None but us to blame

While imperialism has left its mark on the Arab region, it alone cannot be blamed for the failure of the Arabs to build modern states, writes Hussain Abdul-Hussain*

So far America and the world have tried several tactics in the Middle East since 2003. The United States unilaterally toppled Iraq's autocrat, Saddam Hussein, using military power, while the world multilaterally supported a popular uprising in Lebanon, isolated the Syrian regime, and forced elections in the Palestinian territories. None of these policies have resulted in any significant gains in Arab public life.

America and Western capitals are now reversing their course as US troops withdraw from Iraqi cities and the world ignores the results of the June parliamentary elections in Lebanon, re-establishes links with Syria, and strives to revive a Palestinian national unity cabinet as a prerequisite for Palestinian-Israeli peace.

At the risk of sounding overly pessimistic, the new Western plans for the Middle East will soon prove futile. Many of these blueprints have been tested and failed in the past, and there is little reason to believe they will succeed now.

At face value, a lack of democracy stands behind the failure of Arabs in building modern states. But such a diagnosis only scratches the surface. Modern states need citizens, and these are nowhere to be found in Arab countries.

Citizenship is a modern concept that has been evolving in the West since the age of the European Renaissance. In its rudimentary definition, as per its early drafters Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, citizenship starts when the individual gives up on the usage of violence for self-defence. The individual then delegates to a group of elected officers the right to use violence on his or her behalf, for preserving security in public spheres.

Individuals also contribute parts of their income to provide officers, now part of a system called the state, with more tools to be used in the interest of the public. The system operates based on a social contract and constitution, also drafted based by the will of an absolute popular majority. The basic tenant of any constitution is the equality of all citizens before law, as opposed to older hierarchies based on divine right.

While the above description of state and citizens seems outdated and unnecessarily academic, it forms the cornerstone for any state building, in Arab or other countries. If not absorbed at a popular level, the Arab world will remain chaotic and no amount or combination of Western strategies will ever help change its situation.

The Arab world witnessed a glimpse of renaissance between the mid-19th and mid-20th centuries. After being provoked by a vastly superior French force landing in Egypt, under Napoleon, Arab thinkers, mainly in Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria, strived to answer the question of "What went wrong?" by which the Arabs, once a leading civilisation, lost their world primacy and were relegated to Third World status.

The answer of Arab thinkers to that question varied at the time, and a vast amount of ink was spilled over how to restore Arabs to their former days of glory. Even though the answers were sometimes contradictory when some suggested the restoration of the Islamic state and others argued for modernisation and the endorsement of liberal values such as women's liberation, secularism and democracy, the debate -- later known as the Arab Renaissance -- was timely and sobering.

Then oil reserves were discovered in Arab lands and this proved to be a double-edged sword. While subsequent colossal revenues allowed for the building of modern infrastructure and the creation of jobs in the region, the mega- billions remained in the hands of religiously dogmatic conservatives from both branches of Islam, Sunni and Shia.

Conservatives as they are, they used money power to kill genuine debate and entrench the traditional tribal structure, the antithesis of the modern state. Popular understanding of the state went awry as the region took the direction of reinventing Islam in its most puritanical form, which in turn pushed the Arab peoples to further fanaticism, less debate and more misery.

As such, regime intellectuals were forced to come up with justifications for Arab failure; enter greedy Western imperialism, which the Arabs have been blaming for all their ills for more than a century now.

True America and Western capitals have committed grave errors in dealing with Arab peoples, but blaming others for all of one's faults can hardly be a remedy. After all, India -- a rising power now -- won its independence from imperial Britain in 1947; a few years after most Arab countries -- still struggling to figure out how to build a state until today -- had been independent.

Reform from the inside out is the best bet for an Arab future. This starts by cutting free from endless and unfounded conspiracy theories that blame "the other". This should be followed by building proper understanding of religion as an act of personal faith, rather than a blueprint for state-building, and the acknowledgement of individual equal rights and liberties, for all men and women.

Blaming America, Britain and domestic leaders will not cut it for Arab development. After all, Arab leaders are only the product of their own societies and are its reflection. When society is fixed, Arab states will get leaders who match their aspirations. Until then, free spirited debate is the best path towards finding proper answers to the new and old question, "What went wrong?"

* The writer is a journalist based in Washington, DC.

Join the World or Live Alone, Says Clinton

WASHINGTON: Excerpts on the Middle East from Sec of State Hillary Clinton's speech at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Whether in Latin America or Lebanon, Iran or Liberia, those who are inspired by democracy, who understand that democracy is about more than just elections – that it must also protect minority rights and press freedom, develop strong, competent and independent judiciaries, legislatures and executive agencies, and commit for democracy to deliver results – these are the people who will find that Americans are their friends, not adversaries. As President Obama made clear last week in Ghana, this Administration will stand for accountable and transparent governance, and support those who work to build democratic institutions wherever they live.

And we know that progress toward peace cannot be the responsibility of the United States – or Israel – alone. Ending the conflict requires action on all sides. The Palestinians have the responsibility to improve and extend the positive actions already taken on security; to act forcefully against incitement; and to refrain from any action that would make meaningful negotiations less likely.

