Everywhere in the world, civil society, government, private sector and religious groups work hard to overcome prejudice and hatred, and to promote tolerance and coexistence. So why is it that all these efforts fail to stem the continued expansion of radical ideologies, while acts of violence anchored in religious, ethnic, or ideological hatred continue to be among the world’s biggest growth sectors?

In recent weeks we have seen new initiatives from giant web-based companies like Google, twitter and Facebook to prevent militant movements from promoting their criminal ideas on line. Last week we saw the launch of “Make Friends,” an initiative of the U.S.-Israel-based Elijah Interfaith Institute that seeks to counter the idea that people view each other’s religions with distrust or disdain―and to potentially even reduce violence conducted in the name of religion. Leading global religious leaders―from Pope Francis to the Dalai Lama―issued a joint appeal asking people to follow a simple bit of advice: Make friends with people of other faiths.

Yet the killings go on, everywhere. It does not matter whether the bad guys doing the killing and stoking the hate are elected presidents or hereditary appointed leaders in both the West and the Middle East, or freelance criminals and terrorists working beyond the control of governments. It does not matter whether the victims are tourists and civilians in London, farmers in Yemen, or schoolgirls in Texas, and it certainly does not matter if the killers or the killed are Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, or any other faith identity. Almost daily attacks now occur against civilians in dozens of countries.

Most of the world’s political leaders respond with the sad phenomenon of stick-your-head-in-the-sand emotionalism and cultural jingoism. They predictably but fruitlessly orate over the bodies of murdered innocent civilians that we are tough and stoic, that we endure criminal acts against us by reasserting our moral and political superiority, that our national values are good and enduring, and that the religion of the killers—whether Christian, Muslim, Jewish or any other—is a deviant version of the true religion. In Moscow, London, Paris, Orlando, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Cairo, Amman, Istanbul, Brussels, and all points in between, the message is the same.

So my reaction and that of many others in the world is also the same: Why in their wisdom cannot our great leaders in the West and Middle East summon a more effective response to terror and political violence, slow-motion state frailty and occasional disintegration, severe ideological polarization, growing and often extreme socio-economic disparities, and heightened desperation at individual, family, and community levels in so many places around the world? Ohio, Bristol, Taez, north Paris suburbs, and Hebron now share common socio-economic fractures that are all anchored in shared attributes. We can trace most of these to government actions, including misuse of political power, uncaring and insensitive policies that disregard equity ethics, rampant free market dominance at the expense of social justice, and assorted brutal colonization and war-making efforts by governments and non-government sectarian armies.

Religious expressions of humankind’s fraternity and sorority are important endeavors. So are high-tech blockers of hate speech, or local initiatives to hug a Muslim, Jew, Black person, White farmer, aging Republican senator, or any other group identified as needing to be embraced in order to keep them from slipping into hate and war. But these occasional expressions of love are daily overwhelmed by the storms of actual government policies over the past half century that have brought us to this point today where fratricide routinely overwhelms fraternity.

At this point today, every 35 seconds a child in Yemen is hit by cholera, Zionist-Israeli colonization in Palestine remains unchecked or supported by Western powers since the late 19th Century, leading Arab governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars to wage war and lay siege to fellow countries while half their schoolchildren are not learning anything in school, and any interested regional or global power can test out new weapons in open warfare season in Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and other shattered Arab lands that seem helpless before their own sustained dysfunction and frailty.

Our religious and political leaders around the world really need to wake up from and transcend their increasingly tangential world of do-good moral self-assertion; Je Suis Charlie, Boston Strong, Stiff Upper Lip, I Am a Moderate Muslim, and other moving responses to the swirling terror all around us need to be accompanied by political and religious leaders who dare to emulate the examples of the great Abrahamic prophets Moses, Elijah, Jesus, and Mohammad, who challenged the unjust political orders of their day. The current group of global leaders seem only able to perpetuate destructive, often criminal, public and private policies that generate the fear, hate, and violence they seem unable to understand or counter.

I will continue to hug Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and even the occasional Boston Red Sox baseball fan, because fraternity, mercy, and love are what my Arab-Islamic and American cultures have taught me to do all my life, as is the case with most other ordinary citizens around the world. Our political and religious leaders, though, have a greater responsibility to challenge and change the policies that are shattering our world, and as of today they are all collectively failing their mandate.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. On Twitter: @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global

Former army commander Michel Aoun, since becoming president of the Lebanese republic in October 2016, has played a delicate balancing act between Tehran and Riyadh, and the rival regional alliances they represent. While preserving his alliance with Hezbollah and his Iranian patrons—without whose support he couldn’t have assumed office after a thirty-month presidential vacancy—President Michel Aoun has undertaken multiple trips in order to reassure his Arab partners about Lebanon’s position in the region’s many conflicts, notably in the Syrian civil war.

Aoun symbolically chose Saudi Arabia for his first state visit last January, followed by Jordan. His Arab tour allowed him to meet with the kings of both countries, who are among the region’s principal Sunni leaders. Yet at home he continues to strongly defend the Shiite militant group Hezbollah and its right to bear arms. In February, he told the Egyptian TV CBC that the “arms of the resistance” are needed to fight “against the Israeli occupation.” Far from weakening the Lebanese state, he added, Hezbollah’s weapons constitute “an essential pillar of the defensive strategy.”

The Lebanese president’s balancing act aims for several objectives. Above all, as head of state, Aoun would like to rise above his image as the chief of a local party beholden to its political allies—without actually imperiling Hezbollah’s own strategic interests. The reputation of Aoun, former chief of Lebanon’s army and once a leading opponent to the Syrian regime and Hezbollah, was deeply tarnished among some Lebanese and Arab Sunni leaders when he flipped sides and became allies with President Bashar Al-Assad and the Shiite militia group after his return from exile in 2005. His realignment was calculated, among other things, to weaken his political rival Prime Minister Saad Hariri, who is Lebanon’s main Sunni leader and supported by almost all Arab countries.

