David Brooks’ column in the Sunday issue of The New York Times deserves a few thoughts from a colleague who has generally admired his work, but finds him now reflecting the troubling intellectual and ideological gap between the United States and the Arab world. One of the grave new threats facing both sides is the declining quality of public analysis and discussion of American-Middle Eastern relations, especially in the mainstream American media that have lived so cozily with the exercise of American military power in the Middle East in recent years. I was particularly struck by this column because I read it on the last day of a two-week trip to the US that allowed me to mix with a wide range of Middle East experts, scholars in various fields, and many other Americans. Everywhere, I encountered and sometimes engaged in a lively, healthy discussion on the deteriorating relations between various quarters of the US and many people in the Arab and Islamic world. In all the discussions and encounters I had – including with many fine men and women at the US Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, at the University of Chicago, and the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, and in Philadelphia, Boston and New York City – the dominant tone was that American-Middle Eastern relations were in deep trouble and we needed to put our heads together to find a way out of the mess we had created. I have had the exact same discussions with a variety of Arabs, Iranians, Israelis, and Turks for many years; but for some reason this deeper reality of an ongoing quest for rational problem-solving rarely gets into the mainstream American media. Brooks in his column wrote about his views after attending a weekend conference in Jordan that brought together Arab intellectuals and activists with leading American neoconservatives. He concluded: “The events of the past three years have shifted [the Arabs’] diagnosis of where the cancer is – from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in [the American Israel Public Affairs Committee]. He saw Arab elites becoming less introspective, and instead “blaming everything on the villainous Israeli network. And so we enter a more intractable phase in the conflict, which will not be a war over land or oil or even democratic institutions, but a war over narratives. Americans, meanwhile, will simply want to get out. After 9/11, George Bush called on the US to get deeply involved in the Middle East. But now, most Americans have given up on their ability to transform the Middle East and on Arab willingness to change. What we have is not a clash of civilizations, but a gap between civilizations, increasingly without common narratives, common goals or means of communication. I’ve spent my whole life between the US and the Arab world, and I strongly disagree. While Arabs do blame Israel and the US for many of their contemporary ills (and European colonial powers, too, not to forget that older culprit), they have also spent much of the last quarter-century criticizing their own elites and power structures, and trying to figure out how to make things better at home. American and Arab civilizations share many common goals, and can use numerous means of communications should they make the effort. My experience in traveling between these two civilizations is that Arabs and Americans share predominantly common values and goals. However, they are plagued by the problem of entangled relations in the Arab-Israeli-American web, and poor political leadership verging on the morally deficient and criminally negligent on all sides. Focusing only on Arab criticism of the US and Israel while ignoring the rest of this cycle, and sidestepping the impact of American and Israeli policies in the Middle East, is both factually inaccurate and politically inflammatory. Our most useful job as newspaper columnists is not to lounge in an ideological fog that mediocre statesmen and angry citizenries generate, but rather to cut through it, to make way for more complete, honest communication. Powerful American leaders like President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice choose to inhabit worlds in which Arabs and Muslims suffer terrible faults that must be rectified by the values-changing and swamp-draining actions of the noble American armed forces. Arab dictators, extremists and terrorists respond with equal ferocity and intellectual dishonesty. Those who have the opportunity to shape and enrich the public debate should describe, understand and repudiate all such fanaticism, not just be irritated and perplexed by it. That many journalists abandoned this responsibility four years ago has proven terribly costly to all of us. We should avoid repeating that shortcoming by making a more rigorous effort to understand and describe our world in all its integrity and complexity, however perplexing things may appear on any one weekend. Rami G. Khouriwrites a twice-weekly commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
Where columnist David Brooks went wrong