And Arab states have a responsibility to support the Palestinian Authority with words and deeds, to take steps to improve relations with Israel, and to prepare their publics to embrace peace and accept Israel’s place in the region. The Saudi peace proposal, supported by more than twenty nations, was a positive step. But we believe that more is needed. So we are asking those who embrace the proposal to take meaningful steps now. Anwar Sadat and King Hussein crossed important thresholds, and their boldness and vision mobilized peace constituencies in Israel and paved the way for lasting agreements. By providing support to the Palestinians and offering an opening, however modest, to the Israelis, the Arab states could have the same impact. So I say to all sides: Sending messages of peace is not enough. You must also act against the cultures of hate, intolerance and disrespect that perpetuate conflict.

Our second policy approach is to lead with diplomacy, even in the cases of adversaries or nations with whom we disagree. We believe that doing so advances our interests and puts us in a better position to lead with our other partners. We cannot be afraid or unwilling to engage. Yet some suggest that this is a sign of naiveté or acquiescence to these countries’ repression of their own people. I believe that is wrong.

As long as engagement might advance our interests and our values, it is unwise to take it off the table. Negotiations can provide insight into regimes’ calculations and the possibility – even if it seems remote – that a regime will eventually alter its behavior in exchange for the benefits of acceptance into the international community. Libya is one such example. Exhausting the option for dialogue is also more likely to make our partners more willing to exert pressure should persuasion fail.

With this in mind, I want to say a few words about Iran. We watched the energy of Iran’s election with great admiration, only to be appalled by the manner in which the government used violence to quell the voices of the Iranian people, and then tried to hide its actions by arresting foreign journalists and nationals, and expelling them, and cutting off access to technology. As we and our G-8 partners have made clear, these actions are deplorable and unacceptable.

We know very well what we inherited with Iran, because we deal with that inheritance every day. We know that refusing to deal with the Islamic Republic has not succeeded in altering the Iranian march toward a nuclear weapon, reducing Iranian support for terror, or improving Iran’s treatment of its citizens.

Neither the President nor I have any illusions that dialogue with the Islamic Republic will guarantee success of any kind, and the prospects have certainly shifted in the weeks following the election. But we also understand the importance of offering to engage Iran and giving its leaders a clear choice: whether to join the international community as a responsible member or to continue down a path to further isolation.

Direct talks provide the best vehicle for presenting and explaining that choice. That is why we offered Iran’s leaders an unmistakable opportunity: Iran does not have a right to nuclear military capacity, and we’re determined to prevent that. But it does have a right to civil nuclear power if it reestablishes the confidence of the international community that it will use its programs exclusively for peaceful purposes.

Iran can become a constructive actor in the region if it stops threatening its neighbors and supporting terrorism. It can assume a responsible position in the international community if it fulfills its obligations on human rights. The choice is clear. We remain ready to engage with Iran, but the time for action is now. The opportunity will not remain open indefinitely.

With respect to Syria, we have made it very clear to the Syrians, including with the offer to return an ambassador, that we do want an engagement, but we expect it to be reciprocal, and there are certain actions that we would like to see the Syrians take as we begin to explore this with them. I think Syria is a critical player in whatever we do in the Middle East. I’m hoping that the Syrian calculation of where they should be positionally with respect to their relationship with Iran and their support for extremist and terrorist activities will be changing so that we can pursue a two-way engagement that will benefit both us and the larger region.