Today, the substance of his message to Arab leaders across the political spectrum is that he is the master of his own political choices: he is not necessarily bound by the interests of his supporters in Lebanon and, ultimately, Iran. Diplomatically, Aoun’s visits to Riyadh, Doha and Amman were, in fact, meant to signal his desire to be seen as a neutral party in the conflict between regional alliances—above all, the intense rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

His repositioning has not entirely pleased his recent allies. Al-Assad, in an interview with the daily Al-Watan last December, revealed that the new Lebanese president had not yet been invited to Damascus. At the same time, Al-Assad criticized Lebanon’s policy of keeping itself at arm’s length from the region’s conflicts—a thinly veiled allusion to Aoun’s apparent neutralism in Syria’s sectarian-tinged conflict since coming to office.

In response, Aoun has tried to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. In an interview with the French news channel La Chaîne Info not long after, he reaffirmed his support for the regime in Damascus, underlining that “without the current Syrian government, all of us would be living a second Libya,” adding that “Al-Assad is the only person capable of uniting all the different parties and putting together a government.”

Aoun’s balancing act between different allies is trying to leverage a degree of influence and independence for Lebanon’s foreign policy, which is deeply caught up in the rivalries of bigger regional powers. He has counted on his connections with both sides in the Syrian conflict from his long years in public life—on the one hand, his current ally Hezbollah and the regime in Damascus, and on the other, his recent rapprochement with actors opposed to Al-Assad, like the Lebanese Forces and Prime Minister Hariri. The latter has been possible partly thanks to Aoun’s long anti-Syrian past. In the 1990s, Aoun had, in fact, been a leading voice of opposition to Syrian influence in Lebanon.

Aoun’s turning of a page with the region’s Sunni monarchies—chiefly Saudi Arabia—includes an important economic dimension. Aoun is looking to limit the fallout from cold relations in recent years with the Gulf countries, at a time when Lebanon’s economy has been bled dry by violence and political instability.

Lebanon, moreover, must keep in mind the interests of its large community of expatriates working in the Gulf—estimated to be around 400,000 nationals—who represent roughly 40 percent of the $7 billion sent home every year by the global Lebanese diaspora. Remittances, which represent about 20 percent of the country’s GDP, have acted as a bulwark until now against economic collapse. Aoun’s Gulf tour was, in this respect, essential. Traditionally the leading foreign investors in Lebanon, Gulf countries had already suspended many projects with the start of the civil war next door—before freezing and even liquidating many of their investments and forbidding their nationals, who represent some one third of tourists, from even visiting the country.

Aoun even hopes to win back $3 billion in aid promised by Saudi Arabia in November 2014, funds that were destined for the purchase of much needed military equipment. In 2016, Riyadh suspended the project. Among other reasons were the repeated and hostile statements of Lebanon’s foreign minister Gebran Bassil, the son-in-law of Aoun, regarding Saudi foreign policy, followed by the foreign minister’s refusal at the Arab League summit in January 2016 to officially condemn attacks on the Saudi embassy in Tehran that same month.

Support for the Lebanese army, which is at the heart of Aoun’s balancing act, is of vital geopolitical interest in the rivalry between the region’s principal powers. Saudi Arabia, through strengthening the national army, has traditionally aimed to weaken Hezbollah in the long run—a prospect Iran fears would reduce its own influence. That is why Tehran seized the opportunity, after the announced Saudi aid withdrawal in late 2014, to offer its own material assistance to the army. The counter-proposal, renewed last August, remains, as yet, unrealized.

Whether Aoun will succeed in courting, and maintaining both Iranian and Saudi support for Lebanon’s army, as well as its economic and political stability, is a vital question for his government. In Riyadh, the recent Arab and Muslim summit with President Donald Trump underlined the challenges for the Lebanese leader’s balancing-act policy. The host country, Saudi Arabia, and its Arab allies are clearly aiming to strike a blow at Iran’s influence in the region. Aoun was not officially invited to the summit—another sign of the still-existing tensions—but was represented by his Sunni prime minister. The reaction of the Lebanese foreign minister to a summit statement condemning “Iran’s destabilizing activities”—he claimed the Lebanese government was unaware of the final document—provoked the anger of Saudi authorities. The popular Jeddah daily newspaper Okaz called both Bassil and Aoun “liars.”

Translated from the French by Amir-Hussein Radjy.

Bachir El Khoury is a journalist based in Beirut.

From the nineteenth to mid-twentieth century, Egypt pioneered the experiment of building a modern, secular, Western-oriented Arab-majority state, out of four-centuries-old Ottoman rule. President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in the early 1950s overthrew Egypt’s monarchy and dismantled its liberal political structure, turned the Egyptian state into a force fighting colonialism across the region, and sought to create out of disparate Arab countries a semi-unified “nation” that, he envisaged, would emerge, in one or two generations, as a global power.

Until the 1967 defeat, Nasser’s project resonated with the aspirations of tens of millions of Arabs. It was a moment of global transformation—the end of the Second World War and the fall of Europe’s empires. Large groups of Arabs, especially the first generations ever to be educated in the West, felt the “nation” was on the verge of discarding centuries of regress and subordination; that the “people” would now reap the fruits of the past century’s modernization; and that a new dawn after centuries of darkness awaited the Arab nation.

Nasser’s project became a dream, and the man its hero. For Egypt, however, the real value was in evolving its place in the collective Arab psyche from being the country where many Arabs came to learn, work, and holiday, into the custodian of the ideals of modern Arab nationalism. This custodianship gave legitimacy to Egypt’s political leadership in the Arab World.

