The Middle East and  the West

A vision of the future

Across the broad spectrum of the Arab world, new challenges abound and opportunities await. A vision of the region, with an eye on the West.

By GUILAIN DENOEUX WASHINGTON

It was in the Summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs that Samuel Huntington first introduced the idea of a “clash of civilizations.” In the post-Cold War world, Huntington argued, international politics no longer would be driven primarily by conflicts over ideologies or economic interests. Instead, he suggested, “the battle lines of the future” would consist increasingly of cultural antagonisms between the world’s great civilizations: Western, Slavic-Orthodox, Japanese, Islamic, Confucian, Latin American and African.

Huntington conceded that nation-states would remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but predicted that the main schisms of global politics would oppose countries or blocs of countries belonging to different civilizations. Particularly critical, he warned, would be the collision between Islam and the West.

The thesis was quickly rejected by most scholarly analysts as simplistic, if not bizarre, and as unlikely to provide a reliable guide to the complexities of world politics in the 21st century. Yet the controversies it spurred immediately spread to the mass media, triggering a vast debate. That surprising development reflected the craving for a new way of understanding international politics, as well as the boldness of Huntington’s argument, which clearly identified an approaching enemy and imminent threat to the West.

Huntington’s thesis also resonated because it tapped into longstanding Western fears of Islam, evoked memories of Muslim armies at the gate of Vienna and capitalized on years of negative stereotyping of Islam in the Western media. During the previous decade, Western cultural anxieties about Islam already had been revived by the rise of political Islam across the Middle East, the Islamic Revolution and seizure of the American Embassy in Iran, the assassination of President Sadat, the bombing of the US Marines’ barracks in Beirut and the wave of kidnapping of Westerners by Shi’ite militants associated with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Many worlds. The attention it generated notwithstanding, Huntington’s thesis was always problematic. And as the years passed its limitations became even more evident. Civilizations are not the coherent, monolithic entities Huntington implies. Stretching over every single continent and across radically different cultures endowed with their own histories and traditions, the Islamic world cannot be seen as a single unit.

Senegalese Muslims are culturally much closer to non-Muslim West Africans than to Iranians, Afghans or Kuwaitis. Within the Islamic world, loyalties based on Islam constantly compete with other, often older, bases for identity, such as those built on ethnicity and language, or those revolving around family, tribal and geographic affiliations. A Pakistani may be keen to remember he has been a Muslim for “only” 1,500 years, but a Pashtun for over 3,000. Meanwhile, newer forms of solidarities based on class and professional affiliations have gained ground. Conflicts pitting Muslims against one another thus have been prevalent throughout the Islamic world.

In an increasingly globalized and interconnected world, the boundaries between civilizations are becoming ever more fluid and porous. Western influence pervades Islamic countries. Enmeshed in the very fabric of those societies, it shapes how millions of Muslims think, behave, dress, earn a living and relax at home. For better or worse, the inroads that Western-inspired, secular values have made into Islamic societies cannot be wished away.

Meanwhile, the expansion of Muslim communities in Western countries – and the emergence of Islam as the fastest-growing religion in North America and Western Europe – does not square easily with Huntington’s view of clearly demarcated boundaries between civilizations.

Real synthesis. The unprecedented ease with which information, ideas, cultural products and people travel from one “civilization” to the next has greatly strengthened transnational, “multi-civilizational” identities and value systems. Instances of violent clashes between ideologies drawn from, respectively, the Islamic and Western traditions, are very real indeed. But they should not detract from equally significant, ongoing efforts by Muslim intellectuals to achieve a synthesis between Islamic notions and concepts rooted in the Western heritage.

Ideas of freedom, liberalism, human rights and constitutionalism have tremendous appeal across the Islamic world; they are not, as Huntington would have it, incompatible with Islam. No less a prominent Islamic figure than Mohammed Khatami went out of his way to rebut the idea of a “clash of civilizations,” calling instead, in his inaugural speech and then later at the United Nations, for a “dialogue of civilizations.”

The foreign policies of Muslim states have been driven not by civilization-based hostilities or affinities, but by national security concerns, realpolitik considerations, ruling-elite interests and various Muslim countries’ search for political and economic advantage in regional and international arenas. The Islamic community has experienced no processes of political and economic integration or military cooperation such as those seen in the West and reflected in such institutions as the European Union or NATO.

“Islamic solidarity” certainly did not prevent the Iran-Iraq War. Two years after that conflict came to an end, Muslim Iraq invaded Muslim Kuwait, and, shortly thereafter, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Syria all took part in the US-led military campaign against Iraq. Since the mid-1990s, Muslim Turkey has struck an increasingly close military alliance with Israel. Meanwhile, even self-proclaimed Islamist regimes have clashed with one another: in 1998, Iran and Afghanistan (then under the Taliban) almost went to war with each other. Clearly, international conflict has not taken place primarily along the “cultural fault lines” identified by Huntington.

In fact, the most devastating conflicts of the 1990s were not between, but within, the civilizations identified by Huntington. They took the form of ethnic bloodshed (in Rwanda, for instance); civil wars driven by greed and the naked search for power (as in Sierra Leone, Liberia or the Democratic Republic of Congo); or rightist paramilitary forces fighting leftist rebels (in Colombia). Among predominantly Muslim countries, clan warfare devastated Somalia, while in Algeria a military-dominated regime was engaged in a bloody struggle against an Islamist insurgency that left well over 100,000 dead. Elsewhere, Islamists fought Islamists (as in Afghanistan) and Muslim regimes from Egypt to Central Asia repressed their predominantly Islamist opposition.

By the time the world entered a new century, Huntington’s thesis had been largely discredited. Too much evidence simply could not be reconciled with it. Yet from the moment the Twin Towers came crashing down, many analysts celebrated Huntington’s views as prescient. His argument suddenly was given a new lease on life, and the book he had developed out of the original article became an instant bestseller. After all, the most devastating attack ever to take place on US soil seemed to offer tragic vindication of his prediction that the most serious threat to Western security would emanate from Islam.

