Month: December 2013

Here in Switzerland, the train chugs along nicely between Geneva and Lausanne. The Alpine mountain range desperately fights to make its presence known despite the irritating persistence of low- hanging clouds. A friend had just introduced me to the music of J.J. Cale, but my thoughts were moving faster than the speed of the train. Time is too short to sleep, but never long enough to think.

It has been nearly a week since I embarked on a speaking tour in French-speaking countries of Europe. The trip was more difficult than I thought it would be, but also successful. I am here to talk about Gaza, to explain Arab revolutions and to remind many of their moral responsibility towards Palestine and Arab nations. For six months prior to that date, I lived and worked in the Middle East. Soon after I had arrived, Egypt entered into a most disheartening new phase of violence and chaos. Despite the suffering and bloodletting, the fresh turmoil seemed to correspond more accurately to the greatness of the fight at hand. The Jan 25 revolution was declared victorious too soon.

For me, the turmoil in Egypt was more than a political topic to be analyzed or a human rights issue to be considered. It was very personal. Now, my access to Gaza is no longer guaranteed. Gaza, despite its impossible reality and overwhelming hardship, was the last space in Palestine in which I was allowed to visit after 18 years of being denied such access. It was the closest place to what I would call home.

My travel companion informs me that we have ten minutes to Lausanne. I wish it was much longer. There is so much to consider. My sorrow for Gaza and its suffocating siege, for Palestine and its denied freedom is now part of a much larger blend of heartbreaks over Arab peoples as they struggle for self-definition, equality, rights and freedom. No, hope will never be lost, for the battle for freedom is eternal. But the images in my head of the numerous victims in this war – especially children who barely knew what war is even about in the first place – are haunting.

I went back in the Middle East hoping to achieve some clarity. But at numerous occasions I felt more confused. I don’t know why I get bewildered feelings every time I am back in the Middle East. I only refer to the Middle East when I write in English. In Arabic, it is ‘al-watan al-Arabi’, the Arab homeland. We were taught this as children, and knew of no other reference but that. Among Arab friends, I sound juvenile when I say the ‘Arab homeland’. No one there makes that reference anymore.

Continue reading “From the Middle East to Lausanne: Arabic Thoughts Amidst the Alps”

When U.S. leaders and pundits talk about NATO, they describe it as the linchpin of world security and the manifestation of Western liberal values. In other formulations, the U.S. is graciously bestowing a kind of welfare program to its allies in the form of security and protection throughout the European continent because, well, that’s just how much we care about our fellow man.

In reality, NATO is about U.S. control and domination, and a recent report at Foreign Policy demonstrates this fact quite well. Apparently Turkey, a NATO member, has been trying to finalize a deal with a Chinese company to build its first long-range air and missile defense system. This infuriated officials in Washington to the point that they drew up legislation that would ban Chinese-built missile defense systems within NATO. Subtle, I know.

Turkey stunned U.S. officials in September when it reached a provisional deal worth up to $3.4 billion with a Chinese company blacklisted in the United States to build Turkey’s first long-range air and missile defense system. Monday, Congress drew a line in the sand over it: If the 2014 U.S. defense spending bill goes through as proposed, it will ban the use of U.S. funding to integrate Chinese missile defense systems with U.S. or NATO systems, effectively making it impossible for Turkey to operate Chinese equipment with many partner nations.

The provision is one of many hardball tactics in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), and is clearly aimed at short-circuiting Turkey’s plan. Turkey, which entered NATO in 1952, indicated it favored the Chinese company, China Precision Machinery Export-Import Corporation, in part because some components would be built in Turkey, providing a boost to the country’s economy. U.S. and NATO officials strenuously objected to Turkey’s plan, warning that Turkish companies involved in building components for the Chinese system could face U.S. trade sanctions.

It looks like Turkey’s rationale for dealing with the Chinese company mirrors perfectly U.S. rationales for selecting defense corporations to build weapons and defense systems – namely, that it enhances the security of the nation and boosts the economy by creating jobs. But that is a prerogative Turkey doesn’t have, apparently.

The other aspect of this is that Turkey’s willingness to deal with a Chinese company in particular probably irked U.S. officials profoundly. China is a rising superpower and its expanding global influence, especially on military and foreign policy matters, is terrifying to U.S. policymakers intent on maintaining the position of sole superpower, or to put it in Pentagon-ese, hegemony.

As this controversy demonstrates, NATO is not about helping keep our allies safe and strong. International relations scholar Christopher Layne, in his book The Peace of Illusions, describes NATO as “the instrument through which Washington exercise[s] its continental preeminence.” It is essential to U.S. grand strategy, he writes, to “prevent” member countries “from following an independent foreign or security policy.” If countries do attempt to demonstrate independence, Washington views it as “a direct assault on U.S. hegemony.”

NATO ensures a U.S.-run system of control over much of history’s most strategically important geography. It is not a charitable welfare program.

The House of Representatives is currently considering putting forth a vote on additional sanctions on the Iranian economy. Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has declared unequivocally that additional sanctions would mean “the entire deal is dead.”

Well, that seems to be the point. This piece in Al Monitor authored by Daniel Kurtzer and Thomas Pickering, two former U.S. diplomats, along with former Iranian diplomat Seyed Hossein Mousavian, spells it out in plain English:

[I]f the West does not lift the specified sanctions or, worse, should US Congress or another country actually impose greater sanctions during this six-month period, it will be a clear sign that the West is not interested in a negotiated deal and that the United States has not distanced itself from a policy of regime change.

