An NPR Interview: Rami Khouri And Youssef Ibrahim Discuss The Rifts Among Nations That Would Be Most Affected By War Against Iraq
Weekend Edition Saturday: November 2, 2002
Mideast Politics
SCOTT SIMON, host:
The investigation continues into this week's assassination of American diplomat Laurence Foley, who was shot outside of his home in Amman, Jordan. The incident has underscored uneasiness in Jordan and elsewhere in the region as the United States continues its push for regime change in Iraq. Now the Bush administration has called war there a last option in ridding Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, but these ongoing deliberations have already damaged economies and exposed rifts between governments in public opinion in the nations that would be most affected by war, countries with strong trade partnerships with both Iraq and the United States. Rami Khouri is a syndicated columnist and former editor of The Jordan Times. He joins us from Amman.
Mr. Khouri, thanks very much for being with us.
Mr. RAMI KHOURI (Syndicated Columnist; Former Editor, The Jordan Times): Thanks for having me.
SIMON: And Youssef Ibrahim is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and he joins us from our studios in New York City.
Mr. Ibrahim, thanks very much for being with us.
Mr. YOUSSEF IBRAHIM (Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations): Thank you.
SIMON: And, Mr. Khouri, if I could start with you there on the ground in Amman, there has been no official confirmation yet, but, obviously, the working assumption has been that this was an act of terrorism. Does it look that way to you, and does it, to your practiced eye, bear the fingerprints of any specific group of terrorists?
Mr. KHOURI: It certainly does look like a terrorist politically motivated act, and there are plenty of people who would have the motivation to do this, unfortunately, and there are quite a few people who would actually carry it out. But clearly, it must be analyzed as both a criminal act and as a political act, and only if you analyze both those dimensions of it can we figure out why it happened and, more importantly, how to stop these things from happening in the future.
SIMON: Mr. Khouri, you've recently minted a phrase that a lot of people have picked up, in which you've said that it's important not to just try to know the mood of what's often been called the Arab street but the Arab basement. Could you tell us about that place?
Mr. KHOURI: Yeah, what I meant by that is that, you know, for years and years people have been talking about you got to watch the Arab street, Arabs are going to be demonstrating against Israel, against the US, against their own government. And I think this is important to keep an eye on. But the fact is that over all these years, all the points that the people in the Arab streets have been making have been virtually ignored by their own Arab governments, by Israel and by the United States. So what's happened is a few angry young men have quietly slipped away from the crowds on the street and gone down to the basements of their buildings in Nablus or in Yemen or in New Jersey, or wherever they're making these bombs, and they've been getting involved in terror. So it's these guys in the basement with their bombs who are now driving a lot of the policy and public opinion. And what doubly worries me is that every time there's one of these attacks, you don't hear a lot of explicit, strong public condemnation, because most people around here in the Arab world, in the Middle East, accept it as something that's inevitable and has become almost normal.
SIMON: Mr. Ibrahim.
Mr. IBRAHIM: May I add to this?
SIMON: Yeah.
Mr. IBRAHIM: If you consider the biggest part of this basement to be al-Qaeda, I am very alarmed at what's happening in the basement. It's a brilliant analysis that Rami Khouri gave. I am now watching this basement getting bigger. Al-Qaeda is getting bigger, and the people who are joining the basement are no longer just religious Islamic fundamentalists--I think a lot of secularists, angry, young men, including people who normally would have been our friends, the students who are stuck, unable to get visas to return to continue their studies here, and so on and so forth, or the people who are going to be fingerprinting when they come into this country. We are making hundreds of enemies that are going to be joining this basement.
Mr. KHOURI: As even, again, worse news that I would have to bring to the attention of the audience, which is that in public opinion surveys that have been carried out either in public or quietly in Jordan and Kuwait, the evidence is that around somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of the people look positively on bin Laden or Saddam Hussein, and this is a very alarming trend.
SIMON: I think the United States and Great Britain have been pretty explicit about saying that they think victory takes care of a lot of qualms in terms of public opinion, that once the United States and Great Britain indicate that they are prepared to win in a war, they're prepared to bear the cost of changing regimes and staying the course, that public opinion, although it might not be enthusiastic, will recognize that the United States and Britain are willing to defend themselves and that these demonstrations have a way of just frittering away. Do you accept that?
Mr. IBRAHIM: I don't accept that because there is a huge elephant in this room and we are all dancing around that elephant. The reason for the anger in the Arab world is our policy towards Israel and the Palestinians. The fact that we have completely ignored the Palestinians, the fact that we have totally supported the Sharon government, the fact that we are completely overlooking the total reoccupation of what's left of Palestine is the reason for the anger.
SIMON: Mr. Khouri?
Mr. KHOURI: Yeah, I think there's a really important link with the Israeli-Palestinian situation, and I would argue also with domestic trends within most of the Arab countries. You had mentioned the issue of Iraq and power and winning.
SIMON: Right.
Mr. KHOURI: I think this is a pretty nonsensical argument because you can look back to the Gulf War of 1990 and '91 and many of the problems that we've suffered in the last decade come out directly from the consequences of that war, leaving a large American military presence in Saudi Arabia, this very harsh embargo on Iraq, not pushing the Israelis to stop their colonization and settlement. Everybody is delighted that Kuwait is a liberated country and it should never have been occupied. But the problems that came out of military victory by the Anglo-American troops have now led a linear path to not only acts of terror against the United States but to a radicalization of much of the region, much of the Middle East and Asia against the United States. And you're seeing it expressed yet again now in the next form, not just these guys in the basement, but you've got Islamist groups who have just done very, very well in elections in Pakistan, in Morocco and in Bahrain, and they're probably going to do well in Turkey in elections there. So these are such enormously clear signs, and it just staggers us that otherwise sensible people making policy in the United States simply appear to be blind to this, and this really has to change.
SIMON: Rami Khouri, a syndicated columnist speaking from Amman, Jordan, and Youssef Ibrahim, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, from our studios in New York.
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