To many Americans, the “clash of civilizations” offered a readymade framework within which the trauma of 9/11 could be understood. It helped them make sense of what seemed like a senseless, barbaric and unprovoked attack: it was, they were told, a case of “Muslim rage against Western civilization.” Hadn’t bin Laden himself described his actions as “a war between Islam and the West”? Predictably, religious hatred for “our values, culture, and way of life” repeatedly was offered as an answer to the “Why do they hate us” question that was on everyone’s lips.

Fortunately, cooler heads were quick to refute those views. The unfolding crisis between the West and the Muslim world, they rightly observed, did not stem from Islam or from a fundamental clash between antagonistic cultures. It reflected instead the utter failure of the political and economic models adopted by so many Muslim states; the large-scale societal crises created by population explosions, bankrupt ideologies, rampant corruption and lack of opportunity across the Islamic world; as well as the accumulated resentment and anger created by US policies in the Middle East. They also rightly noted that bin Laden’s call for a jihad against the West had elicited no significant response from the Muslim masses – and indeed had been publicly derided by such prominent Islamic leaders as President Khatami.

And yet, since 9/11, the idea of a clash of civilizations has taken hold on both sides of the Islam-West divide. The gulf of distrust and misunderstanding between the United States and the Islamic world has grown wider, fueled by simultaneous crises in Palestine, over Iraq and in US-Saudi relations; by the controversies surrounding the impact on the Muslim world of the US “war on terrorism;” by the events in Bali and Kenya, as well as by continued concerns over terrorist attacks in the West; by the smearing of Islam by influential religious and political leaders in the United States; and by the growing perception, among Muslims all over the world, that they and their religion are being unfairly blamed for September 11th.

Neither Islam nor the West can afford to see the clash of civilizations become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Since averting such a catastrophe may be the single most important task in the world today, decision-makers might remember the following nine crucial points.

That vision thing. First of all, vision matters. Unless the international community develops a coherent agenda to prevent the clash, the sheer momentum created by 9/11 and its aftermath – including rising fears and emotions on both sides – may make a religious war inevitable. The clash is not pre-ordained, and the West and Islam are not condemned to perpetual conflict. But it will require imagination, sustained political will, the harnessing of intellectual energies and material resources, as well as proactive diplomacy, to prevent the terrible conflagration that may be in the making. Disjointed initiatives will not do. Political, civic and intellectual leaders in both the West and the Islamic world will have to rise to the occasion.

Second, there is a need to support freedom. The West, and the international community as a whole, needs to step up assistance to the process of political reform across the Islamic world. As the Arab Human Development Report released last July demonstrated, much of what has gone wrong in so many Muslim countries can be traced back to “a deficit of freedom.” Political exclusion has fed economic decay, stifled intellectual creativity, thwarted individual initiative and created the climate of despair and collective failure that has bred radical Islam. Unfortunately, since 9/11, authoritarian regimes often have used the war on terrorism as an excuse to silence all opposition and constrict further already limited political space. That trend must be reversed.

Hot air. Third, bellicose rhetoric must be avoided. At a time when Islam and the West feel unfairly targeted by each other, it is imperative to remember that words have consequences – particularly as information and communication technologies now enable incendiary talk to spread instantly across continents and reach people in their living rooms.

Since 9/11, the Bush administration’s rhetorical excesses have damaged US interests and relations with the Islamic world. Sometimes, words have been poorly chosen, as when President Bush declared war on terrorism by describing the effort as a “crusade.” Most often, however, linguistic belligerence has been deliberate, as shown by the “axis of evil” speech, the articulation of a strategic doctrine of “pre-eminence,” or the multiplication of statements that have conveyed arrogance, insensitivity, self-righteousness and Manichean views of the world.

Washington’s rhetoric would not have been different had the United States actually set out to discredit Muslim moderates and strengthen their hardline rivals (as it did in Iran by branding the country as part of the “axis of evil”); had it aimed to create dismay and disillusion among its friends in the region; had it intended to confirm images of itself as a bully; and had it been intent on wasting the capital of genuine sympathy expressed toward America across the Islamic world in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks.

Fourth, leaders must move quickly to denounce bigotry. Decision-makers in both the Islamic world and the West must confront openly those who demonize the other side. Some Muslim regimes have a longstanding habit of blaming the West for their own failings. They have turned a blind eye to, or even encouraged, hateful speech toward the West in the official media. The world no longer can afford this practice. By the same token, decision-makers in the West must distance themselves forcefully and immediately from those influential voices that smear Islam. President Bush waited too long before making it clear that he disagreed with prominent religious conservatives who have vilified the Prophet Mohammed and depicted Islam as an inherently violent and militaristic religion. But to his great credit, Bush now has done so, repeatedly and in a vigorous and unambiguous manner, despite the price he may pay among his political base for this display of leadership.

Fifth, remember that a little symbolism can go a long way. More courageous, high-visibility speeches such as President Khatami’s on the “dialogue of civilizations” will help correct misperceptions of Islam in the West, and reduce the belief that the two civilizations are on a collision course. Similarly, President Bush’s well-timed visit to the Islamic Center in Washington, DC, six days after the 9/11 attacks, had a considerable and beneficial impact across the Muslim world. The president’s return to that same center, to celebrate Eid al-Fitr, on December 5, 2002, was an equally praiseworthy effort to prevent the war on terrorism from being seen as a clash of civilizations.

Mass media. Sixth, harness the power of the media and educational systems. Children in North America and Europe must become more aware of Islam’s many gifts to the West – in the arts, medicine, mathematics, astronomy, literature and philosophy. Like their peers in the Islamic world, those children will benefit from being taught the lessons of Islamic Spain, where for several hundred years a rich cultural synthesis occurred between Christian, Islamic and Jewish civilizations.

For their part, Muslim children must be made to understand that Western culture, including its American subset, cannot be reduced to hedonism, materialism, unbridled individualism and sexual permissiveness, but that it is the source of great ideas and achievements from which the Islamic world can benefit. In the West, the media can do more to shed light on the complex and multifaceted nature of both Islam and political Islam, while in Muslim countries it can adopt a more nuanced approach to the Western world.

Seventh, tap the potential of Muslim communities in the West to act as bridges with the world of Islam. These communities offer an under-utilized reservoir of knowledge and understanding that can be used to overcome mutual distrust. They can help focus dialogue around those values that the United States and Islam share, such as the emphasis on community, family, integrity and hard work, as well as on the ideals of participation, human rights and dignity that resonate with large constituencies in the Islamic world.

