http://uscpublicdiplomacy.org/index.php/newsroom/memp_main/ en USC Center on Public Diplomacy Copyright 2005 2005-06-30T21:51:11+00:00 This is an XML content feed. It is intended to be viewed in a newsreader or syndicated to another site, subject to copyright and fair use. #When:21:51:11Z This op-ed piece was originally published on the Daily Star on June 28, 2005. The Daily Star is published in Beirut, and it is the "insert" paper that comes folded inside every copy of the International Herald Tribune published in the Middle East (except Ha'aretz in Israel). -- the Editor So Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is not Iran's new president. That result must come as a particular surprise to anyone who tried to follow the campaign by light of the Western media. As recently as last Thursday - the day before the run-off vote between Rafsanjani and his rival, Tehran mayor Mahmood Ahmadinejad - reputable polls gave the latter a clear lead. Yet headlines in the International Herald Tribune continued to describe Rafsanjani as the "front-runner." In the run-up to the first round of voting on June 17, his campaign was the focus of most election coverage in the Western media. CNN's interview with Rafsanjani during the campaign treated him as a president-in-waiting. So what happened, exactly? Was the election actually much freer than most Western observers were willing to credit? Or, on the other hand, if it was fixed from the beginning, then we of the Western media were obviously woefully ill-informed about Iranian politics, particularly with regards to exactly who fixes elections and to what end. The answer may be much simpler, if no less embarrassing: Granted how little most of us outsiders know about the politics of the Islamic Republic, it was probably just easiest to focus on Rafsanjani because he, alone among the candidates, was a familiar figure to Western journalists. That quality made him easy to write about, and easy to cover; it made it especially easy for us to assume that he would win. It was also relatively easy to assume that Rafsanjani's candidacy represented a bid by conservatives to reclaim the presidency, which they lost eight years ago to the reform-minded Mohammad Khatami. Rafsanjani, after all, was Khatami's predecessor. Rafsanjani ran as a moderate reformer, a position that, granted his history, most in the West found difficult to credit. It was only in the final few days of the campaign that some reporters began noticing that Iranians, too, seemed to find his new-found liberalism a bit difficult to believe. With Rafsanjani the Iranian system's consummate insider, it was easy to dismiss his moderate platform as a pose and to assume that the results had been fixed in his favor, particularly since he was standing against a field of candidates most outsiders had never heard of. Yet, when the first round of voting produced no clear majority for a single candidate, thereby forcing a runoff, media coverage focused more on the fact that no previous Iranian campaign had gone to a second round. "Historic" and "unprecedented" were common terms used in the press. Rarely asked was how the Western pundits and reporters could have been so wrong. Rafsanjani did, indeed, top the first round of voting, but with barely 20 percent of the total in a seven-candidate field. More surprisingly, the second-place candidate was not the reformer Mustafa Moin, who came in fifth, but Ahmadinejad, a candidate generally described as being so hard-line that, by comparison, Rafsanjani's status as a reformer was hardly open to question. Prior to the election Moin was often seen in the West as Rafsanjani's main competition. The assumption in that narrative was that Rafsanjani represented the conservative old guard. Moin, a former cabinet minister who was initially barred from standing by Iran's Council of Guardians (the body that approves potential candidates for Parliament and the presidency), was seen as the obvious successor to Khatami. That might have been true, but it ignored the fact that there is more than one type of "reform." Reform can mean loosening restrictions on how people dress and behave in public and private. But it can also mean tackling corruption and cronyism - which was the vein of popular anger into which Ahmadinejad tapped. None of this is meant as commentary on the fairness or unfairness of the Iranian electoral system. Nor is this to pass judgment on the claims of electoral fraud made by some of the candidates defeated in the first round; or to debate the effect President George W. Bush's criticism of the vote may have had on turnout (anecdotal evidence suggested it may have increased it). The simple fact is that Iran is a society in transition - to what is not exactly clear, but in transition nonetheless. Eight years ago the unexpected election of Mohammed Khatami seemed to promise an era of reform. We in the West did not know exactly what to make of Khatami back then, and we seem equally unsure of Ahmadinejad today. Perhaps, though, we have learned a lesson about not assuming that outcomes in certain situations are preordained. *** Gordon Robison is a senior fellow at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication. He is based in Amman, and his weblog on Middle East politics is www.mideastanalysis.com. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR. 2005-06-30T21:51:11+00:00 #When:08:09:48Z When I was younger I occasionally tagged along with my father at conferences in Europe where East-West security issues were discussed. Dad taught me two especially important lessons during this time: 1) find a seat on an aisle near the back, that way you can slip out quietly if things get really boring; and 2) all the really interesting stuff happens during the coffee breaks, at meal times and (especially) in the bar. All this comes back to me as I contemplate this weekend's meeting here of the World Economic Forum, the Geneva-based organization that runs the annual Davos conference. The regional meetings are less well known than the January bash in Switzerland, but they are important. This weekend's conference brought together about 1,000 business, media and political leaders from around the region and the wider world for three days of formal and, more importantly, informal talks. During a town hall session the occupants of each table were asked to discuss a particular issue, in our case educational reform, and then share thoughts with the rest of the delegates. My companions for this exercise included Radhida Dergham, the chief diplomatic correspondent for Al-Hayat (probably the region's top newspaper); Lakhdar Brahimi, the former Algerian foreign minister and UN Special Envoy; and a Dubai-based regional manager for Microsoft. At other points during the weekend I had coffee with the Afghan foreign minister, a long chat with a Palestinian deputy prime minister, lunch with the head of the Middle East's largest cellphone operator, and a 15-minute discussion on Egyptian reform with the editor-in-chief of the Arab world's top business newspaper (who is, incidentally, one of the few women in the region to hold so senior a media job). What an opportunity to show a human face, make contact with opinion leaders and, generally, soften the American image where it most needs softening. For the official American delegation it was a public diplomacy opportunity of the first order. But sadly it's one they fumbled badly. The official American delegation was huge: four senators (Gordon Smith of Oregon, John Sununu of New Hampshire, Norm Coleman of Minnesota and Orrin Hatch of Utah), two members of the House (Christopher Shays of Connecticut and Jane Harman of California), Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick, Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Elizabeth Cheney, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Scott Carpenter and, of course, first lady Laura Bush. Throughout the weekend they were everywhere and nowhere. They sat on many panels, but invariably arrived at the last minute (if not later) and left the instant things were over. Thirty-minute coffee-break-cum-networking sessions separated each round of panels. At these times the conference center's two lobbies were packed with the region's most senior politicians and businesspeople, all milling around, chatting and getting to know each other shorn of the aides, secretaries and other hangers-on who usually accompany them (I have returned from the weekend with a two-inch high stack of other people's business cards). In three days of talks I only saw one of the above-mentioned grandees bothering to mix with the rest of the attendees. That was Sen. Coleman, who also spent an hour working the bar at one of the conference hotels on Friday night. The rest of the delegation members spent every networking session closeted in private meetings with other big-wigs. I'm not saying the meetings among the high officials are not important, even necessary, but a bit of balance might have brought America's distinguished representatives into contact with a lot of other interesting people: People who can sway public opinion out here; People who just might have valued a three-minute chat with a key senator or State Department official. And maybe that human connection would soften some of the delegates' images of the American behemoth. grr 2005-05-26T08:09:48+00:00 #When:06:18:26Z As I write this it is late evening and Lebanon's Future Television is deep into