The international community must find courage to address the deeply-rooted dynamics upon which conflict in the Middle East thrives, writes Karim Mroue* The Middle East seems to generate and reproduce crises at breakneck speed. Countries in the region are in the grip of wars with outside powers, civil wars, and foreign occupations. Larger regional powers are meddling in the internal affairs of weaker neighbours, while within individual nations rival political forces seek backing from abroad, wittingly or unwittingly transforming themselves into tools in the hands of players that do not balk at exploiting and exacerbating internal conflicts in pursuit of their own political and economic objectives. The international community is left gasping for breath. Simultaneously, broad segments of opinion in the West feel compelled to take a stance but find themselves baffled by sudden twists and turns of events, not least because they are unable to understand the source of the region's problems and, hence, its varying forms of expression. Aggravating the confusion is the difficulty in differentiating effectively between the specific and the general with regard to a number of crucial issues. For example, while it is a gross fallacy to lump Hizbullah together with Bin Laden in Afghanistan and Al-Zarqawi-like groups in Iraq, it is equally erroneous to deny the existence of some common denominators. Perhaps most indicative of the gravity of this double blindness is public outrage in the Arab world over cartoons offending the Prophet Mohamed that appeared in a Danish newspaper and the Catholic pope's remarks in which he cited an ancient text pertaining to Islamic conquests. Clearly, what is at play here is a wariness of what is different or unfamiliar -- in this case, another religion. The West has yet to come to terms with the phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism. The very fact that its reactions towards this phenomenon range from the belligerently hostile -- as exemplified by the American branding of Islam as "terrorist" and its declaration of war upon it -- to the verbally and pictorially abusive tells us, above all, that few in the West have dedicated sufficient attention to studying its evolution and its complex relationship with socio-economic conditions in the region. This, however, does not absolve us, the people of this region, of the task to study this phenomenon ourselves, and to take the initiative to offer some answers to the many questions it raises. But before we even begin we must not only recognise that this phenomenon has deep roots and developed gradually, passing through many phases, but also, and more importantly, that it coincides with phenomena of a different order. I refer here primarily to the prevalence of dictatorial regimes, the frailty of civil and political party life due to the absence of political freedoms, widespread political apathy, a reversion to primary kinship and sectarian allegiances, and a growing politicisation and polarisation between these forms of allegiance. THE ORIGINS OF THE PROBLEM: In order to attempt to explain the significance of the major events that are sweeping the region, we must turn to history. Given, however, that a full elucidation is beyond our present purposes, we must restrict ourselves to the observation that each case has ancient roots and a specific set of regenerative causes. We must also note that the countries of the region themselves are far from uniform. Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey and Pakistan cannot be compared to the Arab countries, and these have very different histories with regard to their emergence as independent nations. Yet, while it is important to bear in mind these differences, we must simultaneously bear in mind the factors these countries have in common, for not only do they have a strong element of shared history, both ancient and modern, they are all predominantly Muslim nations. While the overwhelming majority of the populace of these nations combined are Sunni Muslims, the Islamic revolution in Iran introduced a new and important factor, which is the emergence of Shia Islam as a political force of unprecedented influence in modern times. Lebanon, in spite of its denominational plurality, is no exception. Another clear common denominator resides in the enormous oil resources that many of these countries possess. This mineral wealth, of which there are still huge untapped reserves, has been a constant source of problems both between them and within them, especially since their emergence as independent nations. More crucial yet, however, is how it has affected their relations with the outside world and specifically with those powers that have scrambled to seize control over this vital resource and, in order to further this end, to control the fates of the peoples in these countries. Finally, the majority of these countries remain in the clutches of political, economic, social and cultural underdevelopment. Widespread poverty, disease and ignorance are major sources of discontent and unrest, aggravated in modern times by the fact that in spite of the plethora of schools and universities, educational systems and curricula are so poorly designed, administered and integrated into social needs that the developmental value of the spread of knowledge and education is lost. The regimes that have emerged in Middle Eastern countries are as different as the countries themselves. It is not so much the existence of a monarchical form of government here and a republican system there that concerns us as the underlying socio-political orders in these countries. If Turkey, for example, has sustained, albeit in varying forms, the secularist traditions established by Ataturk, Iran, following the Islamic revolution, swung in the opposite direction. Here, a cross of Persian nationalism and Shia fundamentalism gave rise to a pluralistic republican order on the outside and a theocracy on the inside. Again, the Arab countries stand apart. Following independence, their systems of government either took the form of despotic dynastic monarchies or parliamentary republics that were soon transformed by military coup to dictatorships, also with dynastic leanings. These "republican" dictatorships, which based their legitimacy on nationalist and Arab nationalist slogans, rested their power on military establishments that were tyrannical towards