Eighth, strive to empower voices of moderation, dialogue and cross-cultural understanding on both sides of the divide. A critical component of this endeavor should consist of efforts by political and civic leaders in the West to reach out to the “democratic middle” that, throughout the Islamic world, finds itself caught between discredited regimes and the radical movements bred by failed political orders. This democratic middle is currently on the defensive. Yet it can be strengthened through activities that enable reformers across the Islamic world to link up with each other and their Western counterparts behind a reform agenda.

Ninth, and last, spare no efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian dispute. A fair, and therefore lasting, resolution of the Palestinian tragedy will not eliminate all sources of friction between the West and the Islamic world. But it is essential to reducing the deep sense of moral outrage and injustice that have bred anti-US fervor from Morocco to Indonesia.

Unless Washington displays at least a willingness to curb Israeli abuses, its perceived role as an enabler for Israeli excesses will continue to widen the gap between the Islamic world and America, and threaten to degenerate into a much broader civilizational dispute – something, perhaps, approaching Huntington’s thesis, first published a decade ago.            N

The price of war and the peace dividend

War in Iraq could spark an economic boom in the Gulf and across the wider Middle East. A look at the possible post-war scenarios.

By RICHARD DEAN DUBAI

Middle East governments have pulled no punches in condemning US plans to attack Iraq. Across the region, heads of state have taken every opportunity to publicly attack President George Bush for even considering a move on Baghdad.

On the surface, their pleas seem well founded. No country wants a war on its doorstep – military conflicts have a nasty habit of spilling over. However, closer scrutiny suggests that some Middle East countries, particularly in the Gulf, have plenty to gain if it goes ahead.

In the short term, oil prices will shoot up, leading to windfall revenues for the likes of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE. In the medium term, the economic rebuilding of Iraq will throw up lucrative commercial opportunities for its neighbors. And in the long term, a stable regime in Iraq will bring greater stability to the entire Gulf region, invigorating foreign investment.

“I don’t think war in Iraq would do much damage to the regional economy,” says Gill James, Standard Chartered bank’s Middle East economist. “We have looked at this and while there would be some short-term shocks, I don’t foresee major problems.”

Of course, debates on the post-war prospects for the regional economy assume that conflict is a foregone conclusion. By and large, they also assume that it will be short and decisive – an assumption that is wide open to question. However, the international consensus points towards a US assault in the first half of this year, with the fighting over by summer.

“We are saying that it is highly likely,” says Neil Partrick, Middle East economist and defense specialist with the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) based in London. “We put the probability of war at 70 percent.” The EIU forecasts an attack within the first four months of 2003, and for it to be a short-lived campaign. “It is likely that it will be more a matter of weeks and months – three months at a maximum – although putting hard times on it is difficult.”

Thinking long term. Given this baseline scenario, what will be the economic implications for the Middle East when war breaks out and, perhaps more importantly, in years to follow? On the whole, largely favorable. Clearly, a war in Iraq will carry some costs for its neighbors. But these are likely to be outweighed by significant benefits in the short, medium and long term.

The short-term implications are dominated by oil markets. “Clearly, there will be some oil price volatility,” says Standard Chartered’s James. The most likely outcome is that Iraqi exports will dry up for at least two months in the event of an attack. When this happens, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the UAE will step in to make up the shortfall. (Their combined spare capacity is estimated at around 5 million barrels per day (b/pd) at present, so they will easily cover Iraq’s current production, which fluctuates around 2.3 million b/pd.) At the same time, prices will spike, at least in the short term, leading to revenue windfalls for the region’s major oil producers.

On the flip side, tourism will be the main short-term casualty. Vacationers are notoriously fickle creatures, and the Middle East’s beaches are likely to empty as soon as the first shots are fired. Egypt and Dubai will be hit hardest. Tourism forms the backbone of their economies, and the wider business communities will feel the pinch as tourism revenues dry up.

Egypt will suffer the most from the drop in revenues as its economy is already in a fragile state. Tourism is one of the main sources of US dollars in Egypt, and a sharp downturn in the hospitality sector will have serious implications for the strength of the Egyptian pound, public spending and economic reform.

Shipping out. The Gulf’s shipping industry will also take a hit. The slightest hint of trouble in the Gulf sends insurance rates soaring for vessels entering the Strait of Hormuz, so Dubai’s twin ports of Jebel Ali and Mina Rashid in particular will be affected. But their loss will be others’ gain. Rival container ports on the region’s eastern seaboard will look to mop up the business lost by their rivals in the Gulf. Salalah in Oman will be the main beneficiary, with Fujairah and Khor Fakkan in the UAE also likely to enjoy an upturn in traffic.

Crucially, though, these effects are likely to brief. “There will be short-term shocks [when war breaks out],” says James. “The tourism industry will be affected, and you will see some tailing off of foreign direct investment. But I don’t think these will last too long.” The experience of September 11th provides valuable, and encouraging, pointers. Regional tourism dried up in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, but within six months hotels were once again hanging out the “no vacancy” signs.

Even in neighboring Kuwait, the victim of Saddam’s last act of international military aggression, analysts expect the impact to be limited. “The idea of Iraq invading Kuwait seems to me entirely irrational,” says the EIU’s Partrick. “I cannot see how Saddam would think that invading Kuwait would help.” Indeed, it is questionable whether Iraq troops would obey orders to march across the border. More likely is an Iraqi missile attack on US bases in Kuwait.

But unless Saddam Husseins’s Scuds are armed with biological warheads, the impact will be minimal. As such, the EIU – in common with the International Monetary Fund and other agencies – forecasts a strong economic recovery in Kuwait for 2003 and 2004, albeit with a slight dip in consumer spending and investment while the conflict rages.

For the Middle East region as a whole, the outlook is even more bullish over the medium term. Broadly speaking, this can be defined as covering the second half of 2003 (assuming that the current Iraq regime has been defeated by then) through to 2005. Crucially, this phase will see the start of the rebuilding of post-Saddam Iraq – a process that should present some very rich opportunities for Iraq’s Gulf Arab neighbors. “This is something I definitely expect to see,” says Standard Chartered’s James. “Particularly in somewhere like Dubai, which can emerge as a gateway to Iraq.”