June 1967, when Israel obliterated Egypt’s air force and occupied the whole of Sinai, crushed that dream. The blow was not in the military defeat. Six years later, in the October 1973 war, Egypt’s success at launching a strategic military surprise and a crossing of its forces into Sinai, secured for it serious negotiations with Israel, sponsored by the United States. Ultimately, Egypt managed to regain all the lands it had lost in 1967. The blow, however, was in the humiliation, and the crumbling of the pride and the image of the hero, Nasser, which June 1967 inflicted.

Most Arabs felt humbled. Arab art, especially poetry, spent two decades dissecting the pain. For some, like the Syrian poet Nizar Kabbani, Nasser became the Arab’s “Christ” who was to deliver the “nation” its historical salvation. For others, his project smacked of vacant rhetoric. Half a century later, Arab political discourse continues to oscillate between revering and loathing the man, and more importantly between self-victimization and self-flagellation.

The blow to Nasserist Arab nationalism took from Egypt a lot of its claim to leadership. No one understood this better than Nasser himself. His rhetoric, style of governing, even his posture and walk changed. Christ became mortal. Indeed, less than three years later, he died at the age of 52. His successor, Anwar Sadat, believed that his leading the country into the October 1973 war gave him a new mandate—not only to rule Egypt, but to chart for the country a new strategic direction. President Sadat harbored the ambition that Egypt would move beyond its connections with the Arab World and “join the developed world, the West”—the same vision, or delusion, that a century earlier, had inspired the most ambitious ruler of Egypt’s liberal age, Khedive Ismail. Ismail paid the price of his ambition, an exile in Naples and Vienna. Sadat paid with his life. In October 1981, Egyptians watched a group of militant Islamists assassinate the modern-day pharaoh live on television.

President Hosni Mubarak, who took over after the assassination, lacked Sadat’s ambition and Nasser’s charisma. In his first term in power (effectively throughout the 1980s) he eschewed real politics altogether. He focused on the country’s teetering economy, particularly on upgrading the infrastructure. For him, foreign policy’s primary objectives were avoiding problems and serving the economy. That sat well with millions of Egyptians who, after decades of political and military adventurism and fighting, aspired to better living. Like most people, they prioritized daily life over intangible notions of identity, the country’s role in the region, or place in the world.

But three decades of a foreign policy of “muddling through” became political surrealism—open to any interpretation, or charges of meaninglessness. Egypt’s 2011 uprising was not about foreign policy; but lurking behind the colossal anger that contributed to the eruption of the January 2011 revolt were the frustrations of a young generation of Egyptians about the yawning gap between the nation’s historic image as a powerful leader in the region, and the reality of a country consumed by its colossal social and economic problems.

Fifty years after June 1967, Egypt is no closer to bridging that gap. The dichotomy between the country’s nostalgia for that historic role and its current absorption with its challenges continues to torment the society. In 1930, Gramsci observed that “morbid moods arise from the unwillingness of the old to die and the inability of the new to be born.” Egypt’s old view of itself as the leader of the Arabs refuses to go into the shadows of historical memory. And no fresh self-image, and definition of what it means to be Egypt in the Arab World, has emerged either. Perhaps young Egyptian thinkers can dispel the morbidness.

Tarek Osman, a political economist and broadcaster focused on the Arab and Islamic worlds, is the author of Islamism and Egypt on the Brink. On Twitter: @TarekmOsman.

The Arab World is in a sorry state. The spat between the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) and Qatar is but the latest symptom of an enduring serious rot in governance and a destructive power struggle in the wake of the Arab Spring. This situation is compounded by a lack of constructive dialogue on addressing the challenges that face most countries of the region.

Qatar’s excommunication from the GCC is the latest schism to hit what has seemed, at least since 2011, to be a stable and unified bloc. On June 5, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Egypt broke diplomatic ties with Qatar and cut off air, land, and sea transportation links. On the surface, it appeared that Qatar’s alleged support for terrorism was at the heart of the dispute. Certainly, U.S. President Donald J. Trump’s tweet, sympathizing with the action taken against Qatar, implied that this was his understanding. It took reminders from the Pentagon and the U.S. State Department of U.S. national interests in Qatar and its strategic interest in Gulf stability to get Trump to pull back on his original impulse to take sides and instead advise Saudi King Salman to seek unity and harmony within the GCC rather than allow a dangerous escalation in rancor.

The rift within the GCC, or at least this latest manifestation of it, has more to do with power and leadership than terrorism. GCC members are mostly opposed to maintaining good relations with Iran, talking to the Houthis in Yemen, and supporting some Islamist factions in the region.  Support for the Muslim Brotherhood, specifically, has been an issue of contention between Qatar, which supports the Brotherhood, and Saudi Arabia and the UAE, which generally do not.  On this, too, Saudi Arabia has been at odds with the UAE over which groups to support inside Yemen. Saudi Arabia, leading a coalition in the fight against the Houthis, has itself accepted Yemen’s Islah party, which houses within its coalition the country’s Muslim Brotherhood. To boot, Riyadh continues to host and rely on Ali Mohsen Al-Ahmar, a Yemeni Islamist general who has a long history of shady deals and alliances.

The point of variance on all these issues is not so much the principle behind the particular policy but the question of who strategizes and who leads. In Saudi Arabia, the young, ambitious, and hard-driving deputy crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, is the power behind the throne. He seeks to lead not just in the region but beyond through a Muslim (albeit mostly Sunni) coalition that can help him achieve the regional upper hand and enhance the kingdom’s international stature and influence.  Qatar, in turn, has a new young leader in Tamim Bin Hamad Al-Thani who has of late attempted to follow in his father’s footsteps in maintaining a semi-independent line that stresses the ability to launch diplomatic initiatives and keep open lines of communication to Islamist groups, which Qatar considers facts of life in the region.

In an ideal GCC structure, and in the spirit of an honest and open dialogue, all these contentious issues could be discussed and different tactical approaches coordinated towards the groups and nations in question. The mood in the GCC and the region, however, is neither ideal nor conducive to that spirit. It is difficult, therefore, to see how this rift can be mended short of one member losing face and/or position in the process. In the case of the GCC rift with Qatar, even if Kuwait’s offer of mediation succeeds, tensions are likely to linger and further fuel regional instability.

