Rookies And Reality
You'd think that after 232 years, this country would have gotten some kind of handle on what is necessary for a reasonable foreign policy. You'd think so, but you would, alas, be wrong. The basis for our ways of dealing with the rest of the world too often is what we think the world ought to be like rather than what it actually is like. Nowhere is that more evident than in our Middle East policy, especially under this administration. People in the Middle East have noticed, as this article written by Rami Khouri for the Jordan Times, makes clear.
One of the frightening lessons one learns from spending time in Washington DC is that most of the men and women who make or influence American policy in the Middle East actually have little or no first-hand experience in the region. They know very little about its people, or its political trends at the grassroots level - as the Iraq experience reconfirms so painfully.
American policymaking throughout the Middle East remains defined largely by three principal forces: pro-Israeli interests and lobbies in the United States that pander almost totally to Israeli government positions; an almost genetic, if understandable, need to respond to the September 11 terror attack against the United States by politically and militarily striking against Middle Eastern targets; and growing determination to confront and contain Iran and its assorted Sunni and Shiite Arab allies.
A significant consequence of Washington’s deep pro-Israeli tilt has been to ignore public opinion throughout the region, which in turn, generates greater criticism of the United States. It is not clear if American policy-makers ignore Middle Eastern public opinion because of ignorance and diplomatic amateurism or because of the structural dictates of pro-Israeli compliance.
While I tend to agree that "pro-Israeli" factors do enter into too much of American policy decisions in the Middle East, I think the overall approach has been based on a template constructed by the US which too often has had no direct connection with the reality the rest of the world operates with.
If the US were dealing with the same reality as the rest of the world (instead of being oh-so-busy constructing a new one, which the current administration shamelessly admitted it was going to do), it would realize that the overarching concern of those in the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The US is perceived as willfully refusing to understand that. Furthermore, the US is perceived as not recognizing what Mr. Khouri calls the "new spirit" afoot in the Middle East.
I have argued for years now that a new spirit of populist defiance, resistance and self-assertion is the single most important strategic development in the Middle East. Large numbers of Arabs, Iranians and Turks - hundreds of millions of people - have shed their legacy of passive acquiescence in their own suffering, weakness, marginalisation and victimisation. Instead, they are determined to take their fate in their own hands, and to challenge and checkmate those who would keep them in their previous vulnerable, dehumanised state.
At the domestic level, more and more people around the Middle East actively demand, and when possible work to craft, a life and society that offer them more human dignity and citizen rights. These include such basic issues as security, opportunity, socio-economic needs and expressing their cultural or political identity. At regional level, this spirit of self-assertive defiance is more difficult to manifest or actualise, but it comes through very clearly in people’s attitudes, which are now well captured in public opinion polls.
If Mr. Khouri's thesis is correct, and I suspect it is, the US could actually have a more positive impact in its dealings with the Middle East if it would only pay attention to what is actually happening there. This would require policies being crafted by people who actually are in touch with the reality of the Middle East as it is now being manifested and who actually understand the various parts of what for too long has been seen as a puzzle so complicated that no attempt to put the various parts together has ever really been tried.
It's obviously too late for this administration, even if it ever intended to put forth a serious, reality-based foreign policy in this part of the world. The next administration would be well advised to take a different approach.
One of the frightening lessons one learns from spending time in Washington DC is that most of the men and women who make or influence American policy in the Middle East actually have little or no first-hand experience in the region. They know very little about its people, or its political trends at the grassroots level - as the Iraq experience reconfirms so painfully.
American policymaking throughout the Middle East remains defined largely by three principal forces: pro-Israeli interests and lobbies in the United States that pander almost totally to Israeli government positions; an almost genetic, if understandable, need to respond to the September 11 terror attack against the United States by politically and militarily striking against Middle Eastern targets; and growing determination to confront and contain Iran and its assorted Sunni and Shiite Arab allies.
A significant consequence of Washington’s deep pro-Israeli tilt has been to ignore public opinion throughout the region, which in turn, generates greater criticism of the United States. It is not clear if American policy-makers ignore Middle Eastern public opinion because of ignorance and diplomatic amateurism or because of the structural dictates of pro-Israeli compliance.
While I tend to agree that "pro-Israeli" factors do enter into too much of American policy decisions in the Middle East, I think the overall approach has been based on a template constructed by the US which too often has had no direct connection with the reality the rest of the world operates with.
If the US were dealing with the same reality as the rest of the world (instead of being oh-so-busy constructing a new one, which the current administration shamelessly admitted it was going to do), it would realize that the overarching concern of those in the Middle East is the Israeli-Palestinian issue. The US is perceived as willfully refusing to understand that. Furthermore, the US is perceived as not recognizing what Mr. Khouri calls the "new spirit" afoot in the Middle East.
I have argued for years now that a new spirit of populist defiance, resistance and self-assertion is the single most important strategic development in the Middle East. Large numbers of Arabs, Iranians and Turks - hundreds of millions of people - have shed their legacy of passive acquiescence in their own suffering, weakness, marginalisation and victimisation. Instead, they are determined to take their fate in their own hands, and to challenge and checkmate those who would keep them in their previous vulnerable, dehumanised state.
At the domestic level, more and more people around the Middle East actively demand, and when possible work to craft, a life and society that offer them more human dignity and citizen rights. These include such basic issues as security, opportunity, socio-economic needs and expressing their cultural or political identity. At regional level, this spirit of self-assertive defiance is more difficult to manifest or actualise, but it comes through very clearly in people’s attitudes, which are now well captured in public opinion polls.
If Mr. Khouri's thesis is correct, and I suspect it is, the US could actually have a more positive impact in its dealings with the Middle East if it would only pay attention to what is actually happening there. This would require policies being crafted by people who actually are in touch with the reality of the Middle East as it is now being manifested and who actually understand the various parts of what for too long has been seen as a puzzle so complicated that no attempt to put the various parts together has ever really been tried.
It's obviously too late for this administration, even if it ever intended to put forth a serious, reality-based foreign policy in this part of the world. The next administration would be well advised to take a different approach.
Labels: Foreign Policy, Middle East
posted by Diane at 3:30 PM
1 Comments:
Rami Khouri must be living in imaginable world if he says "a new spirit of populist defiance, resistance and self-assertion is the single most important strategic development in the Middle East." The Arab world is, with minor exception, the most autocratic region of the world. It's religious and intolerant as Europe was in 17th and 18th centuries. It has shown only marginal progress the last 50 years.
Khouri also fails to understand the major reason the US supports Israel. Israel is way more democratic than the US, it has a really free press that is always in the face of the government no matter who is in control. As traumatic as 9/11 is in the US, the Holocaust is a trauma the US shares with Israel.
Khouri also knows way too well that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to the life in the Middle East because Arab leaders are exploiting it to control their population. With less support from the bleachers, the two sides to the conflict will be forced to reach peace whose parameters have been known and implicitly agree upon for more than a decade.
Khouri argument is not less misleading or more sophisticated than Bush's. You can treat illegal immigrants well without speaking Spanish and with being Catholic. You can oppose racism without being black. The idea that you must know the other side well in order to treat her well is baseless. It doesn't hurt, but FDR was very rich and still created the New Deal.
So much for Khouri's whining.
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