EIU economist Partrick agrees that the rebuilding of Iraq represents a golden commercial opportunity for the Gulf states. However, he warns that the process will not begin as soon as the guns fall silent. “We expect the conflicts to be over in a matter of weeks, but it could take some time to put in place a new regime. It will probably be towards the end of 2003, or early part of 2004, before we see a new regime emerge.”

Even with a new regime in place, crucial issues must be resolved before rebuilding work begins in earnest. Specifically, the issues of UN weapons inspections, UN sanctions and Iraq’s 1991 Gulf War reparation obligations: “It is certainly going to take time before the economic regeneration of Iraq gets going,” says Partrick. “I don’t think sanctions will come off as soon as Saddam is dead or out of his palaces. In a meaningful sense, the rebuilding of Iraq will begin to happen in 2004.”

Once this happens, Gulf businesses can look forward to a mini-boom. On the macroeconomic level, Iraq’s rebuilding will be financed from three areas: international aid, soft loans from Arab neighbors and oil revenues. On the ground in Iraq, this is certain to stimulate a construction boom – great news for Gulf-based contractors, suppliers and consultants. Gulf banks will inevitably come out winners, as they will be asked to finance much of the development work. Further opportunities will emerge as Iraq’s regeneration reaches maturity – for a start, the country’s entire information technology and telecommunications infrastructure will need to be rebuilt.

Indeed, some of the Gulf states have been preparing for a post-Saddam Iraq for years. Dubai has a provisional agreement to manage Baghdad Airport once it reopens to international traffic, and the UAE has stepped up its diplomatic and trade relations with Iraq in recent years. Similarly, Bahraini merchants have established ties with their counterparts in Iraq through a regular, UN-approved ferry service between Manama and Umm Qasr. And Kuwaiti traders have been awaiting the removal of Saddam Hussein for decades, hoping that a thriving, new Iraq will allow them to rebuild their status as a robust regional entrepôt.

Clearly, this is all good news for the Gulf. “The early stages of the rebuilding process are likely to be a win-win situation for the Gulf states,” says one Bahrain-based banker. “On the one hand, demand for products and services from Iraq will surge. At the same time, regional stability should encourage the inflow of tourists and foreign investment.”

In the long term, however, a serious downside begins to emerge: from 2005 onwards, Iraq should be able to ramp up its oil production. Iraq is home to the world’s second largest oil reserves – second only to Saudi Arabia – but today it just scrapes into the top 10 of world producers, behind the likes of Russia, the United States, Britain and Iran. This situation will not survive into the post-sanctions era.

“Once sanctions come off, we will see spare parts for the oil industry coming through much more quickly,” says Partrick. The EIU does not expect this to have a great deal of impact in the immediate post-war period. But by 2005 Iraqi production should have reached 4 million b/pd, and rising. Sharp increases in Iraqi output will play havoc with OPEC’s already strained efforts to prop up prices by limiting supply.

Iraq is a member of OPEC, but since 1991 it has fallen outside the cartel’s quota system, thanks to United Nations sanctions. Once those sanctions end and Iraq becomes OPEC’s 11th active member it is likely to insist on an unlimited quota – a move that could shatter the group’s recent cohesion. The upshot will be a sharp fall in oil prices, with all the associated negative consequences that brings to the Middle East.

Winners & losers. Inevitably, there will be winners and losers from war in Iraq, with conflicting forces pulling the regional economy in opposite directions. But it is already clear that war is far from a nightmare scenario if, as forecast, the US-led operation is swift and decisive. For two decades, Iraq has been a constant thorn in the side of the Gulf states – from the Iran-Iraq War that began in 1982, to the fear and uncertainty it is spreading today. With that “fear factor” missing, the region could look forward to a period of unprecedented prosperity.

It is unlikely that Middle East governments will ever thank George W. Bush for replacing Saddam Hussein. Indeed, the purely economic argument in favor of regime change ignores crucial political questions about the United States emerging as an armed, dangerous and arbitrary regional policeman. But the irony is that while local leaders will never admit it in public, they are likely to have much to be grateful for if the United States does usher in a new era in Baghdad.            

Seeing stars and stripes

The Arab world views American plans for the Middle East with increasing alarm. But what does Washington really want?

By ED BLANCHE BEIRUT

The marked shift in US national security policy from deterrence and containment to an aggressive, unilateral approach based on the twin pillars of pre-emptive military strikes and global military supremacy is of immense importance to the Middle East. Reflecting the post-9/11 realities and new priorities, the authors of the Bush administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) argue that “America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones. We are menaced less by fleets and armies than by catastrophic technologies in the hands of the embittered few.”

Strategy session. However, even some US military commanders, notably General Anthony Zinni, former head of the US Central Command, which covers the Middle East, are questioning the wisdom of this new strategy. Analyst Geoffrey Kemp of the Nixon Center told the Washington-based Middle East Institute’s annual conference in October during a debate on the NSS that “the institution least enamored with attacking Iraq is the military, because they know what their limits are.” 

From the Middle East perspective, Bush’s war against terrorism has increasingly become a war to enforce US global power, and this has left the Arab world, particularly US allies like Egypt and Jordan, wringing their hands, impotent and uneasy, unable to influence events that could affect them severely, and fearful of the upheavals that a US conquest of Iraq could trigger in a region that Salah al-Din Hafiz, editor of the international edition of Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper, says is now sitting “on the edge of a volcano.”

In the wider context, the Arab world is in danger of being marginalized by the impact of 9/11 and the manner in which it has changed geopolitics. According to Giandominico Picco, a former assistant secretary general of the United Nations who succeeded in the perilous mission of securing the release of US and other Western hostages held by Iranian-backed militants in Lebanon in the late 1980s, the suicide attacks on the US “accelerated processes that were already underway. It brought to the surface trends that had been previously been less visible. And in others still it has provided an opportunity, or excuse, to undertake policies under the cover of the struggle against terrorism. New political partnerships have also been initiated or strengthened, and the most striking is a convergence of sorts, an alignment . . .  involving the US, Russia, China and India.”