its nightly talk show. Four hours, more or less, on where the country is headed. In the upper left corner of the screen a black mourning band cuts across the station's logo. Next to it is the legend "40 ... for Lebanon." The number marks the days since the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. The words are part of the Lebanese opposition's slogan: "The Truth ... for Lebanon." Much of central Beirut is festooned with pictures of Hariri and banners calling for "The Truth." Hariri has been buried in Martyrs Square, the historical heart of the city, and the scene of some of the fiercest fighting during the civil wars that wracked Lebanon from 1975 until 1990. The demonstrations that took place in the square for nearly a month after Hariri's assassination have ceased, but Christians and Muslims continue to trek to the grave day and night, a sign that the tensions of Lebanon's war years are buried, but far from forgotten. The media's role in all this has been extraordinary. "TV and newspapers are not only following the news, they are part of it," says Yusef Bazzi, a columnist for Al-Mustaqbal, Future Television's sister newspaper. It is a view seconded by Gebran Tueni, publisher of one of the country's oldest newspapers, An-Nahar. "We have a clear agenda now for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon .... The Syrians have been behaving very badly with all of Lebanon and now there's a snowball effect." The weeks since the assassination have been a defining event for this country's media. "My impression is that the media has had a huge impact at several different levels. It was the vehicle that promoted mass mobilization ... providing a sense of solidarity. Even just by watching the media at home you felt fortified and you felt part of something big," says Rami Khouri, editor-at-large of the English-language Daily Star. The effect, Khouri says, has been similar to that of the first Gulf War on CNN: bringing the young network into the big leagues, and instilling it with a sense of mission. Future, a television station set up by Hariri in the early '90s, has stayed with the story in ways the rest have not. Its anchors are required to wear black mourning clothes and Hariri pins with blue ribbons, another symbol of Lebanon's opposition. The regular programming schedule of movies and soap operas has been abandoned, and almost any statement by an opposition political leader is carried in full. The station's staff argue that none of this compromises their objectivity as journalists. "All Lebanese TV stations are owned by somebody. Everyone understands this," says Elsa Yazbek, an anchor/reporter at Future TV. "The first mission is we want the truth. The first mission is to keep the subject alive in the minds of the people." "The owners of the media are politicians," Bazzi says. And objectivity? "It's very relative." Yazbek and others come close to arguing that the media's open partisanship serves some sort of higher purpose. Her refrain, "people are not afraid anymore," is one a visitor to Beirut hears often these days. Not all stations have taken the same approach. Hizbollah's Al-Manar television seems to do its best to minimize the opposition's activities, while Lebanon's most popular station, LBC (which is Christian-owned and is widely identified with some of the wartime Christian militia leaders) has almost completely returned to its regular schedule, which is long on soap operas and relatively thin when it comes to news. Khouri decries a lack of "detached analysis" in the Arab media generally, something he says the performance of Lebanese newspapers and television stations has only made more glaringly obvious over the last month. There's a dearth of balanced interpretation, he says. "They've provided a megaphone, rather than a microscope." 2005-03-27T06:18:26+00:00 #When:15:43:00Z According to news reports over the weekend, President Bush plans to appoint his long-time media advisor, Karen Hughes, as the new undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. That this post has been vacant for months, even amid general agreement that America’s image overseas is in need of a radical makeover, is itself testimony to the depth of the challenges the new undersecretary faces. The downside of the President’s choice is Hughes’ lack of foreign policy credentials. She rose to national prominence as the chief spokeswoman for Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign. When Bush entered the White House, Hughes ceded the high-profile press secretary’s job to Ari Fleischer, opting instead for a (probably more powerful) behind-the-scenes role as counselor to the president. She left the administration to return to Austin in 2002, but is widely reported to have remained an informal advisor to Bush from her home in Texas. This resume hints at the upside of her selection: Hughes is personally close to the president. She has his ear. He trusts her. Those facts make this, potentially, a very good appointment for the advancement of public diplomacy. Here, then, are some things the new undersecretary may wish to keep in mind. First and foremost, this is a long-term job. When Bush talks about the need for reform in the Middle East he speaks of “generational change.” That applies as much to the U.S. and our public diplomacy efforts as it does to building a democratic and electoral culture in places like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Hughes needs both to broaden and to narrow the focus of her new job. Her first Bush administration predecessor, Charlotte Beers, came from Madison Avenue and erred in the belief that selling America and its policies was not fundamentally different from selling soda or laundry soap. It has become common to dismiss Beers as a failure because she failed to see that in many cases it was the policies themselves that needed to change, not the way they were sold. There is some truth in this, but it is overly simplistic. It is true that some American policies (an unquestioning embrace of Ariel Sharon, for example) simply cannot be presented in a way that makes them palatable to the Arab World. It is equally true that presentation has been a problem. Last year the United States sent an enormous delegation to the World Economic Forum’s regional meeting here in Jordan. A number of the delegation’s mid-level officials gave interviews to the Jordanian media that were so condescending that officials at the U.S. embassy here still wince when the subject comes up in conversation. Similarly, it is easy to fear that Hughes, coming as she does from the world of political spin, will see public diplomacy as little more than keeping the administration ‘on-message’ overseas as well as at home. That, too, would be a misreading of the situation, though it touches on another American public diplomacy shortcoming: the inability to counter rumors and negative information quickly and forcefully. Too often accusations or rumors appear in the morning papers in this part of the world and spend an entire day being repeated on satellite TV with no attempt at an American reply. Why? Because the reply, according to current procedure, must wait for the daily State Department news briefing. By the time the briefing takes place the TV channels of the Middle East have moved on to another news cycle, and the next day’s newspapers are in the final stages of production. For most viewers and readers the charges, therefore, go unanswered. If Hughes can bring her communications experience to bear on this aspect of public diplomacy it will be a welcome change. Finally, we need to look carefully at the long-term, less glamorous aspects of public diplomacy. There is a glaring need, above all, for vehicles that promote American and Western culture, society and values in a neutral, non-ideological way. The British, French, Spanish and German governments are all good at this. Want to learn French? Watch Spanish movies? Study German cooking? The Alliance Francaise, Instituto Cervantes and Goethe Institute are all happy to help you. The United States, on the other hand, has spent the last decade shutting down its fine network of libraries and cultural centers around the world. The result has been the ceding of cultural promotion to Hollywood and the commercial marketplace. Personally, I love both “24” and “Sex and the City,” but if that’s the only image of American society on offer one can understand why a lot of people find it less than appealing. All of this is a tall order for the new undersecretary. The rest of us can only wish her well, and hope for the best. Gordon R. Robison 2005-03-15T15:43:00+00:00 #When:22:20:01Z This is an important moment in the Middle East. Events have been moving quickly in several countries around the region. The questions now are whether the momentum for reform can be sustained, and whether the United States, despite its poor reputation throughout the Arab World, can play a constructive role. The year began with elections that went better than expected in both Iraq and the Palestinian territories, followed by voting for municipal councils in Saudi Arabia – a country whose king said a decade ago that elections were culturally inappropriate for Arabs. What is happening now in Egypt and Lebanon, however, is potentially even more significant. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s surprise announcement that he will allow candidates other than himself to stand in September’s presidential election was unexpected, but it has been greeted warily both at home and abroad. Everyone agrees a ballot with several candidates is fundamentally better than a ballot with only one. Exactly how much is really going to change in Egypt is, however, another question. Symptomatic of this was a conversation I had with a prominent Egyptian over the weekend. He’s the sort of person who would surely like to see the country open up and have a freer political system. But the fact that I can’t name him, and that he was clearly reluctant to speak on the phone is a reminder of how far Egypt still has to go before it can be considered even a partially open society. He was markedly less than enthusiastic about Mubarak’s announcement, noting that the constitutional changes making their way through Egypt’s parliament will require all presidential candidates to be approved by parliament itself, a rubber stamp body controlled by Mubarak’s National Democratic Party. Talking to Egyptians it is difficult to miss the sense that they believe they are trading one sort of stage-managed election for another. “What we really need is some kind of independent body to oversee the election,” my friend said. For the moment the administration is saying the right things. “Egypt has now the prospect of competitive, multi-party elections,” President Bush said during a speech earlier today at the National Defense University. “Like all free elections, these require freedom of assembly, multiple candidates, free access by those candidates to the media and the right to form political parties.” All of those are going to be key indicators of how free this election really is. It is right and appropriate that the President make it clear now, early on, that the United States will be watching. Conventional wisdom has it that Condeleezza Rice’s cancellation of her visit to Cairo helped prompt Mubarak’s decision. “There’s a feeling that Mubarak got the Americans off his back for the moment,” offered a Cairo-based Western observer. He added that the real question is not what happens in this election, but what happens in the next one. No one questions that Mubarak will win again. The things to watch are how much openness his regime allows during this fall’s campaign and who it lets onto the ballot. This could be the thin end of the proverbial wedge. That is where pressure, such as Bush’s remarks, can be useful. The trick is not to provoke a reaction. Beirut today saw a huge pro-Syria demonstration, organized mainly by Shiite Muslims, who make up Lebanon’s largest single confessional group. The gist of their argument was that foreign governments (by which they mainly meant the United States and France) should not interfere in Lebanese affairs. As Ghassan Salame, a former Lebanese cabinet minister, told the New York Times last week, “You need democrats to produce democracy. You can’t produce it through institutions. You need people to fight for it to make it real. Neither American tanks nor domestic institutions can do it.” “Each country in the Middle East will take a different path of reform and every nation that starts on that journey can know that America will walk at its side,” Bush said today. The trick is doing that in a way that helps without alienating. grr 2005-03-08T22:20:01+00:00 #When:00:04:43Z The Oscars wrapped up a bit before 7am over here and I crawled off to grab a few hours sleep after the school bus picked up my teenage daughter. Neither of us usually gets up at three in the morning to watch television, but the Oscars are something rare: a cultural moment we can share with the rest of America, in real time. We almost missed it because of a problem with our satellite dish, and because I had not noticed that the long-time holder of the ceremony’s Middle East broadcast rights, MBC2, had lost the telecast to a new rival channel, One TV. Luckily the repairman showed up Sunday both to fix our reception and to add One TV to our channel list. I spent a good chunk of yesterday phoning friends who work in TV out in the Emirates trying, without success, to figure out how much One TV paid to get the Oscars away from MBC. An inattentive viewer, however, might not even have noticed that MBC has lost the rights. MBC was airing so much pre and post-Oscar programming that its lack of the ceremony itself seemed almost a minor issue. All this is a useful reminder that at this moment when ‘America’ is deeply unpopular in this part of the world, much that is ‘American’ remains both much desired and difficult to escape. MBC and One TV are perfect illustrations of this. Both stations are based in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, are seen throughout the region and compete for viewers with steady streams of American fare. One TV offers “CSI”, “Law and Order”, “The Sopranos” and (I swear I’m not making this up) “The Bold & the Beautiful” against MBC’s longtime line-up of “Seinfeld”, “Frazier”, “Buffy, the Vampire Slayer” and Oprah. On both stations the shows air with subtitles. The ads during the commercial breaks, however, are entirely in Arabic. And that only covers the free-to-air channels. If one is willing to shell out $30-$60 a month there is a lot more American TV buzzing around the ether. While it is true that American shows have long been a fixture here, the current fare is a far cry from a generation ago when Egyptian TV’s only English-language series were five year old episodes of “Falcon Crest” while the Saudis offered decade-old reruns of “CHiPS”. The latest twist in the programming war, however, is news. About a month ago MBC launched a new channel, MBC4, to which it moved all of its American series. The long-established MBC2 channel became an all-English-language-movies station. Faced with the need to fill hours of extra airtime every day on MBC4 programmers opted not for more reruns, but for news. As weird as this may sound, viewers around the region can now catch ABC’s “Good Morning, America” and “World News Tonight” and CBS’s “The Early Show” and “CBS Evening News” every single day. MBC4 also shows “60 Minutes”, “48 Hours” and “20/20”. The Oscars, I understand. “Friends” I understand. But “Good Morning, America”? “There’s a lot of interest in what is being said in America and this interest does not lie with the people watching ‘Friends’,” a long-time, and well-connected, Gulf observer said. “It lies with people who went to school in the States and important people in the government. They want to know what this congressman is saying to that congressman and what’s on the agenda over there.” He pointed out that the market for American broadcast news had been established by the pay-service Orbit, which offers a 24 hour news channel cobbled together from the three US broadcast networks and Fox. Orbit News proved that elites would pay to see “Face the Nation” and “Fox News Sunday”, he said, so why not see if people would watch “World News Tonight” if it was offered for free? All this is a sign that public diplomacy is not just about what the government does, and may not even be primarily the government’s doing. It is a reminder to our politicians that they are addressing the world, even when they think they are talking only to the folks back home. It is proof, if we needed any, that the public diplomacy paradigms of the Cold War need to be rethought in the 21st century. grr 2005-03-01T00:04:43+00:00 #When:21:19:56Z Iraq’s election went off better than expected. Now that the results have been announced the hard part begins. Though Ibrahim Al-Jafaari’s emergence as the prime ministerial candidate of the United Iraqi Alliance makes him the leading contender to head the country’s next government his grasp on the levers of power remains far from certain. The Shia-led UIA emerged with a thin majority in the 275 seat National Assembly, but it is far short of the two-thirds needed to form a government. This is especially the case since the UIA is hardly a cohesive block. It is hard to imagine any grouping containing both Abdel Aziz Al-Hakim, the leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, and Ahmed Chalabi holding together for long. The current Prime Minister, Iyad Allawi (a secular Shiite) is openly courting some of its members in a bid to keep his job. The Kurds appear to be watching all of this warily. Their role, or lack of it, in the new government will be a key indicator of the country’s future. Kurdistan’s two main parties fought the election as a single slate. When facing the rest of Iraq their leadership is relatively united and pretty clear about what it wants. For now their list of demands does not include breaking up the country, but there is little doubt they will do so if they feel that is the only way to preserve the society they have built in northern Iraq over the last dozen years To no one’s surprise there are virtually no Sunnis in the assembly. President Ghazi al-Yawr’s list managed only five seats. How the Sunni political class, and the Sunni population at large, deal with this will be one of the great unknowns of the coming months. An intriguing titbit came from an Iraqi friend of mine, a journalist who comes from one of the larger and more important Sunni tribes. A few days after the election he told me he could have voted in relative safety because he works in the Green Zone, but chose not to do so out of solidarity with his neighbors in the overwhelmingly Sunni district of Abu Gharib, on Baghdad’s western outskirts. Many of his neighbors, he