Yemen and Syria, two countries that have fallen prey to deep internal fissures and become part of regional and international power struggles, are no longer viable unified states. Despite a balance of power in its favor, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime is unlikely to restore its influence over all of Syria anytime soon. The struggle for land will inevitably be followed by a struggle for power within any unified state regardless of who coerces that ultimate union into existence.  The minorities question, especially that of Kurdish sovereignty and independence, will have long-term ramifications and the direction of Syria’s foreign policy, let alone the question of its identity, will linger given the deepening Iranian influence and a festering regional power struggle between Iran and Saudi Arabia.

In Yemen, instead of the Arab World falling over itself in attempts to save the country from division, famine, and disease, the country finds itself in the limbo between its neighbors’ regional ambitions and strategic interests on the one hand and the indifference and/or impotence of the permanent members of the United Nations (UN) on the other.  Despite the tireless efforts of UN Special Envoy Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed and international humanitarian agencies, no one with the power to stop the tragedy in Yemen—such as Saudi Arabia or the United States—has stepped up to empower the UN to end the war.

Egypt, of course, remains mired in the throes of a security maelstrom, sectarian extremism—of which the minority Christian Copts have been the main victims—and an economic downward spiral that threatens the military regime with further upheaval if it cannot create jobs and an acceptable standard of living for the booming young population.

The rest of North Africa, including Tunisia, which has had a relatively positive post-Arab Spring experience, still suffers from growth pains, specifically instability, weak economic growth, and governance problems in the face of rampant corruption, poverty, and rising demands from the youth.

The Arab Spring in 2011 triggered a political upheaval in the Middle East that quickly descended into chaos and violence. This has complicated a fluid regional power balance that was already upset by religious and sectarian extremism and the competition for regional supremacy.

In a perfect world, the region’s intellectual leaders would think collectively and the nations act in concert to ease the situation. Unfortunately, this is an age of intellectual decline in the Arab World. There are no literary giants or political philosophers to offer guidance, no benevolent rulers to persuade rather than coerce, and no solidarity among the big powers to help ease the pain—conditions which are likely to endure and fester for years to come.

To borrow the sad words of the English poet Matthew Arnold, the Middle East these days “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain/And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

This article is republished here with permission of the Atlantic Council. It can be accessed online here.

Nabeel Khoury is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East. On Twitter: @khoury_nabeel.

The dispute between Saudi Arabia/United Arab Emirates and Qatar has added major new developments and regional dynamics to existing dramatic situations across the Middle East—especially in Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Palestine. Diving deep into any of these situations inevitably leads one to some of the others, confirming again and again the interconnections between the many actors and issues that have generated so much violence and uncertainty in the Arab region.

So it might be useful to step back from examining any one conflict and instead simply try to identify larger historical and political patterns that help us understand the players and the issues at stake. The latest dispute in particular, focused on Qatar and the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), has generated a flurry of speculation about new alliances coming into being. The most popular one is a possible alliance between Qatar, Iran, Turkey, and Russia to face off against the Saudi-Emirati-led group of half a dozen countries that have lined up against Qatar. While nothing can be ruled out in the modern Middle East, this kind of instant alliance-formation seems more reflective of a Western tradition of toying with Arab lands and peoples like a handful of putty, rather than any serious analysis of realistic expectations.

We can, however, survey the region and identify notable new political dynamics and actors in the Arab World’s past several hundred years of colonial entanglements, state formation, and foreign military interventions. However the Qatar-GCC, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya situations are resolved, I suggest that we can see in them the beginning of a new era that has taken a quarter century to come into focus—since the end of the Cold War around 1990.

I see this as a new era because of several novel developments. One is the phenomenon of two very small and very young Arab states—Qatar and UAE—playing much bigger regional and global roles militarily and politically than their geography and demography would normally suggest. Another is the spectacle of several Arab energy-producing wealthy states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE ganging up against a third, Qatar, using siege tactics that cause havoc regionally and seek to bludgeon it into submission to their will—despite their having spent several decades trying to create a GCC regional block that values stability and security above all else. A third is the direct military, strategic, political, and economic involvement of two regional non-Arab powers—Turkey and Iran—in both participating in and trying to resolve the disputes. And a fourth is the role of the two big global powers—the United States and Russia—who promote a mediated resolution to the Qatar-GCC and Syria conflicts, but often also are vexingly imprecise on their bottom lines.

Two important things about these phenomena are that they all reached maximum impact and clarity in the last six years since the 2010-11 Arab uprisings, even though their roots sprouted during the post-Cold War years; and, they include within them a relatively clear scorecard of actors, identities, and ideologies that now battle in the open to define the Arab region, whether through the policies of the existing states or large non-state actors like Hezbollah and Hamas.

Perhaps this clarifies the major forces at work that now compete for the soul, spirit, and sovereignty of the Arab region and its many smaller components. I would list the following as the players to watch in this respect: Foreign big powers (U.S., Russia, for now), regional non-Arab powers (Iran, Turkey, for now), Arabism even in its faded state, Islamism even in its subjugated state, oil-anchored materialistic patriarchy (the energy producers and their dependents, like Egypt), and remnants of former socialist-nationalist-military states in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and other places.

These actors and a few other smaller ones now wage battle in the open to shape the identities and policies of the existing Arab countries. It is unlikely that any one or two will achieve full victory and dominate the region, as imperial powers did in history. More likely is that most of them will coexist in uneasy truces, as the region gets back to a developmental phase in a no-war context that can resume the socio-economic growth needed to respond to people’s basic needs and thus achieve lasting security and stability.