This could impact significantly on the Gulf states’ traditional dominance of the oil market, with Russia re-emerging as a major exporter and, with US encouragement, challenging Saudi Arabia. “A new era in oil production has just begun with significant efforts under way to make Russia a de facto competitor to Saudi Arabia in the determination of oil prices and market shares, although not, of course, in exports,” Picco wrote in a recent article.

“A major oil company today can be a player with hardly any presence in the Arab oil-producing countries, an unlikely possibility some 20 years ago. Indeed, a more relevant development in the months and years ahead will be the potential repatriation of Arab funds from the US. More than oil, this may be the real weapon left in the hands of Arab oil producers.”

Arab dismay at Bush’s strategy is compounded by his reluctance, or inability, to tackle their conflict with Israel. They are alarmed by Bush’s tolerance of Ariel Sharon’s use of overwhelming force to crush the intifada, and fear that the Israeli leader will use the smokescreen of the war in Iraq to drive Palestinians out of the West Bank and Gaza Strip into Jordan – what the Israeli’s call “transfer” – to change the demography of the occupied territories and thus annex them into “Greater Israel.”

The so-called Middle East peace plan that Bush unveiled in June, in which he referred to the emergence within three years of a “provisional” Palestinian state (whatever that might mean) in the “disputed” (not occupied) territories, provided Yasser Arafat was cast aside and democratic reforms initiated, has been described as “the dampest of damp squibs” since it put no obligation on Sharon to negotiate a political settlement.

Small wonder, then, that when Sharon visited Washington in October 2002, his seventh visit since becoming prime minister in February 2001, he told Bush: “I think we have never had such relations with any president of the US as we have with you, and we never had such cooperation in everything as we have with the current administration.” The Arabs would not argue with that.

Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi leaders see the resolution of the conflict with Israel as the key to defusing discontent among their restive populations and undermining the appeal of bin Laden and other anti-Western extremists. King Abdullah II of Jordan, who has spoken more forcefully in support of Bush’s war on terrorism than any other Arab leader, is the most vulnerable to deepening violence between Israel and the Palestinians, haunted as the Hashemite kingdom is with the specter of a mass exodus of Palestinians across the Jordan River.

Stability. Arab leaders, fearful of regional destabilization once the Americans hit Iraq, are aghast at Washington’s apparent inability to distinguish between Osama bin Laden’s ideologically driven violence and the Palestinians’ struggle against the region’s military superpower that has occupied their land for 35 years, and balks at setting them free.

As Hafiz noted, “The US finds itself in a contradiction. . . . For while it is pressing home its demand for political reform, it is causing the process to be delayed because of its anticipated war.”

The war in Iraq is not expected to be a lengthy one. The biggest problem is likely to be installing a transitional government to transform Saddam’s dysfunctional police state and into a democratic one in which all Iraq’s ethnic groups are represented. Given Iraq’s internal divisions, that may be difficult. The last thing anyone wants is to have the country fragment into cantons – Shi’ites in the south, Sunnis in the center and the Kurds in the north.

Turkey, Syria and Iran do not want to see Iraq’s rebellious Kurds become independent, since that would encourage the Kurdish minorities in their countries to press for similar arrangements. Turkey’s powerful generals have indicated they could seize the northern province around Mosul, which contains the Kirkuk oil fields, to prevent the Iraqi Kurds from achieving their long-held ambition of statehood and reviving their old claim to the region that was a separate vilayat during the Ottoman days.   

Iraq’s oil wealth is likely to be a critical issue. A US inter-agency task force, known as the Executive Steering Group, run by the White House has been seeking to formulate a plan on how to run the country once Saddam has been removed. According to some reports, there have been suggestions that Washington use oil revenues to help pay for the war, but the general feeling is that it would be better to use the money to start rebuilding the country’s infrastructure, wrecked by war and UN sanctions, to demonstrate that the Bush administration is not seeking to control the oil, as many Arabs believe.

Iraqi opposition groups in exile who expect to be represented in any new government have long been fractious and have put forward various and often competing proposals on how the country should be governed after Saddam has gone. This is likely to be a real headache for the Americans, and they will have to get it right the first time or face potentially serious trouble in the long term.

Sovereign states. How the Americans cope with that problem could dictate to some degree how the rest of the region views US military intervention against a sovereign state, however odious its regime may be. And it is here that Bush’s relations with Sharon become critical. Although the Israelis have sought to portray Iraq as a mortal danger to them, Saddam is really a more minor (and rather convenient) threat. The handful of aging Scud-type missiles he may have stashed away are not likely to be able to penetrate Israel’s defense shield, namely two batteries of Arrow missiles, the world’s most advanced anti-missile system, and several batteries of the latest US Patriot missiles.

Israelis have long viewed Iran as their primary threat. In early November, Sharon was quoted by The Times of London as demanding that pressure should be put on Iran – part of Bush’s “axis of evil” with Iraq and North Korea – “the day after” action against Iraq ends. Only a few days earlier, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had declared that, amid growing street protests in Tehran, the conservative clerical regime would soon collapse.

Such comments are causing considerable unease in Tehran, which fears that it may be next on Bush’s hit list, particularly with US forces in Iraq, the Gulf, Afghanistan and Central Asia encircling it. Tehran’s jitters could well be justified, given the convergence of Israel’s strategic aims and the Bush administration’s aggressive new doctrine of pre-emption, long a pillar of Israel’s military doctrine. The influence of hardline pro-Israel hawks in the administration seems to be near-total now, and talk of regime change in Tehran has been growing of late.

Richard Perle, an advocate of hardline policies since the Reagan administration who has Rumsfeld’s ear, recently declared that the US was prepared to attack Iran, Syria and Lebanon – all enemies of Israel – if necessary. It was the Pentagon Defense Policy Board, chaired by Perle, that was given a briefing that urged seizing Saudi Arabia’s oil fields.

