouin tribes and West Bank Palestinians, who fought a civil war in 1970. “There is no way that the East Bankers would join with the Palestinians to topple the Hashemite monarchy,” a retired Jordanian general remarked to me. But this balance also makes reform difficult. The East Bankers overwhelmingly staff the army and government jobs. They prefer the welfare state, and hate both “privatization” and what they call “the digitals,” the young Jordanian techies pushing for reform. The Palestinians dominate commerce but also greatly value the stability the Hashemite monarchy provides.
Egypt was definitely a wake-up call for Jordan’s monarchy. The king’s challenge going forward is to convince his people that “their voices are going to be louder in the voting booth than in the street,” said Salah Eddin al-Bashir, a member of Jordan’s Senate.
As for Cairo, I think the real story in Egypt today is the 1952 revolution, led from the top by the military, versus the 2011 revolution, led from below by the people. The Egyptian Army has become a huge patronage system, with business interests and vast perks for its leaders. For Egypt to have a happy ending, the army has to give up some of its power and set up a fair political transition process that gives the Egyptian center the space to build precisely what Mubarak refused to permit — legitimate, independent, modernizing, secular parties — that can compete in free elections against the Muslim Brotherhood, now the only authentic party.
If that happens, I am not the least bit worried about the Muslim Brotherhoods in Jordan or Egypt hijacking the future. Actually, they should be worried. The Brotherhoods have had it easy in a way. They had no legitimate secular political opponents. The regimes prevented that so they could tell the world it is either “us or the Islamists.” As a result, I think, the Islamists have gotten intellectually lazy. All they had to say was “Islam is the answer” or “Hosni Mubarak is a Zionist” and they could win 20 percent of the vote. Now, if Egypt and Jordan can build a new politics, the Muslim Brotherhood will, for the first time, have real competition from the moderate center in both countries — and they know it.
“If leaders don’t think in new ways, there are vacancies for them in museums,” said Zaki Bani Rsheid, political director of Jordan’s Islamic Action Front, the Muslim Brotherhood’s political arm. When I asked Rsheid if his own party was up for this competition, he stopped speaking in Arabic and said to me in English, with a little twinkle in his eye: “Yes we can.”
I hope so, and I also hope that events in Egypt and Jordan finally create a chance for legitimate modern Arab democratic parties to test him.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opini ... emc=tha212
February 12, 2011
They Did It
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
CAIRO
In the end, President Obama made a hugely important but unintended contribution to the democracy revolution in Egypt. Because the Obama team never found the voice to fully endorse the Tahrir Square revolution until it was over, the people in that square now know one very powerful thing: They did this all by themselves. That is so important. One of the most powerful chants I heard in the square on Friday night was: “The people made the regime step down.”
This sense of self-empowerment and authenticity — we did this for ourselves, by ourselves — is what makes Egypt’s democracy movement such a potential game-changer for the whole region. And in case other autocrats haven’t picked up on that, let me share my second favorite chant from the streets of Cairo after President Hosni Mubarak resigned. It was directed at the dictator next door, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, and it went like this: “We’re not leaving Tahrir until Qaddafi leaves office.” Hello, Tripoli! Cairo calling.
This could get interesting — for all the region’s autocrats. Egypt’s youthful and resourceful democrats are just getting started. Up to now, the democracy movement in the Arab world was largely confined to the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, which, because it was U.S.-led, has not been able to serve as a model for emulation. If, and it remains a big if, Egypt can now make the transition to democracy, led by its own youth and under the protection of its own armed forces, watch out. The message coming out of Cairo will be: We tried Nasserism; we tried Islamism; and now we’re trying democracy. But not democracy imported from Britain or delivered by America — democracy conceived, gestated and born in Tahrir Square. That will resonate among Arabs — and in Iran.
Some people worry, though, that the Egyptian Army will strangle this Egyptian democracy movement in its crib. Personally, I think the army leadership is a little afraid of the Twitter-enabled Tahrir youth. The democracy movement that came out of Tahrir Square is like a tiger that has been living in a tiny cage for 30 years. Having watched it get loose, there are two things I would say about this tiger. One is that anyone who tries to put it back in that little cage will get his head bitten off. And, two, any politician who tries to ride the tiger for his own narrow interests, not for the benefit Egypt, will get eaten by it as well. Iran, the other day, issued a declaration urging the Tahrir youth to make an “Islamic revolution,” and none other than Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood told Tehran to get lost because the democracy movement here is pan-Egyptian and includes Christians and Muslims.
But here’s the big question in Egypt now: Can this youth-led democracy movement take the power and energy it developed in Tahrir Square, which was all focused on one goal — getting rid of Hosni Mubarak — and turn it into a sustainable transition to democracy, with a new constitution, multiple political parties and a free presidential election in a timely fashion? Here, the movement’s strength — the fact that it represented every political strain, every segment and class in Egyptian society — is also its weakness. It still has no accepted political platform or leadership.
“It is essential that the democracy movement now form its own leadership and lay down its own vision and priorities which it can hold the government to. Otherwise, all this effort can be lost,” cautioned Rachid Mohamed Rachid, the liberal former minister of trade and industry, who declined to continue serving in Mubarak’s cabinet before the revolt happened. “They have to have a vision of what Egyptian education should be, about agriculture policy and human rights. Getting rid of Mubarak was not the only hope. That ultimate goal is to have a new Egypt.”
Ever since this revolt started, America, Israel and Saudi Arabia seemed to hope that there were two choices here — one called “stability” that would somehow involve Mubarak, and the other called “instability,” which was to be avoided. Well, let me put this as plainly as possible: Here in Egypt, stability has left the building. For which I say: good riddance. Or as Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian-American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, put it to me: Egypt was stable these past 30 years because it had no vision, no aspiration and was “stagnating.” That kind of stability couldn’t last.
That’s why today Egypt has before it only two paths, and both are unstable. One is where this democracy movement falters and Egypt turns into an angry Pakistan, as it was under the generals. And the other is the necessarily unstable, up and down transition to democracy, which ends stably with Egypt looking like Indonesia or South Africa.
This will be hard. Many tough days lie ahead, but they will be made much easier thanks to the self-confidence bred here among Egypt’s youth the past three weeks. Watching so many Egyptians take pride in their generally peaceful birth of freedom — to listen to them say in different ways to themselves and each other, “I am somebody” — was to witness one of the great triumphs of the human spirit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/opini ... emc=tha212
*****
February 12, 2011
What Egypt Can Teach America
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
It’s a new day in the Arab world — and, let’s hope, in American relations to the Arab world.
The truth is that the United States has been behind the curve not only in Tunisia and Egypt for the last few weeks, but in the entire Middle East for decades. We supported corrupt autocrats as long as they kept oil flowing and weren’t too aggressive toward Israel. Even in the last month, we sometimes seemed as out of touch with the region’s youth as a Ben Ali or a Mubarak. Recognizing that crafting foreign policy is 1,000 times harder than it looks, let me suggest four lessons to draw from our mistakes:
1.) Stop treating Islamic fundamentalism as a bogyman and allowing it to drive American foreign policy. American paranoia about Islamism has done as much damage as Muslim fundamentalism itself.
In Somalia, it led the U.S. to wink at a 2006 Ethiopian invasion that was catastrophic for Somalis and resulted in more Islamic extremism there. And in Egypt, our foreboding about Islamism paralyzed us and put us on the wrong side of history.
We tie ourselves in knots when we act as if democracy is good for the United States and Israel but not for the Arab world. For far too long, we’ve treated the Arab world as just an oil field.
Too many Americans bought into a lazy stereotype that Arab countries were inhospitable for democracy, or that the beneficiaries of popular rule would be extremists like Osama bin Laden. Tunisians and Egyptians have shattered that stereotype, and the biggest loser will be Al Qaeda. We don’t know what lies ahead for Egypt — and there is a considerable risk that those in power will attempt to preserve Mubarakism without Mr. Mubarak — but already Egyptians have demonstrated the power of nonviolence in a way that undermines the entire extremist narrative. It will be fascinating to see whether more Palestinians embrace mass nonviolent protests in the West Bank as a strategy to confront illegal Israeli settlements and land grabs.
2.) We need better intelligence, the kind that is derived not from intercepting a president’s phone calls to his mistress but from hanging out with the powerless. After the 1979 Iranian revolution, there was a painful post-mortem about why the intelligence community missed so many signals, and I think we need the same today.
In fairness, we in the journalistic community suffered the same shortcoming: we didn’t adequately convey the anger toward Hosni Mubarak. Egypt is a reminder not to be suckered into the narrative that a place is stable because it is static.
3.) New technologies have lubricated the mechanisms of revolt. Facebook and Twitter make it easier for dissidents to network. Mobile phones mean that government brutality is more likely to end up on YouTube, raising the costs of repression. The International Criminal Court encourages dictators to think twice before ordering troops to open fire.
Maybe the most critical technology — and this is tough for a scribbler like myself to admit — is television. It was Arab satellite television broadcasts like those of Al Jazeera that broke the government monopoly on information in Egypt. Too often, Americans scorn Al Jazeera (and its English service is on few cable systems), but it played a greater role in promoting democracy in the Arab world than anything the United States did.
We should invest more in these information technologies. The best way to nurture changes in Iran, North Korea and Cuba will involve broadcasts, mobile phones and proxy servers to leap over Internet barriers. Congress has allocated small sums to promote global Internet freedom, and this initiative could be a much more powerful tool in our foreign policy arsenal.
4.) Let’s live our values. We pursued a Middle East realpolitik that failed us. Condi Rice had it right when she said in Egypt in 2005: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”
I don’t know which country is the next Egypt. Some say it’s Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Syria or Saudi Arabia. Others suggest Cuba or China are vulnerable. But we know that in many places there is deep-seated discontent and a profound yearning for greater political participation. And the lesson of history from 1848 to 1989 is that uprisings go viral and ricochet from nation to nation. Next time, let’s not sit on the fence.
After a long wishy-washy stage, President Obama got it pitch-perfect on Friday when he spoke after the fall of Mr. Mubarak. He forthrightly backed people power, while making clear that the future is for Egyptians to decide. Let’s hope that reflects a new start not only for Egypt but also for American policy toward the Arab world. Inshallah.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/opini ... emc=tha212
They Did It
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
CAIRO
In the end, President Obama made a hugely important but unintended contribution to the democracy revolution in Egypt. Because the Obama team never found the voice to fully endorse the Tahrir Square revolution until it was over, the people in that square now know one very powerful thing: They did this all by themselves. That is so important. One of the most powerful chants I heard in the square on Friday night was: “The people made the regime step down.”
This sense of self-empowerment and authenticity — we did this for ourselves, by ourselves — is what makes Egypt’s democracy movement such a potential game-changer for the whole region. And in case other autocrats haven’t picked up on that, let me share my second favorite chant from the streets of Cairo after President Hosni Mubarak resigned. It was directed at the dictator next door, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya, and it went like this: “We’re not leaving Tahrir until Qaddafi leaves office.” Hello, Tripoli! Cairo calling.
This could get interesting — for all the region’s autocrats. Egypt’s youthful and resourceful democrats are just getting started. Up to now, the democracy movement in the Arab world was largely confined to the U.S.-led liberation of Iraq, which, because it was U.S.-led, has not been able to serve as a model for emulation. If, and it remains a big if, Egypt can now make the transition to democracy, led by its own youth and under the protection of its own armed forces, watch out. The message coming out of Cairo will be: We tried Nasserism; we tried Islamism; and now we’re trying democracy. But not democracy imported from Britain or delivered by America — democracy conceived, gestated and born in Tahrir Square. That will resonate among Arabs — and in Iran.
Some people worry, though, that the Egyptian Army will strangle this Egyptian democracy movement in its crib. Personally, I think the army leadership is a little afraid of the Twitter-enabled Tahrir youth. The democracy movement that came out of Tahrir Square is like a tiger that has been living in a tiny cage for 30 years. Having watched it get loose, there are two things I would say about this tiger. One is that anyone who tries to put it back in that little cage will get his head bitten off. And, two, any politician who tries to ride the tiger for his own narrow interests, not for the benefit Egypt, will get eaten by it as well. Iran, the other day, issued a declaration urging the Tahrir youth to make an “Islamic revolution,” and none other than Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood told Tehran to get lost because the democracy movement here is pan-Egyptian and includes Christians and Muslims.
But here’s the big question in Egypt now: Can this youth-led democracy movement take the power and energy it developed in Tahrir Square, which was all focused on one goal — getting rid of Hosni Mubarak — and turn it into a sustainable transition to democracy, with a new constitution, multiple political parties and a free presidential election in a timely fashion? Here, the movement’s strength — the fact that it represented every political strain, every segment and class in Egyptian society — is also its weakness. It still has no accepted political platform or leadership.
“It is essential that the democracy movement now form its own leadership and lay down its own vision and priorities which it can hold the government to. Otherwise, all this effort can be lost,” cautioned Rachid Mohamed Rachid, the liberal former minister of trade and industry, who declined to continue serving in Mubarak’s cabinet before the revolt happened. “They have to have a vision of what Egyptian education should be, about agriculture policy and human rights. Getting rid of Mubarak was not the only hope. That ultimate goal is to have a new Egypt.”
