http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/the-bahrain-stalemate/242086/

That Bahrain’s monarchy appears to be squandering the opportunity presented by its “national dialogue” between the government and the opposition should be the source of deep concern both regionally and in the United States. Bahrain’s strategic and political significance is totally disproportionate to its small geographical and demographic size, since it is the home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet, a flashpoint in the Gulf region between Arab Sunnis and Shiites, and the subject of long-standing Iranian ambitions.

Since protests erupted on the island after similar movements toppled the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt, the diverse but largely Shiite opposition movement has struggled against the minority Sunni-dominated government and royal family. Following a violent crackdown against protesters and a military intervention by Saudi and other Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) forces, the government has cast all opposition, of whatever variety, as part of an Iranian-inspired conspiracy to overthrow the monarchy.

The government’s response to protests — numerous killings, widespread arrests, mass firings, and the jailing of dozens of opposition leaders who have virtually nothing in common other than their demand for reform — has effectively divided the society into two irreconcilable halves. But, in this contest, neither side can possibly hope to “win” over the other. Bahrainis in both camps face a simple choice: make a deal or face a deeply uncertain and probably very unpleasant future.

The Shiite majority cannot be indefinitely marginalized and excluded from power — as it historically has been — without tensions continuing to intensify and potentially spiraling out of control with ever increasing levels of violence. On the other side, it’s clear most Bahraini Shiites understand that their chances of successfully overthrowing the monarchy are extremely slim. In any event, they know they don’t have a viable future outside of the GCC framework. The prospects of leaving the Arab fold altogether to join forces with Iran are politically implausible and, to all appearances, unappealing to the vast majority of Bahrainis.

The crackdown produced a lull in protests, but also a political stalemate. The government asserted its practical authority, but its legitimacy has been left in tatters, and its relations with the restive and suppressed sectarian majority at an all-time low. Thus far, the government appears to have no strategy beyond repression, which is, of course, a recipe for disaster.

The national dialogue, which King Hamad al-Khalifa first called for on May 31, was the first opportunity since the uprising began for the parties to begin to find a way out of this dangerous impasse. Several prominent opposition parties agreed to take part, including the largest Shiite group al-Wefaq and the nonsectarian social democrats in al-Waad. Their inclusion presented a serious opportunity to begin to craft a new consensus in the country.

Since proposing the so-called dialogue, however, the government has handed leaders of both of those opposition parties, along with other opposition figures, indefensibly stiff prison sentences in a mass trial that lumped together political figures of all stripes. Al-Waad leader and moderate Sunni reformist Ebrahim Sharif, who had scrupulously avoided calling for anything resembling the overthrow of the monarchy, was given five years. His sentence demonstrated both the totality and indiscriminate nature of the crackdown. The presence of Sharif, a moderate Sunni reformist, in the protests severely undermined the “Shiite/Iranian plot” narrative the government has relied upon, and he paid a heavy price for confusing people by not fitting any stereotype.

The national dialogue is rapidly falling apart, just as it enters its second round. Almost all opposition participants have complained the discussions are too broad, vague, and generalized to be politically meaningful. Results will be forwarded to the King for possible royal decrees. Or not.

Moreover, bitter acrimony has erupted, and four Wefaq members last week threatened to pull out on the grounds that the pro-government Salafist Member of Parliament Jassim Al Saeedi referred to the organization as “rawfidh” (“refusers” of traditional Sunni narratives about Islamic history, effectively the equivalent of “heretics”), a term regarded as highly derogatory by Shiites. During the course of the unrest, Shiite derogatory terms for Sunni Bahrainis, including the royal family, have also become well-known, generally some form of “visitors,” “strangers,” or “immigrants,” suggesting their presence is alien and temporary and their rule illegitimate.

All of this is disturbingly reminiscent of sectarian tensions at the height of the civil conflict in Iraq, when Sunni and Shiite Iraqis referred to each other as Umayyads and Safavids, respectively. Of course, Bahrain has not seen anything close to Iraq’s orgy of bloodletting, but the pattern is hard to ignore. Such terms not only draw clear sectarian distinctions, but they invoke bitter historical memories and age-old grievances, linking them to contemporary conflicts in an exceptionally dangerous way.