Sharon’s expected re-election, with a mandate for harsher military action against the Palestinians, will inevitably deepen the sense of insecurity pervading the region as the objectives of the US and Israeli governments move increasingly in tandem.  According to some accounts, the $800 million nuclear reactor the Russians are building for Iran outside the port of Bushehr could become the litmus test for the Bush administration’s doctrine of pre-emptive strikes – if the Israelis, who consider it a threat to their national security, don’t attack it first, as they did against Saddam’s nascent nuclear program when F-16s destroyed the French-built Osirak reactor near Baghdad in June 1981.            N

Iran’s next revolution

More than two decades after the fall of the Shah, the Islamic Republic appears poised for a second revolution.

By Afshin Molavi WASHINGTON

Mohammad Kermanshahi, a 45-year-old Tehran schoolteacher, is a fairly typical Iranian. He voted “yes” in a 1980 referendum calling for the creation of an Islamic republic. With that vote, Kermanshahi joined millions of Iranians in sanctioning a groundbreaking experiment in modern statecraft: the creation of a theocratic republic with Shi’ite Muslim clergymen at the helm of state.

On the ropes. Today, 23 years after that vote, the Islamic Republic is on the ropes as a restive population is calling loudly for change. Battered by an anemic economy, frustrated youth and a powerful democracy movement, the Islamic Republic faces a critical turning point: a reform movement that promised change has lost its steam in the face of conservative intransigence, and a new secular wind blows across the land, threatening the very foundations of the state.

Today, Kermanshahi – like an increasing number of Iranians – wishes he had his vote back. “I voted yes in the referendum back then because I thought the new system would offer me more economic opportunities and give us political freedoms and a real voice in our government. I also hated the corruption of the Shah’s elite, though, in retrospect, I respect his economic modernization. Still, at the time, I saw no reason why we shouldn’t try an Islamic republic. Maybe it would bring us the political freedoms and economic security we wanted. Besides, I thought religious men would be less corrupt.”

He shakes his head and continues: “If I knew that we would become poorer, less socially free, only marginally more politically free, beset with corruption and internationally isolated, I would never have voted yes.”

Kermanshahi is hardly alone. Across Iran, the population seethes under the weight of a crushingly anemic economy, the failed political promises of the revolution (and, more recently, of the country’s reform movement), restrictions on social freedoms, government corruption, and domination of the system by conservatives and hardliners.

Their frustration has manifested itself in the resounding defeat of conservative candidates in elections for the presidency (1997 and 2001), parliament (2000) and nation-wide municipal council polls (1999), the tremendous popularity of the reformist press; the overwhelming sales of pro-democracy books, the frequent outburst of street protests against the weak economy and the jailing of journalists; an ominously rising tide of anti-clericalism and, most recently, student protests sparked by the death sentence imposed on a reformist academic who implicitly called for the separation of mosque and state.

The protest on behalf of the jailed academic, Hashem Aghajari, revealed a new and groundbreaking discourse of public protest in Iran: for the first time, Iranians in large numbers (5,000 students at Tehran University; 2,000-3,000 in other cities) daringly called for the separation of mosque and state. Going one step further than reformist President Mohammed Khatami’s calls for Islamic democracy, Iranian students chanted slogans calling for de facto secular democracy. As one student leader, Akbar Atri, put it: “We want democracy without a prefix or suffix. That means no Islamic or religious democracy. The two are incompatible.”

They also chanted slogans against a key plank of the Islamic Republic: the office of Supreme Leader, a position that Khomeini envisioned as a high cleric ruling justly in the name of Islam, but has morphed into a virtual clerical dictatorship that grants the Supreme Leader veto power over all matters of state and control of the elements of coercive force from the army to the police to the Revolutionary Guards. The Supreme Leadership stands at the heart of today’s conservative vision of the Islamic Republic, despite the fact that it has no precedent in Muslim history. Today, loyalty to the position of the Supreme Leader, conservatives say, has become a litmus test for loyalty to the Islamic Republic. Opposition to the Supreme Leader’s office or the current leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, is a red line that should not and has rarely been crossed – until the recent student protests. Iran’s student movement should be watched closely. Nearly two-thirds of the population is under the age of 30, and half is under 21. Iran’s youth will not only determine the future, they will overwhelm it.

Most significantly, this new secular discourse has emerged from Iran’s organized Islamist student associations, which generally supported the reformist ideas of “Islamic democracy” advocated by Khatami and his reformist clerical supporters. Today, the students are separating themselves from the Islamic democrat reformers like Khatami. The only serious intellectual debate in Iran takes place between Islamic democrats and a new breed of de facto secular democrats.

Safeguards. The voices behind this new secular democracy movement are surprising ones. Akbar Atri, who called for “democracy without a prefix” and separation of mosque and state, is a member of the Daftar-e-Tahkim-e-Vahdat (the Office to Foster Unity), an Islamist university student association that was formed in the early 1980s to “safeguard” the revolution and confront, often violently, secular democrats, communists or Islamic Marxists on campus.

Over time, however, the group evolved into a more moderate force, and the new generation of the Office to Foster Unity played a key role in the election of the reformist Khatami in 1997. They also championed his ideas of Islamic democracy on campuses. Now they are taking their advocacy one step further by breaking free of Khatami and the reform movement and calling, in effect, for a secular democracy. An Islamist student association calling for de facto separation of mosque and state? The terms of the Iranian debate have undoubtedly shifted.

In a bold public relations move, Atri and the other student leaders have called for a referendum on college campuses to determine the popularity of the current system. They point out that a referendum was held in 1980 to create the Islamic Republic. So why not hold another one today to determine whether people still want the system? Were such a referendum to occur, hardline thugs affiliated with police and some of the organized militia units still loyal to the conservatives would likely create a confrontation on campus and intimidate potential voters. Still, the very call for the referendum is full of portent, for most Iranians know that the results would deal a harsh blow to the conservative rulers, and most probably repudiate the system of rule by clergy.

So how has the current disenchantment come to pass? Why have Iranians, who so passionately welcomed Ayatollah Khomeini upon his return to Iran and shook the region with their revolution, turned against the state?

New dawn. Like other revolutionary movements, particularly 20th-communism, the Islamic Republic promised a new dawn, a new way that would neither resemble the decaying autocracies of the East nor the “exploitative” capitalist societies of the West. In reality, the Islamic Republic fell into the very traps that undid communism: hollow, state-sponsored glorification of a leader; dramatic but abrasive attempts at social engineering to create “the vanguard” of the Islamic Republic (“Islamicizing” Iran’s universities, for example, and creating “Islamic tests” for officials); purges of “disloyal” officials; corruption within the nomenklatura; tight control of the media; a sluggish and failing state-dominated economy; and the use of hired street thugs to break up protests.