The most striking thing about this situation is that the ordinary Arab citizen is not among the powerful forces battling it out for the soul and sovereignty of the Arab region, which has been the case for centuries, unfortunately. One day, who knows when, the final battle of the modern Arab era will take place and witness the will of the citizenry struggle to achieve supremacy over the stultifying power of autocratic local elites and foreign powers that have subjugated hundreds of millions of men, women and children for hundreds of years. The Arab uprisings of 2010-11 hinted at that eventuality; but they were quickly put down by local and foreign forces of autocracy and control that have stepped out into the open more clearly this week in the Qatar-GCC crisis.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. On Twitter: @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri — distributed by Agence Global


I have followed closely, and read dozens of Arab and international analyses about, the new tensions generated by the Saudi Arabian-led pressures on Qatar, including cutting diplomatic ties and isolating Qatar by curtailing its use of vital air, sea and land transport routes. Not surprisingly, the media sphere is flooded with analyses that speculate about half a dozen possible motives for the moves to pressure Qatar by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Egypt, Bahrain and a few other smaller states.

Speculation in such cases always replaces hard facts in discussing policy moves by Arab governments that remain secretive and unaccountable. So let me add my own thoughts on what has motivated these harsh moves against Qatar, though I focus more on broad, proven, political values rather than speculative, specific policy aims linked to issues like ties to Iran, press freedoms, strategic military ties to the United States, or support for Islamist groups in the Arab World like the Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas.

This looks to me like a desperate Saudi-led move by a group of leading Arab autocrats to maintain their grip on the region, and to complete the counter-revolution against the 2011 Arab uprisings that saw tens of missions of ordinary Arab men and women demonstrate for more freedom, rights, justice, and dignity in their lives. Citizens’ freedom, rights, justice, and dignity seem to be the threats that frighten Saudi and other Arab autocrats, and these must be minimized at any cost, it seems.

Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and others now pressuring Qatar have worked overtime in the past six years to maintain the traditional political status quo in the Arab region. This status quo comprises handfuls of old men and their sons, soldiers, and supportive foreign powers that maintain an iron grip on political power and everything that emanates from that, like media freedoms, civil society activism, quality education, and genuine accountability and meritocracy.

Saudi Arabia and its few partners now using siege tactics against Qatar seem to have complaints against several Qatari policies, which you can read about in any of the hundreds of analytical speculative articles widely available in the global media. Yet none of these Qatari activities that may have triggered the Saudi-led siege actually or seriously hurt Saudi Arabia in any tangible way—and they certainly do not impact Egypt and others in the siege party. Having working relations with Iran or Hamas, and promoting a relatively free and open media constellation in Qatar and abroad, are political irritants at most, rather than genuine security threats.

The “threats” the Saudis and Emiratis feel are neither tangible nor dangerous in any credible way; rather, they are symptoms of an independent policy by a fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) member that Saudi Arabia cannot easily accept. The leadership in Riyadh has used similar tactics before, such as in its use of financial pressures against Lebanon a few years ago and other instances against fellow Arab governments, but it has always failed in these tactics. It has also tried using direct military force in Yemen, with active UAE participation, and that approach has also failed. It has tried supplying money and weapons to anti-regime rebels in Syria, and that policy has also failed. It has tried combinations of these and other tactics to contain Iran’s spreading strategic ties across the Arab region, and that has also failed. It has also spent many millions of dollars to influence the mainstream media in the West and across the Arab World, but that policy has also largely failed; for Saudi policies and some of its domestic practices are widely criticized in the global media—except by those who benefit financially from Saudi funds.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt in particular have employed draconian tactics to muzzle any independent media across the Arab World, and Qatar in this respect is a prime target for their ire. They cannot accept that independent thinkers, reporters, and analysts express their thoughts in public in a manner that deviates from the Saudi-defined policy of maintaining the autocratic status quo that has defined (and ravaged) the Arab region during the past half century or so.

Qatar’s crime in Saudi eyes is simply its insubordination and its refusal to accept the Saudi approach to maintaining stability in the Arab region through the use of guns and money to silence any critics. Qatar is particularly vulnerable to the siege tactics now being used against it, given its geographic position on a small peninsula attached to Saudi Arabia along its lone land border. It probably cannot long maintain its independent policies if the siege against it is maintained. How it responds to the pressures it now suffers will become clear in the coming weeks.

What is already evident, though, and quite depressing, is the determination of some Saudi-led Arab countries to squeeze Qatar in this manner, as a sign of their willingness to use economic and military warfare, starvation tactics, and other means to keep the Arab World in the dilapidated condition of incompetent governance, corruption, pauperization, polarization, civil wars, fragmentation, and other dire conditions that emanate directly from non-stop autocracy as the reigning paradigm of modern Arab governance. This is the real security threat to the Arab people and societies, even though the political space to express such views across the Arab region and abroad continues to narrow.

Rami G. Khouri is senior public policy fellow and professor of journalism at the American University of Beirut, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School Middle East Initiative. On Twitter: @ramikhouri.

Copyright ©2017 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global

Over the past month, debate in Egypt has centered around a legislative initiative designed to reorganize the way the country’s religious establishment is governed.

At first glance, the initiative appeared designed to place the top leadership of Al-Azhar, the sprawling research and educational state institution that looms over the religious field in Egypt, under greater presidential oversight, much as was done with top judicial positions last month. However, the effort was actually more audacious, designed not just to change things at Al-Azhar’s senior levels, but to reach deep into its functioning.

Its audacity was its own undoing, at least for now. Al-Azhar succeeded in rallying its supporters, wrapping itself in a mixture of religious authority and Egyptian pride, and portraying itself as an institution under unjustified assault. It was an increasingly rare example of an Egyptian political actor mobilizing a constituency on its own behalf. Yet there are signs that the effort to restructure Al-Azhar, though tabled, had real effects. Egypt’s religious leadership has been treading more carefully and the political leadership has been more successful in exploiting some divisions in the religious sector.