their own people but weak and easily defeated by their outside enemies -- primarily Israel. Because the foremost concern of the ruling elites in these countries was to perpetuate themselves in power, they transformed their countries, by means of direct and indirect forms of repression, into weak and backwards societies, heavily dependent upon the regime, too intimidated not to conform, and despairing of any possibility of change. The eventual effect of this was to sap political life of all vitality, as evidenced by widespread apathy and the dwindling presence and efficacy of political parties and organisations of civil society. With no institutionalised channels of expression to turn to, large segments of the general public, and even the political and intellectual elites, reverted to organic sectarian or kin- based bonds and this, against the backdrop of poverty, despair and insecurity, facilitated the rise of fundamentalist movements as a form of political protest. These movements were brutally repressed only to emerge ever more radical and determined. Their growing impetus was simultaneously fed by a string of military adventures waged by Arab regimes against Israel, the failure of which drove these regimes to further militarise life at home and to augment the levels of domestic repression in order to defend their grip on power. Also contributing to the rising influence and increasingly vehement militancy of fundamentalist movements were the various forms of American intervention in the Middle East. Although this interventionism paraded under the pretext of spreading democracy, it was palpably evident that its aim was to assert American control over the region and the region's petroleum resources, and that the official Arab order was directly or indirectly lending itself to America's strategies. Regretfully, the movements that claimed to stand for the defence of Arab and Islamic identity drove large segments of society to turn inwards and to regard anything that came from the West as a threat to this identity. There, thus, arose a new source of underdevelopment as ideas and knowledge that people would under normal circumstances strive to acquire became "dangerous" imports. Even large segments of the political and intellectual elite seemed to lack that essential awareness that all truly vibrant national identities thirst for enrichment, which comes from the fertile interaction with other cultures, and with those achievements that are the property of universal human civilisation and that hold the keys to progress and development for all peoples. THE ARAB-ISRAELI CONFLICT: Any investigation into the source of the regional problem and its repercussions in the course of its modern history must inevitably lead us to an issue that has yet to receive its proper share of attention on the part of the international community. Although the Arab-Israeli conflict essentially concerns the Palestinian cause and the right of the Palestinian people to an independent state in accordance with the UN resolution of 1947 calling for the partition of Palestine and the creation of an Arab and a Hebrew state side-by-side, it has other far-reaching dimensions. The 58-year-long Arab-Israeli conflict is at the root of enormous material and spiritual destruction in the region and remains a complex and intractable threat to the peace and security of the region and the world. The recent Israeli invasion of Lebanon, regardless of what triggered it, is another in the series of wars connected with the Arab-Israeli dispute. Like its predecessors, it generated dangerous levels of regional and international tension. Nor has this chapter in the conflict ended yet. It is long overdue that the international community summon the courage and responsibility to remedy this conflict at its roots. Israel must not be allowed to persist in its refusal of the Palestinians' right to an independent state on their territory and in its savage repression of this people on the grounds that they are defending this right by recourse to arms. Israeli intransigence and brutality only conspire to make the problem worse, to cause greater death and destruction, and to stimulate more widespread and increasingly violent manifestations of extremism. Events in Palestine today are a catastrophe in the fullest sense of the term. The world is standing by as a people demanding their inalienable right to nationhood is being annihilated. But this conflict is also a catastrophe for all Arab people and the people of Israel, precisely because it continues to fester as a source of tension and violence. Therefore, all possible effort must be made to compel Israel to enter into serious negotiations leading to the creation of a fully sovereign Palestinian state within pre-June 1967 boundaries and with its capital as East Jerusalem. Only such a solution will defuse current tensions and, simultaneously, take the wind out of the sails of extremist-fundamentalist movements. THE US OCCUPATION OF IRAQ: While it is not within our scope here to delve into the intricate details of the situation in Iraq resulting from the American occupation and the various forms of intervention in that country by Iraq's neighbours, it is important to note that the origins of the Iraqi tragedy reside in a brutal dictatorial regime that ruled the country for nearly 40 years, during which it wreaked enormous material and moral damage. The irony is that today Iraq is torn by a conflict involving diverse parties bent on preventing Iraq, whose regime was overthrown on the pretext of spreading democracy, from emerging as a truly pluralistic democracy, because such a form of government would conflict with the interests of other dictatorial regimes in the region, and notably the regimes of Syria and Iran. Paradoxically, and very ominously, this conflict has assumed the tenor of a dispute between Sunni Islam, the creed of the majority of the people in the Arab world, and Shia Islam, led by Iran. THE COLLAPSE OF NATIONAL REVIVAL PROJECTS: It is impossible to address the multiple crises that beset the region without discussing the failure of the grand projects of national liberation inspired by socialist ideas. That the national liberation movements in question laid seeds for the demise of their own projects for change by producing dictatorial regimes is undeniable. Equally beyond doubt is that this process of degeneration began decades before