Middle Eastern foundations start to shake

By Rami G. Khouri

GSTAAD, Switzerland: It is personally pleasant and politically instructive to spend two days in the idyllic environment of the resort of Gstaad in the Swiss Alps discussing the increasingly violent, fractured and fragmenting Middle East. This is what I did earlier this week with 20 other colleagues at an annual gathering sponsored by major American and European research centers. A detached review of trends throughout the region paints a rather depressing picture.

The discussion of events related to Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and Syria, Turkey, terrorism, democratic reform, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, Egypt, and other regional issues highlighted a significant and potentially historic new trend: The four most important drivers of politics and public sentiment in the Middle East - Israel/Palestine, Iraq, Iran and Arab democratic reform - are all bogged down in either chronic violence or massive political uncertainty. Here and elsewhere, local and American political sentiments are often in a state of confrontation and tension.

Throw in Turkey's fast changing and slightly souring relations with the U.S. and the European Union, the persistent tensions between Washington and Damascus, Egypt's increasingly strident domestic politics, and the U.S.-Saudi Arabian pattern of loving and lashing out at one another, and you have a Middle East region in the early stages of across-the-board, potentially massive changes. The screws are loosening around the ideological, geographic, emotional, cultural and economic anchors of the Middle East, and new moorings will emerge to replace the failed old ones.

Given that America's anger and army are a primary driving force of the change, it remains unclear if the transformations to come will be destructive or constructive for all concerned.

Several processes seem to me to be at work here. The first is the delayed consequence of the end of the cold war and the slow rise of American triumphalist dominance, which was speeded up by Washington's reaction to September 11, 2001. As the United States since late 2001 has pushed its own agenda to change the Middle East by using military and diplomatic force, the region's thin police state controls have started to weaken and perhaps collapse.

The second force at work is the slow unraveling, or at least fraying, of the Arab nation-state itself that was largely invented by receding European colonial officials around 1920. This has been due to a simultaneous combination of internal economic weaknesses, political incoherence, demographic pressures, and external jolts. The prevalence throughout the Middle East of tribal, religious, ethnic, regional and sectarian identities - and numerous militias - is not necessarily a sign of the future of this region. It is a sign of how fractured Arab societies regroup to handle the threat of foreign armies and the specter of indigenous political amateurism and failure.

The third force at work is the rather rich combination of attempts to rebuild better societies and more responsive governance systems, using all available mechanisms and identities. The most common trend to be populist, usually Islamist, rhetoric and the strengthening local tribal, ethnic and regional identities, along with some serious attempts by liberals who want to replace Arab autocracy with Arab democracy. In all cases, indigenous movements mobilize large numbers of disaffected citizens who often feel disappointed and marginalized by their own nation-states, and humiliated and threatened by the continued military and political aggressions of the United States Great Britain, Israel and other such external menaces.

The severe impact of these three forces is visible to anyone who cares to see it, as internal and external pressures spark transformations in the structures, power flows and behavior of most established Arab states and regimes. Unfortunately, to date a prevalent common image of the challenge of change is that of the helmeted, gun-toting soldier or policeman beating, threatening or shooting Arabs - whether an American in Iraq, an Israeli in occupied Palestinian lands, or assorted Arabs fighting and constraining their own people. Many Arab nation-states are finding it increasingly difficult to control and subdue their own people through the use of force or coercive preemption, and they are also discovering that embracing the U.S.-led "war on terror" does not achieve any better results.

The epitome of this deep malaise in the Arab world is probably the American armed forces in Iraq, now mired in an impossible task on both the political and military fronts. Astoundingly, the world's most powerful army is unable to use its full military power, because doing so only alienates more Iraqis and others in this region, and generates greater instability in Iraq and its neighbors. It is also unable to use its political muscle in Iraq or the wider region, because it remains so glaringly ignorant of what makes people tick in these ancient lands, and it is severely hampered by accusations of hypocrisy and double standards in its unevenhanded stance in the Arab-Israeli conflict. A faith-based strategy implemented with threat-and-assault-based policies on the ground elicits first contempt and derision, and then active resistance, as we continue to witness in Iraq and other Middle Eastern lands.

A telltale sign of this perplexing policy is that American officials and soldiers cannot walk in the streets of Iraq without a large armed escort.

The allusion is often made to America's failures in Vietnam; the better analogy is the Russians in Afghanistan. A generation has passed, and the Americans in Baghdad in 2005 have become like the Russians in Kabul in 1985 - mighty foreign warriors, armed to the teeth, technologically superior, full of determination and staying power, clear on their mission and their resolve, willing to kill hundreds at a time ... but unable to walk into a local grocery store and buy a chocolate bar from the people they are trying to liberate and protect.

They try and compensate for this political dilemma with a public relations onslaught showing American troops handing out candy bars to Iraqi children.

That only makes matters worse. They could have sent the candy bars with FedEx. Washington remains strangely unaware that American soldiers running Iraq and American soldiers handing out candy to Iraqi children are equally uncomfortable political phenomena for most people in the Middle East. Washington's brazen gamble in Iraq also spreads tensions throughout the region, especially as the U.S. pressures and threatens Iraq's neighbors, who then only have new incentives to make life difficult for the U.S. in Iraq.

An entire region coming untethered from its moorings is not a pretty sight, but this seems to be the state of things in the Middle East these days, thanks in large part to decades of inept Arab state policies and a resurgent American unilateralist militarism. The potential consequences of this process are only now becoming clear, in a Middle East region whose national and state structures have proven much easier to shock, shake and dismantle than to rebuild on a rational basis.

Rami G. Khouri writes a weekly commentary for The Daily Star.