The political contest over governing Al-Azhar stretches back decades. With a university, a nationwide network of elementary and secondary schools, research institutions, and fatwa-giving bodies, Al-Azhar shapes how Islam is taught in Egypt. The institution also sees itself as a preeminent global voice for Sunni Islam. Some Islamic institutions in Egypt lie outside its orbit. The Ministry of Religious Affairs oversees mosques and religious endowments and is part of the executive branch. Dar Al-Ifta, responsible for issuing fatwas for state bodies, is independent though its head is currently appointed by Al-Azhar. However, Al-Azhar’s prestige is greater, not only because of its international standing but also because it has some autonomy from the rest of the state.

That autonomy, never unlimited, was diminished in the 1960s as Egypt’s authoritarian presidency sought to bring Al-Azhar under greater control. But in January 2012, the country’s military rulers in the Supreme Council for the Armed Forces—which then enjoyed presidential authority in the wake of Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow the previous year—suddenly issued a new law by decree that recreated a body that had been disbanded in the 1960s. This was the Body of Senior Scholars, and its role was to oversee Al-Azhar. The current grand imam of Al-Azhar, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Tayyib, was to name the first members of the body, after which it would fill any vacancies from within in its own ranks. The Body of Senior Scholars would also name the grand imam and the head of Dar Al-Ifta, both of whom were previously appointed by the Egyptian president. Under the 2012 amendments, the grand imam retained the power to choose the president of Al-Azhar University, or, more precisely, to send choices to Egypt’s president, whose appointment power would be reduced to a mere formality.

The military’s motives seemed clear. The Muslim Brotherhood and its allies were about to take up a parliamentary majority hours after the decree was issued, so Al-Azhar was set free in order to prevent the Islamist movement from remaking the institution in its own image. The Brotherhood was thus in the odd position of decrying a reform for which it had long called—and it was unsuccessful, with state Islam (represented by Al-Azhar) maintaining its independence until the Islamists were tossed out of office. The grand imam made a series of initial appointments to the Body of Senior Scholars, filling over half the seats. However, subsequently he was so careful in his appointments that members have actually been dying more rapidly than they are being replaced. But the body, though incomplete in its membership, has still allowed the grand imam to wrap himself in the collective wisdom of learned scholars when necessary.

So when President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi took office in 2014, he found himself facing the same fences around religion that had been built to keep out his bearded predecessor. And he sought to breach them—first by lecturing Al-Azhar’s leaders on curricular issues, then by hectoring them on divorce law.

It is that context that best explains the most recent legislative proposal. Technically, the draft was the initiative of Muhammad Abu Hamed, a Sisi supporter in the Egyptian parliament. In that sense, it reflects a new trend in Egyptian legislation, in which controversial and authoritarian proposals are presented as coming from parliament rather than the presidency and security bodies (the more likely real initiators). This keeps the regime’s fingerprints off of legislation and also avoids much involvement by concerned ministries, the cabinet, and other state bodies. The recent changes in organizing the judiciary—which gave Egypt’s president discretion over senior judicial appointments—was rushed through using a similar opaque process. Earlier, a law on nongovernmental organizations was also rewritten by parliament, with widespread speculation that parliamentary quills were guided by security bodies.

If the process of legislation in Egypt is Byzantine, the text of the law on Al-Azhar was all too clear. The most attention-getting changes in the draft were those that would have directly affected the grand imam. The legislation would have imposed a twelve-year limit on his tenure. It proposed a mechanism to allow a committee to investigate the grand imam if he was accused of misconduct and introduced a process to remove him. It also broadened the way he was selected. He would be chosen not only by the Body of Senior Scholars, but also by the members of the Islamic Research Academy, another body within Al-Azhar. Finally, the Body of Senior Scholars would no longer be self-perpetuating or restricted to religious scholars. It would also include some members with secular expertise (such as those familiar with psychology) and include individuals designated by Egyptian ministries and councils.

The new legislation would also have made changes to the role and composition of the Supreme Council of Al-Azhar, a structure primarily responsible for administrative matters, to include not merely religious officials and representatives of various concerned ministries, but also five individuals appointed by the president. The Supreme Council, under the 2012 amendments, is mainly responsible for determining Al-Azhar’s budget. The 2017 draft legislation would have expanded this role, putting the council in charge of establishing the Islamic framework within which Al-Azhar would carry out its religious teachings. Consequently, the Supreme Council would have been responsible for reforming religious discourse in the way for which Sisi has been pushing.

The draft would also have gone deeper into the structure of the institution. Currently, Al-Azhar University has a collection of colleges, both religious and not, that coordinate with the Ministry of Education but also have autonomy and answer to a president appointed by the grand imam. However, the draft called for the separation of literary and scientific colleges from Al-Azhar University and the formation of a new university, the University of Imam Muhammad Abduh for International Studies. This division aimed to bring all of Al-Azhar’s non-religious colleges under the jurisdiction of the Supreme Council of the Universities and the Ministry of Higher Education. While Al-Azhar today draws its students from graduates of Al-Azhar-run secondary schools, the new university would also have admitted students without religious backgrounds.

Al-Azhar was more successful in fighting these changes than the judiciary. While the judiciary—which was largely aghast at the changes imposed on it—is a powerful institution, Al-Azhar’s social reach is much broader. It has over 9,000 schools across the country, with over 2 million students, and its alumni pepper state institutions. The grand imam could call on Sufi and regional networks to back Al-Azhar. And even for those outside the institution’s immediate orbit, it is regarded as a national symbol, anchoring nationalist perceptions of Egypt’s leadership of Sunni Muslims. Thus, the legislative proposal set off what amounted to a lobbying campaign against the draft.