Let Go James Glassman, Alhurra is a Scam

Note: This page was designed to serve as the archives of my published work. Today, however, is an exception with some blogging.
I have just read James K Glassman’s Alhurra’s 27 Million Viewers, posted on his blog on June 4. Glassman, like many of the Bush era sponsors of the creation of Congress-funded Arabic satellite TV Alhurra, just does not let go, even after retiring from his position as Assistant Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy earlier last year.
Glassman blames ProPublica’s Dafna Linzer for what he implicitly describes as slandering Alhurra. He employs a tactic that Alhurra has been employing since inception in Feb. 2004: Use presumed viewer figures to show Alhurra’s success. Of course, without such figures, non-Arabic speaking people like Glassman – entrusted to supervise an Arabic TV – cannot tell the difference between any two shows from an editorial perspective.
Anyway, since numbers have been the game of Glassman and other Alhurra officials, let’s look closer. Who produces these numbers? In his posting, Glassman says AC Nielsen, and mentions Intermedia.
AC Nielsen is an independent survey group. In the Middle East, it operates a number of offices. The way Alhurra surveys are produced is this way. Intermedia specifies the methodology and the questions, AC Nielsen serves as the survey arm and deploys agents to ask people in predetermined areas. Then, AC Nielsen sends the raw data to Intermedia, which in turn analyses it and puts it in a report. Whatever Alhurra viewer numbers are the responsibility of Intermedia alone, not AC Nielsen.
Now Glassman knows this. Look how he described this: “The question that Nielsen asks is this: “Apart from today, when was the last time you watched [Alhurra, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, et al.]?” Glassman wants to make it look as if Nielsen are the ones responsible for the numbers. This is wrong. Read what he writes about Intermedia: “The BBG, through InterMedia, a respected and independent research firm, contracts with ACNielsen to do its viewership surveys.”
So why does Glassman insist on tagging InterMedia as “independent?” Well, simply because Glassman knows that more than 80 percent of all the InterMedia contracts come from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which supervises Alhurra. In a sense, Alhurra and InterMedia operate from the same budget. This is as independent as it can get for InterMedia.
BUT, let’s give it to Glassman that Alhurra indeed gets 27 million viewers a week (the daily numbers, like the ones American networks employ, would be miserably lower for Alhurra than 27 million). What does the number 27 million mean? What is this number measured against? For obvious reasons, Glassman, his predecessors, the BBG and InterMedia, have all concealed the Alhurra surveys – paid for by tax money – from the public eye. Without the numbers of other stations, one can never put the Alhurra number in context. The BBG’s lame excuse has been that it is not its business to publish figures of other stations. Fine, let InterMedia do it then, if it is as independent as Glassman says. Money for these Alhurra surveys have been already been paid, from tax money, and should be posted online for every American to see.
But, twisting facts as they always do, the BBG posts numbers on its website (like the Iraq ranking) only to show Alhurra ahead of other TVs. Where Alhurra is not ahead (that is technically in all other Arab countries), numbers are concearled.
If you have any friend in our transparent government, however, you might get a glimpse of the numbers. According to the same InterMedia survey which Glassman cited, Alhurra got 27 million viewers a week. If you examine these same surveys, you will find out that Al-Jazeera received more than 75 million, while Al-Arabiya teeters around 50 million, triple and double Alhurra’s numbers of viewers, respectively.
Now this is another Glassman and the BBG’s trick. They often say they never intended to compete with Al-Jazeera. If this is true, why has Glassman made it clear, time and again, that Alhurra leads Al-Jazeera in Iraq? And speaking of Iraq, Alhurra’s best success, it is just embarrassing to learn – through InterMedia’s surveys, that Al-Arabiya is a leader there among foreign broadcasters. It is a shame especially if you learn than unlike foreign broadcasters, Alhurra has terrestrial broadcast inside Iraq, has dedicated a channel to Iraq, has a whole Iraqi team in Springfield and the biggest bureau compared to other stations in Baghdad. And still, Alhurra is trailing 4 or 5 other channels in Iraq.
Deception has been the specialty of Alhurra’s leadership and the BBG. Alhurra alone has cost Americans more than $0.5 billion since inception in 04. It is a big scam, and should be fundamentally overhauled.
Dafna Linzer and ProPublica are simply doing their job, and I think they have done a fairly good one so far.
I will stop here, and maybe if I ever blog about Alhurra again, I will just write bits about corruption, nepotism and sexual harassment, all abundant in this scam operation called Arab TV.

Hiding behind Palestine

Hussain Abdul-Hussain, NOW Contributor , July 2, 2009

An Iranian supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi holds a sign that reads "We are all Neda." (AFP PHOTO/SAHAR JALILI)

A number of leftists in Lebanon become uneasy when talking about the recent events in Iran. They perceive of Iran, with its anti-Western rhetoric and rogue nuclear program, as an anti-imperial ally but cannot ignore the images streaming out of Tehran showing “the regime of the downtrodden of the earth” ruthlessly cutting down innocent protestors. To overcome their dilemma, these activists, mostly coming from the Lebanese counterculture, are doing what people in this region have done for decades to hide their hypocrisy: they claim the moral high ground by pointing in the direction of Palestine.

The case of the victims
The shooting of 26-year old Neda Soltan in Tehran last month, and her subsequent death in front of a crowd of protestors who had come to her rescue, made headlines worldwide. The public outcry over her murder did not sit well with defenders of the Iranian regime, whether from the West or the Middle East.

Unable to blame the innocent Neda for her death, and unwilling to blame her murder on the Iranian regime, defenders of Iran tried to take the moral high ground by highlighting the tyranny of Israel and the crimes it commits against the Palestinians.

After failing to redirect the world’s attention from the brutality of the Iranian Basij militia, Iran apologists started attacking the US mainstream media, accusing it of bias. If Neda, who has become an icon of Iran’s Green Revolution, was unjustifiably murdered, then American TV networks should be blamed for focusing on Iran alone while ignoring tragedies suffered by the Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli army.

In his The Huffington Post article “Neda in Palestine, Sentenced to Die Alone,” Daily Beast senior writer Max Blumenthal praised the US media’s decision to air footage of Neda’s murder, but added that the decision “nonetheless highlighted its hypocritical attitude toward Palestinians who resist Israeli occupation on a daily basis, and who often meet the same fate as Neda.”

Fair enough. A murder is a murder anywhere and should be covered and denounced on TV, whether it took place in Iran or in Palestine. But how about Lebanon?

Hiding behind Palestine continued here