Ever since this revolt started, America, Israel and Saudi Arabia seemed to hope that there were two choices here — one called “stability” that would somehow involve Mubarak, and the other called “instability,” which was to be avoided. Well, let me put this as plainly as possible: Here in Egypt, stability has left the building. For which I say: good riddance. Or as Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian-American Nobel Prize-winning chemist, put it to me: Egypt was stable these past 30 years because it had no vision, no aspiration and was “stagnating.” That kind of stability couldn’t last.
That’s why today Egypt has before it only two paths, and both are unstable. One is where this democracy movement falters and Egypt turns into an angry Pakistan, as it was under the generals. And the other is the necessarily unstable, up and down transition to democracy, which ends stably with Egypt looking like Indonesia or South Africa.
This will be hard. Many tough days lie ahead, but they will be made much easier thanks to the self-confidence bred here among Egypt’s youth the past three weeks. Watching so many Egyptians take pride in their generally peaceful birth of freedom — to listen to them say in different ways to themselves and each other, “I am somebody” — was to witness one of the great triumphs of the human spirit.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/opini ... emc=tha212
*****
February 12, 2011
What Egypt Can Teach America
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
It’s a new day in the Arab world — and, let’s hope, in American relations to the Arab world.
The truth is that the United States has been behind the curve not only in Tunisia and Egypt for the last few weeks, but in the entire Middle East for decades. We supported corrupt autocrats as long as they kept oil flowing and weren’t too aggressive toward Israel. Even in the last month, we sometimes seemed as out of touch with the region’s youth as a Ben Ali or a Mubarak. Recognizing that crafting foreign policy is 1,000 times harder than it looks, let me suggest four lessons to draw from our mistakes:
1.) Stop treating Islamic fundamentalism as a bogyman and allowing it to drive American foreign policy. American paranoia about Islamism has done as much damage as Muslim fundamentalism itself.
In Somalia, it led the U.S. to wink at a 2006 Ethiopian invasion that was catastrophic for Somalis and resulted in more Islamic extremism there. And in Egypt, our foreboding about Islamism paralyzed us and put us on the wrong side of history.
We tie ourselves in knots when we act as if democracy is good for the United States and Israel but not for the Arab world. For far too long, we’ve treated the Arab world as just an oil field.
Too many Americans bought into a lazy stereotype that Arab countries were inhospitable for democracy, or that the beneficiaries of popular rule would be extremists like Osama bin Laden. Tunisians and Egyptians have shattered that stereotype, and the biggest loser will be Al Qaeda. We don’t know what lies ahead for Egypt — and there is a considerable risk that those in power will attempt to preserve Mubarakism without Mr. Mubarak — but already Egyptians have demonstrated the power of nonviolence in a way that undermines the entire extremist narrative. It will be fascinating to see whether more Palestinians embrace mass nonviolent protests in the West Bank as a strategy to confront illegal Israeli settlements and land grabs.
2.) We need better intelligence, the kind that is derived not from intercepting a president’s phone calls to his mistress but from hanging out with the powerless. After the 1979 Iranian revolution, there was a painful post-mortem about why the intelligence community missed so many signals, and I think we need the same today.
In fairness, we in the journalistic community suffered the same shortcoming: we didn’t adequately convey the anger toward Hosni Mubarak. Egypt is a reminder not to be suckered into the narrative that a place is stable because it is static.
3.) New technologies have lubricated the mechanisms of revolt. Facebook and Twitter make it easier for dissidents to network. Mobile phones mean that government brutality is more likely to end up on YouTube, raising the costs of repression. The International Criminal Court encourages dictators to think twice before ordering troops to open fire.
Maybe the most critical technology — and this is tough for a scribbler like myself to admit — is television. It was Arab satellite television broadcasts like those of Al Jazeera that broke the government monopoly on information in Egypt. Too often, Americans scorn Al Jazeera (and its English service is on few cable systems), but it played a greater role in promoting democracy in the Arab world than anything the United States did.
We should invest more in these information technologies. The best way to nurture changes in Iran, North Korea and Cuba will involve broadcasts, mobile phones and proxy servers to leap over Internet barriers. Congress has allocated small sums to promote global Internet freedom, and this initiative could be a much more powerful tool in our foreign policy arsenal.
4.) Let’s live our values. We pursued a Middle East realpolitik that failed us. Condi Rice had it right when she said in Egypt in 2005: “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”
I don’t know which country is the next Egypt. Some say it’s Algeria, Morocco, Libya, Syria or Saudi Arabia. Others suggest Cuba or China are vulnerable. But we know that in many places there is deep-seated discontent and a profound yearning for greater political participation. And the lesson of history from 1848 to 1989 is that uprisings go viral and ricochet from nation to nation. Next time, let’s not sit on the fence.
After a long wishy-washy stage, President Obama got it pitch-perfect on Friday when he spoke after the fall of Mr. Mubarak. He forthrightly backed people power, while making clear that the future is for Egyptians to decide. Let’s hope that reflects a new start not only for Egypt but also for American policy toward the Arab world. Inshallah.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/opini ... emc=tha212
February 15, 2011
Pharaoh Without a Mummy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Cairo
One thing I can tell you about Egypt: It is not Las Vegas. What happens in Egypt does not stay in Egypt.
For the last 30 years, that has been the bad news. Egypt was in a state of drift and decline and, as a result, so was the Arab world at large. Egypt has now been awakened by its youth in a unique way — not to fight Israel, or America, but in a quest for personal empowerment, dignity and freedom. In this part of the world, people have very sensitive antennae for legitimacy and authenticity because they have been fed so many lies by their leaders. Because Egypt’s democracy revolution is so homegrown because the young people who led it suffered more dead to liberate Egypt than the entire Egyptian Army has suffered since the 1973 war to defend it, this movement here has enormous Arab street cred — and that is why, if it succeeds (and the odds are still long), other young Arabs and Muslims will emulate it.
Indeed, if it can move Egypt to democracy, this movement, combined with social media, will be more subversive to autocratic regimes than Nasserism, Islamism or Baathism combined. What emerged from below in Egypt is, for now, the first pan-Arab movement that is not focused on expelling someone, or excluding someone, but on universal values with the goal of overcoming the backwardness produced by all previous ideologies and leaders.
I understand why Israel is worried; a stable relationship with Hosni Mubarak has given way to a totally uncertain relationship with Egypt’s people. But Egypt’s stability under Mubarak was at the expense of those people, and they finally had had enough. There will be ugliness aplenty in the days ahead as Egyptians are free to vent. There is still a lot of pent-up fear and anger boiling here. But at least other authentic voices, with a different, more hopeful song, are also emerging.
Every Israeli and Saudi should watch this video made by the youth in Tahrir — www.memritv.org/clip/en/2804.htm — about their quest to bring their country “back from the dead.”
The Arab tyrants, precisely because they were illegitimate, were the ones who fed their people hatred of Israel as a diversion. If Israel could finalize a deal with the Palestinians, it will find that a more democratic Arab world is a more stable partner. Not because everyone will suddenly love Israel (they won’t). But because the voices that would continue calling for conflict would have legitimate competition, and democratically elected leaders will have to be much more responsive to their people’s priorities, which are for more schools not wars.
That is why the most valuable thing America could do now is to help Egypt’s democracy movement consolidate itself. And the best way to do that would be to speak its language. It would be to announce that the U.S. intends to divert $100 million of the $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt this year to build 10 world-class science and technology high schools — from Aswan to Alexandria — in honor of all Egyptians who brought about this democratic transformation.
“Nothing would have a bigger impact here,” said Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian-American Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry. Nothing would have a bigger impact on youth across the Middle East.
After all, the Egyptian Army has no external predators today. Egypt’s only predators today are poverty and illiteracy. Forty percent of Egyptians live on $2 a day and some 30 percent are illiterate.
On my way back from Tahrir Square on Saturday, I ran into five young Egyptians who were trying to wipe off “Leave Now, Mubarak” graffiti spray-painted on a stone wall. You don’t see students removing graffiti very often, so I asked them why. “Because he is not our president anymore,” said a youth with the rubber gloves and solvent. They just didn’t want to see his name anymore — even as the object of an insult.
As I kept walking to my hotel, I realized why. When I looked down at the Nile embankment — and this was central Cairo — all I saw was garbage strewn about, a crumbling sidewalk and weeds sprouting everywhere. I thought: If this were Sydney, Singapore or Istanbul, the government would have built a beautiful walkway along the banks of the Nile where Egyptians and visitors could stroll with families in the afternoon. Not here.
And that in my view was Mubarak’s greatest crime against his people. He had no vision, no high aspiration, no will for great educational attainment. He just had this wildly exaggerated sense of Egypt’s greatness based on the past. That is why I feel sorry for those Egyptians now clamoring to get back money they claim the Mubaraks stole. That is surely a crime, if true, but Mubarak is guilty of a much bigger, more profound, theft: all the wealth Egypt did not generate these past 30 years because of the poverty of his vision and the incompetence of his cronies.
“He is a pharaoh without a mummy,” the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem said to me of Mubarak. He left little trace. “Every Egyptian citizen is carrying inside them 100 short stories of pain and novels of grievance. Everyone has to pay for their children to take private lessons after school because the schools are so bad. Can you imagine? You prevent yourself from eating to pay for private lessons?” At least these rebellious youth, he added, “don’t know the rules, so they are not afraid of anything. They can do what our generation did not dare to think of.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/opini ... emc=tha212
Pharaoh Without a Mummy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Cairo
One thing I can tell you about Egypt: It is not Las Vegas. What happens in Egypt does not stay in Egypt.
For the last 30 years, that has been the bad news. Egypt was in a state of drift and decline and, as a result, so was the Arab world at large. Egypt has now been awakened by its youth in a unique way — not to fight Israel, or America, but in a quest for personal empowerment, dignity and freedom. In this part of the world, people have very sensitive antennae for legitimacy and authenticity because they have been fed so many lies by their leaders. Because Egypt’s democracy revolution is so homegrown because the young people who led it suffered more dead to liberate Egypt than the entire Egyptian Army has suffered since the 1973 war to defend it, this movement here has enormous Arab street cred — and that is why, if it succeeds (and the odds are still long), other young Arabs and Muslims will emulate it.
Indeed, if it can move Egypt to democracy, this movement, combined with social media, will be more subversive to autocratic regimes than Nasserism, Islamism or Baathism combined. What emerged from below in Egypt is, for now, the first pan-Arab movement that is not focused on expelling someone, or excluding someone, but on universal values with the goal of overcoming the backwardness produced by all previous ideologies and leaders.
I understand why Israel is worried; a stable relationship with Hosni Mubarak has given way to a totally uncertain relationship with Egypt’s people. But Egypt’s stability under Mubarak was at the expense of those people, and they finally had had enough. There will be ugliness aplenty in the days ahead as Egyptians are free to vent. There is still a lot of pent-up fear and anger boiling here. But at least other authentic voices, with a different, more hopeful song, are also emerging.
Every Israeli and Saudi should watch this video made by the youth in Tahrir — www.memritv.org/clip/en/2804.htm — about their quest to bring their country “back from the dead.”
The Arab tyrants, precisely because they were illegitimate, were the ones who fed their people hatred of Israel as a diversion. If Israel could finalize a deal with the Palestinians, it will find that a more democratic Arab world is a more stable partner. Not because everyone will suddenly love Israel (they won’t). But because the voices that would continue calling for conflict would have legitimate competition, and democratically elected leaders will have to be much more responsive to their people’s priorities, which are for more schools not wars.
That is why the most valuable thing America could do now is to help Egypt’s democracy movement consolidate itself. And the best way to do that would be to speak its language. It would be to announce that the U.S. intends to divert $100 million of the $1.3 billion in military aid to Egypt this year to build 10 world-class science and technology high schools — from Aswan to Alexandria — in honor of all Egyptians who brought about this democratic transformation.
“Nothing would have a bigger impact here,” said Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian-American Nobel Prize laureate in chemistry. Nothing would have a bigger impact on youth across the Middle East.
After all, the Egyptian Army has no external predators today. Egypt’s only predators today are poverty and illiteracy. Forty percent of Egyptians live on $2 a day and some 30 percent are illiterate.
On my way back from Tahrir Square on Saturday, I ran into five young Egyptians who were trying to wipe off “Leave Now, Mubarak” graffiti spray-painted on a stone wall. You don’t see students removing graffiti very often, so I asked them why. “Because he is not our president anymore,” said a youth with the rubber gloves and solvent. They just didn’t want to see his name anymore — even as the object of an insult.
As I kept walking to my hotel, I realized why. When I looked down at the Nile embankment — and this was central Cairo — all I saw was garbage strewn about, a crumbling sidewalk and weeds sprouting everywhere. I thought: If this were Sydney, Singapore or Istanbul, the government would have built a beautiful walkway along the banks of the Nile where Egyptians and visitors could stroll with families in the afternoon. Not here.
And that in my view was Mubarak’s greatest crime against his people. He had no vision, no high aspiration, no will for great educational attainment. He just had this wildly exaggerated sense of Egypt’s greatness based on the past. That is why I feel sorry for those Egyptians now clamoring to get back money they claim the Mubaraks stole. That is surely a crime, if true, but Mubarak is guilty of a much bigger, more profound, theft: all the wealth Egypt did not generate these past 30 years because of the poverty of his vision and the incompetence of his cronies.