said, wanted to vote but thought it was simply too dangerous to do so. He says he does expect them to vote in October when the new constitution is put to a referendum. If his reading of his neighbors is correct this is a particularly good sign, and one that reinforces the emerging conventional wisdom that Sunni leaders may now believe their boycotts were shortsighted. The real question is whether the leaders who are now emerging with some electoral legitimacy can deal with each other with a measure of maturity, farsightedness and statesmanship. The, admittedly short, history of Iraq’s emerging political class does not inspire much confidence on this score, but the election was a surprise, so things might go better than expected. Writing a new constitution by October is going to be a tall order. Getting it approved in a vote a month later may be even harder, especially since a two-thirds ‘no’ vote in any three provinces sends the entire process back to the drawing board. It is going to be a long spring and summer in Iraq – but one well worth watching. grr 2005-02-26T21:19:56+00:00 #When:23:58:54Z I’ve spent a day here in the suburbs of Los Angeles talking about the Middle East with students and faculty at my alma mater, Pomona College. The really interesting thing is that while I came to talk about Iraq, I keep getting asked about Israel and the Palestinians. Add in Monday’s assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and Iraq, the constant topic of the last two years, seems to have vanished from the agenda, at least for a moment. The thing about living in the Middle East in general, and in Amman in particular, is that Iraq has a way of looming over nearly every conversation. Amman is the way station for virtually everyone traveling to or from Baghdad. The city is filled with exiles from street vendors to wealthy merchants. On both Arab satellite television and on CNN it is the first story in a generation that has managed to push the Israeli-Palestinian conflict off center-stage for more than a few weeks. Any yet in the four days I have been in the United States people have asked me about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict at least twice as often as about Iraq. What is happening here? Has the carnage in Baghdad numbed us to the story? Is the daily news from Iraq so repetitive that people have finally tuned out and moved on (as for popular media, I gave up on the radio on the drive out from Los Angeles this morning after finding every talk radio outlet – including Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly – talking about the Michael Jackson trial)? If one accepts the (in my opinion overly narrow) definition of public diplomacy as the selling of the administration’s policies then this, I suppose, must be counted a victory. But it is dangerous to assume that if Americans are not paying attention then no one else is. That surely would be a gross misreading of the situation. Iraq is a long-term project, both our involvement there per se and undoing the damage our adventure there has done to our image in the wider world. It is important to talk about what we are doing – or at least what we think we are doing – as long as this mess continues. grr 2005-02-17T23:58:54+00:00 #When:19:33:39Z America’s public diplomacy problems in the Middle East can be summed up in a single word: credibility. Over two generations we have acquired a well-deserved reputation for saying one thing and doing another. We preach the virtues of democracy while supporting tyrants. We proclaim our openness and freedom even as we make the US an ever-more-difficult place to visit (and don’t kid yourself – getting a US visa was a slow and often humiliating process before 9-11, in the three years since it has only gotten worse). Washington has long portrayed itself as an honest broker in Arab-Israeli peace talks, but as the recent memoirs of long-time Mideast envoy Dennis Ross show Washington usually cleared American proposals and ideas with the Israelis in private before ‘presenting’ those ideas to ‘both’ sides. That revelation surprised some in the US. In the Arab world it merely confirmed what most people had long suspected. In Egypt today the Bush administration faces a crucial test of its public diplomacy skills and, hence, its own credibility: after all the talk over the last month about supporting freedom and standing up to tyrants, will the United States do anything serious to help Ayman Nur? Nur is an opposition member of Egypt’s parliament. In recent weeks the government has blocked his attempts to form a new political party, prevented the party from publishing a weekly newspaper, stripped Nur of his parliamentary immunity and arrested him on trumped up charges of forgery and corruption. Nur’s sins include questioning President Hosni Mubarak’s policies, calling for the direct election of Egypt’s president (currently parliament – dominated by Mubarak’s party – ‘picks’ a single candidate who is then submitted to the public for a yes/no referendum in which the ‘yes’ vote invariably draws 95+ percent) and openly questioning the president’s efforts to pass his office on to his son Gamal. There have been demonstrations in support of Nur in Cairo, despite emergency laws making such protests difficult and dangerous. The case is getting significant media coverage around the region though little internationally (the best place to follow it in English is Al-Jazeera’s website: english.aljazeera.net). And where, in all this, is the Bush administration, the self-declared foe of tyranny and friend of democracy activists? State Department spokesman Richard Boucher told reporters in Washington last week that a dialogue between Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party and opposition parties is scheduled to take place later this year, adding “we find this arrest at this moment incongruous with proceeding with that dialogue.” In fairness, the United States is not completely absent on this one. This evening US-funded Radio Sawa devoted a good chunk of its evening news and current affairs program to a report on the case including interviews with several opposition-leaning Egyptian analysts. That’s a good start, but it is far, far from adequate. Egypt is one of the largest recipients of American foreign aide. It is a key military ally. It plays an important role in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. All of this has, on the whole, earned it a pass on public criticism as Mubarak’s government has grown steadily more repressive over the last 15 years. If President Bush’s inaugural address and Condoleezza Rice’s speech this week in Paris are to mean anything then something beyond Boucher’s wishy-washy statement needs to come out of Washington. The criticism needs to be sharply worded and public. It is Mubarak’s sovereign right to go down this repressive road, but if he chooses to do so America must make it clear he does so without our support. Later this spring G8 foreign ministers are scheduled to meet their Arab counterparts in Cairo. If Mubarak refuses to ease up on Nur’s Al-Ghad party, allow it to function and drop the ridiculous charges against Nur himself then neither Rice nor any other American official should attend that meeting, and the Secretary should publicly say why she is not going to Cairo. Many Egyptians will complain that this amounts to interference in their internal affairs. Perhaps, but then we are under no obligation to give large sums of money to a government that abuses its citizens and flouts its own laws. Even if you deeply oppose the policies President Bush has laid out over the last month there is a bigger issue at stake here. American credibility is once again on the line. Right now hardly anyone here in the Middle East thinks the Bush administration is really serious about supporting democratic reform in the region. Public diplomacy is in large measure about showing the world what we, as a society, stand for. If the president means what he says the time to prove it is now and Egypt is the place to start. grr 2005-02-11T19:33:39+00:00 #When:18:42:50Z So I spend three weeks on the road, nearly half that time in the snowy mountains of Italy and Austria. I get home late last night, rise early this morning, look out the window… and it’s snowing. This is not utterly unknown here in Jordan, it happens roughly once each winter. Last year’s ‘storm’ (I use this word generously. Today’s snow virtually shut down the city but would barely have qualified as a flurry in Vermont, where I grew up) left me stranded in Baghdad for two days because the plane scheduled to bring me home was unable to leave Amman. By day’s end we had an accumulation of, perhaps, 2mm. Still, it was a decidedly mixed blessing. I have only four working days here at home before I hit the road again, and I work out of my apartment. Today was supposed to be the day my daughter returned to school full-time after a long convalescence entailed by a car accident. I was looking forward to a long, quiet day in which many things could be accomplished. But by 7:20a I had a bad feeling about things. Looking out my front window, coffee in hand, it dawned on me that in the previous ten minutes I had seen only one school bus come down the street, rather than the usual six or eight. With immense trepidation I picked up the phone. “Is there school today?” I asked the man who answered. “No, no, sir,” he said. “There is no school because of the