Eventually, inevitably, Iranians began to grumble. Today, the country is in a state of quiet revolt, punctuated by the occasional loud protest. Like the peoples of the Eastern Bloc who grew tired of empty slogans and stifled potential, Iranians are hungry for change.

On the issues that matter most to the average Iranian and, in fact, the average Russian or average Czech or Frenchman or Brit or American – jobs, the economy, education, social freedoms, political freedoms – there is overwhelming evidence that the Islamic Republic has been a failure. Iranians today earn 25 percent, in real terms, of what they did before the revolution – a serious indictment against a government that promised greater economic prosperity for all.

Today, Iranians face high unemployment (16 percent officially; 25 percent unofficially) high inflation (13 percent last year) and stagnant wages. The effect has been to raise Iran’s misery index to alarming levels.

Economic stagnation has devastated the middle class and widened the disparities in wealth between rich and poor. Middle-class Iranians have consistently sold assets acquired after the 1973 oil boom – carpets, gold, apartments – to keep up with the rising cost of living. Iranians eat 20 percent less meat, bread and rice than they did before the revolution, and in a food-centric culture that prizes meat-based stews and generous hospitality toward guests, the turn rankles.

University education has increased since the revolution, but the admissions process remains tainted with politicization (the sons and daughters of government functionaries and supporters of conservatives are given quota slots), and the economy is unable to absorb the new graduates. One in four Iranians with a college degree works outside the country, and last year 200,000 Iranians – mostly those with higher educations – emigrated.

For the country’s large modern middle class, who have seen more liberal days, today’s social restrictions, imposed from above by stern men in gray beards and enforced by young thugs in wispy beards, rankle as much as the political or economic restrictions. Interestingly, the sons and daughters of traditional middle-class Iranians – whose parents might have supported the social restrictions in the early years of the revolution – are rebelling against their parents, listening to Western music, attending parties and, in some cases, using illegal drugs.

Iran’s political freedoms have marginally increased since the autocratic days of the Shah, but there still remains a powerful current of authoritarianism that curbs serious attempts at democratization. Every “democratic” layer of the Islamic Republic is covered by two or three authoritarian layers. For example, the president is popularly elected, but to be able to run for the presidency in the first place he must get by an authoritarian layer: approval of his candidacy by the unelected Council of Guardians, a 12-member body of six clerics and six lay jurists who were originally intended to “oversee” the popularly elected parliament. Once in office, the president must contend with another authoritarian layer, the unelected Supreme Leader, who has virtual veto power over all matters of state and controls the elements of coercive force: the judiciary, the security services, the army, the revolutionary guards, the Basij volunteer militia whose most militant members regularly clash with student pro-democracy protestors. These competing layers reflect the tensions between popular sovereignty and religious legitimacy that were never fully resolved by the crafters of the Islamic Republic’s constitution.

Basic needs. Iranians are not alone in their frustration. Governments that fail to meet the basic needs and desires of their populations are nothing new in the Middle East and the Muslim world. Residents of Egypt, Syria, Pakistan and Algeria will recognize all too well Iran’s state-dominated, inefficient economy, which rewards well-connected merchants and marginalizes middle-class professionals. Muslim youth from non-Gulf states certainly know the emotional and psychological strain their Iranian counterparts feel as they line up outside foreign embassies hoping for a visa that will lead, perhaps, to a life of economic dignity.

But Iran’s failures take on added meaning because of what the government represents: a modern attempt to fuse mosque and state. As a result, today’s Iranian discourse of protest is increasingly secular, in marked contrast to the winds of Islamist protest swirling around most regimes in the Muslim world with secular “monarchical presidencies” or traditionalist monarchies.

In Iran, the colors of protest are tinged with varying secular hues. In major urban centers, clerics have trouble getting taxis to stop for them. In a small village in the north, an agricultural laborer said to me that “it’s time for the men with neckties to return,” a reference to secular technocrats. A deeply religious veteran of the devastating 1980-88 war between Iran and Iraq spoke bluntly: “The men of religion have tainted themselves in the eyes of the people. My own son has little respect for them. For their own good, they should retreat.”            

Their backs to the wall

Will the Oslo process ever prove the right path to peace? Or is time for new ideas?

By HARVEY MORRIS JERUSALEM

Members of an Israeli think tank that prides itself on its “out-of-the-box” analysis of the Middle East conflict recently concluded that the Palestinians needed to have their national liberation struggle before they could accept peace.

At first sight, this reappraisal of the Palestinian intifada as some kind of political rite of passage looks like a condescending piece of pop psychology. It appears to absolve Israel of any responsibility for the events that lead up to the outbreak of violence over two years ago. But the think tankers insist they are not interested in assigning blame for a conflict that has claimed almost 3,000 lives, crippled the Palestinian economy and severely damaged the Israeli one.

After Oslo. They say their assessment is a reflection of the reality that the Oslo peace process – a series of concessions made grudgingly by the stronger to the weaker party – failed to fulfill Palestinian aspirations to statehood. It was a process that enriched a minority at the expense of the many. A final settlement will only have real meaning, they say, if Palestinians believe they have won their statehood through struggle and hardship. The significance of the new thinking on the conflict is that it reflects a glimmer of optimism that fundamental changes have occurred in the past two years that could lead to a future solution.

Optimism is a scarce commodity on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian divide after a year that has seen increased bloodshed and the reoccupation of territories ceded to the Palestinian Authority under the peace accords. At the same time, the aggressive response by the Israeli authorities to Palestinian violence has failed to persuade Israelis that their lives are any more secure.

The current perception on both sides is that things can only get worse. Israeli military planners believe the unrest may last for several more years, longer than they had first envisaged. Palestinian analysts meanwhile fear that the march of Israeli colonization in the West Bank means little will be left of the putative Palestinian state by the time meaningful negotiations are resumed. There are, however, fragile signals of mounting moderation on both sides. These include the growing perception on the Palestinian side that violence – in the form of attacks on civilian targets inside Israel – has failed to advance the Palestinian cause.

