Middle East Research and Information Project: Critical Coverage of the Middle East Since 1971
When Lt. Gen. William Caldwell pitched the US Army’s updated field manual on the March 10 Daily Show, Jon Stewart inquired: “If I read this, can I take over a country?” Caldwell, who served 13 months in Iraq and today runs the Combined Arms Center in Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas, demurred with a chuckle. And the text his center published in October, FM 3-07, Stability Operations (2008), treats the question as moot.
In the summer of 2008, there was an epidemic of diplomatic initiatives in the Middle East. The new diplomacy represented a striking break with the pattern of statesmanship that has prevailed in the region for the last decade: It always involved an ally of the United States talking to an enemy of America without Washington’s approval or participation.
The sheer symbolic power of the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States is difficult to capture in words. It is not only that a black man has won the highest office of a nation that, at its inception, defined close to every black man or woman as three fifths of a person. It is not just his middle name, Hussein, and the failure of his political opponents’ miserable attempts at race baiting and Islam bashing.
In the first attempt by a foreign country to break the blockade of Gaza, a Libyan freighter carrying 3,000 tons of essential humanitarian aid set sail for the impoverished coastal strip. On the shore Gazans assembled to welcome its arrival, a much needed gesture of hope and relief for Gaza’s 1.5 million residents, caged in on all sides in one of the most densely populated areas on earth, allowed only the most basic food stuffs and regularly bombarded with ordinance from the skies. As it approached Gaza’s coastal waters on December 1, the ship was intercepted by the Israeli navy and forced to turn back.
On October 8, 48-year old Tawfiq Jamal got into his car with his 18-year old son and a friend, and set out for the house of his relatives, the Shaaban family, who lived as of then in a new, predominantly Jewish neighborhood on the eastern edges of Acre. A walled city on the sea, mainly famed in the West for having served as the CENTCOM of the crusading Richard the Lionheart, Acre is today a “mixed” Israeli town, inhabited by Jews as well as Arabs like Tawfiq. That day, he was on his way to pick up his daughter, who had been helping the Shaabans prepare cakes for a wedding scheduled for the following week. He insists that he drove slowly and quietly, with his radio turned off.
If American troops are ever to come home from Iraq and Iraqis are to have a decent chance at peace and prosperity, the United States must open up a new chapter in its Middle Eastern diplomacy. The Iraq Study Group in 2006 made this point when it called for “diplomatic dialogue, without preconditions.” The Bush administration has largely ignored this advice.
The diplomatic challenge before the United States and the international community is to secure non-intervention of neighboring states in Iraqi affairs and to nurture a substantial international commitment to long-term Iraqi recovery from its decades of war, sanctions and authoritarian rule. To meet this challenge, the United States will need a new policy in the broader region.
The town of Bayt Sahour spills down the hills to the east of Bethlehem, spreading out along ridges and valleys that mark the beginning of the long descent to the Dead Sea. Up the slopes the roads carve out twisting rivers of dirt and asphalt, wending their way through clusters of soft brown stone houses, but across the ridges they run straight and smooth.
On the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year, the sitting Israeli prime minister spoke more plainly than ever before in public about what will be required of Israel in a comprehensive peace with the Palestinians and Syria. In a September 29 interview with the newspaper Yediot Aharonot, Ehud Olmert said that, to achieve peace, “we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories” that have been under Israeli occupation since the 1967 war, including most of the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Particularly coming from Olmert, who long opposed the notion of swapping land for peace, these words might have inspired hope that deals on the Palestinian or Syrian fronts were at hand.
Abrahamian, Ervand. A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Bayoumi, Moustafa. How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America (New York: Penguin, 2008).
Bensahel, Nora et al. After Saddam: Prewar Planning and the Occupation of Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2008).
Cobban, Helena. Re-Engage! America and the World After Bush (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2008).
Hillel Cohen, Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948 (translated by Haim Watzman)(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008).
Martin Evans and John Phillips, Algeria: Anger of the Dispossessed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007).