snow.” This was one of those moments of parental epiphany. As a child in New England I lived for snow days. I gather my parents viewed them with dread. Suddenly, watching the microscopic snowflakes land in the empty street three floors below, I understood exactly how my parents felt a quarter-century ago. There goes the day. So much for getting significant amounts of work done. Sure enough, by 10am the DVD player was going non-stop. The fact that our heating was on the blink for most of the day did little to improve my mood (though surprisingly little to dampen my daughter’s). Worse news came around midday when a friend mentioned that Thursday is a holiday – Islamic New Year. No school then either. For forgetting this, I have no one but myself to blame. As I write this it is early evening and Halle is vigorously arguing that there will be no school tomorrow either. Things are too messed up around the city (not my impression when I was out this afternoon, but I’ve learned to avoid arguments like these). Her friends say so, and they are always right. Fine, I said. You get up at 6:30a tomorrow as usual. I’ll call the school at 7:15 and we’ll see what they say. I am desperately hoping for a warm front. grr 2005-02-08T18:42:50+00:00 #When:23:11:35Z I have spent the weekend here at a conference entitled “Broadcast Media in the 21st Century: Engaging the World”. The Salzburg Seminar and Washington DC’s Center for Strategic and International Studies brought together about 35 Arab and western journalists for a long weekend of discussions about how we perceive the world, the Middle East, our profession and each other. There were a smattering of people from outside either broadcasting or the media, but it was mostly television people and mostly Americans and Arabs. Topics here have included language and bias, how death is portrayed, external pressures on the media and the search for a universal system of journalistic ethics. To promote candid discussion conference sessions were off-the-record, but as I prepare to return to Jordan there are some thoughts I can share. It quickly became clear that even those of us familiar with the Middle East have a lot of questions about how the Arab media sees itself and its role in society. This is hardly surprising granted the revolutionary change stations like Al-Jazeera and Al-Arabiya have brought to the Middle East in recent years. Arab satellite media remain a relatively new phenomenon, and are still trying to find their exact role in the region’s political and media cultures. Satellite channels still operate essentially at the sufferance of local governments. Qatar, in the case of Al-Jazeera and Dubai, in the case of Al-Arabiya, currently regard hosting a provocative media channel as something in their interests. Were attitudes to change, however, the stations enjoy none of the legal protections we in the West often take for granted. A certain defensiveness on the part of many of the Arab attendees was hard to miss on the opening day, a sign of the unfortunate gulf of understanding still separating Arab and western media communities. When clips of Al-Arabiya’s Iraqi election coverage were screened with translation several of the westerners expressed surprise to see how closely it resembled American television coverage of the same event. It was a moment highlighting the degree to which the West’s understanding of the media revolution taking place in the Middle East remains based on hearsay and fifth-hand information. Another case in point: a western participant, inevitably, spoke about the televising of beheadings of hostages in Iraq. To his credit it was a western news executive who leapt in to remind everyone that no Arab news channel has ever aired a beheading. Ever. The conversations have been both illuminating and useful. One (Arab) participant pointedly asked why the Arab media, when speaking in Arabic to an Arab audience should be criticized for failing to take American sensitivities into account. This is a legitimate question. Since the Afghanistan war in 2001 Arab satellite stations have been criticized in the United States for showing casualties. American viewers are angered by scenes of bloodied civilians and, occasionally, of dead Americans. To my mind, however, much of the American criticism of Arab war coverage over the last few years has amounted to a charge that Arab journalists are not sufficiently patriotic in their coverage of American wars. But then, why should they be? The weekend was also a humbling reminder of the extent to which the best Arab journalists know, and are comfortable in, our culture despite our lack of familiarity with theirs. The conference was conducted entirely in English for the simple reason that most elite Arab journalists speak English fluently, while it would be near impossible to find even half a dozen similarly senior American media figures who could attend a conference where Arabic was the working language. The weekend was especially refreshing in that it combined candor with an impressive lack of rancor and invective. The really heartening thing was seeing how much we all share as journalists. At a time when the dialogue between Americans and Arabs, particularly concerning the media, is more often marked by accusations than by understanding this was a truism of which I was happy to be reminded. As Sunday night turned to Monday morning about ten of us – a mixed group of Arabs and westerners – gathered around a TV set to watch the Super Bowl (which sounds really, really strange with German commentary) – a final act of bonding to wrap up an unexpectedly successful weekend. grr 2005-02-07T23:11:35+00:00 #When:17:23:19Z There can be no denying that Sunday’s Iraqi elections went better than expected. I honestly did not think I’d be saying this, but the vote, whatever the final tally may prove to be, was something of which both Iraqis and Americans can be proud. Even the death of an estimated 36 people in election-related violence was, in the twisted logic of today’s Iraq, a relief: the sad fact is that many Iraq-watchers, myself included, would not have been surprised by a body count ten times that size. Flawed though it may have been, Sunday’s vote was surely a significant moment in the history of the modern Middle East. Arab newspapers and television channels acknowledged this with extensive coverage. Also heartening was the fact that the Americans managed to remain largely out of sight throughout the process. This is a moment where the best thing we can do in public diplomacy terms is to keep as low a profile as possible. One reporter who phoned me on election day noted that the people working in Iraq for the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (the Democratic party’s international democracy-building NGO) have become harder and harder to find. He wanted to know if I had any useful phone numbers. I suspect NDI’s going to ground is partly a security issue, but also partly reflects a feeling that their effectiveness is, to some extent, inversely related to their visibility. Media coverage of Sunday’s vote often contrasted it with the farcical ‘elections’ staged by Saddam Hussein. We need to be reminded that such ‘elections’ remain all too common in the Middle East. Egypt has a presidential election scheduled for later this year and the contrast with the weekend’s events in Iraq is likely to be striking. I lived in Cairo for more than six years and in that time I never met a single well-educated Egyptian (government electoral flacks and actual MP’s excepted) who would admit to having voted, ever. The country’s elections were, and remain, such a farce that sophisticated people regard the question ‘did you vote’ as an insult to their intelligence. Jordan’s elections are somewhat more significant, but among the country’s elite the attitude toward voting is similar. Votes like the one in Egypt will be bigger public diplomacy challenges for Washington. Support for democracy and opposition to tyranny is the Bush administration’s new mantra, but are we willing to criticize electoral shortcomings in a key ally? For two generations few things have done more to damage America’s reputation in the Arab World than the contrast between our rhetorical embrace of liberty and our practical embrace of repressive-but-friendly regimes. This does not mean that we have to abandon our support of old friends, but if we are not willing to be true to our own values in public, our word given in private will ultimately count for little. In Iraq, it remains true that the really hard work lies ahead. As Kofi Annan noted, “It’s the first step in a democratic process. It’s the beginning, not the end.” But surely this is a Good Thing – and that’s a nice change of pace, because it has been a long time since Iraq gave us anything to smile about, however briefly. On that note, I’ll close by updating the story of the young Iraqi who spent election day competing in skeleton in an effort to qualify for next year’s winter Olympics (if he makes it he would be the first Iraqi ever to participate in the winter games). Faisel Ghazi Faisel placed 32nd of 37 racers in the competition held at Lake Placid, NY. He missed the cut for the race’s second round (only the top 25 go through), but was reportedly jubilant at making his personal goal of getting down the track safely in under one minute. A nice footnote to election day. grr 2005-02-02T17:23:19+00:00 #When:19:42:13Z A friend asked incredulously how I could