“He is a pharaoh without a mummy,” the Egyptian playwright Ali Salem said to me of Mubarak. He left little trace. “Every Egyptian citizen is carrying inside them 100 short stories of pain and novels of grievance. Everyone has to pay for their children to take private lessons after school because the schools are so bad. Can you imagine? You prevent yourself from eating to pay for private lessons?” At least these rebellious youth, he added, “don’t know the rules, so they are not afraid of anything. They can do what our generation did not dare to think of.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/opini ... emc=tha212
For Arabs, the challenge of democracy starts with the family
IRSHAD MANJI | Columnist profile | E-mail
From Friday's Globe and Mail
For the past two weeks, we’ve been hearing that the “wall of fear” in Egypt has collapsed. Not to rain on anyone’s revolutionary parade, but I beg to differ.
What’s changed in Egypt is the politics of the state. A big deal, to be sure. Yet, a culture of democracy will require piercing something more: the politics of the family. That’s where fear begins in much of Arab society.
Brian Whitaker, former Middle East editor of The Guardian, did an experiment when researching his 2010 book, What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East. He presented his Arab interviewees with 10 critical statements about the Middle East and asked them to choose which they wanted to discuss.
One statement beat out the rest as a matter of urgency – so much so, Mr. Whitaker reveals, that “toward the end I was saying to people: ‘Please, let’s not talk about that one, I’ve heard enough already.’ ” The statement? “The family is a major obstacle to reform in the Arab world.”
I caught my first glimpse of this truth in Cairo five years ago. After watching democracy activists pillory Hosni Mubarak and his thugs for their secrecy, corruption and brutality, I hung out with a few of the demonstrators at a café. Recognizing me from interviews on CNN International, one of the protesters – a Muslim woman – confided to me that she was in love with a Jewish man. She wanted to marry him, but quaked at the thought of telling her father.
At the time, I found it astonishing that, while this young Egyptian would risk her neck to call out a notorious autocrat, she got visibly anxious about speaking the truth to her own family.
And she’s far from alone. Another Egyptian, Mona, recently e-mailed me, describing herself as a 37-year-old who’s been “raised with the fear of the dad, the teacher and God.” Although “fear is so embedded in my soul,” Mona wrote, she aspires to the day when “I’ll get rid of it.”
Her e-mail landed in my inbox before the uprising. I have no idea whether Mona or the woman I met at the café in Cairo participated. If they did, they’ll now need to apply their gutsiness to relationships at home.
As Brian Whitaker came to discover, home is ground zero of an Arab cultural transformation that, in turn, can reshape government for good. That’s because, according to the Arabs whom Mr. Whitaker interviewed, family is “the primary mechanism for social control” – the first clamp on independent thinking and the model for many more constraints, including those imposed by the state.
Salem Pax, the famed Iraqi blogger, explains it this way: “I’m depending on the family so much [that] I need to constantly make sure they approve of all my decisions. … Most governments in the Arab world function like that, too. There is the person who is the head of the family, the head of the tribe, the head of the state, who has final call on every single decision, and you will do what he says, otherwise there is always the fear of being cast outside the family, which is shameful.”
Halim Barakat, a Syrian sociologist, backs up the blogger’s claim. Political leaders “are cast in the image of the father, while citizens are cast in the image of children.” (Remember the speech in which Mr. Mubarak defiantly affirmed that he wouldn’t step down? He painted himself as the father figure who deserved absolute compliance from his 80 million toddlers, whom he’d previously ordered to go home.)
In short, what happens in the Arab household is a microcosm for what can be expected from a nation’s rulers. Reimagine family dynamics and you reimagine governance itself.
Maybe it can work the other way around, too. Maybe democracy in parliament will convulse autocracy in the house. It’s a time of possibilities. After all, I didn’t believe that Mr. Mubarak, however devastated and dishonoured, would leave office as quickly as he did.
Let’s hope the Muslim woman with the Jewish boyfriend is gearing up for a good talk with her dad.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opi ... cmpid=rss1
IRSHAD MANJI | Columnist profile | E-mail
From Friday's Globe and Mail
For the past two weeks, we’ve been hearing that the “wall of fear” in Egypt has collapsed. Not to rain on anyone’s revolutionary parade, but I beg to differ.
What’s changed in Egypt is the politics of the state. A big deal, to be sure. Yet, a culture of democracy will require piercing something more: the politics of the family. That’s where fear begins in much of Arab society.
Brian Whitaker, former Middle East editor of The Guardian, did an experiment when researching his 2010 book, What’s Really Wrong with the Middle East. He presented his Arab interviewees with 10 critical statements about the Middle East and asked them to choose which they wanted to discuss.
One statement beat out the rest as a matter of urgency – so much so, Mr. Whitaker reveals, that “toward the end I was saying to people: ‘Please, let’s not talk about that one, I’ve heard enough already.’ ” The statement? “The family is a major obstacle to reform in the Arab world.”
I caught my first glimpse of this truth in Cairo five years ago. After watching democracy activists pillory Hosni Mubarak and his thugs for their secrecy, corruption and brutality, I hung out with a few of the demonstrators at a café. Recognizing me from interviews on CNN International, one of the protesters – a Muslim woman – confided to me that she was in love with a Jewish man. She wanted to marry him, but quaked at the thought of telling her father.
At the time, I found it astonishing that, while this young Egyptian would risk her neck to call out a notorious autocrat, she got visibly anxious about speaking the truth to her own family.
And she’s far from alone. Another Egyptian, Mona, recently e-mailed me, describing herself as a 37-year-old who’s been “raised with the fear of the dad, the teacher and God.” Although “fear is so embedded in my soul,” Mona wrote, she aspires to the day when “I’ll get rid of it.”
Her e-mail landed in my inbox before the uprising. I have no idea whether Mona or the woman I met at the café in Cairo participated. If they did, they’ll now need to apply their gutsiness to relationships at home.
As Brian Whitaker came to discover, home is ground zero of an Arab cultural transformation that, in turn, can reshape government for good. That’s because, according to the Arabs whom Mr. Whitaker interviewed, family is “the primary mechanism for social control” – the first clamp on independent thinking and the model for many more constraints, including those imposed by the state.
Salem Pax, the famed Iraqi blogger, explains it this way: “I’m depending on the family so much [that] I need to constantly make sure they approve of all my decisions. … Most governments in the Arab world function like that, too. There is the person who is the head of the family, the head of the tribe, the head of the state, who has final call on every single decision, and you will do what he says, otherwise there is always the fear of being cast outside the family, which is shameful.”
Halim Barakat, a Syrian sociologist, backs up the blogger’s claim. Political leaders “are cast in the image of the father, while citizens are cast in the image of children.” (Remember the speech in which Mr. Mubarak defiantly affirmed that he wouldn’t step down? He painted himself as the father figure who deserved absolute compliance from his 80 million toddlers, whom he’d previously ordered to go home.)
In short, what happens in the Arab household is a microcosm for what can be expected from a nation’s rulers. Reimagine family dynamics and you reimagine governance itself.
Maybe it can work the other way around, too. Maybe democracy in parliament will convulse autocracy in the house. It’s a time of possibilities. After all, I didn’t believe that Mr. Mubarak, however devastated and dishonoured, would leave office as quickly as he did.
Let’s hope the Muslim woman with the Jewish boyfriend is gearing up for a good talk with her dad.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opi ... cmpid=rss1
February 20, 2011
Watching Protesters Risk It All
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Manama, Bahrain
As democracy protests spread across the Middle East, we as journalists struggle to convey the sights and sounds, the religion and politics. But there’s one central element that we can’t even begin to capture: the raw courage of men and women — some of them just teenagers — who risk torture, beatings and even death because they want freedoms that we take for granted.
Here in Bahrain on Saturday, I felt almost physically ill as I watched a column of pro-democracy marchers approach the Pearl Roundabout, the spiritual center of their movement. One day earlier, troops had opened fire on marchers there, with live ammunition and without any warning. So I flinched and braced myself to watch them die.
Yet, astonishingly, they didn’t. The royal family called off the use of lethal force, perhaps because of American pressure. The police fired tear gas and rubber bullets, but the protesters marched on anyway, and the police fled.
The protesters fell on the ground of the roundabout and kissed the soil. They embraced each other. They screamed. They danced. Some wept.
“We are calling it ‘Martyrs’ Roundabout’ now,” Layla, a 19-year-old university student, told me in that moment of stunned excitement. “One way or another, freedom has to come,” she said. “It’s not something given by anybody. It’s a right of the people.”
Zaki, a computer expert, added: “If Egypt can do it, then we can do it even better.”
(I’m withholding family names. Many people were willing for their full names to be published, but at a hospital I was shaken after I interviewed one young man who had spoken publicly about seeing the police kill protesters — and then, he said, the police kidnapped him off the street and beat him badly.)
To me, this feels like the Arab version of 1776. And don’t buy into the pernicious whisper campaign from dictators that a more democratic Middle East will be fundamentalist, anti-American or anti-women. For starters, there have been plenty of women on the streets demanding change (incredibly strong women, too!).
For decades, the United States embraced corrupt and repressive autocracies across the Middle East, turning a blind eye to torture and repression in part because of fear that the “democratic rabble” might be hostile to us. Far too often, we were both myopic and just plain on the wrong side.
Here in Bahrain, we have been in bed with a minority Sunni elite that has presided over a tolerant, open and economically dynamic country — but it’s an elite that is also steeped in corruption, repression and profound discrimination toward the Shia population. If you parachute into a neighborhood in Bahrain, you can tell at once whether it is Sunni or Shia: if it has good roads and sewers and is well maintained, it is Sunni; otherwise, it is Shia.
A 20-year-old medical student, Ghadeer, told me that her Sunni classmates all get government scholarships and public-sector jobs; the Shiites pay their own way and can’t find work in the public sector. Likewise, Shiites are overwhelmingly excluded from the police and armed forces, which instead rely on mercenaries from Sunni countries. We give aid to these oligarchs to outfit their police forces to keep the Shiites down; we should follow Britain’s example and immediately suspend such transfers until it is clear that the government will not again attack peaceful, unarmed protesters.
We were late to side with “people power” in Tunisia and Egypt, but Bahrainis are thrilled that President Obama called the king after he began shooting his people — and they note that the shooting subsequently stopped (at least for now). The upshot is real gratitude toward the United States.
The determination of protesters — in Bahrain, in Iran, in Libya, in Yemen — is such that change is a certainty. At one hospital, I met a paraplegic who is confined to a wheelchair. He had been hit by two rubber bullets and was planning to return to the democracy protests for more.
And on the roundabout on Sunday, I met Ali, a 24-year-old on crutches, his legs swathed in bandages, limping painfully along. A policeman had fired on him from 15 feet away, he said, and he was still carrying 30 shotgun pellets that would eventually be removed when surgeons weren’t so busy with other injuries. Ali flinched each time he moved — but he said he would camp at the roundabout until democracy arrived, or die trying.
In the 1700s, a similar kind of grit won independence for the United States from Britain. A democratic Arab world will be a flawed and messy place, just as a democratic America has been — but it’s still time to align ourselves with the democrats of the Arab world and not the George III’s.
•
I invite you to comment on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me while I am in Bahrain on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opini ... emc=tha212
Watching Protesters Risk It All
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Manama, Bahrain
As democracy protests spread across the Middle East, we as journalists struggle to convey the sights and sounds, the religion and politics. But there’s one central element that we can’t even begin to capture: the raw courage of men and women — some of them just teenagers — who risk torture, beatings and even death because they want freedoms that we take for granted.
Here in Bahrain on Saturday, I felt almost physically ill as I watched a column of pro-democracy marchers approach the Pearl Roundabout, the spiritual center of their movement. One day earlier, troops had opened fire on marchers there, with live ammunition and without any warning. So I flinched and braced myself to watch them die.
Yet, astonishingly, they didn’t. The royal family called off the use of lethal force, perhaps because of American pressure. The police fired tear gas and rubber bullets, but the protesters marched on anyway, and the police fled.
The protesters fell on the ground of the roundabout and kissed the soil. They embraced each other. They screamed. They danced. Some wept.
“We are calling it ‘Martyrs’ Roundabout’ now,” Layla, a 19-year-old university student, told me in that moment of stunned excitement. “One way or another, freedom has to come,” she said. “It’s not something given by anybody. It’s a right of the people.”
Zaki, a computer expert, added: “If Egypt can do it, then we can do it even better.”
(I’m withholding family names. Many people were willing for their full names to be published, but at a hospital I was shaken after I interviewed one young man who had spoken publicly about seeing the police kill protesters — and then, he said, the police kidnapped him off the street and beat him badly.)
To me, this feels like the Arab version of 1776. And don’t buy into the pernicious whisper campaign from dictators that a more democratic Middle East will be fundamentalist, anti-American or anti-women. For starters, there have been plenty of women on the streets demanding change (incredibly strong women, too!).