It is possible, in reviewing opinion polls, to pinpoint the incident that swung a divided US electorate firmly and permanently against President George W. Bush. That occurrence was not Hurricane Katrina—two weeks after the storm hit New Orleans, a CBS News poll found the country remained split on “Bush’s response,” with 44 percent approving of Bush’s job performance and 48 percent disapproving. Nor was it his admission in late 2005, after a fall filled with dire news, that the Iraq war was not proceeding according to plan. By the end of that year, nearly all the pollsters had his numbers in the mid-40s (after a dip into the high 30s in October).
“It is our great and historic responsibility,” intoned Egyptian President Husni Mubarak on December 26, 2006, “to achieve the essential goal of developing our democracy and political life, while avoiding drifting into uncalculated steps that could threaten the stability of our country and the success of our democratic experience.” The occasion for this solemn pronouncement was the introduction of 34 constitutional amendments, later passed by Parliament, aiming at tightening the regime’s grip on power. To the informed ear, Mubarak’s words were the same old mantra of Arab autocrats: Arab peoples are not prepared for real political reform. It is not time.
At a 2007 Harvard workshop focusing on sustainable architecture in the Persian Gulf, the assembled academics and practitioners quizzed a public relations official from a large Abu Dhabi real estate developer. The workshop participants, among them experts in the field of sustainable development, were curious to know how the developer could claim its projects—large enclaves of high-end retail, entertainment and tourism—were “sustainable.”
Grass, dry air, thorns, and cactus on the tracks
There, the shape of the object in the absurdity of non-shape is chewing its own shadow
There is nothingness there, tied and surrounded by its opposite
Two doves flying
over the roof of an abandoned room at the station
The station is like a tattoo which has dissolved into the body of the place
There are also two thin cypresses, like two long needles
embroidering a lime-yellow cloud
And there is a tourist photographing two scenes:
I will walk in my footsteps down the old path through the sea air
no woman will see me passing under her balcony
I have of memories only those necessary for the long journey
Days contain all they need of tomorrows
I was smaller than my eyelashes and my two dimples
So take my sleepiness
and hide me in the story of the tender evening
Hide me under one of the two date palms
and teach me poetry
So I can learn how to walk beside Homer
So I can add to the story a description of Akka
Our territory is inhabited by a number of races speaking different languages and living on different historical levels…. A variety of epochs live side by side in the same areas or a very few miles apart, ignoring or devouring one another…. Past epochs never vanish completely, and blood still drips from all their wounds, even the most ancient.
—Octavio Paz, Labyrinth of Solitude
Olive oil has been a central element of Palestinian agriculture for centuries. It is a relatively durable food commodity, unlike fresh produce such as strawberries or tomatoes, which rot quickly in the sun. Unlike wine, however, olive oil does not improve with age, and is best consumed within a year or two of its production. It is extremely sensitive to exposure to heat, air and light, which cause the quality of the oil to deteriorate rapidly. It is also expensive to store and ship; the days of the Roman terracotta amphorae are gone, and now olive oil is often stored in glass bottles, heavy and easily breakable.
Back before the 1991 Gulf war, Palestinians could move fairly easily between the cities and provinces of the West Bank. The trip from Ramallah, in the north, and Hebron, in the south, lasted 50 minutes at most. These days, the luckiest traveler will spend something like two hours on the road.
“They are stealing our time. Everything takes so long!” Muna lamented, referring to the Israeli system of permits and checkpoints that governs daily mobility in the West Bank and makes the normally short trip from Ramallah to Jerusalem a nightmare of delays. She had just been granted a one-day permit to travel those six miles, a requirement for West Bank Palestinians who want to enter Jerusalem. Obtaining such a pass requires advance preparation: a trip to the Palestinian office that coordinates with the Israeli office that confers travel documents. A wait of days or weeks then ensues, followed by another trip to pick up a permit that allows entry into the city for a delimited period of time.