spend Iraqi election day skiing in the Dolomites. I replied that since I could not be in Iraq (when I signed up with USC their insurance people were quite adamant about my not going to Iraq on their nickel) I might as well be here. But isn’t the advantage of living in Amman the ability to catch people on their way in or out of the country, he said? Yes, I replied, but everyone who was going in did so a week or two ago and they won’t be coming out until early February. In any case, we won’t have results from today’s vote for seven to ten days. Aside from turnout and security there’s not a lot to be gleaned from a day spent watching the election coverage on television. The other good reason to be here (aside from the scenery and, of course, the skiing) is that today’s vote is important, but not nearly as important as what happens next. However violent today proves to be – and the early indications were predictably unsettling – the bombs and the mortars will not stop the voting, and they probably won’t do much to change the outcome. Though he overstates the case, President Bush is right to say that the mere fact this vote is taking place is an accomplishment. But what the new Assembly does, and how it does it, will have a more lasting impact than the vote per se. The 275 member assembly elected today has two jobs: it must choose a new interim government, and it must draft a new constitution. Both of these tasks are so crucial to Iraq’s future that today’s voting pales in comparison. If Iraq emerges from this election with a government that can begin to get a handle on security, bring the country’s Sunni Muslim minority back into the political process and put together a constitution capable of winning genuine popular backing then those accomplishments will far outshine today’s voting. Some have questioned how any administration emerging from these deeply flawed elections can hope to have any real legitimacy. There is some truth in that charge, but it would be hard for any successor regime to have less legitimacy than Iyad Allawi’s. However troubled this election it surely confers more of a mandate than being appointed by the United States (which immediately denied having done so – yet another blow to whatever credibility we may still have). If the election ousts Allawi that, too, will be a good thing. Good by example: showing clearly that elections really can change governments in the Middle East. Good in practice, because Allawi is turning into yet another bad, brutal Middle Eastern leader. Regarding the constitution, the key thing to watch in the coming months will be how the winners engage the losers. Will they use their new legitimacy to bring the Sunni minority into the government and the process of drafting the constitution? More importantly, will they do this in a substantive manner? Will Sunni officials be real players, or bi-partisan window dressing, like the token Democrat in George W. Bush’s cabinet? This will be a real test for everyone involved. Iraq’s emerging political class has not, so far, distinguished itself by statesmanlike cooperation across party and sectarian lines. Politics in Iraq, as in the rest of the Middle East, are still too often a zero sum game. In the run-up to the elections there have been both good signs (the Shia leadership’s consistent rejection of efforts by Sunni militants to make Iraq’s growing civil war openly sectarian) and bad (the issuing of a long list of self-serving demands by a major Sunni party, which proceeded to boycott the election when it did not get its way). Good things all to ponder here in the clear mountain air. The funny thing about Iraq, though, is that you can never seem to get away from it. On the sports page of Friday’s International Herald Tribune I ran across the story of Faisel Ghazi Faisel, who hopes next year to be the first Iraqi to compete in the Winter Olympics. His sport is skeleton, which involves going head-first down a bobsleigh track on a sled only slightly bigger than my laptop computer. He will spend today, election day, racing in his first international meet. “That will be my vote for a better Iraq.” He told the reporter. “I’m pretty sure it’s a good vote.” grr 2005-01-30T19:42:13+00:00 #When:16:05:34Z Historically, the United States has favored a Sunni-run Iraq. In part, this represented a status quo with which we were familiar and comfortable. More recently Iraq’s ruling Sunnis (led by Saddam) pitched themselves to Western governments as a bulwark against the menace of post-revolutionary Iran. On top of this, our friends in the region are mostly Sunni-ruled and all of them were scared after the 1979 Islamic revolution. But why were they scared? In some cases the reasons were less than pretty. Saudi Arabia and Kuwait both have large Shiite minorities who they have not, historically, treated well. Bahrain actually has an overwhelming (around 75%) Shiite majority, but it is run by Sunnis. When the Saudis say they are worried about a Shiite run Iraq they less afraid of Iranian influence spreading to their borders than they are of seeing a strong, independent Shiite-run Arab state arise anywhere in the Middle East. Other regional leaders have played on these fears as well. Jordan’s King Abdullah, for example, recently warned of a “crescent” of Shia movements stretching from Iran to Syria and Lebanon. What is happening here is that our Arab friends, pretty much all of whom are Sunnis, are playing on the United States’ deep-seated distrust of Iran to promote their own sectarian agendas. A lot of Sunnis view Shiites with the same mixture of puzzlement, contempt and fear that Roman Catholics and mainline Protestants reserve for Mormons. Many Sunnis regard Shiites as, at best, dodgy. Others (including some fairly prominent religions figures in Saudi Arabia and Egypt) openly declare that Shiites are not Muslims at all and referring to them as heretics or apostates. For such people the notion of Shiites running a major Arab country is simply beyond the pale. Several western journalists with long experience in the Middle East have recently told me they have been appalled at some of the things they are now hearing. Well-educated, broad-minded, seemingly liberal Arabs – some of them senior government officials – have been saying things about Shiites, at least in private, that a western listener can only call racist. The challenge for the US at this moment is to look at our own interest with clear eyes. Does the rise of a Shiite-dominated state in Iraq pose a real, fundamental threat to American interests? Only if we force it to do so. We have an opportunity at this moment in time to become an enabling force for Shiites around the region. We also run the risk of alienating people who might be our friends by giving in to our own prejudices and those of some of our allies. The Jordanians and Saudis may not like the idea of a Shiite-run Iraq. We can and should give them security guarantees – assuring their governments that a new Iraq will not be a base for undermining their regimes. But we should not stifle the legitimate aspirations of some 15 million Iraqi Shiites because small-minded leaders in neighboring countries have a problem with Shiism itself. grr 2005-01-25T16:05:34+00:00 #When:21:27:53Z Simply put, here is America’s quandary in Iraq: we want to see democracy develop, but we are distrustful of the results. As Americans we have been hard-wired since kindergarten to believe Democracy to be a fundamentally Good Thing. Yet we are slowly realizing that a genuine Iraqi democracy may not be pro-American. Many things fuel our rising discomfort. We are taken aback at the rising violence in the country. We fear that political debate within the Sunni community is being driven by Baathists, Islamists and others who detest us. But above all we fear the Shia Islamists. If a report last week in the Financial Times is to be believed we are even tacitly condoning activities by Iyad Allawi’s ‘government’ that we would denounce in any other emerging democracy, such as the shameless use of state television as a propaganda tool, and the use of police and Iraqi soldiers to distribute Allawi’s campaign material and, in some cases, tear down posters put up by rival electoral slates. We do this because the United States has an irrational fear of Iran, and that fear is driving us toward short-sighted policy decisions. US problems with Iran go back a quarter century to the fall of the Shah and the rise of today’s Islamic Republic. Iran and the United States have been, let’s not mince words, enemies ever since. Iran has funded terrorism directed at the United States and its allies both inside and outside the Middle East. The United States has worked to isolate Iran from the outside world. In recent months, however, we seem to have taken this loathing a step further – insisting on seeing an Iranian hand in every Shiite political move in Iraq. This is likely to cause us problems over time. Moreover it is being encouraged by some of our Arab friends for their own less than honorable reasons (more on that tomorrow). Is Iran trying to influence the Iraqi elections? Of course it is. States have interests, and Iran is very interested in what happens in its large, turbulent neighbor. The government Iran would like to see in Baghdad would probably not be one particularly friendly to the United States. But it is a mistake to move from there to the assumption that anything Iran does in Iraq is, by definition, contrary