Immediately after the draft was presented to parliament, several parliamentarians approached the speaker of the House of Representatives, Ali Abdel ‘Al, to reject the draft legislation on the grounds that it violated the constitution. Al-Azhar’s strong relations with parliamentarians and its historical significance in Egypt prompted pushback from parliament that effectively killed the legislation before it was discussed. Muhammad Abu Hamed criticized the reaction and stood firmly by the draft, claiming that the parliamentarians who opposed the legislation had not had a chance to read it and were judging it unfairly. He denied he was acting on behalf of the presidency and said that this false notion had driven away potential supporters by creating an institutional power struggle that was, in his mind, nonexistent.

The reaction from parliament showcased the strength of Al-Azhar as an institution, and displayed its ability to continue to withstand pressure from the presidency. Many of the parliamentarians who resisted the bill claimed allegiance to the grand imam and believed that the legislation had crossed a line by imposing a term limit on him, while establishing an investigative mechanism that could remove him from power. In fact, members of parliament who at first supported the bill withdrew their support in light of this reaction, claiming that they did not realize the bill targeted the imam so pointedly.

But top Al-Azhar officials realized that a political misstep was especially risky at this time. When the president of Al-Azhar University made a statement implying that a prominent critic of the institution was an apostate, the grand imam immediately dismissed him. The tone of senior Al-Azhar officials on curricular reform and the “renewal of religious discourse,” a vague cause championed by Sisi, began to show a bit more responsiveness, despite their resentment at presidential intrusion in a religious matter. And when a prominent religious scholar known for his generally soft approach was heard on television seemingly denouncing Christianity, he was quickly barred from preaching by the Minister of Religious Affairs. The fact that he had been a rival for the ministerial post may have explained the alacrity with which the step was taken.

Such rivalries do open up gaps for the executive to play favorites and work factions against each other (indeed Abu Hamed, the parliamentarian who introduced the draft, claims to have consulted with senior religious figures who are often identified as rivals and critics of the current grand imam). The full frontal assault on Al-Azhar’s autonomy may have been forced into retreat, but for as long as it retains its independent voice the institution may find itself fighting a combination of trench and guerilla warfare.

This article has been reprinted with permission from Sada. It can be accessed online here.

Nathan Brown is a professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University.

Mariam Ghanem is a fellow James C. Gaither Junior Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.

It’s been a long and painful century for Kurds. In the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, Britain and France, as victorious powers in the First World War, redrew the borders of the present-day Middle East dividing the Kurds between Iraq, Turkey, Syria, and Iran. In Iraq over the ensuing decades, superpower politics condemned generations of Iraqi Kurds to brutal oppression, forced displacement, and even genocide under Saddam Hussein’s regime.

In an ironic twist of fate, the interests of the Kurds have now aligned with that of major global powers. Kurdish forces are at the forefront of the campaign to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). In northern Syria, the Kurds, long subjected to harsh discriminatory policies under the Al-Assad dynasty that rendered many of them stateless by depriving them of citizenship rights, are now for the first time in a century in charge of their affairs and an important actor to reckon with. In northern Iraq, Kurdish forces, from their regional capital in Erbil, have been able to militarily secure almost all the lands they have historically claimed. They are closer than ever to the possibility of an independent nation-state.

Traveling along the northern border between Iraq and Syria, Kurdish military outposts dot the landscape on both sides of the frontier. It’s a testament to a watershed moment in the region’s history that has seen the collapse of once-powerful states, Iraq and Syria, that also happened to be brutal oppressors of the Kurds. The anticipated demise of ISIS is expected to give rise to new realities. Many wonder if, unlike a century ago, the Kurds are going to be among the victors in the war against ISIS and finally realize their national aspirations. Indeed, thanks to their control over an extended and largely homogenous swathe of territory, Iraqi Kurds are poised to gain from ISIS’s collapse in the Mosul region.

The Iraqi state in its current form appears to be too weak to take on the Kurds, although that might not last for long, as Baghdad has been slowly but steadily regaining strength and its military capabilities. Overall, surrounded by hostile states, carving out an independent Kurdistan is a highly challenging task. Iran’s backing for Baghdad will only complicate matters further for the Kurds. Iraq’s northern neighbor, Turkey has been sending mixed signals. Officials in Erbil and Ankara have grown even closer in recent years due to energy transport and supply deals. At times, Turkey appears to encourage Iraqi Kurdish statehood. Authorities in Ankara raised the Kurdistan flag when Massoud Barzani, the president of Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region, visited last February, yet opposed that same flag officially being raised in the ethnically mixed province of Kirkuk in Iraq.

To make matters worse, Kurds have been unable to figure out a cure to their longstanding scourge of disunity. So far Barzani has failed to unite the Kurds around the cause of independence. The legacy of past internal fighting among family-centered parties, ego-driven rivalries, and ever-present interference by regional powers such as Iran and Turkey have plunged Iraqi Kurdistan into a state of disarray over the past couple of years. It also doesn’t help that the aging elites from the two ruling Iraqi Kurdish parties, the Kurdistan Democratic Party and the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, plagued by corruption and authoritarian tendencies, are largely out of touch with the aspirations of their young population. If Kurdish leaders in Erbil fail to restore a reasonable degree of order to their divided house, it is difficult to fathom how they can make much of the historic opportunity arising before them.

One thing is clear: there is no love lost between Erbil and Baghdad. It appears that after a century of Kurdish-Baghdad relations, the same vicious pattern keeps manifesting itself in different forms and to varying intensities. History shows that as soon as Baghdad feels powerful enough, it will not hesitate to reclaim control over Kurdistan, no matter how. Even though there was hope that Iraq might take a new path altogether after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003, former Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki opted for bellicosity as soon as U.S. troops left Iraq in 2011 and deployed military divisions to undermine Kurdish power in places such as Kirkuk and Nineveh.

Given the long history of distrust, what is the path forward for Kurds in Iraq? Many Kurds have pinned hopes on President Donald Trump’s administration to back their bid for statehood. They hope, perhaps counterintuitively, that Ankara’s heart will soften and tolerate a Kurdish state, even as it’s locked in yet another round of deadly conflict with its own Kurdish population. In Erbil, the two main ruling Kurdish parties have vowed to hold a referendum on independence this year although it’s not clear if they will or can deliver.

