Nothing Personal
Hobson's chickens
By Thomas O'Dwyer
Arab League summits always send an air of nostalgia wafting over Middle East correspondents. It's like a whiff of damp walls and mushrooms, recalling a long forgotten childhood cellar - not attractive in itself, but deliciously poignant as a contrast to the clear, sunny, leaf-green world just a few meters away. That could have been a metaphor for the hellhole that was Beirut in 1983, with its cordite-filled atmosphere and ravaged buildings where fear dripped off the walls like cold sweat.
Those were the good old days - formerly known as "these trying times," and it was easy to say that as we watched Lebanese workers drape huge banners over buildings near the Phoenicia Hotel earlier this week to hide the scars of battle from the eyes of visiting Arab dignitaries. Now there's another metaphor - for the Arab League. Hide the scars, pretend the war doesn't exist, paint over the cracks. This was being written early in the week, before we even knew if Yasser Arafat would be going to Beirut, much less how the summit itself would go. But there are certain eternal verities about the Arab League and its summitry that provide ample fodder for musing, if not prophecy.
When the Englishman Thomas Hobson died in 1631, he left little behind him by way of legacy except a two-word phrase bequeathed to the English language. In his own day, he was such a respected curmudgeon that he made it into a collection of biographies called Fuller's Worthies, and was twice mentioned by John Milton in epitaphs.
Hobson was a Cambridge liveryman - a horse-rental Hertz of his day - but no matter what the rank or importance of a customer, Hobson insisted he could rent only the next horse in line, and he never bent this rule. The phrase "Hobson's choice" thus entered the language, and to this day is wrongly used to mean "no choice."
It is not no choice. It is a choice between what is offered - or nothing. The Arab League consensus that usually emerges from its meetings manages to ensure that "what is offered" and "nothing" are the same thing.
"We chose the chicken only because we fear the fox," a Cypriot villager once told me after an ineffectual wimp won a presidential election against a hard-line Communist. It could be the motto of the Arab League. Humans are great pattern-makers, and Arab League resolutions are like ink blobs thrown on paper that resolve themselves at once into a pattern derived from the psychology of the day. Toss a few loony rightists into a few minor European democracies and they become an international movement. Add Osama bin Laden and some sinister CIA units, and they become a global conspiracy. (Add aliens and they become a popular television series.) The World Wildlife Fund runs a TV promotion that ends with a number of random and meaningless black shapes zooming in from the edges of the screen. They stop - and out of nothing emerges the logo of the organization - a panda.
Media commentaries on current events often look like they work like this - throw enough black paragraphs on the white paper, and the pattern of the month in world affairs emerges from nowhere - a sort of panda principle. A senior Reuters editor once told me he only had to send 20 journalists to the Sahara for a week, and the world's newspapers would be dominated for a month by the political and economic importance of sand. It was meant to be funny, but he had a manic gleam in his eye that seemed to suggest he was working on how this power could be used.
During the mid-1980s, the Lebanon situation - both internal and vis-a-vis Israel, the United States, hostages, the PLO, and international terrorism - was the only running world story that any journalist eager for a reputation wanted to be involved in. It was the ultimate sandbox for panda-principle reporters. Many became household-name bylines in the major international newspapers. While clearing out some old and yellow archives recently I was disturbed to see how many of the then-indispensable have vanished without trace from the Middle East expert roster.
But, not surprisingly, they have vanished along with their lengthy news analyses and learned predictions on the inevitable "Lebanonization" of the entire Middle East. They have gone along with their predictions for the coming victory for Islamic fundamentalism and yes - the near-certain overthrow of Yasser Arafat after his humiliating evacuation from Beirut, and for the dispersal and demise of the PLO in far-flung camps from Tunisia to Sudan, Iraq and Yemen.
Never mind the demise of the PLO - who in the mid-1980s predicted the demise of the Communist bloc? But the Arab League is still with us, large but unimportant, as are its two protagonist blocs that outlived the Soviet Union - the moderates and the extremists.
"Is Iran's current president more moderate that the previous one?" I once asked Henry Kissinger on one of his visits to Israel. "He is not more moderate," growled Kissinger. "I have seen no sign of it. He is more modern, that is all."
There has always been a tendency to speak of Iraq and Iran in the same breath, as if they were two of a kind - an axis of evil in fact. It would be unlikely for the Arab League to invite Mohammed Khatami to Beirut for its conference - because Iran is not Arab, a point Ariel Sharon appeared to miss this week when he imperiously declared he would like to attend.
From a Western or Israeli standpoint, Iran of course is a problematic state. It is hostile, fundamentalist, dead set against our value systems. But, like Israel, it is a long way from being the Iraq of Saddam or even most countries of the Arab League. Iran has a functioning state system and a government that mainly works. In Iran, the president steps down when his term is done, and the people vote for a new government. It is a vote severely hemmed in by the religious camp and the Ayatollah Khomeini constitution, but it is a vote.
After years in the Middle East, any writer needs a pet cliche against which to measure all others - as a foreign-affairs person, my cliche for a newsless land has always been Denmark. Blessed is the land that has no news, blessed the people that have no enemies. It's a land where every day is a slow news day; if only all our neighbors were Danes, we could finish the whole wretched Middle East peace process over a cup of coffee before 10 A.M. tomorrow.
Like all cliches, it's not absolutely true, but close enough. One can still turn to newspaper archives to search for stories on Denmark, and chuckle when The Washington Post reports "Cannot find item. Refine search" or another comes up with a softball score and a bilateral insurance treaty. When somebody wants to make a stark contrast, they might rely on the useful phrase: "Why, even in ...." It's usually Denmark. Some time ago Jordan asked European experts on anti-Semitism for help in combating growing anti-Muslim prejudice in the EU. "Even in Denmark, which is so tolerant and where religion does not play a great role, there are anti-Muslim feelings," said a Jordanian official. Could we now reverse that and say "Even in the Arab League, there is now real moderation, like in Denmark." Probably not.
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