to American interests. Washington and Tehran both want a peaceful, somewhat stable Iraq. We want peace and stability so we can leave. The Iranians want it because they have to share a long border with Iraq and no one wants to share a border with an anarchic failed state. Our visions for the country’s future are certainly different, but there are broad goals on which we can agree. This is a moment when we could use that small bit of common ground to try to improve relations, yet there seems to be an assumption in the United States that anything Iran does, or tries to do, in Iraq is by definition bad for the US. There also seems to be an assumption in Washington that Iraq’s demographics virtually assure Iranian success, yet this is not true either. It is a mistake to assume that Iraq’s Shiites (some 60% of the country’s population) are in thrall to the clerics who run Iran simply because they are Shiites. First, there are more than a few secular Shiites out there (starting with Iyad Allawi). Second, Iraqi Shiites proved their loyalty when huge numbers of them fought Iran during the 1980-88 war between the two countries. Iran’s leaders assumed that many Iraqi Shiites would rally to their banner – and were sorely mistaken. Third, Iraq’s Shiites have waited centuries for this moment. Why on earth would they want to turn their country into a client state? At a moment when Iraq’s Shia could see us as the agent of their empowerment there is a real danger that we are allowing our deep distrust of Iran poison our relations with what will, one way or another, be Iraq’s dominant community. There’s no real evidence that a Shia-ruled Iraq would be either a theocracy or an Iranian client state. This is not to say that an overtly theological government would not cause problems – the Kurds, for one, would probably object – but an Islamist, Shia-led government need not be a bad thing for Iraq, its neighbors or the United States. We cannot guarantee that it will be a good thing, but letting prejudice cloud our judgment almost assures a bad outcome. grr 2005-01-24T21:27:53+00:00 #When:15:17:13Z Returning to the United States always involves a mixed set of images. Why, I wonder, does the defense of the nation against terrorists require that no one use a mobile phone in Atlanta until they are clear of customs and immigration when travelers arriving at Kennedy airport in New York are perfectly free to let friends and family know they have landed while standing in the 45 minute line at passport control? Usually the many Arab stamps in my passport prompt a second look. This time I was waved customs. At passport control the officer, on learning I am a journalist and I live in Jordan, asked if I’d ever been in Iraq. I said I had. Instead of the usual quick set of questions about what I was doing there he offered, “they sent round a memo a few weeks ago asking for people in our division to volunteer to go work border patrol over in Iraq. Wanna guess how many takers?” “Not many?” “Less than zero.” He shook his head and handed back my passport. And yet, 24 hours later, as I maneuvered my rented car through city traffic I heard a radio ad for an Iraq job fair. It takes place next week at a hotel out in the suburbs, and the company doing the advertising is looking for auto mechanics and people who know how to repair small arms. How ridiculous. Either we are so short-sighted that we instinctively hire Americans to do jobs for which there are many, many qualified Iraqis, thereby missing the chance to dent Iraq’s unemployment problem (which feeds the insurgency, which makes Iraq yet more dangerous, which means that Americans brought over to fix cars command ever-higher salaries). Or the employing of Iraqis has become increasingly difficult – either because of the potential security threat they pose to their American colleagues or because of the very real threat the insurgency poses to any Iraqi working for the Americans. Coming back to the States, however, I find I mostly stare in puzzlement at the media. I know at first hand that American journalism is filled with intelligent people. Why, then, does the actual product often seem so inane? Driving in from the Atlanta airport I listened to the city’s main news-talk station report that President Bush had paid a brief inauguration-eve visit to the National Archives to look over the texts of previous inaugurals addresses there, and to “seek inspiration” for his own speech the following day. I’m not sure which irks me more: the idea that the White House believes the public dumb enough to swallow such a patent absurdity, or the media’s crass repetition of it in the first place. Do they seriously think we’ll buy the idea that a modern president writes his own speeches the night before the event? Why does the media insist on wasting precious airtime on non-stories like this? It’s actually embarrassing. This time last year I was in Baghdad training Iraqi journalists. If someone had brought me an Iraqi version of that inaugural address story I’d have sent it back. Silly photo-ops are not news. At least they are not supposed to be. And we are supposed to be better than this. That’s why we send people out to train journalists at developing media institutions in places like Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan. What, I wonder, would my Iraqi colleagues make of the lazy reporting, the jingoistic inaugural coverage and the smug defensiveness of talk radio? One shudders to think. grr 2005-01-21T15:17:13+00:00 #When:16:57:29Z It has often been said that London is the expatriate capital of the Arab World. It is the city to which a generation of Arab princes came for their educations, where the Middle East’s wealthy come to play and where its dissidents come to plot. Many of the Saudi government’s fiercest critics – the sort of people who believe Saudi Arabia to be a dangerously liberal place – run their websites and publish their manifestos from here. It is also the place to which many of the region’s best scholars and, especially, journalists have long come seeking freedoms they cannot enjoy at home. What got me thinking about the ways in which the Arab World has changed in recent years was an article about airplanes in yesterday’s Financial Times. Earlier today in Toulouse, France Airbus rolled out its latest plane, the A380. The plane is a monster: 555 seats in the standard configuration (that’s about 150 more people than the biggest 747 holds), but theoretically capable of carrying 800 people if you really squeeze them in (waiting for your bags with 800 other people… the mind boggles). As I write this I’m listening to radio coverage of the plane’s roll-out. Much is being made of the fact that Virgin Atlantic plans to purchase six of these behemoths. According to the FT, however, the largest customer for the A380 will be Emirates. The Dubai-based airline plans to buy 43 A380s and lease two more. That will give them almost as many of the planes as the next four customers (Lufthansa, Qantas, Singapore Airlines and Air France) combined. Add in the four A380s that Abu Dhabi-based Etihad has ordered, and the two reserved for Qatar Airways and it’s clear we are going to be seeing a lot of these things around the Middle East by, say, mid-2007. What is extraordinary is the contrast between the Arab World’s economic muscle and its lack of political progress. There is an odd disconnect between the FT’s reference to Emirates as “one of the world’s most important buyers of long-haul aircraft” and the controversy that attends the very idea of political reform in the world’s least democratic region. Things are beginning to change in many parts of the Middle East. But spend a few days here in Britain, and it’s difficult to miss the gulf that increasingly separates the Arab World’s business culture from its political realities. grr 2005-01-18T16:57:29+00:00 #When:16:13:51Z Two days ago I wrote about Iraq’s civil war, which looks more and more as though it has already begun. This begs the question, what should we – the Americans – do about it? Before the US invaded Iraq Colin Powell spoke of what he called the “Pottery Barn rule”: you break it, you bought it. If the United States overthrew Iraq’s government it had a moral responsibility to put the country back together again. As hard as it may be to believe, versions of this mindset (not all of them benign) have governed much of what the United States has done, or at least what US officials think they have done and are doing, in Iraq. So what can, or should, the US now do to help make things better and, hopefully, keep them from getting any worse? First we need to abandon what one might call the strict constructionist view of the Pottery Barn rule. Helping make things better does not always require action on our part. In fact, with the passage of time “nothing” is increasingly the best thing we can do in many situations. An American need to ‘fix’ things, rather than giving Iraqis the tools to do the job themselves lies at the root of many of our worst mistakes over the past 21 months. First, then, we need to move ahead with this month’s elections knowing full well that they will be far from perfect. At this stage postponing the vote will do nothing but embolden the insurgents (who will, with some justification, see any delay as a victory) and anger the Shia who have waited patiently for their moment to assume power. Next, we have to live with the results of the elections. This is going