The Conference

I spent much of the last month - and all of last weekend - preparing for and helping run the 13th Annual Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference. The below article, by Georgie Anne Geyer, is pretty much on target. The cover of our program, below, was designed by yours truly with input from coworkers. The hands are mine and my coworker Shawn's.


ARAB-U.S. CONFERENCE OFFERS FEW SOLUTIONS TO MIDDLE EAST DILEMMAS

WASHINGTON -- If you want a sense of the despair that is gripping many intelligent, experienced and patriotic American professionals and officials, come with me to this week's 13th Annual Arab U.S. Policymakers Conference. Talk about midnight at the end of the tunnel!

"This year, I am much less confident than I was last year about the conflict in Iraq," said Chas. W. Freeman, who was U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. "Neither candidate is saying much about how he would address the conflict, but both are instead involved in this infantile debate about Kerry's silver star and whether George Bush turned up in Alabama to fight the Viet Cong, should they turn up."

"We don't have a civil war in Iraq -- yet," Dr. Phebe Marr, author of "The Modern History of Iraq," told the group meeting at the Marriott Wardman Park Hotel here. "One of the things that disturbs me most is that it is clear the Americans can't assume responsibility for keeping order, while the Iraqi forces are not moving up to the plate. If this doesn't work, we'll get a fragile central government and a total decomposition -- like Lebanon in the '80s -- with militias all over the place."

"The situation in the region is stark," said Philo Dibble, one of the top Middle East experts in the State Department. "Forty-five percent of the population is under 15 -- and that population will double in the next 20 years. But we will pursue getting it right in Iraq ... because we don't have any choice."

Two scholars, men of Arab-American background who are respected in their field for their fair-minded analyses, both warned that the American presence in Iraq, far from bringing together the disparate, fissiparous groups of the thwarted Arab societies, was causing them to regress. They saw a return to tribalism, to old family clans and to more extreme religious persuasions, in place of the supposedly inevitable (according to the delusionary war-planners) "national, democratic Iraq."

As Dr. Edmund Ghareeb, Middle East professor at American University, told the group frankly: "One of the consequences of the war is a revival of tribal, sectarian and religious differences. How to create a feasible new Iraqi identity? The process had gone far in the '70s, but present events are undermining the whole process." And Dr. Shibley Telhami of the University of Maryland carried the theme of "decomposition" further, stating that even the "Palestinian/Israeli conflict is increasingly being perceived in ethnic and religious terms -- and that doesn't work for a nationalist two-state solution."

The conference, held by the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations and sponsored by a host of American companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Aramco Services Co., had as its title a hopeful question: "Restoring Arab-U.S. Mutual Trust and Confidence: What Is Feasible? What Is Necessary?" But answers were not exactly flowing from any lips.

The best that Dr. Anthony Cordesman, scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, could think of was for the United States to support Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's equivocal plan to evacuate Gaza first and hand it over to the Palestinians.

"Bad as it may be, Gaza is the only game we have that could make things better," he said at one point. "Maybe we could make it work as a first step, for the alternative is more paralysis. The second step, long overdue for the U.S. government, is not to tolerate violence on the Palestinian side -- but also not to tolerate the settlers or the fence on the Israeli side."

Some others offered the old idea that "Israel's security should be assured regionally" -- that the United States, Europe, Russia and the moderate Arab countries must come together to solve the problem FOR the Israelis and the Palestinians, who have certainly not shown they can solve it themselves. This is an excellent idea -- but there is not a chance in hell that the Bush administration, which automatically supports Sharon on anything he does, would even consider it.

In fact, said Ambassador Freeman, he would like to ask President Bush flatly about the next four years: "If you're re-elected, is the invasion of Iran the target? What about Syria? What is the meaning of all the talk about the Saudi royal family? What about the Holy Land and the conflict? Will you continue to do everything Sharon says? What ABOUT Iraq?"

To this, Dr. Telhami reverted to the question of whether there ARE any differences between the two candidates on the crucial Middle East questions -- and he warned the group not to be too cynical.

"Yes," he said, "it is hard to discern differences between the candidates on the Middle East, but I do think there are differences. With President Bush, it was the first time in the U.S. that a president came to power believing that the Palestinian question was no longer an important question for America -- that is a historic aberration. To the contrary, Kerry has said all along that it needed to be addressed. The question is, 'What does it mean to support Israel?' Two-thirds of American Jews have been opposed to what the Bush administration is doing with Sharon. In the end, it's how a single president defines those interests."

Dr. Telhami warned that if President Bush thinks the world sees him as stronger because of the Iraq war, he is desperately mistaken. "We just did a survey of six Arab countries, and the vast majority feel that the U.S. is weaker than before the war and therefore less able to use its leverage internationally."

If you go to meetings like this one looking for answers, as I do, the prognosis these days is not good. The best that could be provided were lukewarm remedies such as the cynical "Gaza First." Hope did not attend the meeting; it stuck its head in once and then beat it.

Listening to these fine minds, the depressing conclusion is that George W. Bush has weakened not only himself, but his country, in his cowboy crusader adventures among complicated worlds he chooses not to know.

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