Over the weekend the situation deteriorated significantly, as Wefaq organized tens of thousands of protesters under the slogan “one person, one vote,” which will yet again be perceived as a direct challenge to royal authority and an implicit claim to power by a thus-far marginalized sectarian majority. At least one female protester was reported killed by tear gas asphyxiation in the oil-production hub of Sitra. Between the insults, the frustration, and the unrest, Wefaq’s board said it intends to pull out of the talks and ask its ruling Shura council for approval. The absence of the country’s largest opposition party would probably be the final blow to any chances the dialogue could have of creating a new dynamic in Bahrain.

It’s not clear whether or not Waad and other opposition parties will follow suit, as the opposition is divided on many issues. The royal family also has obvious competing factions, although the power of Saudi influence can hardly be overestimated. As an unnamed senior U.S. official was recently quoted by the Financial Times, Bahrain “is a divided country and a divided ruling family”.

Virtually every piece of good news coming out of Bahrain these days is offset by the bad. For example, the government recently released a 20-year-old poet, Ayat al-Qurmezi, who had been sentenced in June to a year in prison for reciting an anti-royal poem at the now-demolished Pearl Roundabout, then the epicenter of protests. However, Qurmezi now says she was beaten, electrocuted, and threatened with rape during her incarceration. Human rights organizations have issued scathing reports about both the crackdown and ongoing abuses, mainly directed against the Shiite majority. For its part, the government continues to cast the blame squarely on Iranian meddling, although the evidence of this is scant at best.

But, at some point, the government and the opposition are simply going to have to make a deal. Neither has any better, feasible way out. And, given the monarchy’s closing off of almost all oppositional political space in the country, the onus to actually and seriously begin this process, for the moment at least, lies squarely with the government.

Neither the Shiite majority nor the ruling family and its Sunni supporters are going to go away or give up. Indeed, given Bahrain’s small size and population, as well as its economic and security dependence on its neighbors, in the long run, they need each other to survive. The real existential struggle in Bahrain is not an ongoing sectarian conflict, but rather to find a win-win mechanism for workable, sustainable coexistence. Otherwise, a disastrous lose-lose scenario will become more and more likely. It’s difficult to say what, exactly, will happen in Bahrain if it continues down this path, but it’s likely to be far worse for everyone involved than any negotiated settlement possibly could be.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/will_south_sudan_be_a_wake-up_call_for_the_arabs

This weekend’s independence of the Republic of South Sudan should be an urgent wake-up call to the Arab world at large.

The loss of a large, formerly integral and oil-rich part of an important Arab state is obviously a huge blow to Sudan. Moreover, it may prove a significant blow to the Arab world as a whole, since South Sudan’s relationship with the Arabs in general is still in question. It has been offered Arab League membership, but whether it will accept that, or even the alternative of observer status, remains unclear. Meanwhile, it is cultivating strong ties to sub-Saharan African states, the West and Israel.

The reality is that if northern Sudanese and other Arabs are distressed at this development, as they reasonably might be, they have no one to blame but themselves. The almost unanimous yes vote in the secession referendum reflects the grim and bitter treatment of the southern provinces by Khartoum for many decades.

The north gave the southern Sudanese no reason whatsoever to wish to remain part of the united Sudan and every incentive to embrace independence at the soonest possible date. This history is by no means exclusive to Sudan, but reflects a broader problem throughout the Arab world of ignoring peripheral regions, oppressing ethnic and sectarian minorities, and utterly failing to produce societies inclusive of their heterogeneous populations.

Of course the same may prove true of South Sudan, which itself is made up of a myriad of ethnic, tribal and sectarian groups that are presently united mainly by their disdain for Khartoum. While it’s often seen in the West as “largely Christian,” and although its leadership tends to be drawn from that community, most of its peoples adhere to traditional religions and are strongly defined by tribal and ethnic identities.

But that is South Sudan’s problem. The Arabs ought to take this opportunity to learn yet another bitter lesson about the dangers of chauvinism and intolerance, although there is no evidence that they are presently doing so.