to be hard, because heavy-handed behind-the-scenes lobbying seems to be second-nature for US diplomats and no one in Washington is especially thrilled by the prospect of a Shia-led government dominated directly or indirectly by clerics. In fact, such a government may be a good thing or a bad thing in the long run but constantly acting as though it will be a disaster is likely to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. Once the new government is in place we need to reduce both the number and the visibility of our troops. It is true that Iraq’s security forces are not now capable of securing much of anything, but the new government will gain popular legitimacy only to the extent that it is seen to be in control of its own territory and not a puppet of the United States. The trick will be to back the government in a way that neither turns it into our quisling nor us into its mercenaries (I never said this was going to be easy). Then we need to tell Iraq’s neighbors that they need to help. Real help, not half-hearted rhetorical help. Money from the Gulf States. Training assistance from Egypt and Jordan. Properly controlled borders from Syria and Iran. Iran aside none of Iraq’s neighbors are happy with the idea of a Shiite-dominated government. They need to live with it. They won’t like the government’s ties to America. They need to live with that too. If something resembling a democracy really does emerge in Iraq over time they probably won’t like that either. Tough. This is where they need to be told that their own rhetoric about sovereignty, regional cooperation and solidarity with the Iraqi people needs to be taken seriously. It won’t hurt to reminded them that a huge failed state in what is now Iraq threatens them more than it threatens anyone else. Finally, and most importantly, we need to be upfront and honest about what we are doing. Don’t dissemble. Let our deeds complement our words, rather than showing them to be hollow. Our leaders need to stop touting Iraq as a marvelous success story when even my six year old daughter can see it is not. There has been a tendency in recent years to confuse public diplomacy with public relations. The two are related, but they are not the same thing. Realizing that, above all, would be an excellent start. grr 2005-01-15T16:13:51+00:00 #When:22:47:27Z Incipient civil war. The phrase has been repeated over and over since former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft used it in a speech last week to the New America Foundation. “The Iraqi elections, rather than turning out to be a promising turning point, have the great potential for deepening the conflict,” he said, according to the Washington Post. The extensive media coverage of Scowcroft’s comments got me to thinking about the term “civil war”. For all the talk of the danger that one may break out in the coming months, I think a good case can be made that Iraq is already well into its civil war – and, arguably, has been for nearly a year. When does a civil war begin? How do you define it? Establishing a starting point is often easier in retrospect. A conflict’s beginnings are rarely as clear cut as the Confederate shelling of Fort Sumter. Pinning down the exact moment when insurgency, banditry, incipient rebellion or general lawlessness hit their tipping point and metastasize into organized conflict is often best done with the benefit of hindsight. Eleven years ago this month I spent a week in Algiers. The security situation throughout the country was rapidly going to hell, and though we of the foreign media were there to cover a national reconciliation conference it was becoming next to impossible for foreigners to move around the capital. At one point I even bumped into two young western women in the hotel bar. They told me they worked for the United Nations and were based in Algiers. The UN, they said, put them up in the hotel every other weekend because the city had become so dangerous that the hotel’s gardens (which were surrounded by high walls) were now the only place where it was safe for a westerner to get some fresh air. Over lunch and breakfast and dinner our small group of correspondents spent a great deal of time discussing civil wars – how they start and, more importantly how one recognizes that they have started. We concluded that Algeria was not yet in the midst of a civil war, though it was getting seriously close. With a decade of hindsight, almost everyone who keeps track of these things now agrees that Algeria, by January 1994, was well into its civil war. Last summer in Baghdad I had conversations eerily similar to the ones I’d had in Algiers a decade earlier. As time passes I’m more and more convinced that the first half of April 2004 may, eventually, come to be seen as the date when Iraq’s civil war began. It’s difficult today to remember just how quickly things deteriorated that spring. As late as mid-February, when I was still working at Al-Iraqiyah television, my friends and I would think nothing about walking out through one of the Green Zone’s checkpoints and catching a taxi to the Kurdish-run liquor store a half-mile away where we bought beer and scotch. Seven weeks later such a trip was unthinkable for a westerner, and it has remained so ever since. The killing of four American security contractors as they passed through Fallujah at the beginning of April touched off a spiral of violence that has rarely slackened in the months since. Those four deaths did not start the conflict, but they increasingly appear to have been a tipping point of sorts. It is a measure of just how bad things have become that in media circles the summer and fall of 2003 are now seen as a golden moment when Iraq was, relatively speaking, safe. As old friends and new acquaintances have passed through Amman this week en route to Baghdad I’ve detected a degree of tension one rarely sees among war correspondents. It’s not a good sign – and only reinforces my growing belief that the elections are not going to touch off a civil war. They are merely going to move it to a new phase. grr 2005-01-13T22:47:27+00:00 #When:18:13:24Z Here’s a question that has been bothering me as I watch the Middle East watch Iraq’s election campaign: if Iraq’s Arab neighbors are worried about the country breaking up (and conventional wisdom holds that they are) then why do they insist on addressing Iraqi issues in language guaranteed to make things even worse than they already are? Last week a meeting of Iraq’s neighbors took place here in Jordan. Its supposed purpose was to encourage Iraqis to support the January 30 election and to turn out to vote. The rhetoric surrounding the meeting, however, was not especially promising. Iran refused to send its foreign minister in protest against King Abdullah’s (unproven) claim that more than a million Iranians have crossed the border to vote in Iraq. Then, the day before the meeting, Jordan’s foreign minister, Hani Mulki, offered this rationale for the get-together: “The purpose of the meeting is to come out with a clear message to Iraqis that elections are on time and that they should go to vote to… ensure the country preserves its Arab character.” The meeting, he added, would “call on the feelings of all Iraqis to vote for an Arab, not a religious, Iraq.” The problem with calling on “all Iraqis” to vote for an Arab Iraq is that a significant minority of Iraqis are not Arabs. About 20% of all Iraqis are Kurds. This includes the country’s foreign minister (who presumably did not think the purpose of the Amman meeting was to reaffirm Iraq’s Arabness) and a significant portion of the population of Baghdad. In addition to the Kurds there is a smaller, but still significant, minority of Turkmen. Iraqi political leaders are a pretty self-interested bunch, but they at least seem to understand this in a way their neighbors do not. They often talk about the need for a federal Iraq. What exactly a federal Iraq might look like is a separate debate, one on which the country’s various ethnic and religious communities have widely differing views. For now, though, the important thing is that they recognize Iraqi society as a mosaic whose various parts must be accommodated if the country is to hold together. For most people both inside and outside the region holding Iraq together remains the preferred solution. It is difficult to spin a partition scenario that does not devolve into a bloodbath, and pretty much everyone agrees that a violent, unstable Iraq is a very Bad Thing. Iraq’s neighbors have long opposed any break-up of the country. The Saudis don’t like the idea of a Shia state emerging on their northern border any more than the Iranians, Syrians or Turks relish the prospect of an independent Kurdistan. Why, then, this repeated emphasis on the country’s “Arab identity”? Don’t the neighbors understand that this is exactly the sort of thing that makes Iraq’s Kurds and Turkmen nervous? That makes them fear for their culture and desire the independence the rest of the region is so eager to deny them? Do the neighbors understand that by repeatedly stressing Iraq’s Arabness they are making civil war more, not less, likely? Is this really what they want? Pulling off an election three weeks from now that has even a shred of legitimacy is going to be difficult enough as it is. If this is the best the country’s neighbors can offer in the way of help, it might be better if they stayed away entirely. grr 2005-01-10T18:13:24+00:00