For decades, the United States embraced corrupt and repressive autocracies across the Middle East, turning a blind eye to torture and repression in part because of fear that the “democratic rabble” might be hostile to us. Far too often, we were both myopic and just plain on the wrong side.
Here in Bahrain, we have been in bed with a minority Sunni elite that has presided over a tolerant, open and economically dynamic country — but it’s an elite that is also steeped in corruption, repression and profound discrimination toward the Shia population. If you parachute into a neighborhood in Bahrain, you can tell at once whether it is Sunni or Shia: if it has good roads and sewers and is well maintained, it is Sunni; otherwise, it is Shia.
A 20-year-old medical student, Ghadeer, told me that her Sunni classmates all get government scholarships and public-sector jobs; the Shiites pay their own way and can’t find work in the public sector. Likewise, Shiites are overwhelmingly excluded from the police and armed forces, which instead rely on mercenaries from Sunni countries. We give aid to these oligarchs to outfit their police forces to keep the Shiites down; we should follow Britain’s example and immediately suspend such transfers until it is clear that the government will not again attack peaceful, unarmed protesters.
We were late to side with “people power” in Tunisia and Egypt, but Bahrainis are thrilled that President Obama called the king after he began shooting his people — and they note that the shooting subsequently stopped (at least for now). The upshot is real gratitude toward the United States.
The determination of protesters — in Bahrain, in Iran, in Libya, in Yemen — is such that change is a certainty. At one hospital, I met a paraplegic who is confined to a wheelchair. He had been hit by two rubber bullets and was planning to return to the democracy protests for more.
And on the roundabout on Sunday, I met Ali, a 24-year-old on crutches, his legs swathed in bandages, limping painfully along. A policeman had fired on him from 15 feet away, he said, and he was still carrying 30 shotgun pellets that would eventually be removed when surgeons weren’t so busy with other injuries. Ali flinched each time he moved — but he said he would camp at the roundabout until democracy arrived, or die trying.
In the 1700s, a similar kind of grit won independence for the United States from Britain. A democratic Arab world will be a flawed and messy place, just as a democratic America has been — but it’s still time to align ourselves with the democrats of the Arab world and not the George III’s.
•
I invite you to comment on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos and follow me while I am in Bahrain on Twitter.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/21/opini ... emc=tha212
February 24, 2011
A Saudi Prince’s Plea for Reform
By ALWALEED BIN TALAL BIN ABDULAZIZ AL-SAUD
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
THE toppling of the heads of state of Egypt and Tunisia on the heels of huge demonstrations there, and the subsequent manifestations of public unrest in Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, Morocco and Yemen, have generated a wide range of opinion on the root causes of those events. Some analysts see the protests as a natural outcome of the policies of autocratic regimes that had become oblivious to the need for fundamental political reform, while others view them as the inevitable product of dire economic and social problems that for decades have been afflicting much of the Arab world, most particularly its young.
In either case, unless many Arab governments adopt radically different policies, their countries will very likely experience more political and civil unrest. The facts are undeniable:
The majority of the Arab population is under 25, and the unemployment rate for young adults is in most countries 20 percent or more. Unemployment is even higher among women, who are economically and socially marginalized. The middle classes are being pushed down by inflation, which makes a stable standard of living seem an unattainable hope. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening. The basic needs for housing, health care and education are not being met for millions.
Moreover, Arab countries have been burdened by political systems that have become outmoded and brittle. Their leaderships are tied to patterns of governance that have become irrelevant and ineffective. Decision-making is invariably confined to small circles, with the outcomes largely intended to serve special and self-serving interests. Political participation is often denied, truncated and manipulated to ensure elections that perpetuate one-party rule.
Disheartening as this Arab condition may be, reforming it is neither impossible nor too late. Other societies that were afflicted with similar maladies have managed to restore themselves to health. But we can succeed only if we open our systems to greater political participation, accountability, increased transparency and the empowerment of women as well as youth. The pressing issues of poverty, illiteracy, education and unemployment have to be fully addressed. Initiatives just announced in my country, Saudi Arabia, by King Abdullah are a step in the right direction, but they are only the beginning of a longer journey to broader participation, especially by the younger generation.
The lesson to be learned from the Tunisian, Egyptian and other upheavals — which, it is important to note, were not animated by anti-American fervor or by extremist Islamic zeal — is that Arab governments can no longer afford to take their populations for granted, or to assume that they will remain static and subdued. Nor can the soothing instruments of yesteryear, which were meant to appease, serve any longer as substitutes for meaningful reform. The winds of change are blowing across our region with force, and it would be folly to suppose that they will soon dissipate.
For any reform to be effective, however, it has to be the result of meaningful interaction and dialogue among the different components of a society, most particularly between the rulers and the ruled. It also has to encompass the younger generation, which in this technologically advanced age has become increasingly intertwined with its counterparts in other parts of the world.
Exclusion can no longer work. This admonishment was most forcefully and unabashedly expressed by no less a personage of an earlier generation than my father, Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, in a recent television interview.
Social and political change is invariably turbulent, painful and unpredictable. But the Arab world has an abundance of resources, natural and otherwise, that transcend oil. Most important, it has a substantial reservoir of talent that can be enlisted in the creation of a vibrant social and economic order that would enable Arab countries to join the ranks of those nations that have within a few decades propelled themselves out of underdevelopment, stagnation and poverty. But that can be achieved only if the will to reform is unwavering, enduring and sincere.
Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, a grandson of the founding king of modern Saudi Arabia, is the chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company and the Alwaleed bin Talal Foundations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/opini ... emc=tha212
A Saudi Prince’s Plea for Reform
By ALWALEED BIN TALAL BIN ABDULAZIZ AL-SAUD
Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
THE toppling of the heads of state of Egypt and Tunisia on the heels of huge demonstrations there, and the subsequent manifestations of public unrest in Algeria, Bahrain, Jordan, Libya, Morocco and Yemen, have generated a wide range of opinion on the root causes of those events. Some analysts see the protests as a natural outcome of the policies of autocratic regimes that had become oblivious to the need for fundamental political reform, while others view them as the inevitable product of dire economic and social problems that for decades have been afflicting much of the Arab world, most particularly its young.
In either case, unless many Arab governments adopt radically different policies, their countries will very likely experience more political and civil unrest. The facts are undeniable:
The majority of the Arab population is under 25, and the unemployment rate for young adults is in most countries 20 percent or more. Unemployment is even higher among women, who are economically and socially marginalized. The middle classes are being pushed down by inflation, which makes a stable standard of living seem an unattainable hope. The gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening. The basic needs for housing, health care and education are not being met for millions.
Moreover, Arab countries have been burdened by political systems that have become outmoded and brittle. Their leaderships are tied to patterns of governance that have become irrelevant and ineffective. Decision-making is invariably confined to small circles, with the outcomes largely intended to serve special and self-serving interests. Political participation is often denied, truncated and manipulated to ensure elections that perpetuate one-party rule.
Disheartening as this Arab condition may be, reforming it is neither impossible nor too late. Other societies that were afflicted with similar maladies have managed to restore themselves to health. But we can succeed only if we open our systems to greater political participation, accountability, increased transparency and the empowerment of women as well as youth. The pressing issues of poverty, illiteracy, education and unemployment have to be fully addressed. Initiatives just announced in my country, Saudi Arabia, by King Abdullah are a step in the right direction, but they are only the beginning of a longer journey to broader participation, especially by the younger generation.
The lesson to be learned from the Tunisian, Egyptian and other upheavals — which, it is important to note, were not animated by anti-American fervor or by extremist Islamic zeal — is that Arab governments can no longer afford to take their populations for granted, or to assume that they will remain static and subdued. Nor can the soothing instruments of yesteryear, which were meant to appease, serve any longer as substitutes for meaningful reform. The winds of change are blowing across our region with force, and it would be folly to suppose that they will soon dissipate.
For any reform to be effective, however, it has to be the result of meaningful interaction and dialogue among the different components of a society, most particularly between the rulers and the ruled. It also has to encompass the younger generation, which in this technologically advanced age has become increasingly intertwined with its counterparts in other parts of the world.
Exclusion can no longer work. This admonishment was most forcefully and unabashedly expressed by no less a personage of an earlier generation than my father, Prince Talal bin Abdulaziz, in a recent television interview.
Social and political change is invariably turbulent, painful and unpredictable. But the Arab world has an abundance of resources, natural and otherwise, that transcend oil. Most important, it has a substantial reservoir of talent that can be enlisted in the creation of a vibrant social and economic order that would enable Arab countries to join the ranks of those nations that have within a few decades propelled themselves out of underdevelopment, stagnation and poverty. But that can be achieved only if the will to reform is unwavering, enduring and sincere.
Alwaleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al-Saud, a grandson of the founding king of modern Saudi Arabia, is the chairman of the Kingdom Holding Company and the Alwaleed bin Talal Foundations.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/25/opini ... emc=tha212
Op-Ed Columnist
Tribes With Flags
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 22, 2011
David Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief for The Times, wrote an article from Libya on Monday that posed the key question, not only about Libya but about all the new revolutions brewing in the Arab world: “The question has hovered over the Libyan uprising from the moment the first tank commander defected to join his cousins protesting in the streets of Benghazi: Is the battle for Libya the clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition, or is it fundamentally a tribal civil war?”
This is the question because there are two kinds of states in the Middle East: “real countries” with long histories in their territory and strong national identities (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran); and those that might be called “tribes with flags,” or more artificial states with boundaries drawn in sharp straight lines by pens of colonial powers that have trapped inside their borders myriad tribes and sects who not only never volunteered to live together but have never fully melded into a unified family of citizens. They are Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The tribes and sects that make up these more artificial states have long been held together by the iron fist of colonial powers, kings or military dictators. They have no real “citizens” in the modern sense. Democratic rotations in power are impossible because each tribe lives by the motto “rule or die” — either my tribe or sect is in power or we’re dead.
It is no accident that the Mideast democracy rebellions began in three of the real countries — Iran, Egypt and Tunisia — where the populations are modern, with big homogenous majorities that put nation before sect or tribe and have enough mutual trust to come together like a family: “everyone against dad.” But as these revolutions have spread to the more tribal/sectarian societies, it becomes difficult to discern where the quest for democracy stops and the desire that “my tribe take over from your tribe” begins.
In Bahrain, a Sunni minority, 30 percent of the population, rules over a Shiite majority. There are many Bahraini Sunnis and Shiites — so-called sushis, fused by inter-marriage — who carry modern political identities and would accept a true democracy. But there are many other Bahrainis who see life there as a zero-sum sectarian war, including hard-liners in the ruling al-Khalifa family, who have no intention of risking the future of Bahraini Sunnis under majority-Shiite rule. That is why the guns came out there very early. It was rule or die. Iraq teaches what it takes to democratize a big tribalized Arab country once the iron-fisted leader is removed (in that case by us). It takes billions of dollars, 150,000 U.S. soldiers to referee, myriad casualties, a civil war where both sides have to test each other’s power and then a wrenching process, which we midwifed, of Iraqi sects and tribes writing their own constitution defining how to live together without an iron fist.
Enabling Iraqis to write their own social contract is the most important thing America did. It was, in fact, the most important liberal experiment in modern Arab history because it showed that even tribes with flags can, possibly, transition through sectarianism into a modern democracy. But it is still just a hope. Iraqis still have not given us the definitive answer to their key question: Is Iraq the way Iraq is because Saddam was the way Saddam was or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is: a tribalized society? All the other Arab states now hosting rebellions — Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and Libya — are Iraq-like civil-wars-in-waiting. Some may get lucky and their army may play the role of the guiding hand to democracy, but don’t bet on it.
In other words, Libya is just the front-end of a series of moral and strategic dilemmas we are going to face as these Arab uprisings proceed through the tribes with flags. I want to cut President Obama some slack. This is complicated, and I respect the president’s desire to prevent a mass killing in Libya.
But we need to be more cautious. What made the Egyptian democracy movement so powerful was that they owned it. The Egyptian youth suffered hundreds of casualties in their fight for freedom. And we should be doubly cautious of intervening in places that could fall apart in our hands, a là Iraq, especially when we do not know, a là Libya, who the opposition groups really are — democracy movements led by tribes or tribes exploiting the language of democracy?
Finally, sadly, we can’t afford it. We have got to get to work on our own country. If the president is ready to take some big, hard, urgent, decisions, shouldn’t they be first about nation-building in America, not in Libya? Shouldn’t he first be forging a real energy policy that weakens all the Qaddafis and a budget policy that secures the American dream for another generation? Once those are in place, I will follow the president “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/opini ... emc=tha212
Tribes With Flags
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Published: March 22, 2011
David Kirkpatrick, the Cairo bureau chief for The Times, wrote an article from Libya on Monday that posed the key question, not only about Libya but about all the new revolutions brewing in the Arab world: “The question has hovered over the Libyan uprising from the moment the first tank commander defected to join his cousins protesting in the streets of Benghazi: Is the battle for Libya the clash of a brutal dictator against a democratic opposition, or is it fundamentally a tribal civil war?”
