Category: Middle East

Two fascinating– and hopeful– items of Middle East news this morning. First, Syria, Israel, and Turkey have all confirmed that senior officials of Israel and Syria have been holding “proximity talks” on final-peace issues in Turkey since Monday.
Second, the Lebanese faction leaders and representatives who have been talking in Doha, Qatar since Sunday, have now announced their agreement on an package deal covering the three issues of: (1) getting the long-agreed presidential candidate Gen. Michel Suleiman finally inaugurated into office, (2) the make-up of the next cabinet, and (3) the rules for the next parliamentary election.
These items of diplomatic news are significant for these reasons:

(1) In both cases, an entity that the Bush administration has been seeking to completely exclude from political participation has been included in a substantial way in this process. That is, Syria, and Lebanon’s biggest political party, Hizbullah.
(2) In both cases, the mediation has been done by a non-American government that is (and remains) broadly friendly to the US, but with little regard for the preferences that the Bush administration has expressed very vociferously regarding the “exclusion” aim described above.

So it’s not the case that any anti-US forces are “taking over” the Middle East. But it is the case that Washington, which has long succeeded in exercising complete control over all the region’s “peace diplomacy” has now lost the ability to do that.
One earlier attempt by a pro-US power to do something broadly parallel to what the Qataris have achieved regarding Lebanon came in February 2007, when Saudi Arabia succeeded in brokering a “National Unity Agreement” between the Palestinian Fateh and Hamas movements.
On that occasion, Washington was furious, and stepped up its efforts to arm and train the pro-US Fateh people so they could retake the Palestinian polity by force. (They did succeed in breaking up the National Unity Government, but they left Palestinian society sorely wounded and badly divided.)
On this occasion, I’m not quite sure what cards the hardliners in Washington, led by Elliott Abrams, feel they might have left to play. Two facts are relevant to this. First, is the incredibly damaging effects that GWB’s diva-like appearances last week in Israel have had on his administration’s ability to exercise any persuasive sway at all in Arab capitals… And second is the fact that one of the parties going “off the Elliott Abrams-defined reservation” this time round is the Prime Minister of Israel.
I guess the Bush administration will just have to tag meekly along behind him.
Still worth watching for in the days ahead: whether these two diplomatic breakthroughs might also be accompanied by arrival at the long-promised breakthrough in the Israel-Hamas talks? (Pursuit of which by Israel in recent weeks has been another example of Israel going off the Elliott Abrams reservation.)
These are interesting times.

I want to underline something very significant about the multiple crises now simmering in the Contested (once ‘Fertile’) Crescent that stretches from Egypt through Israel/Palestine, to a lesser extent Syria, and then finishes strongly in Iraq. That is that right now you have considerably heightened political tensions in that crescent, revolving principally around the question of whether US-Israeli power is to be succumbed to or resisted, that come on top of rapidly worsening economic conditions.
It is this combination– plus of course, Pres. Bush’s singularly ill-timed, and Israel-centered visit to the region this coming week– that make the crises potentially more serious than any of the other internal crises of governance this region has seen in recent years.
Thus we have seen:

In Egypt, on May 4, the Muslim Brotherhood, which in terms of both economic and social policy is fundamentally very conservative, threw its weight behind the anti-price-rise stoppage called by non-MB networks of social-issues activists. That, after the MB notably stood aside from engagement in previous economics-focused public actions.
In Lebanon, we should recall the confrontations of recent days started with a nationwide protest against price hikes.
In Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s policy of tightly linking economic issues to issues of political control and domination has continued for so long, and with such viciousness, that it is now just about impossible to disentangle the two. But the economic-political combination there is particularly combustible right now.
In Iraq, the failure of the US occupation force to allow the rebuilding of a working, livelihoods-focused economy– or indeed, we could say the decisions it took at so many levels to block the re-emergence of a functioning national economy– has contributed hugely, and for more than five years now, to the occupation power losing its political legitimacy in the eyes of Iraq’s citizens. Most recently, and most acutely, the economic/anti-humane suffering inflicted through the occupation power’s aggressive pursuit of plans of military control and quadrillage in Sadr City have forced the whole situation there to a crisis.

What you have in all those parts of the now-Contested Crescent is a US-Israeli-dominated political order that has failed to meet even the most basic economic (let alone political) needs of local citizens.
You could describe this as a small subset of the global economic-political order, which is also to some extent US-dominated, though in the Contested Crescent the political, and therefore also the economic, domination is particularly extensive and all-encompassing.
Around the world, there have been signs of considerable pushback against US policies regarding, in particular, the very basic issue of very basic foodstuffs: policies that in recent months have helped to drive many parts of the low-income world toward starvation.
Thanks to alert JWN commenter Roland for contributing this linkto a Times of India article from May 4 titled: US eats 5 times more than India per capita. The article presents a wealth of data, including a very recent US Department of Agriculture survey that found that, “Each Indian gets to eat about 178 kg of grain in a year, while a US citizen consumes 1,046 kg.”
The story also surveys various disparities around the world in the consumption of other foodstuffs (noting that many Indians are anyway vegetarians.)
It adds:

the story would not be complete without mentioning the plight of Africa, where foodgrain consumption in 2007 was a mere 162 kg per year for each person, or about 445 grams per day. Don’t forget they are not getting any meat or milk products out there.