The Arab world has a long tradition of ignoring peripheries, both within states and within the Arab world as a whole. The Arabs as a collectivity did little to prevent secessionist impulses in South Sudan, ignoring ongoing problems in that country and mainly moving to rally around Sudanese President Omar Bashir when he was indicted by the International Criminal Court.

It’s fair to observe that the South was virtually driven out, or at least away, by decades of intolerable behavior from Khartoum, although Bashir deserves at least some credit for enduring the indignity of attending the independence ceremony, at the John Garang Mausoleum no less.

Many other Arab societies need to take careful note of the consequences of oppressive behavior.

Probably the only reason that the Kurds of Iraq, for example, have not really pushed for full independence is that theirs would be a landlocked state surrounded by hostile powers and most likely unable to export its petroleum overland. South Sudan, by contrast, is surrounded by states that are likely to help it overcome its lack of direct access to the sea.

The Arab world isn’t only plagued by dominant intolerant majorities, but also by oppressive rule by minorities in some cases. The Syrian regime, dominated by the Alawite sect, and the minority Sunni-dominated monarchy in Bahrain, are cases in point. Even endemic tensions between native Jordanians and their Palestinian fellow citizens demonstrate a more attenuated version of the same problem.

The bottom line is that throughout the Arab world, governments and societies tend to look at their peoples through sectarian and ethnic lenses that dangerously cast populations primarily in terms of their narrower, sub-state identities rather than as citizens and individuals with inviolable rights that must be respected for both moral and political reasons.

Many Arabs may view Bahrain is an anomaly or South Sudan as a remote and essentially marginal area, but the problems they illustrate about citizenship and identity are endemic and almost universal.

Like most of the postcolonial world, many Arab states are indeed jerry-rigged conglomerations that don’t reflect sectarian, ethnic and even cultural homogeneity. But that’s no excuse for a prevailing attitude that pushes marginalized and minority regions and communities to reject or resist existing state formations and structures on the well-founded grounds that they do not seem capable of accommodating the basic rights of individuals and sub-national groups.

Blaming the West, Israel, Iran or other outside forces is an illusion. For these internal divisions, like the northern Sudanese, the Arabs in general have no one to blame but themselves, since they are largely at fault for the centrifugal forces pulling societies across the region apart. That other Middle Eastern societies, including Turkey, Israel and Iran all have the same problem is no excuse either.

The Arab world must urgently learn the lesson of the secession of South Sudan: Move quickly toward inclusive national politics that respect the rights of marginalized minorities and regions, or face the bitter consequences of inevitable strife and, at its most extreme, national disintegration.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/07/12/knesset_of_fools?page=full

In the latest of a series of extraordinarily self-defeating moves, Israel’s legislature, the Knesset, has just adopted the so-called “Boycott Bill,” penalizing any call within Israel to boycott Israel or its settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The new law allows for civil suits against boycott supporters, denies them state benefits, and prevents the Israeli government from doing business with them. For a society terrified of what it sees as an international campaign of “delegitimization,” its own parliament could not have produced a more stunning blow to Israel’s legitimacy by conflating Israel as such with the settlements and the occupation.

Of course this law could not have been otherwise, since virtually all effective BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) efforts in the West have been targeted against the occupation and the settlements, not against Israel. Some BDS activists would clearly like to extend this campaign to target Israel proper, but such efforts have met with extremely limited success in Western societies. On the other hand, efforts to express disapproval of Israel’s illegitimate settlement activities and therefore also illegitimate goods produced in the settlements have been meeting with a modest but increasing degree of effectiveness.

The “Boycott Bill,” therefore, was never really about Israel at all, but about protecting the settlements and the settlers from a growing international campaign to refuse to subsidize a project that is a dagger aimed at the heart of prospects for a viable peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians, as well as a blatant violation of international law. City councils and governments in Europe are increasingly distancing themselves from commercial activities connected to the occupation. Norway, for example, divested from Elbit Systems, a company that manufactures sensor devices for the West Bank separation barrier, and subsequently from Africa Israel Investments, which is heavily involved in settlement construction.

The campaign against Israeli settlements is real, but this new law will almost certainly backfire. By crudely conflating Israel — which is almost universally regarded as a legitimate member state of the United Nations — with its occupation and settlements in the West Bank — which are almost universally regarded as illegitimate and indeed illegal, as well as a threat to peace — the Knesset has yet again provided an official Israeli argument for those who would extend the boycott campaign to include all Israeli institutions and not just aspects of the occupation.