This is the question because there are two kinds of states in the Middle East: “real countries” with long histories in their territory and strong national identities (Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, Iran); and those that might be called “tribes with flags,” or more artificial states with boundaries drawn in sharp straight lines by pens of colonial powers that have trapped inside their borders myriad tribes and sects who not only never volunteered to live together but have never fully melded into a unified family of citizens. They are Libya, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Bahrain, Yemen, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. The tribes and sects that make up these more artificial states have long been held together by the iron fist of colonial powers, kings or military dictators. They have no real “citizens” in the modern sense. Democratic rotations in power are impossible because each tribe lives by the motto “rule or die” — either my tribe or sect is in power or we’re dead.
It is no accident that the Mideast democracy rebellions began in three of the real countries — Iran, Egypt and Tunisia — where the populations are modern, with big homogenous majorities that put nation before sect or tribe and have enough mutual trust to come together like a family: “everyone against dad.” But as these revolutions have spread to the more tribal/sectarian societies, it becomes difficult to discern where the quest for democracy stops and the desire that “my tribe take over from your tribe” begins.
In Bahrain, a Sunni minority, 30 percent of the population, rules over a Shiite majority. There are many Bahraini Sunnis and Shiites — so-called sushis, fused by inter-marriage — who carry modern political identities and would accept a true democracy. But there are many other Bahrainis who see life there as a zero-sum sectarian war, including hard-liners in the ruling al-Khalifa family, who have no intention of risking the future of Bahraini Sunnis under majority-Shiite rule. That is why the guns came out there very early. It was rule or die. Iraq teaches what it takes to democratize a big tribalized Arab country once the iron-fisted leader is removed (in that case by us). It takes billions of dollars, 150,000 U.S. soldiers to referee, myriad casualties, a civil war where both sides have to test each other’s power and then a wrenching process, which we midwifed, of Iraqi sects and tribes writing their own constitution defining how to live together without an iron fist.
Enabling Iraqis to write their own social contract is the most important thing America did. It was, in fact, the most important liberal experiment in modern Arab history because it showed that even tribes with flags can, possibly, transition through sectarianism into a modern democracy. But it is still just a hope. Iraqis still have not given us the definitive answer to their key question: Is Iraq the way Iraq is because Saddam was the way Saddam was or was Saddam the way Saddam was because Iraq is the way Iraq is: a tribalized society? All the other Arab states now hosting rebellions — Yemen, Syria, Bahrain and Libya — are Iraq-like civil-wars-in-waiting. Some may get lucky and their army may play the role of the guiding hand to democracy, but don’t bet on it.
In other words, Libya is just the front-end of a series of moral and strategic dilemmas we are going to face as these Arab uprisings proceed through the tribes with flags. I want to cut President Obama some slack. This is complicated, and I respect the president’s desire to prevent a mass killing in Libya.
But we need to be more cautious. What made the Egyptian democracy movement so powerful was that they owned it. The Egyptian youth suffered hundreds of casualties in their fight for freedom. And we should be doubly cautious of intervening in places that could fall apart in our hands, a là Iraq, especially when we do not know, a là Libya, who the opposition groups really are — democracy movements led by tribes or tribes exploiting the language of democracy?
Finally, sadly, we can’t afford it. We have got to get to work on our own country. If the president is ready to take some big, hard, urgent, decisions, shouldn’t they be first about nation-building in America, not in Libya? Shouldn’t he first be forging a real energy policy that weakens all the Qaddafis and a budget policy that secures the American dream for another generation? Once those are in place, I will follow the president “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/23/opini ... emc=tha212
April 12, 2011
Pray. Hope. Prepare.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
When I was in Cairo during the Egyptian uprising, I wanted to change hotels one day to be closer to the action and called the Marriott to see if it had any openings. The young-sounding Egyptian woman who spoke with me from the reservations department offered me a room and then asked: “Do you have a corporate rate?” I said, “I don’t know. I work for The New York Times.” There was a silence on the phone for a few moments, and then she said: “ Can I ask you something?” Sure. “Are we going to be O.K.? I’m worried.”
I made a mental note of that conversation because she sounded like a modern person, the kind of young woman who would have been in Tahrir Square. We’re just now beginning to see what may have been gnawing at her — in Egypt and elsewhere.
Let’s start with the structure of the Arab state. Think about the 1989 democracy wave in Europe. In Europe, virtually every state was like Germany, a homogenous nation, except Yugoslavia. The Arab world is exactly the opposite. There, virtually every state is like Yugoslavia — except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.
That is to say, in Europe, when the iron fist of communism was removed, the big, largely homogenous states, with traditions of civil society, were able to move relatively quickly and stably to more self-government — except Yugoslavia, a multiethnic, multireligious country that exploded into pieces.
In the Arab world, almost all these countries are Yugoslavia-like assemblages of ethnic, religious and tribal groups put together by colonial powers — except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, which have big homogeneous majorities. So when you take the lid off these countries, you potentially unleash not civil society but civil war.
That is why, for now, the relatively peaceful Arab democracy revolutions are probably over. They have happened in the two countries where they were most able to happen because the whole society in Tunisia and Egypt could pull together as a family and oust the evil “dad” — the dictator. From here forward, we have to hope for “Arab evolutions” or we’re going to get Arab civil wars.
The states most promising for evolution are Morocco and Jordan, where you have respected kings who, if they choose, could lead gradual transitions to a constitutional monarchy.
Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, countries fractured by tribal, ethnic and religious divisions, would have been ideal for gradual evolution to democracy, but it is probably too late now. The initial instinct of their leaders was to crush demonstrators, and blood has flowed. In these countries, there are now so many pent-up grievances between religious communities and tribes — some of which richly benefited from their dictatorships while others were brutalized by them — that even if the iron fist of authoritarianism is somehow lifted, civil strife could easily trample democratic hopes.
Could anything prevent this? Yes, extraordinary leadership that insists on burying the past, not being buried by it. The Arab world desperately needs its versions of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk — giants from opposing communities who rise above tribal or Sunni-Shiite hatreds to forge a new social compact. The Arab publics have surprised us in a heroic way. Now we need some Arab leaders to surprise us with bravery and vision. That has been so lacking for so long.
Another option is that an outside power comes in, as America did in Iraq, and as the European Union did in Eastern Europe, to referee or coach a democratic transition between the distrustful communities in these fractured states. But I don’t see anyone signing up for that job.
Absent those alternatives, you get what you got. Autocrats in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain shooting their rebels on the tribal logic of “rule or die.” Meaning: either my sect or tribe is in power or I’m dead. The primary ingredient of a democracy — real pluralism where people feel a common destiny, act as citizens and don’t believe their minority has to be in power to be safe or to thrive — is in low supply in all these societies. It can emerge, as Iraq shows. But it takes time.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which is 90 percent Sunni and 10 percent Shiite, has made clear that it will oppose any evolution to constitutional monarchy in neighboring Bahrain, where a Sunni minority rules over a Shiite majority. Saudi Arabia has no tradition of pluralism. When we say “democratic reform” to Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, we might as well be speaking Latin. What their rulers hear is “Shiites taking over from Sunnis.” Not gonna happen peacefully.
Even evolution is difficult in Egypt. The army overseeing the process there just arrested a prominent liberal blogger, Maikel Nabil, for “insulting the military.”
Make no mistake where my heart lies. I still believe this Arab democracy movement was inevitable, necessary and built on a deep and authentic human quest for freedom, dignity and justice. But without extraordinary leadership, the Arab transitions are going to be much harder than in Eastern Europe. Pray for Germanys. Hope for South Africas. Prepare for Yugoslavias.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/opini ... emc=tha212
Pray. Hope. Prepare.
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
When I was in Cairo during the Egyptian uprising, I wanted to change hotels one day to be closer to the action and called the Marriott to see if it had any openings. The young-sounding Egyptian woman who spoke with me from the reservations department offered me a room and then asked: “Do you have a corporate rate?” I said, “I don’t know. I work for The New York Times.” There was a silence on the phone for a few moments, and then she said: “ Can I ask you something?” Sure. “Are we going to be O.K.? I’m worried.”
I made a mental note of that conversation because she sounded like a modern person, the kind of young woman who would have been in Tahrir Square. We’re just now beginning to see what may have been gnawing at her — in Egypt and elsewhere.
Let’s start with the structure of the Arab state. Think about the 1989 democracy wave in Europe. In Europe, virtually every state was like Germany, a homogenous nation, except Yugoslavia. The Arab world is exactly the opposite. There, virtually every state is like Yugoslavia — except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco.
That is to say, in Europe, when the iron fist of communism was removed, the big, largely homogenous states, with traditions of civil society, were able to move relatively quickly and stably to more self-government — except Yugoslavia, a multiethnic, multireligious country that exploded into pieces.
In the Arab world, almost all these countries are Yugoslavia-like assemblages of ethnic, religious and tribal groups put together by colonial powers — except Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco, which have big homogeneous majorities. So when you take the lid off these countries, you potentially unleash not civil society but civil war.
That is why, for now, the relatively peaceful Arab democracy revolutions are probably over. They have happened in the two countries where they were most able to happen because the whole society in Tunisia and Egypt could pull together as a family and oust the evil “dad” — the dictator. From here forward, we have to hope for “Arab evolutions” or we’re going to get Arab civil wars.
The states most promising for evolution are Morocco and Jordan, where you have respected kings who, if they choose, could lead gradual transitions to a constitutional monarchy.
Syria, Libya, Yemen and Bahrain, countries fractured by tribal, ethnic and religious divisions, would have been ideal for gradual evolution to democracy, but it is probably too late now. The initial instinct of their leaders was to crush demonstrators, and blood has flowed. In these countries, there are now so many pent-up grievances between religious communities and tribes — some of which richly benefited from their dictatorships while others were brutalized by them — that even if the iron fist of authoritarianism is somehow lifted, civil strife could easily trample democratic hopes.
Could anything prevent this? Yes, extraordinary leadership that insists on burying the past, not being buried by it. The Arab world desperately needs its versions of South Africa’s Nelson Mandela and F.W. de Klerk — giants from opposing communities who rise above tribal or Sunni-Shiite hatreds to forge a new social compact. The Arab publics have surprised us in a heroic way. Now we need some Arab leaders to surprise us with bravery and vision. That has been so lacking for so long.
Another option is that an outside power comes in, as America did in Iraq, and as the European Union did in Eastern Europe, to referee or coach a democratic transition between the distrustful communities in these fractured states. But I don’t see anyone signing up for that job.
Absent those alternatives, you get what you got. Autocrats in Syria, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain shooting their rebels on the tribal logic of “rule or die.” Meaning: either my sect or tribe is in power or I’m dead. The primary ingredient of a democracy — real pluralism where people feel a common destiny, act as citizens and don’t believe their minority has to be in power to be safe or to thrive — is in low supply in all these societies. It can emerge, as Iraq shows. But it takes time.
Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, which is 90 percent Sunni and 10 percent Shiite, has made clear that it will oppose any evolution to constitutional monarchy in neighboring Bahrain, where a Sunni minority rules over a Shiite majority. Saudi Arabia has no tradition of pluralism. When we say “democratic reform” to Saudi Arabia or Bahrain, we might as well be speaking Latin. What their rulers hear is “Shiites taking over from Sunnis.” Not gonna happen peacefully.
Even evolution is difficult in Egypt. The army overseeing the process there just arrested a prominent liberal blogger, Maikel Nabil, for “insulting the military.”
Make no mistake where my heart lies. I still believe this Arab democracy movement was inevitable, necessary and built on a deep and authentic human quest for freedom, dignity and justice. But without extraordinary leadership, the Arab transitions are going to be much harder than in Eastern Europe. Pray for Germanys. Hope for South Africas. Prepare for Yugoslavias.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/13/opini ... emc=tha212
May 10, 2011
Bad Bargains
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The systems in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that created a Bin Laden are alive and well.
So Osama bin Laden was living in a specially built villa in Pakistan. I wonder where he got the money to buy it? Cashed in his Saudi 401(k)? A Pakistani subprime mortgage, perhaps? No. I suspect we will find that it all came from the same place most of Al Qaeda’s funds come from: some combination of private Saudi donations spent under the watchful eye of the Pakistani Army.
Why should we care? Because this is the heart of the matter; that’s why. It was both just and strategically vital that we killed Bin Laden, who inspired 9/11. I just wish it were as easy to eliminate the two bad bargains that really made that attack possible, funded it and provided the key plotters and foot soldiers who carried it out. We are talking about the ruling bargains in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which are alive and well.
The Saudi ruling bargain is an old partnership between the al-Saud tribe and the Wahhabi religious sect. The al-Saud tribe get to stay in power and live however they want behind their palace walls, and, in return, the followers of the Wahhabi sect get to control the country’s religious mores, mosques and education system.
The Wahhabis bless the Saudi regime with legitimacy in the absence of any elections, and the regime blesses them with money and a free hand on religion. The only downside is that this system ensures a steady supply of “sitting around guys” — young Saudi males who have nothing other than religious education and no skills to compete — who then get recruited to become 9/11-style hijackers and suicide bombers in Iraq.
No one explains it better than the Saudi writer Mai Yamani, author of “Cradle of Islam” and the daughter of Saudi Arabia’s former oil minister. “Despite the decade of the West’s war on terror, and Saudi Arabia’s longer-term alliance with the United States, the kingdom’s Wahhabi religious establishment has continued to bankroll Islamic extremist ideologies around the world,” wrote Yamani in The Daily Star of Beirut, Lebanon, this week.