the collapse of the international socialist order that had been a major source of inspiration. The causes for the decline of the parties that had affixed "socialist" to their names were, thus, internal, and foremost among these were the strenuous social, economic and political conditions generated by dictatorial regimes. However, another source of these parties' decline was structural: unable for various reasons to take root in their societies, they attached themselves to authorities of the regime, forfeiting whatever autonomy they may have possessed. Then, following the collapse of the Soviet order, they aligned themselves, to varying degrees, with political factions bound by allegiances of mutual interest and other more traditional forms of allegiance. Under such conditions of dependency and weakness, they also lost their ability to accurately gauge the mood and conditions in their own country and, hence, to participate constructively and dynamically to the process of change. There were external causes as well. Prime among these was the nature of the connection between these parties and the Soviet Union. Moscow's long-prevailing paternalistic relationship with these parties was well known, as was the repression of all tendencies that strayed from the directives of the Comintern. This said, the decline of these nationalist projects did not occur overnight. It would also be doing them injustice to belittle the pivotal role the international socialist movement and the national movements inspired by them played in various struggles for political and social justice. However, the divisions that arouse between the communist and nationalist camps over national leaderships, the conflicts between them over the aims and means of their struggle, and the rifts that occurred within these parties because of their totalitarian ideology and centralised organisation ultimately left their negative impact on all. In addition, because these parties and movements were driven more by their utopian ideas, slogans and fervour than by rational political design, the frequently plunged headlong into political adventures, the most dangerous and disastrous of which were wars with Israel for which they were not equipped, forced unifications between certain countries, and military coups in order to hasten their rise to power. This outcome of this impetuousness was the rise of militaristic totalitarian governments, defeat and destruction from wars with Israel, brutal repression of all forms of protest and persecution of national minorities. The upshot of these phenomena was that the public recoiled from the nationalist revival projects and, above all, from the leaderships of these projects. The conditions were thus in place for the rise of various fundamentalist movements and their bid to occupy the vacuum extant in the struggle for the present and the future. THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE US: Among the most immediate consequences of the earthshaking collapse of the Soviet Union was that the world fell captive to a unipolar order led by the US. However, as momentous as this change was, it was not the first indicator of the growing influence of globalised capitalism in the contemporary world. Indeed, capitalist globalisation had begun to assert itself since at least as early as the 1970s, in tandem with America's drive towards global hegemony, as exemplified by Washington's determination to control the United Nations and its incessant campaigns to expand its influence through interventionist wars and various forms of economic coercion against peoples and nations. The many forms of injustice and tyranny that the US has inflicted, and continues to inflict, on the peoples and nations of this region have bred deep resentment. It is simultaneously clear that despair drives some people not only to suicide but also to violent forms of protest. Alongside the exploitation and deprivation caused by globalised capitalism, the people of this Middle East additionally suffer from the US's relentless direct and indirect suppression of their national, social and human rights. The most salient example takes the form of Washington's boundless support for Israel and longstanding deliberate blindness to the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. The international community attaches nowhere near the level of concern to this issue as the people of Arab world, and it has yet to appreciate the fact that one of the main reasons why vast segments of public opinion in this region tend to overlook the injustices of the Saddam Hussein regime, to postpone consideration of the potential dangers of religious fundamentalism and to sympathise with Hizbullah, Hamas and even Bin Laden, resides in their overwhelming and growing rancour towards the US, Israel and the international Zionist movement. Indeed, an increasing portion of this discontent is also homing in on the international community due to its inability to stand up against American bullying and Israeli racism. UNAVOIDABLE SOLUTIONS: The purpose of this article was to offer an overview of the urgent problems confronting this region and to appeal to the international community to devote a level of attention commensurate to the gravity of these problems; to familiarising itself with their deeper causes and intricacies. Only then will the international community be properly equipped to help the peoples of this region produce phased solutions to these issues and, thereby, rescue the cause of peace and stability in this region and the world and, simultaneously, come to the aid of oppressed and victimised peoples here and elsewhere. Although it was not my purpose to suggest solutions, I will permit myself the opportunity to offer some brief deductions that I believe will contribute to an accurate and realistic reading of present problems and, hence, to viable and just solutions. First, however, I would like to state what I consider to be the four axiomatic principles with regard to the treatment of peoples and nations and their problems. I refer to these as the "four impossibilities": Firstly, happiness cannot be forcefully imposed from abroad against a people's will. The attempt will only backfire against the outside power and produce within the country concerned results contrary to the aims of the intervention. Afghanistan, from the time of the Soviet occupation to the present, stands as the most