That last sentence is probably a little overdrawn. But the sense of the general argument remains… And as a US citizen I have to say I find these figures completely shocking.
But US citizens and everyone else around the world need to understand that food-price issues which are now becoming something of a factor inside the (ever-self-referential) US political system are a much larger issue in the politics of countries and communities that are living closer to the edge of real food insecurity and starvation. And understand, too, that given the dominance that the US undoubtedly exercises over much of the global economy, concerns and resentments that various non-Americans around the world harbor over food-price issues segue almost seamlessly into resentment against the US’s strong and often controlling role in world politics, as well.
This global economic order that the US has built up over the past 63 years is being sharply tested by the current food crisis, and in many parts of the world it is being found wanting. US government actions like the decision to subsidize the conversion of fine American agricultural land to production of the inputs for motor fuel have provoked quite understandable anger around the world. As did Bush’s completely maladroit recent statement about the global food crisis having been in some sense “caused” by the rise in living standards in India and China in recent years. (Right. From what to what, Mr. Bush?)
… So what’s happening in the Contested Crescent these days is all a part of that broader global picture. But in the CC, it strikes me, these issues of economic and political control have come into particularly tight focus, in good part because of the destabilizing presence and actions of the US military and its allies in the Israeli military.
So many people, writing about the present crisis in Lebanon, have tried to portray it as a “sectarian”– or even, in Juan Cole’s bizarre recent post, “ethnic”– conflict. Fundamentally, it is no such thing. It is a political conflict, that is overwhelmingly over this issue of being for or against US domination of the region. Though it does have some sectarian overtones– but no “ethnic” ones at all– these are quite secondary to the political issue at stake. Thus, you’ll find a majority of Shiites back the jabhat al-mumana’a (anti-US) alliance, and a small minority who back the pro-US March 14 movement. The country’s Christians, including its Maronite Christians, are probably about evenly split between Mumana’a and M-14. The Sunnis and Druze probably trend fairly strongly toward M-14, though there are certainly plenty of Sunnis, and some Druze, who are Mumana’a supporters.
FWIW, the Shiites are easily the largest population group in the country. They are historically extremely deeply rooted in Lebanon, where they have three strong centers of demographic concentration.
But the present unrest is notably not just about politics. It is also about the economic crisis that has been gathering force in Lebanon as everywhere else in the Contested Crescent. That is, in large part, why the US currently looks so weak in the region: Because it is blamed, among other things, for having presided over a world and regional economic order that has failed to assure basic food and economic security to the citizens of these countries. There is a disquieting degree of justification to those accusations.
Oh, and the US is also blamed for having invaded and smashed Iraq, and for having connived in Israel’s smashing-up of Palestine.
It looks like huge flocks of chickens of long-time US policies in the region are these days coming home to roost.
On Mr. Bush’s shoulder when he attends Israel’s continuing Independence Day ceremonies next week, perhaps.

The group of visionary retired world leaders called The Elders has announced that three of their number– Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter, and former Irish President Mary Robinson– will be undertaking a peace-focused fact-finding mission in mid-April.
The announcement says the three,

will visit Israel, the Palestinian territories, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, and Saudi Arabia from April 13-21 to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the interlocking Middle Eastern conflicts.
The Elders will listen to all parties in the countries. They will meet with leaders from governments, civil society, and key groups that influence the conflict, in an attempt to understand their various perspectives. At the end of the mission, the Elders will prepare a report for the public to help people understand the urgency of peace and what is needed to secure it. The Elders will also meet and begin to work with groups that will reinforce the efforts by the government of Israel and the Palestinian Authority to negotiate a peace agreement based on a two-state solution.

I am intrigued by the way they describe their mission there. They notably make zero mention of the very disappointing “Annapolis” peace process. Indeed, it also looks as if that last sentence there was sort of tacked on as a later addendum to what otherwise looks like a very appropriately open-ended, listening-focused mission.
The very best of luck to them. If it would help them, I’d be very to send along any of my writings on the conflicts and the prospects for peace in Iraq, Lebanon, or Palestine. That would include numerous posts here on JWN, or articles elsewhere, especially my longer articles in Boston Review since 2001; my 2000 book on Syrian-Israeli peace diplomacy; or the 2004 book that I worked on with 13 other Quakers that was basically the result of a three-week listening-centered mission we conducted in Israel and Palestine in 2002.
The very best of luck to them. I have great respect for all three of these leaders. I have had the honor of meeting and interviewing both Robinson (when she was at the UNHCHR in Geneva) and Carter. I certainly hope that on this mission these Elders make a point of meeting, and listening carefully to, all the relevant parties in the region including those who are currently judged to be “off-limits” to the diplomats of the US and its allies on the (highly politicized) grounds that they are terrorists. I’ll read the report they produce with huge interest.