“Bin Laden, born, raised and educated in Saudi Arabia, is a product of this pervasive ideology,” Yamani added. “He was no religious innovator; he was a product of Wahhabism, and later was exported by the Wahhabi regime as a jihadist. During the 1980s, Saudi Arabia spent some $75 billion for the propagation of Wahhabism, funding schools, mosques, and charities throughout the Islamic world, from Pakistan to Afghanistan, Yemen, Algeria and beyond. ... Not surprisingly, the creation of a transnational Islamic political movement, boosted by thousands of underground jihadist Web sites, has blown back into the kingdom. Like the hijackers of 9/11, who were also Saudi-Wahhabi ideological exports ... Saudi Arabia’s reserve army of potential terrorists remains, because the Wahhabi factory of fanatical ideas remains intact. So the real battle has not been with Bin Laden, but with that Saudi state-supported ideology factory.”
Ditto Pakistan. The Pakistani ruling bargain is set by the Pakistani Army and says: “We let you civilians pretend to rule, but we will actually call all the key shots, we will consume nearly 25 percent of the state budget and we will justify all of this as necessary for Pakistan to confront its real security challenge: India and its occupation of Kashmir. Looking for Bin Laden became a side-business for Pakistan’s military to generate U.S. aid.
As the Al Qaeda expert Lawrence Wright observed in The New Yorker this week: Pakistan’s Army and intelligence service “were in the looking-for-Bin-Laden business, and if they found him they’d be out of business.” Since 9/11, Wright added, “the U.S. had given $11 billion to Pakistan, the bulk of it in military aid, much of which was misappropriated to buy weapons to defend against India.”
(President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan plays the same game. He’s in the looking-for-stability-in-Afghanistan business. And as long as we keep paying him, he’ll keep looking.)
What both countries need is shock therapy. For Pakistan, that would mean America converting the lion’s share of its military aid to K-12 education programs, while also reducing the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan. Together, the message would be that we’re ready to help Pakistan fight its real enemies and ours — ignorance, illiteracy, corrupt elites and religious obscurantism — but we have no interest in being dupes for the nonsense that Pakistan is threatened by India and therefore needs “strategic depth” in Afghanistan and allies among the Taliban.
Ditto Saudi Arabia. We are in a ménage à trois with the al-Sauds and the Wahhabis. We provide the al-Sauds security, and they provide us oil. The Wahhabis provide the al-Sauds with legitimacy and the al-Sauds provide them with money (from us). It works really well for the al-Sauds, but not too well for us. The only way out is a new U.S. energy policy, which neither party is proposing.
Hence, my conclusion: We are surely safer with Bin Laden dead, but no one will be safe — certainly not the many moderate Muslims in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who deserve a decent future — without different ruling bargains in Islamabad and Riyadh.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/opini ... emc=tha212
Bad Bargains
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
The systems in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that created a Bin Laden are alive and well.
So Osama bin Laden was living in a specially built villa in Pakistan. I wonder where he got the money to buy it? Cashed in his Saudi 401(k)? A Pakistani subprime mortgage, perhaps? No. I suspect we will find that it all came from the same place most of Al Qaeda’s funds come from: some combination of private Saudi donations spent under the watchful eye of the Pakistani Army.
Why should we care? Because this is the heart of the matter; that’s why. It was both just and strategically vital that we killed Bin Laden, who inspired 9/11. I just wish it were as easy to eliminate the two bad bargains that really made that attack possible, funded it and provided the key plotters and foot soldiers who carried it out. We are talking about the ruling bargains in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, which are alive and well.
The Saudi ruling bargain is an old partnership between the al-Saud tribe and the Wahhabi religious sect. The al-Saud tribe get to stay in power and live however they want behind their palace walls, and, in return, the followers of the Wahhabi sect get to control the country’s religious mores, mosques and education system.
The Wahhabis bless the Saudi regime with legitimacy in the absence of any elections, and the regime blesses them with money and a free hand on religion. The only downside is that this system ensures a steady supply of “sitting around guys” — young Saudi males who have nothing other than religious education and no skills to compete — who then get recruited to become 9/11-style hijackers and suicide bombers in Iraq.
No one explains it better than the Saudi writer Mai Yamani, author of “Cradle of Islam” and the daughter of Saudi Arabia’s former oil minister. “Despite the decade of the West’s war on terror, and Saudi Arabia’s longer-term alliance with the United States, the kingdom’s Wahhabi religious establishment has continued to bankroll Islamic extremist ideologies around the world,” wrote Yamani in The Daily Star of Beirut, Lebanon, this week.
“Bin Laden, born, raised and educated in Saudi Arabia, is a product of this pervasive ideology,” Yamani added. “He was no religious innovator; he was a product of Wahhabism, and later was exported by the Wahhabi regime as a jihadist. During the 1980s, Saudi Arabia spent some $75 billion for the propagation of Wahhabism, funding schools, mosques, and charities throughout the Islamic world, from Pakistan to Afghanistan, Yemen, Algeria and beyond. ... Not surprisingly, the creation of a transnational Islamic political movement, boosted by thousands of underground jihadist Web sites, has blown back into the kingdom. Like the hijackers of 9/11, who were also Saudi-Wahhabi ideological exports ... Saudi Arabia’s reserve army of potential terrorists remains, because the Wahhabi factory of fanatical ideas remains intact. So the real battle has not been with Bin Laden, but with that Saudi state-supported ideology factory.”
Ditto Pakistan. The Pakistani ruling bargain is set by the Pakistani Army and says: “We let you civilians pretend to rule, but we will actually call all the key shots, we will consume nearly 25 percent of the state budget and we will justify all of this as necessary for Pakistan to confront its real security challenge: India and its occupation of Kashmir. Looking for Bin Laden became a side-business for Pakistan’s military to generate U.S. aid.
As the Al Qaeda expert Lawrence Wright observed in The New Yorker this week: Pakistan’s Army and intelligence service “were in the looking-for-Bin-Laden business, and if they found him they’d be out of business.” Since 9/11, Wright added, “the U.S. had given $11 billion to Pakistan, the bulk of it in military aid, much of which was misappropriated to buy weapons to defend against India.”
(President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan plays the same game. He’s in the looking-for-stability-in-Afghanistan business. And as long as we keep paying him, he’ll keep looking.)
What both countries need is shock therapy. For Pakistan, that would mean America converting the lion’s share of its military aid to K-12 education programs, while also reducing the U.S. footprint in Afghanistan. Together, the message would be that we’re ready to help Pakistan fight its real enemies and ours — ignorance, illiteracy, corrupt elites and religious obscurantism — but we have no interest in being dupes for the nonsense that Pakistan is threatened by India and therefore needs “strategic depth” in Afghanistan and allies among the Taliban.
Ditto Saudi Arabia. We are in a ménage à trois with the al-Sauds and the Wahhabis. We provide the al-Sauds security, and they provide us oil. The Wahhabis provide the al-Sauds with legitimacy and the al-Sauds provide them with money (from us). It works really well for the al-Sauds, but not too well for us. The only way out is a new U.S. energy policy, which neither party is proposing.
Hence, my conclusion: We are surely safer with Bin Laden dead, but no one will be safe — certainly not the many moderate Muslims in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan who deserve a decent future — without different ruling bargains in Islamabad and Riyadh.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/opini ... emc=tha212
May 14, 2011
‘I Am a Man’
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Watching the Arab uprisings these days leaves me with a smile on my face and a pit in my stomach. The smile comes from witnessing a whole swath of humanity losing its fear and regaining its dignity. The pit comes from a rising worry that the Arab Spring may have been both inevitable and too late. If you are not feeling both these impulses, you’re not paying attention.
The smile? A Libyan friend remarked to me the other day that he was watching Arab satellite TV out of Benghazi, Libya, and a sign held aloft at one demonstration caught his eye. It said in Arabic: “Ana Rajul” — which translates to “I am a man.” If there is one sign that sums up the whole Arab uprising, it’s that one.
As I’ve tried to argue, this uprising, at root, is not political. It’s existential. It is much more Albert Camus than Che Guevara. All these Arab regimes to one degree or another stripped their people of their basic dignity. They deprived them of freedom and never allowed them to develop anywhere near their full potential. And as the world has become hyper-connected, it became obvious to every Arab citizen just how far behind they were — not only to the West, but to China, India and parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
This combination of being treated as children by their autocrats and as backward by the rest of the world fueled a deep humiliation, which shows up in signs like that one in Libya, announcing to no one in particular: “I am a man” — I have value, I have aspirations, I want the rights everyone else in the world has. And because so many Arabs share these feelings, this Arab Spring is not going to end — no matter how many people these regimes kill.
It is novelists, not political scientists, who can best articulate this mood. Raymond Stock, who teaches Arabic at Drew University in Madison, N.J., is writing a biography of the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. In an essay published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Stock pointed out how Mahfouz foreshadowed so many of the feelings driving the Arab Spring in his novel “Before the Throne.” There, Mahfouz puts in the mouth of a rebel firebrand, defending his revolution against the pharaoh, words that could have been heard on any afternoon in Tahrir Square this year:
“We have endured agonies beyond what any human can bear. When our ferocious anger was raised against the rottenness of oppression and darkness, our revolt was called chaos, and we were called mere thieves. Yet it was nothing but a revolution against despotism, blessed by the gods.”
But that also explains that pit in the stomach. These Arab regimes have been determined to prevent any civil society or progressive parties from emerging under their rule. So when these regimes break at the top, the elevator goes from the palace straight to the mosque. There is nothing else in between — no legitimate parties or institutions.
So outsiders face a cruel dilemma: Those who say America should have stood by Hosni Mubarak, or should not favor toppling Bashar al-Assad in Syria — in the name of stability — forget that their stability was built on the stagnation of millions of Arabs, while the rest of the world moved ahead. The Arab people were not offered Chinese autocratic stability: We take your freedom and give you education and a rising standard of living. Their deal was Arab autocratic stability: We take your freedom and feed you the Arab-Israeli conflict, corruption and religious obscurantism.
But to embrace the downfall of these dictators — as we must — is to advocate leveling a rotten building with no assurance that it can be rebuilt. That is what happened in Iraq, and it was hugely expensive for us to rebuild a new, and still tenuous, order there. No outsider is going to do that again.
So to embrace the downfall of these dictators is to hope that their own people can come together to midwife democracy in Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Libya. But here one must honestly ask: Is the breakdown in these societies too deep for anyone to build anything decent out of? Was the Arab Spring both inevitable and too late?
My answer: It’s never too late, but some holes are deeper than others, and we are now seeing that the hole Arab democrats have to climb out of is really, really deep. Wish them well.
Again, Stock points us to a passage in Mahfouz’s “Before the Throne,” which is a novel in which each Egyptian leader challenges his successor. In this case, Mustafa al-Nahhas, the head of the liberal Wafd Party, which was crushed when Gamal Abdel Nasser led a military coup in 1952, berates Nasser for eroding Egypt’s constitutional heritage.
“Those who launched the 1919 Revolution were people of initiative and innovation in ... politics, economics and culture,” Nahhas tells Nasser. “How your highhandedness spoiled your most pristine depths! See how education was vitiated, how the public sector grew depraved! How your defiance of the world’s powers led you to horrendous losses and shameful defeats! You never sought the benefit of another person’s opinion ... And what was the result? Clamor and cacophony, and an empty mythology — all heaped on a pile of rubble.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opini ... emc=tha212
‘I Am a Man’
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
Watching the Arab uprisings these days leaves me with a smile on my face and a pit in my stomach. The smile comes from witnessing a whole swath of humanity losing its fear and regaining its dignity. The pit comes from a rising worry that the Arab Spring may have been both inevitable and too late. If you are not feeling both these impulses, you’re not paying attention.
The smile? A Libyan friend remarked to me the other day that he was watching Arab satellite TV out of Benghazi, Libya, and a sign held aloft at one demonstration caught his eye. It said in Arabic: “Ana Rajul” — which translates to “I am a man.” If there is one sign that sums up the whole Arab uprising, it’s that one.
As I’ve tried to argue, this uprising, at root, is not political. It’s existential. It is much more Albert Camus than Che Guevara. All these Arab regimes to one degree or another stripped their people of their basic dignity. They deprived them of freedom and never allowed them to develop anywhere near their full potential. And as the world has become hyper-connected, it became obvious to every Arab citizen just how far behind they were — not only to the West, but to China, India and parts of sub-Saharan Africa.
This combination of being treated as children by their autocrats and as backward by the rest of the world fueled a deep humiliation, which shows up in signs like that one in Libya, announcing to no one in particular: “I am a man” — I have value, I have aspirations, I want the rights everyone else in the world has. And because so many Arabs share these feelings, this Arab Spring is not going to end — no matter how many people these regimes kill.