Among Israelis, meanwhile, as is reflected in opinion polls, more and more people are coming to the conclusion that there is no military solution to the conflict. In pre-election party primaries held in late fall, members of the opposition Labor party chose a “peace” candidate, Amram Mitzna, who promised to evacuate unilaterally Jewish settlements in the territories, over his rival, former Defense Minister Benjamin Ben Eliezer, who had backed Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s strategy of reconquest.

Sharon’s Likud party opted to put its faith in the prime minister’s new tone of moderation – that included his acceptance of the inevitability of a Palestinian state – rather than back the more hawkish and rejectionist stance of his rival, Benjamin Netanyahu. By choosing Sharon as their candidate for the January 28th general elections, Likud effectively reversed its own decision earlier in the year to reject the concept of a Palestinian state. For the first time, candidates of the two main parties were going into the election on platforms that included recognition of future Palestinian statehood.

On the Palestinian side, opinion polls indicated that internal political reform was more important to most people than a continuation of the uprising. Those who still supported suicide bombings were in a minority by late 2002 and, even more significantly, up to three-quarters of Palestinians accepted the necessity of a crackdown on those groups that continued to use violence.

It is too early to predict, however, whether these trends will translate into positive moves towards peace, or even overcome the high degree of antagonism – not to say hatred – between the two communities. There are many hurdles in the way of progress, not least the deep mistrust built up during two years of violence.

Palestinians instinctively distrust Sharon’s apparent moderate shift, regarding it as a more electoral ploy to outflank Likud right-wingers by focusing his appeal on centrist voters. Many doubt that his acceptance of eventual Palestinian statehood will translate into positive progress in that direction during a second Sharon term.

Sharon is remembered by Palestinians as the man held responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres of Palestinian refugees in Beirut in 1982, and reviled for his reinvasion of the West Bank 20 years later.

Palestinians also point out that Sharon’s concept of a Palestine state is quite divorced from their own aspirations. What few hints he has let drop about his vision point to a small and powerless entity, confined to the main Palestinian population centers and with little control over its own economic destiny.

Israelis are similarly distrustful of the reform process within the Palestinian Authority. Yasser Arafat appears to be firmly entrenched at the helm of his failed regime, holding out against moves to deprive him of his executive powers.

Negotiations. The Sharon government is at least partly to blame for scuppering a reform process that it had itself insisted was a prerequisite for renewing peace negotiations. The siege of Arafat’s compound in Ramallah – eventually called off under US pressure – only succeeded in reviving popular support for the beleaguered leader.

The prospect for much-heralded Palestinian elections meanwhile evaporated after Israel and the United States decided they did not really want them anyway. Elections that carried the risk of endorsing Arafat’s rule, they decided, were worse than no elections at all. There was, in any case, little prospect of elections being held in a situation of military occupation and prolonged curfew.

Two international factors also cloud the local scene – the prospect of war in Iraq and the targeting of Israel by Al-Qaeda or its affiliates.

Sharon’s tactics in late-2002 – including his relative moderation on the issue of Palestinian statehood – were tempered by the need to take into account the US administration’s interests in the Middle East. The Israeli prime minister regards good relations with Washington as a key electoral asset and so he bowed to the insistence of President Bush that Israel should do nothing to escalate the local crisis as the United States prepared for possible war in Iraq. Washington wants Israel to stay out of a war, although it recognizes Israel’s right to self-defense in the event that it is attacked with Iraqi missiles.

In late November, however, Islamic militants succeeded in pulling Israel into the international “war on terror” by attacking Israeli targets in Kenya. Israeli officials warned that any further attacks would lead to an unprecedented response. Any dramatic Israel initiative in this global war threatened to further undermine US attempts to develop a broad coalition of support – or at least acceptance – in the Arab world for possible American action in Iraq.

The Kenya bombings also gave Israel a further pretext to resist international pressure to move swiftly to a resumption of the peace process. The international quartet – the Unites States, European Union, United Nations and Russia – worked intensively in the autumn to draw up a final version of a “road map” for peace based on President Bush’s vision of a two-state solution.

Stall tactics. Israel lobbied intensively to get the road map shelved, at least until after the January elections. Officials argued that holding off the initiative for a month or two was of little consequence. The Palestinians and some of the quartet countries most closely involved in the search for peace do not agree. They fear that any delay falls into the pattern of stalling by the Israeli government that only serves to meet Israeli interests. Sharon, so the theory goes, is not really interested in a peace settlement and therefore wants to put of progress as long as possible in order to establish new “facts on the ground” in the form of infrastructure and settlement expansion in the West Bank. Although Sharon has spoken of his readiness to make “painful” concessions in return for peace, settlement expansion continued uninterrupted in his first term, just as it did under the premierships of his predecessors.

The Israeli presence in the occupied territories has even prompted some Palestinian analysts to conclude that a two-state solution is no longer possible. The Israeli hold on territory and resources, coupled with the growth of a settler road network that has left Palestinian communities isolated from each other, is now too advanced to be untangled, they argue.

This has prompted some “out-of-the-box” thinking to match that of the Israeli analysts. Some Palestinian intellectuals believe the Palestinians should now ditch the dream of an independent state and go back to the idea of a bi-national state in historical Palestine in which they would fight for their rights as equal citizens with Jews. It is an idea that has yet to filter down to the general Palestinian population and would, in any event, be instantly dismissed by most, if not all, Israelis.

Israel is faced with a demographic challenge if it fails to find a solution to the conflict. The Palestinians’ birth rate is rising faster than that of their Israeli neighbors. If Israel were to continue occupying the territories for another decade, it would find itself governing a population with an Arab majority between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River. That, many Israeli analysts fear, would spell the end of Israel as a democratic Jewish state. Procrastinating, Sharon-style, is therefore not the answer. But will Sharon surprise the skeptics in a second term by accepting moves towards a renewal of the peace process?

Some Israeli officials believe the 74-year-old ex-general is too old to change his ways. “His role,” said a senior official, “is to defeat terrorism and be at the helm during a period of Palestinian reform. It will then be up to someone else – maybe even Mr. Mitzna – to move towards a settlement in the next government.”