The changing Middle East: The Fat Legacy of Bush

The degree to which this administration is stubbornly ignorant of the Middle East is quite amazing. I was looking today at the various Arab channels, including the Saudi-funded ones, and they could not escape the reality: that today was a Day of Popular Wrath in the Arab world. 100,000 demonstrators in Alexandretta, and tens of thousands defied the ban on demonstrations in Algeria, and people in Kuwait ignored their divisons for a day. Now you will expect the articles on the Arab streets to be vomited from one mainstream newspaper after another. The scenes were unmistakable. The mukhabart in Jordan were in a state of panic, and they started to beat up Al-Jazeera's correspondent, the mild-mannered Yasir `Abu Hlalah. And in the middle of this to announce the shipment of US arms and ammunition is just an expression of the degree to which the administration does not want to come to terms with the facts in the region. Today, with all this happening, you read that Rice said that it is difficult for Israel to avoid killing children due to population density. She basically blamed the destruction and deaths on the demographic factors in Gaza. But I started imagining her talking about the Middle East with the administration top expert: Elliott Abrams. I can easily see Abrams assuring Israel and the US administration that there would be no reactions in the Arab world to the Zionist slaughter in Gaza. He probably would consult with Martin Peretz and Walid Phares and then report to Rice: all is well in the Middle East. And don't expect the quality of the top Middle East policy makers to be better under Obama who is resurrecting the likes of Ross and Indyk. You could not go worse: and the real experts of the Middle East in the US government will yet again be marginalized and sidelined and called bad names (like "Arabists" which has become an obscene word). And the pro-US Saudi media face a dilemma: you try to shape public opinion but you need a modicum of credibility to shape public opinion. When you veer off too much away from the general mood, you make yourself irrelevent and obsolete. This explains why even Al-Arabiyya had to reverse itself after two days when it tried to treat the Gaza story as regular news feature. But I am not sure that Al-Arabiya can recover from its big fall this week. I see signs of Saudi-Qatari tensions, and Jordanian-Qatari tensions. You will know if that becomes more serious or if the conflict is re-ignired when I get invited back to Qatar to speak agasint the regimes. I told Al-Jazeera managers recently that I am willing to do my share to spoil inter-Arab relations at every corner. I would relish such a role. Saudi Arabia is very nervous: as is Mubarak. The Hashemites do what they do best in crisis and they lie: or they try to have it both ways. They conspire in private, and decry conspiracies in public. Israel may have crossed the thresholed when it could have made the Gaza attack into a political asset. It is over before it is over, for Israel. Israel rejection in the region was affirmed more than ever: one of the most constant refrain in the chants in every Arab country (including in Oman and Algeria for potato's sake), was the Khaybar chant, which I abhor of course but I blame Zionist crimes for the resurfacing of that hateful sentiment. I first heard that chant in a small demonstration in Beirut only days after Sabra and Shatila massacres. I never ever heard it before that day in the summer of 1982. Zbigniew Brezezinski, Carter's national security adviser, famously said in an interview with Paris Match back in 1978 (I think it was 1978) "Bye Bye PLO." The national security adviser of this president could easily now say: Bye Bye Zionism. In 1897, Herzl came back from the founding conference of the Zionist movement and wrote in his diary that he could easily see a Jewish state forming in 50 years. Similarily, I can see the end of Zionism in less than 50 years. And when the history is written, the stories of the hundreds of killed children in Gaza will be told and retold.