The strategic disadvantage that Kurds have suffered from for centuries—a minority population divided by regional rival powers—cannot be rectified without a state for so long as the nation-state is the basis of international relations and the recognition of sovereign rights. Short of independence, only a confederal formula for Iraq will guarantee that Erbil can be Baghdad’s equal partner, with a greater degree of autonomy and mutually beneficial collaboration on matters of defense, fiscal and foreign policy. The coming year will be decisive in shaping the destiny of Kurds for years to come.

Mohammed A. Salih is a journalist from Iraqi Kurdistan. He is a a doctoral student at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. On Twitter: @MohammedASalih.

In February 2008, British journalist Edward Lucas published a book titled The New Cold War: Putin’s Russia and the Threat to the West. Back then many Russia-watchers found Lucas’ view overly alarmist. In retrospect, the book is prophetic. The 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq changed President Vladimir Putin’s stance toward the United States—Putin blamed American unilateralism and “regime change” for unleashing chaos and disorder in world affairs. Even more important, Russia was pushing back against the color revolutions in the former Soviet Union republics. The Kremlin linked the popular upheavals between 2003 and 2005 in Ukraine, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan—in which protesters adopted the color orange, the rose, and the tulip, respectively, to symbolize their resistance—to Western meddling.

A number of influential European Union (EU) countries, including Germany, France, and Italy, considered Russia a partner rather than a threat through the early 2000s. Russia’s oil and gas exports to the EU and large-scale influx of European investment and consumer goods to cater to the growingly prosperous Russian middle class had created unprecedented levels of economic interdependence in the 1990s, which accelerated after Putin’s arrival in the Kremlin in 2000. Even the brief conflict in Georgia in August 2008 did not lead to a rupture in relations with the West. Russia and the EU quickly returned to business as usual, agreeing to disagree on issues such as Georgia’s breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which Moscow recognized as independent states. The Barack Obama administration followed down the same path. In 2009, the U.S. announced a reset of bilateral ties with Russia, manifest in cooperation on issues like nuclear disarmament and the sanctions imposed on Iran.

Fast forward to 2017 and Russia’s relationship with the West looks much closer to how Edward Lucas depicted it. Due to the March 2014 annexation of Crimea, Moscow is subject to economic sanctions by the United States and the EU. NATO revived its strategy of containment, deploying multinational troops in the Baltic states and Poland to reassure allies and deter Russia. Germany and France joined the camp of Russia-skeptics, shifting the internal balance from doves to hawks within the EU and ensuring there is a degree of unity within the 28-member bloc rarely seen before. The hope that there will be a shift in U.S.-Russian relations with President Donald Trump has gone unfulfilled. The scandal about Russian interference in the American presidential election and the difficulty of forging a common policy on Syria make the rapprochement elusive. In short, confrontation is here to stay.

What does Russia want? Putin’s overarching goal is preserving stability at home. He presides over a regime haunted by the memory of Soviet collapse and aware of the plentiful internal challenges facing “the system,” from ethnic tensions in the North Caucasus to social discontent driven by declining living standards. The period of steady growth and rising prosperity fuelled by record-high oil prices in the 2000s came to a halt with the global economic crisis. Nowadays, the Kremlin seeks legitimacy through foreign policy. The annexation of Crimea brought Putin’s popularity to sky-high levels, even though ordinary Russians continue to distrust state institutions and figures associated with the regime, notably Prime Minister Dmitri Medvedev.

Russia also wants to re-establish control over the former Soviet Union. The goal is, again, security in the Russian Federation itself, inasmuch as the Kremlin believes events next door have direct repercussions at home. That explains the harsh reaction against Ukraine’s choice to sign an association agreement with the EU and the ensuing Maidan Revolution in 2014, which toppled President Viktor Yanukovych and precipitated the annexation of Crimea and the war in Eastern Ukraine. This does not necessarily mean further annexation of territories populated by ethnic Russians or Russian speakers. Rather, it implies support for regimes that lean toward Moscow, rather than toward Washington or Brussels. To achieve this goal, Russia deploys a variety of instruments, from the encouragement of market integration via the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) to the use of brute military force as in Ukraine and Georgia. The results are mixed: even Moscow’s closest allies such as Belarus and Kazakhstan have been hedging their bets and maintaining ties with rival poles of power such as the EU and, especially in Central Asia, China.

Finally, Russia wants to be a global, rather than simply regional power, and therefore able to transact on an equal footing with the United States. Though it is not nearly as powerful as the former Soviet Union, Putin’s Russia has certain assets: a nuclear arsenal, a permanent seat at the United Nations Security Council, hydrocarbons, its position as the world’s second largest arms exporter. The ongoing intervention in Syria has demonstrated Moscow’s ambitions backed by improved conventional military capacity. It has brought the Russians tremendous geopolitical dividends and made them a powerbroker in the Middle East, for the first time since the 1970s.

However, Russia knows it is too weak to restore the bipolar order of the Cold War-era, embracing instead the vision of multipolarity where it is part of the top tier of states along with the U.S., China, India, and other emerging powers. Whether this goal is within reach or not depends not so much on Russia’s foreign policy but on whether it manages to modernize and transform its economy and society. This remains an elusive aspiration. And that is why Russia still needs the West—despite the current dead-end in relations or indeed the rhetoric of Moscow’s own “pivot to Asia.” In the short term, Western powers may curry favor with Russia to fight the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq (ISIS), or secure stability in the Caucasus and Central Asia. Yet Russia’s internal weakness, and the corresponding need for its integration into the European economy, coupled with China’s inexorable rise, will keep better relations with the West high on the Kremlin’s agenda.

Dimitar Bechev is a research fellow at the Center for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.