It is novelists, not political scientists, who can best articulate this mood. Raymond Stock, who teaches Arabic at Drew University in Madison, N.J., is writing a biography of the Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. In an essay published by the Foreign Policy Research Institute, Stock pointed out how Mahfouz foreshadowed so many of the feelings driving the Arab Spring in his novel “Before the Throne.” There, Mahfouz puts in the mouth of a rebel firebrand, defending his revolution against the pharaoh, words that could have been heard on any afternoon in Tahrir Square this year:
“We have endured agonies beyond what any human can bear. When our ferocious anger was raised against the rottenness of oppression and darkness, our revolt was called chaos, and we were called mere thieves. Yet it was nothing but a revolution against despotism, blessed by the gods.”
But that also explains that pit in the stomach. These Arab regimes have been determined to prevent any civil society or progressive parties from emerging under their rule. So when these regimes break at the top, the elevator goes from the palace straight to the mosque. There is nothing else in between — no legitimate parties or institutions.
So outsiders face a cruel dilemma: Those who say America should have stood by Hosni Mubarak, or should not favor toppling Bashar al-Assad in Syria — in the name of stability — forget that their stability was built on the stagnation of millions of Arabs, while the rest of the world moved ahead. The Arab people were not offered Chinese autocratic stability: We take your freedom and give you education and a rising standard of living. Their deal was Arab autocratic stability: We take your freedom and feed you the Arab-Israeli conflict, corruption and religious obscurantism.
But to embrace the downfall of these dictators — as we must — is to advocate leveling a rotten building with no assurance that it can be rebuilt. That is what happened in Iraq, and it was hugely expensive for us to rebuild a new, and still tenuous, order there. No outsider is going to do that again.
So to embrace the downfall of these dictators is to hope that their own people can come together to midwife democracy in Egypt, Syria, Yemen and Libya. But here one must honestly ask: Is the breakdown in these societies too deep for anyone to build anything decent out of? Was the Arab Spring both inevitable and too late?
My answer: It’s never too late, but some holes are deeper than others, and we are now seeing that the hole Arab democrats have to climb out of is really, really deep. Wish them well.
Again, Stock points us to a passage in Mahfouz’s “Before the Throne,” which is a novel in which each Egyptian leader challenges his successor. In this case, Mustafa al-Nahhas, the head of the liberal Wafd Party, which was crushed when Gamal Abdel Nasser led a military coup in 1952, berates Nasser for eroding Egypt’s constitutional heritage.
“Those who launched the 1919 Revolution were people of initiative and innovation in ... politics, economics and culture,” Nahhas tells Nasser. “How your highhandedness spoiled your most pristine depths! See how education was vitiated, how the public sector grew depraved! How your defiance of the world’s powers led you to horrendous losses and shameful defeats! You never sought the benefit of another person’s opinion ... And what was the result? Clamor and cacophony, and an empty mythology — all heaped on a pile of rubble.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/opini ... emc=tha212
May 21, 2011
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
BEIRUT, Lebanon
There is a story making the rounds among Lebanese Facebook users about a Syrian democracy activist who was stopped at a Syrian Army checkpoint the other day. He reportedly had a laptop and a thumb drive on the seat next to him. The Syrian soldier examined them and then asked the driver: “Do you have a Facebook?” “No,” the man said, so the soldier let him pass.
You have to feel sorry for that Syrian soldier looking for a Facebook on the front seat, but it’s that kind of regime. Syria really doesn’t know what’s hit it — how the tightest police state in the region could lose control over its population, armed only with cellphone cameras and, yes, access to Facebook and YouTube.
You can see how it happened from just one example: Several Syrian dissidents have banded together and from scratch created SNN — Shaam News Network — a Web site that is posting the cellphone pictures and Twitter feeds coming in from protests all over Syria. Many global TV networks, all of which are banned from Syria, are now picking up SNN’s hourly footage. My bet is that SNN cost no more than a few thousand dollars to start, and it’s become the go-to site for video from the Syrian uprising. Just like that — a regime that controlled all the news now can’t anymore.
I don’t see how Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, can last — not because of Facebook, which his regime would love to confiscate, if it could only find the darn thing — but because of something hiding in plain sight: Many, many Syrian people have lost their fear. On Friday alone, the regime killed at least 26 more of its people in protests across the country.
This is a fight to the death now — and it’s the biggest show on earth, for one very simple reason: Libya implodes, Tunisia implodes, Egypt implodes, Yemen implodes, Bahrain implodes — Syria explodes. The emergence of democracy in all these other Arab countries would change their governments and have long-term regional implications. But democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.
A collapse or democratization of the Syrian regime would have huge ramifications for Lebanon, a country Syria has controlled since the mid-1970s; for Israel, which has counted on Syria to keep the peace on the Golan Heights since 1967; for Iran, since Syria is Iran’s main platform for exporting revolution into the Arab world; for the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, which gets rockets from Iran via Syria; for Turkey, which abuts Syria and shares many of its ethnic communities, particularly Kurds, Alawites and Sunnis; for Iraq, which suffered from Syria serving as a conduit for jihadist suicide bombers; and for Hamas, whose leader sits in Damascus.
Because Syria is such a keystone nation, there is a tendency among its neighbors to hope that the Assad regime could be weakened — and therefore moderated — but not broken. Few dare trust the Syrian people to build a stable social order out of the ashes of the Assad dictatorship. Those fears may be appropriate, but none of us get a vote. Only the Syrians do, and they are voting with their feet and with their lives for the opportunity to live as citizens, with equal rights and obligations, not pawns of a mafia regime.
More than in any other Arab country today, the democracy protestors in Syria know that when they walk out the door to peacefully demand freedom they are facing a regime that has no hesitancy about gunning them down. Lebanese have been surprised by their sheer bravery.
“We have an obligation of solidarity with people in distress who are fighting for their freedom and their dignity with nonviolent means,” said Michel Hajji Georgiou, a writer at Beirut’s L’Orient Le Jour newspaper and one of the drivers of the Cedar Revolution here in 2005. “There can be no stable democracy in Lebanon if there is no democracy in Syria.”
Of course, the million-dollar question hanging over the Syrian rebellion, and all the Arab rebellions, is: Can the people really come together and write a social contract to live together as equal citizens — not as rival sects — once the iron fist of the regimes is removed?
The answer is not clear, but when you see so many people peacefully defying these regimes, like Syria’s, it tells you that something very deep wants to rise to the surface. It tells you that while no Arabs are really citizens today with full rights and obligations, said Hanin Ghaddar, editor of NOWlebanon.com, a Web site tracking the revolutions, “they want to be” and that’s what these uprisings are largely about.
Ghaddar added that she recently returned from New York City, where she ran into rival demonstrations in Central Park between people who insisted that horse-drawn carriages there were just fine and animal-rights activists who argued that these street carriages endangered horses: “I thought, ‘Oh, my God! I just want to live in a country where you have the luxury to worry about animal rights,’ ” not human rights. “We are still so far from that luxury.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/opini ... emc=tha212
They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
BEIRUT, Lebanon
There is a story making the rounds among Lebanese Facebook users about a Syrian democracy activist who was stopped at a Syrian Army checkpoint the other day. He reportedly had a laptop and a thumb drive on the seat next to him. The Syrian soldier examined them and then asked the driver: “Do you have a Facebook?” “No,” the man said, so the soldier let him pass.
You have to feel sorry for that Syrian soldier looking for a Facebook on the front seat, but it’s that kind of regime. Syria really doesn’t know what’s hit it — how the tightest police state in the region could lose control over its population, armed only with cellphone cameras and, yes, access to Facebook and YouTube.
You can see how it happened from just one example: Several Syrian dissidents have banded together and from scratch created SNN — Shaam News Network — a Web site that is posting the cellphone pictures and Twitter feeds coming in from protests all over Syria. Many global TV networks, all of which are banned from Syria, are now picking up SNN’s hourly footage. My bet is that SNN cost no more than a few thousand dollars to start, and it’s become the go-to site for video from the Syrian uprising. Just like that — a regime that controlled all the news now can’t anymore.
I don’t see how Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, can last — not because of Facebook, which his regime would love to confiscate, if it could only find the darn thing — but because of something hiding in plain sight: Many, many Syrian people have lost their fear. On Friday alone, the regime killed at least 26 more of its people in protests across the country.
This is a fight to the death now — and it’s the biggest show on earth, for one very simple reason: Libya implodes, Tunisia implodes, Egypt implodes, Yemen implodes, Bahrain implodes — Syria explodes. The emergence of democracy in all these other Arab countries would change their governments and have long-term regional implications. But democracy or breakdown in Syria would change the whole Middle East overnight.
A collapse or democratization of the Syrian regime would have huge ramifications for Lebanon, a country Syria has controlled since the mid-1970s; for Israel, which has counted on Syria to keep the peace on the Golan Heights since 1967; for Iran, since Syria is Iran’s main platform for exporting revolution into the Arab world; for the Lebanese Shiite militia Hezbollah, which gets rockets from Iran via Syria; for Turkey, which abuts Syria and shares many of its ethnic communities, particularly Kurds, Alawites and Sunnis; for Iraq, which suffered from Syria serving as a conduit for jihadist suicide bombers; and for Hamas, whose leader sits in Damascus.
Because Syria is such a keystone nation, there is a tendency among its neighbors to hope that the Assad regime could be weakened — and therefore moderated — but not broken. Few dare trust the Syrian people to build a stable social order out of the ashes of the Assad dictatorship. Those fears may be appropriate, but none of us get a vote. Only the Syrians do, and they are voting with their feet and with their lives for the opportunity to live as citizens, with equal rights and obligations, not pawns of a mafia regime.
More than in any other Arab country today, the democracy protestors in Syria know that when they walk out the door to peacefully demand freedom they are facing a regime that has no hesitancy about gunning them down. Lebanese have been surprised by their sheer bravery.
“We have an obligation of solidarity with people in distress who are fighting for their freedom and their dignity with nonviolent means,” said Michel Hajji Georgiou, a writer at Beirut’s L’Orient Le Jour newspaper and one of the drivers of the Cedar Revolution here in 2005. “There can be no stable democracy in Lebanon if there is no democracy in Syria.”
Of course, the million-dollar question hanging over the Syrian rebellion, and all the Arab rebellions, is: Can the people really come together and write a social contract to live together as equal citizens — not as rival sects — once the iron fist of the regimes is removed?
The answer is not clear, but when you see so many people peacefully defying these regimes, like Syria’s, it tells you that something very deep wants to rise to the surface. It tells you that while no Arabs are really citizens today with full rights and obligations, said Hanin Ghaddar, editor of NOWlebanon.com, a Web site tracking the revolutions, “they want to be” and that’s what these uprisings are largely about.
Ghaddar added that she recently returned from New York City, where she ran into rival demonstrations in Central Park between people who insisted that horse-drawn carriages there were just fine and animal-rights activists who argued that these street carriages endangered horses: “I thought, ‘Oh, my God! I just want to live in a country where you have the luxury to worry about animal rights,’ ” not human rights. “We are still so far from that luxury.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/opini ... emc=tha212
August 2, 2011
The New Hama Rules
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
What a difference three decades make. In April 1982, I was assigned to be the Beirut correspondent for The Times. Before I arrived, word had filtered back to Lebanon about an uprising in February in the Syrian town of Hama — famed for its water wheels on the Orontes River. Rumor had it that then President Hafez al-Assad had put down a Sunni Muslim rebellion in Hama by shelling the neighborhoods where the revolt was centered, then dynamiting buildings, some with residents still inside, and then steamrolling them flat, like a parking lot. It was hard to believe and even harder to check. No one had cellphones back then, and foreign media were not allowed access.
That May I got a visa to Syria, just as Hama had been reopened. It was said that the Syrian regime was “encouraging” Syrians to drive through the town, see the crushed neighborhoods and contemplate the silence. So I just hired a cab in Damascus and went. It was, and remains, one of the most chilling things I’ve ever seen: Whole neighborhoods, the size of four football fields, looked as though a tornado had swept back and forth over them for a week — but this was not the work of Mother Nature.
This was an act of unprecedented brutality, a settling of scores between Assad’s minority Alawite regime and Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority that had dared to challenge him. If you kicked the ground in some areas that had been flattened, a tattered book, a shred of clothing, the tip of a steel reinforcing rod were easily exposed. It was a killing field. According to Amnesty International, up to 20,000 people were buried there. I contemplated the silence and gave it a name: “Hama Rules.”
Hama Rules were the prevailing leadership rules in the Arab world. They said: Rule by fear — strike fear in the heart of your people by letting them know that you play by no rules at all, so they won’t ever, ever, ever think about rebelling against you.
It worked for a long time in Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, etc., until it didn’t. Today, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, Hafez’s son, is now repeating his father’s mass murdering tactics to quash the new Syrian uprising, again centered in Hama. But, this time, the Syrian people are answering with their own Hama Rules, which are quite remarkable. They say: “We know that every time we walk out the door to protest, you will gun us down, without mercy. But we are not afraid anymore, and we will not be powerless anymore. Now, you leaders will be afraid of us. Those are our Hama Rules.”
This is the struggle today across the Arab world — the new Hama Rules versus the old Hama Rules — “I will make you afraid” versus “We are not afraid anymore.”
Good for the people. It is hard to exaggerate how much these Arab regimes wasted the lives of an entire Arab generation, with their foolish wars with Israel and each other and their fraudulent ideologies that masked their naked power grabs and predatory behavior. Nothing good was possible with these leaders. The big question today, though, is this: Is progress possible without them?
