University
April 1, 2007
Conversations: An American in Beirut
<http://time-blog.com/middle
Posted by Scott MacLeod |
When I heard John Waterbury was stepping down as president
<http://www.aub.edu.lb/news
University of Beirut < http://www.aub.edu.lb/>, I phoned him to ask
how his 10-year tenure had gone. I was slightly taken aback by
Waterbury's gloom when I asked him how he saw things generally in
the Middle East. He offered a long-term view that was disturbing but
certainly thought-provoking.
"I have been working and living in the Middle East since
1959-1960," he said, "and I have never seen a period in which
U.S.-Arab or U.S.-Middle Eastern relations have been at a lower
ebb. What really has discouraged me and depressed me in this
situation is that anything that the U.S. advocates, even
policies that I think in other times would have been
listened to
seriously if not respected, are now denounced simply because
they emanate from Washington. The whole democracy agenda is
simply identified with the Bush administration. Democracy
advocates can't hold their heads up. They are immediately
accused of trying to carry out the Bush agenda in the Middle
East and somehow being complicit in all aspects of U.S. policy.
Liberalism has kind of disappeared as a force. It is very hard
for a liberal or a democrat to advocate their agenda without
being tarred with the brush of being a lackey of the Bush
administration. The ground is shaking under their feet.
"Why I think relations are so bad, unprecedented in my
experience," he added, "is that we have managed to alienate our
friends. Over the decades, even in the police states of the
Middle East, a rather large middle class has built up alienated
from their own regimes. They were fairly well disposed towards
the West and towards the United States. We have lost them.
Either they are scared to speak up. Or they are flat out
outraged."
I've always had great respect for the university and the man. AUB is
one of the finest universities in the Middle East, and represents
the best of what America has offered the Arab world. AUB began
spreading American ideas and values well over a century before the
Bush administration discovered the merits of doing so through Karen
Hughes's public diplomacy or Liz Cheney's Middle East Partnership
Initiative. Since it opened its doors in 1866, initially as a
project of Presbyterian missionaries, AUB has educated tens of
thousands of Arabs. AUB imbued its students with ideals such as open
society, tolerance and free debate that were often lacking in their
own countries. A list of AUB graduates is a Who's Who of the Arab
world that includes leading government ministers, educators and
businessmen. To name two: Ghassan Tueni, the legendary owner of the
An Nahar publishing house in Beirut, and Marwan Muasher, a former
Jordanian deputy prime minister who has just been appointed senior
vice president of the World Bank.
Americans like Waterbury have provided a tremendous service to the
Arabs and to fellow Americans as well, often at great personal risk.
Former AUB President David Dodge was held hostage by Iranian-backed
Muslim radicals for a year. His brave successor was Malcolm Kerr,
who was assassinated outside his office by a suspected Islamic
extremist in January 1984. I was in Beirut at the time, a few blocks
away, and can tell you that it was a very black day for Lebanon and
for America. Kerr, who was born in Beirut of parents who taught at
AUB, was a leading Arabist of his generation. Waterbury, originally
a specialist on Morocco who taught at Princeton for 20 years, was
the first president to take up residence again in Beirut after
Kerr's death. Since 1998 he has revived AUB's fortunes and spirits,
significantly upgrading academic excellence and campus
facilities alike.
When Waterbury told me that despite AUB's success he saw the
potential for worse in the region, I listened.
"There is more room to fall," he said. "We have taken moderate,
middle-class professional people, who looked to the United
States --not to come in and provide solutions, but to help them
carve out some political space in their own countries-- and
they
now have given up hope and turned away from us. That's bad in
itself. But why I think it could get worse is those are the very
people who have the means to leave. They have connections
abroad. My fear is that they are going to start bailing out and
reestablish in Los Angeles, or Hamburg, or Paris, or Australia.
So as a political force in the region for moderation and a
reasonable dialogue with the West, they may begin to disappear.