The Israeli government has done this numerous times in the past. For example, when Israel applied for OECD membership, the national economic statistics it presented included the entire settlement economy, but no statistics reflecting the Palestinian villages surrounding the settlements throughout the West Bank. What this suggests is an official Israeli perspective in which there is a virtual Israel that exists wherever a settler happens to be at any given moment, and an undefined, unresolved occupation everywhere else. This legally and politically untenable and indeed preposterous position is similarly reflected in the new “Boycott Bill.”

Some of the boycott activities that Israel points to as “delegitimization” were forced by its own refusal to distinguish between itself and the settlements. In several instances, European vendors have made it clear that they are happy to sell Israeli products, but not those from the settlements, which they quite properly decline to support because they are illegitimate and dangerous. Israel has refused to provide any markings, identifying characteristics, or other indicators that would assure these vendors that the products in question were indeed from Israel and not from settlements in the occupied territories. As a consequence, several European vendors, particularly in Italy, simply stopped stocking Israeli imports, not because they objected to goods from Israel, but because they refuse to unwittingly sell settlement products and Israel will not distinguish them.

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the Knesset members who passed the “Boycott Bill” and their supporters do not seem to understand that boycotts, divestment, and sanctions that are carefully targeted against the occupation and the settlements but scrupulously avoid targeting Israel legitimize rather than delegitimize the Israeli state. They say, in effect: We do not want to buy or sell the products of the illegitimate settlement program, but we are happy to buy or sell Israeli goods because Israel is a legitimate state. By carefully targeting the occupation and the settlements, such boycotts implicitly recognize the legitimacy of Israel itself. But to supporters of the settlements, this is of little or no importance. To them, it’s all simply Israel.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) has been engaged in precisely this kind of boycott in the small areas under its control in the West Bank. Beginning in March 2010, it circulated brochures to every household in “Area A” complete with color images of the logos of the banned settlement companies so that no one could have any doubts about which products were unlawful. After an initial grace period, the PA began forcibly removing these products from Palestinian shops and then shortly afterward began prosecuting those distributing them. Palestinians have been effectively urging people the world over, including sympathetic Israelis, to join them in seeking clarity, and drawing a sharp distinction between Israel on the one hand and the settlement project on the other.

This Palestinian boycott of settlement goods is an integral part of the program of nonviolent resistance to occupation currently under way in the West Bank, and the international campaign is an extension of that. The “Boycott Bill” is an attack on precisely this kind of nonviolent protest, which is, of course, the appropriate alternative to the self-destructive and self-defeating violence of the past. But, as with other forms of nonviolent resistance, Israel is proving as intolerant to this nonviolent tactic as it has been to all other forms of combating the occupation. For Israel, it seems, the only accepted response is to submit and stop making a fuss of any kind.

It’s no surprise that large numbers of prominent Knesset members were unaccountably missing from the “Boycott Bill” vote, most notably Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is not only because the law is an obvious affront to freedom of speech and other principles of democracy, but also because of the high likelihood it will be struck down by the Israeli Supreme Court. Canny Israeli politicians no doubt also understand that rhetorically conflating Israel and the settlements in such a crude manner is a very dangerous thing to do in the immediate term, and potentially disastrous in the long run.

Given the powerful international consensus against the settlements — including the United States, which unequivocally holds that the settlement project is at least illegitimate, if not outright illegal, and which clearly distinguishes between Israel and the occupation — this crude law inflicts the most powerful delegitimizing blow against Israel in living memory.

When the Knesset itself says it does not recognize the difference between any effort to boycott Israel and those that target the settlements, it invites the rest of the world to see things in the same light. It encourages those who would not stop at expressing disapproval of the occupation but wish to target Israel and Israelis generally. Moreover, by making Israel indistinguishable from the illegitimate settlement project, it raises the banner of delegitimization higher than any group of non-Israeli activists could ever have hoped to.

https://now.mmedia.me/lb/en/commentaryanalysis/isolationist_america_not_quite

In some quarters of the Arab world there is a misplaced belief in growing American “isolationism” with regard to the Middle East, a false sense that the United States is pulling away from its role in the region. This erroneous conclusion is based on a powerful collection of data points, which are nonetheless being misconstrued.