That is, once these regimes are shucked off, can the different Arab communities come together as citizens and write social contracts for how to live together without iron-fisted dictators — can they write a positive set of Hama Rules based not on anyone fearing anyone else, but rather on mutual respect, protection of minority and women’s rights and consensual government?
It is not easy. These dictators built no civil society, no institutions and no democratic experience for their people to work with. Iraq demonstrates that it is theoretically possible to go from an old Hama Rules tyranny to consensual politics — but it required $1 trillion, thousands of casualties, a herculean mediation effort by the U.S. and courageous Iraqi political will to live together — and even now the final outcome is uncertain. Iraqis know how vital we were in this transition, which is why many don’t want us to leave.
Now Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt and Tunisia are all going to attempt similar transitions — at once — but without a neutral arbiter to referee. It is unprecedented in this region, and we can already see just how hard this will be. I still believe that the democratic impulse by all these Arab peoples to throw off their dictators is heroic and hugely positive. They will oust all of them in the end. But the new dawn will take time to appear.
I think the former foreign minister of Jordan, Marwan Muasher, has the right attitude. “One cannot expect this to be a linear process or to be done overnight,” he said to me. “There were no real political parties, no civil society institutions ready to take over in any of these countries. I do not like to call this the ‘Arab Spring.’ I prefer to call it the ‘Arab Awakening,’ and it is going to play out over the next 10 to 15 years before it settles down. We are going to see all four seasons multiple times. These people are experiencing democracy for the first time. They are going to make mistakes on the political and economic fronts. But I remain optimistic in the long run, because people have stopped feeling powerless.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opini ... emc=tha212
The New Hama Rules
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
What a difference three decades make. In April 1982, I was assigned to be the Beirut correspondent for The Times. Before I arrived, word had filtered back to Lebanon about an uprising in February in the Syrian town of Hama — famed for its water wheels on the Orontes River. Rumor had it that then President Hafez al-Assad had put down a Sunni Muslim rebellion in Hama by shelling the neighborhoods where the revolt was centered, then dynamiting buildings, some with residents still inside, and then steamrolling them flat, like a parking lot. It was hard to believe and even harder to check. No one had cellphones back then, and foreign media were not allowed access.
That May I got a visa to Syria, just as Hama had been reopened. It was said that the Syrian regime was “encouraging” Syrians to drive through the town, see the crushed neighborhoods and contemplate the silence. So I just hired a cab in Damascus and went. It was, and remains, one of the most chilling things I’ve ever seen: Whole neighborhoods, the size of four football fields, looked as though a tornado had swept back and forth over them for a week — but this was not the work of Mother Nature.
This was an act of unprecedented brutality, a settling of scores between Assad’s minority Alawite regime and Syria’s Sunni Muslim majority that had dared to challenge him. If you kicked the ground in some areas that had been flattened, a tattered book, a shred of clothing, the tip of a steel reinforcing rod were easily exposed. It was a killing field. According to Amnesty International, up to 20,000 people were buried there. I contemplated the silence and gave it a name: “Hama Rules.”
Hama Rules were the prevailing leadership rules in the Arab world. They said: Rule by fear — strike fear in the heart of your people by letting them know that you play by no rules at all, so they won’t ever, ever, ever think about rebelling against you.
It worked for a long time in Syria, Iraq, Tunisia, etc., until it didn’t. Today, Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, Hafez’s son, is now repeating his father’s mass murdering tactics to quash the new Syrian uprising, again centered in Hama. But, this time, the Syrian people are answering with their own Hama Rules, which are quite remarkable. They say: “We know that every time we walk out the door to protest, you will gun us down, without mercy. But we are not afraid anymore, and we will not be powerless anymore. Now, you leaders will be afraid of us. Those are our Hama Rules.”
This is the struggle today across the Arab world — the new Hama Rules versus the old Hama Rules — “I will make you afraid” versus “We are not afraid anymore.”
Good for the people. It is hard to exaggerate how much these Arab regimes wasted the lives of an entire Arab generation, with their foolish wars with Israel and each other and their fraudulent ideologies that masked their naked power grabs and predatory behavior. Nothing good was possible with these leaders. The big question today, though, is this: Is progress possible without them?
That is, once these regimes are shucked off, can the different Arab communities come together as citizens and write social contracts for how to live together without iron-fisted dictators — can they write a positive set of Hama Rules based not on anyone fearing anyone else, but rather on mutual respect, protection of minority and women’s rights and consensual government?
It is not easy. These dictators built no civil society, no institutions and no democratic experience for their people to work with. Iraq demonstrates that it is theoretically possible to go from an old Hama Rules tyranny to consensual politics — but it required $1 trillion, thousands of casualties, a herculean mediation effort by the U.S. and courageous Iraqi political will to live together — and even now the final outcome is uncertain. Iraqis know how vital we were in this transition, which is why many don’t want us to leave.
Now Yemen, Libya, Syria, Egypt and Tunisia are all going to attempt similar transitions — at once — but without a neutral arbiter to referee. It is unprecedented in this region, and we can already see just how hard this will be. I still believe that the democratic impulse by all these Arab peoples to throw off their dictators is heroic and hugely positive. They will oust all of them in the end. But the new dawn will take time to appear.
I think the former foreign minister of Jordan, Marwan Muasher, has the right attitude. “One cannot expect this to be a linear process or to be done overnight,” he said to me. “There were no real political parties, no civil society institutions ready to take over in any of these countries. I do not like to call this the ‘Arab Spring.’ I prefer to call it the ‘Arab Awakening,’ and it is going to play out over the next 10 to 15 years before it settles down. We are going to see all four seasons multiple times. These people are experiencing democracy for the first time. They are going to make mistakes on the political and economic fronts. But I remain optimistic in the long run, because people have stopped feeling powerless.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/03/opini ... emc=tha212
October 15, 2011
Democracy’s Collateral Damage
By ROSS DOUTHAT
THE Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, tracing its roots to St. Mark the apostle and the first century A.D. Coptic Christians have survived persecutions and conquests, the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. They have been governed from Constantinople and Ctesiphon, Baghdad and London. They have outlasted the Byzantines, the Umayyads and the Ottomans, Napoleon Bonaparte and the British Empire.
But they may not survive the Arab Spring.
Apart from Hosni Mubarak and his intimates, no group has suffered more from Egypt’s revolution than the country’s eight million Copts. Last week two dozen people were killed in clashes between the Coptic Christians and the Egyptian Army, a grim milestone in a year in which the Coptic community has faced escalating terrorist and mob violence. A recent Vatican estimate suggests that 100,000 Copts may have fled the country since Mubarak’s fall. If Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood consolidates political power, that figure could grow exponentially.
This is a familiar story in the Middle East, where any sort of popular sovereignty has tended to unleash the furies and drive minorities into exile. From Lebanon to North Africa, the Arab world’s Christian enclaves have been shrinking steadily since decolonization. More than half of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christians have fled the country since the American invasion toppled Saddam Hussein.
More important, though, this is a familiar story for the modern world as a whole — a case of what National Review’s John Derbyshire calls “modernity versus diversity.” For all the bright talk about multicultural mosaics, the age of globalization has also been an age of unprecedented religious and racial sorting — sometimes by choice, more often at gunpoint. Indeed, the causes of democracy and international peace have often been intimately tied to ethnic cleansing: both have gained ground not in spite of mass migrations and mass murders, but because of them.
This is a point worth keeping in mind when reading the Big Idea book of the moment, Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Pinker marshals an impressive amount of data to demonstrate that human civilization has become steadily less violent, that the years since 1945 have been particularly pacific, and that contemporary Europe has achieved an unprecedented level of tranquility.
What Pinker sometimes glosses over, though, is the price that’s been paid for these advances. With the partial exception of immigrant societies like the United States, mass democracy seems to depend on ethno-religious solidarity in a way that older forms of government did not. The most successful modern nation-states have often gained stability at the expense of diversity, driving out or even murdering their minorities on the road to peaceful coexistence with their neighbors.
Europe’s era of unexpected harmony, in particular, may have been made possible by the decades of expulsions and genocide that preceded it. As Jerry Z. Muller pointed out in a 2008 essay for Foreign Affairs, the horrors of the two world wars effectively rationalized the continent’s borders, replacing the old multi-ethnic empires with homogeneous nation-states, and eliminating — often all too literally — minority populations and polyglot regions. A decade of civil war and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia completed the process. “Whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant nationality,” Muller wrote, “by 2007 there were only two, and one of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up.”
Along the same lines, the developing world’s worst outbreaks of ethno-religious violence — in post-Saddam Iraq, or the Indian subcontinent after the demise of the British Raj — are often associated with transitions from dictatorships or monarchies to some sort of popular rule. And from Kashmir to the West Bank, Kurdistan to Congo, the globe’s enduring trouble spots are usually places where ethno-religious communities and political borders can’t be made to line up.
This suggests that if a European-style age of democratic peace awaits the Middle East and Africa, it lies on the far side of ethnic and religious re-sortings that may take generations to work out.
Whether we root for this process to take its course depends on how we weigh the hope of a better future against the peoples who are likely to suffer, flee and disappear along the way. Europe’s long peace is an extraordinary achievement — but was it worth the wars and genocides and forced migrations that made it possible? A democratic Middle East would be a remarkable triumph for humanity — but is it worth decades of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing?
I don’t know the answer. But maybe we should ask the Copts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opini ... emc=tha212
Democracy’s Collateral Damage
By ROSS DOUTHAT
THE Coptic Orthodox Church in Egypt is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world, tracing its roots to St. Mark the apostle and the first century A.D. Coptic Christians have survived persecutions and conquests, the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam. They have been governed from Constantinople and Ctesiphon, Baghdad and London. They have outlasted the Byzantines, the Umayyads and the Ottomans, Napoleon Bonaparte and the British Empire.
But they may not survive the Arab Spring.
Apart from Hosni Mubarak and his intimates, no group has suffered more from Egypt’s revolution than the country’s eight million Copts. Last week two dozen people were killed in clashes between the Coptic Christians and the Egyptian Army, a grim milestone in a year in which the Coptic community has faced escalating terrorist and mob violence. A recent Vatican estimate suggests that 100,000 Copts may have fled the country since Mubarak’s fall. If Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood consolidates political power, that figure could grow exponentially.
This is a familiar story in the Middle East, where any sort of popular sovereignty has tended to unleash the furies and drive minorities into exile. From Lebanon to North Africa, the Arab world’s Christian enclaves have been shrinking steadily since decolonization. More than half of Iraq’s 1.5 million Christians have fled the country since the American invasion toppled Saddam Hussein.
More important, though, this is a familiar story for the modern world as a whole — a case of what National Review’s John Derbyshire calls “modernity versus diversity.” For all the bright talk about multicultural mosaics, the age of globalization has also been an age of unprecedented religious and racial sorting — sometimes by choice, more often at gunpoint. Indeed, the causes of democracy and international peace have often been intimately tied to ethnic cleansing: both have gained ground not in spite of mass migrations and mass murders, but because of them.
This is a point worth keeping in mind when reading the Big Idea book of the moment, Steven Pinker’s “Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.” Pinker marshals an impressive amount of data to demonstrate that human civilization has become steadily less violent, that the years since 1945 have been particularly pacific, and that contemporary Europe has achieved an unprecedented level of tranquility.
What Pinker sometimes glosses over, though, is the price that’s been paid for these advances. With the partial exception of immigrant societies like the United States, mass democracy seems to depend on ethno-religious solidarity in a way that older forms of government did not. The most successful modern nation-states have often gained stability at the expense of diversity, driving out or even murdering their minorities on the road to peaceful coexistence with their neighbors.
Europe’s era of unexpected harmony, in particular, may have been made possible by the decades of expulsions and genocide that preceded it. As Jerry Z. Muller pointed out in a 2008 essay for Foreign Affairs, the horrors of the two world wars effectively rationalized the continent’s borders, replacing the old multi-ethnic empires with homogeneous nation-states, and eliminating — often all too literally — minority populations and polyglot regions. A decade of civil war and ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia completed the process. “Whereas in 1900 there were many states in Europe without a single overwhelmingly dominant nationality,” Muller wrote, “by 2007 there were only two, and one of those, Belgium, was close to breaking up.”
Along the same lines, the developing world’s worst outbreaks of ethno-religious violence — in post-Saddam Iraq, or the Indian subcontinent after the demise of the British Raj — are often associated with transitions from dictatorships or monarchies to some sort of popular rule. And from Kashmir to the West Bank, Kurdistan to Congo, the globe’s enduring trouble spots are usually places where ethno-religious communities and political borders can’t be made to line up.
This suggests that if a European-style age of democratic peace awaits the Middle East and Africa, it lies on the far side of ethnic and religious re-sortings that may take generations to work out.
Whether we root for this process to take its course depends on how we weigh the hope of a better future against the peoples who are likely to suffer, flee and disappear along the way. Europe’s long peace is an extraordinary achievement — but was it worth the wars and genocides and forced migrations that made it possible? A democratic Middle East would be a remarkable triumph for humanity — but is it worth decades of sectarian violence and ethnic cleansing?
I don’t know the answer. But maybe we should ask the Copts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/opini ... emc=tha212