It happened in Iran after the 1979 revolution. It is happening
en masse in Iraq. If there is reconciliation, I don't know who
is left to reconcile. What you leave behind are going to be very
difficult and ornery actors let alone elements that could
sustain some kind of democratic system in Iraq.
"My fear is that we're going to see this constant erosion of a
potentially pro-western middle class in the Middle East, as they
are ground down by their own authoritarian regimes and a U.S.
actor that has so far engaged with the region in forceful and
muscular confrontation. I'm struck by how much change takes
place from generation to generation. In any 20-25-year period,
we can see rather dramatic shifts in mood and the way people
think about things. I stress this because we have a tendency to
fight the last battle and not anticipate the new one. It's
extraordinarily hard to predict what we might be looking at in
15 or 20 years from now. Things may go much better than I'm
anticipating, or they might actually go much worse."
What explains this situation? According to Waterbury, it is related
to...
"...the current situation of confrontational politics between
the United States and the Middle East. I think it's pretty
simple. There are a number of policies which I would call the
military-coercive policies of the United States which for
whatever reasons are highly unpopular in the Middle East. The
invasion and so-called occupation of Iraq. From the point of
view of most Middle Easterners, a kind of blind U.S. backing for
Israel's policies in the West Bank and the occupied territories
in general. These are the two flash points. They are so deeply
and hugely unpopular that it is quite easy for the major
adversaries of the United States in the Middle East to
associate
anything coming from Washington with these unpopular policies.
"Anytime a non-Middle Eastern power puts troops on the
ground, I
think you can expect a huge reaction. The Middle East has been
the subject of foreign invasion and occupation for a very long
time. So it is a very gut instinct for Middle Easterners to
react very negatively and suspiciously to a foreign force on its
ground. When a 140,000 of those troops happen to come from the
most powerful nation in the world, that kind of makes it even
worse. It may have looked totally justifiable to us sitting
across the Atlantic to have done so, particularly in light of
9/11, but it really was just a matter of time, and not very much
time, before that presence would be resented, opposed, feared,
denounced. That has enormously complicated a long ongoing
situation of resentment of U.S. support for Israel and its
struggle with its Arab neighbors."
Waterbury says he's seen the problem first-hand in the aftermath of
Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution."
"The so-called opposition has to some extent successfully
identified [Prime Minister] Fouad Siniora with a kind of blind
loyalty or even lackeyism towards the Bush administration," he
said. "It's an unfair portrayal of Siniora and his government,
but it is one that I think has some resonance with many
Lebanese. That is unfortunate, because Siniora's government was
democratically elected, and yet the legitimately that should
have come with that has been severely tarnished by his image as,
to put it unkindly, as a puppet of Washington."
Waterbury's prescription?
"Not an easy one. I don't see how the damage that has been done
can be rectified in any short period of time. I think it's the
work of at least two or three administrations if all went well
to begin to repair the damage. I don't want to be naive. At the
end of the day, this is the greatest military and economic power
on earth and I would never expect many people to love us or
even
welcome us into the neighborhood. Repairing the damage would be
entering into a much less confrontational and more interactive
and cooperative mode with the Middle East. With the
understanding that no one is ever going to throw roses to
Washington, no matter what administration is in there. We are
just too big and frightening for that ever to be the case."
--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo
--
"The idea that it's going to be a long, long, long battle of some kind I
think is belied by the fact of what happened in 1990. Five days or five
weeks or five months,
but it certainly isn't going to last any longer than that . . . It won't
be a World War III." - Donald Rumsfeld, 11/15/02
America has been in Iraq longer than it was in World War II. It has been
50 months since military operations in Iraq began.
As of May 1, 2007, American troops have been in Iraq for 1,504 days
the equivalent of 214 weeks. [NPR, 11/27/06]
Four years after "Mission Accomplished," American troop levels in Iraq
are where they were in May 2003. There were 150,000 American troops in
Iraq in May 2003.
Today there are 146,000 troops in Iraq. [Brookings Institution, 4/23/07]
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