The most important ideas cited by proponents of this interpretation require careful consideration.

First, the United States, while still the paramount actor in the Middle East, is finding it increasingly difficult to project the kind of military and even financial clout in the region that it used to. The fundamental reality is that it is still a uniquely potent power, but one that is nearly broke. It cannot write the kind of checks to others that used to come easily, and it’s even finding it painful to directly finance its own efforts.

One of the factors in the drawdown from Iraq was the cost of the war, which has been seen as prohibitive. This view is also informing the Obama administration’s preparation for a similar drawdown in Afghanistan. Voices from all parts of the political spectrum in the United States are calling for “nation-building at home, not abroad.”

The unquestioned loss of American financial sway means less power and influence globally, including in the Middle East. But this weakening should not be overstated since the United States remains the most influential power in the region by every measure, and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future.

The attempted congressional defunding of the limited military engagement in Libya, however, was less budgetary than election-year politicking by cynical Republicans. Not only is it impossible to imagine Republican legislators defunding a military mission led by a Republican president, they would always have questioned the loyalty and motivations of any Democrat who tried to do so.

Neither Obama’s “leading from the rear” strategy in Libya nor Republican efforts to interfere with the policy for nakedly partisan reasons demonstrates any “new isolationism.” The limited engagement in Libya was a prudent if ugly approach, and Republican harassment of the president is inevitable during an election season.

Perhaps the strongest evidence that there is a neo-isolationist American policy towards the Arab world is the limited American response to the uprisings in Yemen, Bahrain and Syria.

American influence in Yemen is quite limited, the conflict extremely complex, and the variables almost innumerable. That Washington has to work closely with, and to some extent even rely on, Saudi Arabian diplomatic initiatives in Yemen might be a measure of its limited options, but not necessarily growing American isolation. When did the United States ever have more direct influence in Yemen? Even if it did in the past, it does not have a stake today in which faction or coalition emerges victorious, as long as there is a government in Sana’a that controls the country and tries to combat terrorism.

American options may be even more limited in Bahrain. Regarding the uprising as a Shia and Iranian-inspired conspiracy, and therefore an existential threat, the royal family and its Saudi allies are simply not listening to any outside voices, including American ones. Walking away from Bahrain is not really an option for the US, and there is no constituency in Washington for relocating, or threatening to relocate, the Fifth Fleet, which is based in Bahrain. Larger interests and great power can sometimes have the counterintuitive effect of limiting options with indispensable small clients who simply will not listen to reason on their own domestic matters.

Without question the most troublesome policy of all has been the Obama administration’s risk-averse approach to the Syrian uprising. The administration has been misguided in giving the impression that it believes that Bashar al-Assad’s regime either will, or possibly even should, survive the rebellion. In the long run, this is both unlikely and, for American interests, undesirable.

It’s true that there isn’t much the United States can do on its own beyond rhetoric to influence events in Syria, and that there is much to fear from chaos or civil war in that country. But a policy that continues to toss out lifelines and implicit reaffirmation to a regime that should and probably will eventually collapse under the weight of its own dysfunctionality and brutality—and which is historically and currently unfriendly to American policy goals—makes little sense.

But even the so-far misguided approach to Syria that seems to irrationally favor some form of regime continuity to the potential for internal chaos does not bespeak a “new isolationism” in American foreign policy. It is overly cautious to be sure, and excessively risk-averse. But it is not a return to fortress America by any means.

Ending what was always a misguided war in Iraq and what has turned into a fool’s errand in Afghanistan hardly represents isolationism. It is sensible, popular, and a case of moving beyond past mistakes. Bundling these correctives in with both justified and unjustified levels of caution regarding Arab uprisings, and thereby imagining an American retreat in the Middle East, draws the wrong conclusions.

The Obama administration, on the whole, is continuing to pursue American interests in the region aggressively, though not imprudently. This approach isn’t perfect, but it’s a big improvement over reckless past attitudes that smacked of hubris, and it’s anything but isolationist.