I argued something similar in a piece for Al Jazeera back in September. On the road to high-level diplomatic negotiations, Washington’s biggest obstacle was in convincing Iran we weren’t solely after regime change. Typically, rival states don’t engage in good faith negotiations if one is convinced the other is out to destroy their regime.

But Congress is doing everything in its power to make sure not to disabuse the Iranians of this view. They say it will strengthen the West’s negotiating hand, as if they are pretending not to hear the Iranians saying explicitly that talks will fall apart if more sanctions are imposed.

Last week I drew a comparison between the South African apartheid system that is now the focus of Nelson Mandela’s legacy and current Israeli policies toward Palestinians. Obviously, that strikes many in the U.S. as offensive and inaccurate. But, as Israeli activist and military veteran Mikhael Manekin said in January 2012, the “apartheid” criticism is an accepted part of the debate lexicon in Israel.

Today, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz demonstrated how true that is with a discussion of it led by correspondent Amira Hass:

What do those who say “Israeli Apartheid” mean?

They definitely don’t mean the official and popular biological racism that ruled South Africa. True, there is no lack of racist and arrogant attitudes here, with their attendant religious-biological undertones, but if one visits our hospitals one can find Arabs and Jews among doctors and patients. In that regard, our hospitals are the healthiest sector of society.

Those who say “Israeli Apartheid” refer to the philosophy of “separate development” that was prevalent in the old South Africa. This was the euphemism used for the principle of inequality, the deliberate segregation of populations, a prohibition on “mixing” and the displacement of non-whites from lands and resources for their exploitation by the masters of the land. Even though here things are shrouded by “security concerns,” with references to Auschwitz and heaven-decreed real estate, our reality is governed by the same philosophy, backed by laws and force of arms.

What, for instance?

There are two legal systems in place on the West Bank, a civilian one for Jews and a military one for Palestinians. There are two separate infrastructures there as well, including roads, electricity and water. The superior and expanding one is for Jews while the inferior and shrinking one is for the Palestinians. There are local pockets, similar to the Bantustans in South Africa, in which the Palestinians have limited self-rule. There is a system of travel restrictions and permits in place since 1991, just when such a system was abolished in South Africa.

Does that mean that apartheid exists only on the West Bank?

Not at all, it exists across the entire country, from the sea to the Jordan River. It prevails in this one territory in which two peoples live, ruled by one government which is elected by one people, but which determines the future and fate of both. Palestinian towns and villages suffocate because of deliberately restrictive planning in Israel, just as they do in the West Bank.

Read the rest here. See some of my discussion of this subject here, here, and here.

Writing at The Diplomat, Zheng Wang, an Associate Professor of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University and a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, paints a gloomy picture of the recent heightened tensions in the East China Sea:

The clock starts ticking for the next crisis. With China’s announcement of the Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea and the strong response from Japan, the United States and several other countries, tensions in East Asia are mounting. Since the crisis over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands in September 2012, both China and Japan have begun to conduct frequent air and marine patrols in the Diaoyu/Senkakus area. With the flyby of the American B-52s, the area around these tiny islands has become a zone of tension with high probability of an accident and subsequent conflict. Just like the EP-3 collision incident between the US and China in 2001, if states continue to play this game of chicken, then an accident is inevitable. As anyone who studies East Asian international relations knows, a small accident between China and Japan could immediately escalate into a major crisis and even military conflict.

In order to avoid what is a real danger of conflict breaking out, Wang suggests a temporary deal to establish a “zone of peace” in the East China Sea. “If they want to avoid conflict,” Wang writes, “especially one arising from a small incident, they should take measures to decrease the likelihood of such accidents through using tools such as the zone of peace.”

China and Japan could agree not to send any official or military aircraft, vessels, and personnel into this zone for an agreed upon period of time, such as two years, as a means to avoid accidental incidents and conflict. The zone’s size could be decided upon by these countries, perhaps 12 nautical miles surrounding each of the small islands. This zone of peace would only be a temporary arrangement; it would not nullify the territorial claims that each side has maintained.

While that sounds like a fair interim deal to ease tensions, I tend to think there is a simpler long-term solution. As I’ve written and demonstrated numerous times at this blog, U.S. support for countries like Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines are exacerbating the tensions in the region. When the world’s only superpower explicitly vows that it will come to your defense in any conflict, it tends to embolden hardline, nationalistic postures.

There is no guarantee that an absence of U.S. meddling would eliminate the possibility of a clash between China and its neighboring rivals, but the least Washington could do is refrain from inflaming these disputes. Simply put, the U.S. has no business getting involved the regional squabbles in the East and South China Seas. The only reason it’s thought to be any of our business in the first place is because the Asia Pacific is a region Washington has tried to dominate for decades, as it dominates its own Western hemisphere.

In a sense, the real clash here is not between China and Japan, or China and the Philippines, but rather between China and the U.S. The U.S. is the global hegemon and “China,” as Andrew J. Nathan and Andrew Scobell have written in Foreign Affairs, “is the only country widely seen as a possible threat to U.S. predominance.”

In thinking of ways to solve this and other problems, letting go of hegemony as a stated goal of U.S. foreign policy would be a start.