succinct illustration of this principle. Secondly, a victorious revolution should not try to export its revolution and its religious or secular ideological authority by force or other means. Iran's Islamic revolution offers the clearest evidence of the dangers inherent in this process, both for the exporter (the Iranian revolution) and for the recipients (in this case Lebanon and Iraq). It is useful, in this context, to recall developments in Eastern Europe triggered by the Soviet Union in the wake of World War II and the consequences of these events half a century later. Thirdly, military intervention and occupation violate every principle of international and humanitarian law. Here, I refer specifically to the brutal US occupation of Iraq, the Israeli occupation and savage repression of the Palestinians and the Syrian military and political intervention in Lebanon. The spurious justifications and pretexts for these attempts by a super or regional power to impose its will on others are legion, and they all collapse at close inspection. Fourthly, it is wrong to try to suppress religious movements by military means. This applies both to the reactionary and barbarous -- such as the Bin Laden- and Zarqawi-led brands of Islamism -- and to Islamist resistance movements as exemplified by Hamas and Hizbullah. To attempt to fight these movements, in the name of combating terrorism, without addressing the root causes that gave rise to them will only cause ordinary people, and indeed many political and intellectual elites, to sympathise with them in the face of outside military intervention and even to justify unjustifiable nihilistic and arbitrarily violent acts. The Iranian nuclear question is not unrelated to the foregoing issue. This question has two sides, the first pertaining to Iran's right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes, the second to Iran's determination to produce a nuclear bomb. With regard to the latter aim, Iran points to the Israeli nuclear arsenal and Israel's refusal to submit to international inspection. Simultaneously, it points to Israel's abuse of Palestinian human and national rights, its occupation of the Golan Heights and its refusal to implement the provisions of international resolutions with regard to these issues and others. While these arguments may not justify Iran's possession of nuclear weapon capacity, they do throw into relief that permanent source of danger and instability that is Israeli intransigence with respect to the Palestinian cause. Any solution to the Iranian nuclear question must take into account its underlying double dynamic. If democratic forces in the world opposed to American policies truly hope to remedy the problems outlined above they must further realise that merely by declaring their support for the causes of the peoples of this region they contribute little to helping these peoples achieve their aspirations and to stemming the American drive towards global hegemony. It is time that we derive and apply practical and realistic means to address the problems of downtrodden people, to curbing the flagrant and brutal American interventionism, and to halting America's continued attempts to undermine the prestige of the United Nations and to obstruct the functions for which it was created in the wake of World War II. It cannot be overstated how vital it is that all efforts be taken to rehabilitate the UN as an international organisation beyond the control of a single nation or a small clique of nations, fully empowered and equipped to enforce the resolutions it adopts in the interest of promoting and safeguarding the right of all peoples to self- determination. One important way that democratic forces around the world can promote this end and the cause of international justice as a whole is to set into motion and support an international movement for globalised humanitarianism. Only such an alternative to globalised rampant capitalism has the promise to strengthen a truly democratic interaction between the diverse peoples and cultures of the world and to usher in a more humane universal civilisation. With regard to the peoples of the Middle East, they must be empowered to throw off all forms of totalitarianism, whether of a religious or nationalist stripe, and to liberate themselves from all forms of tyranny, both traditional and otherwise, that prevent them from entering the modern age. The steps towards this end are many and formidable. The peoples of this region must strive to build modern democratic states; draw up thoroughly studied plans for social, cultural and economic development; and generally work to free their societies of all residual forms of despotism and from all pieties that have been imposed on the people in the name of keeping identity frozen and isolated from all sources of renewal and enrichment, and in the name of religion stripped of its humanity and distorted by myths and prejudices that are inimical to its inherent humanitarian values. It may fall upon democratic and enlightened religious forces in these countries to push for religious reforms that have their roots both in Islamic history and in the Arab national revival movement that evolved during the 19th century only to be repressed by forces at home and abroad during the 20th century. However, it will be simultaneously important for leftist, socialist and Arab nationalist forces inspired by socialist ideas to do all in their power to regain their former influence, towards which end they, too, must bring their ways of thinking and organisation in line with the times and free themselves of those attitudes and forms of behaviour that contributed to their debilitation, fragmentation and marginalisation. The road ahead will be far from easy. The issues that need to be addressed are extremely complex, made all the more obdurate by a history of major crises and over which hovers a future laden with doubt. But if anything should inspire the resolve of the peoples of this region and the international community it is that all these crises combined brought only further self-destruction while constantly raising alarm over regional and world peace. * The writer is a Lebanese politician, member of the 14 March group, and former deputy secretary-general of the Lebanese Communist Party. This article appears simultaneously in the French magazine Foundation published by the Gabriel Berri Institution in Paris.