Images and Tasks: Before and After the US Election

On the eve of the American presidential election, three images from the Middle East caught my attention:

Image No. 1: When Iraqi citizens Monday started to register for voting in their scheduled January 2005 parliamentary elections, they often refused to allow themselves to be filmed by television cameras; they feared being killed or abducted by anti-American and anti-Iraqi interim government militants. Stealth voter registration is not a very good start for an Iraqi democratization process that the US touts as crucial to its long-term aims in the Middle East.

Image No. 2: When the Iranian Parliament overwhelmingly voted last week to continue uranium enrichment activities, defying the US and the world, the entire Parliament - conservatives and reformers alike - stood up and rhythmically chanted "death to America." Iran is one of the few legitimate, credible, genuine, stable and powerful nation-states in the Middle East. To unite the entire Iranian Parliament in such a rhetorical but heartfelt death chant against the US is not a good sign for Washington's desire to win the hearts and minds of just ordinary folks out here in the swamp.

Image No. 3: Osama bin Laden appears in a video recording a few days before the American election, speaking calmly about his motives for attacking the United States and suggesting a different American policy course to end his confrontation with America. The image was not of a harried bin Laden hiding in his cave, but rather of a political activist or professorial type calmly lecturing on policy issues at the Council on Foreign Relations. This man came to debate and engage on television, not to fight in Tora Bora. The cave has entered the post-modern world.

These three images spell trouble for the United States in the Middle East. The next American president will instantly find himself having to deal with several Middle Eastern issues that will be with us for decades: the war in Iraq, the "war on terror," the Arab-Israeli conflict, promoting democracy and free market economies, and non-proliferation of nuclear capabilities and weapons of mass destruction. Americans and Middle Easterners - leaders or citizens - must move quickly to address these issues in a more constructive manner than that which has given us the three images I mentioned above.

Instant solutions are not possible. We required decades to arrive at today's situation of mutually polarized anger, militant policies, and freelance terroristic barbarism. The extreme attitudes and killer actions of Donald Rumsfeld and Osama bin Laden brewed and matured for decades, and now plague us all. They will be changed slowly, only over some time, but that process must start soon.

Current attitudes and policies - based on fear, anger, revenge, ignorance, transforming and killing the enemy - are defined by small groups of leaders on both sides. Yet ultimately they reflect, and must be approved by, their public opinions. A majority of Americans wants to continue the war on terror and complete the tasks defined by Washington in Iraq. A mirror majority of Arabs supports resistance attacks against American troops in Iraq and political defiance of US policies throughout the region, such as in Israel-Palestine and Iran.

Relatively small groups of extremist militants led by the likes of Rumsfeld and bin Laden can be dealt with. What makes this situation so dangerous is the broad, intense public acquiescence in the mutual killing among Americans and Middle Easterners, which is why US-Mideast relations must be addressed quickly by both sides after the election.

Such an effort must transcend the distorted mindsets and deviant behavior of the bands of militants of this world. It must start with those vast publics in both regions, the masses of American, Arab, Iranian, Israeli, Turkish and other ordinary people whose rights, sentiments, and interests - rather than ignorance and fears - should drive policy.

Official individuals and institutions in both worlds have miserably failed their respective people. Institutions of civil society - academia, the media, religious groups, think tanks, women, labor and business organizations - must step forward now and take three critical steps that mediocre officials and criminal militants on both sides have failed to do:

1. Allow the moderate, sensible majority of Americans and Middle Easterners to engage one another with respect and even affection - the dominant sentiments that I have seen define the encounter among these people throughout my own lifetime of constant movement among them both. Thousands and thousands of people from both worlds must sit down and meet and talk in person, rather than trade barbs on television, or exchange rockets and dead bodies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

2. Drop the rhetoric, and forge sensible, realistic, practical policies on both sides that respond to the ideals and rights of the Middle Eastern and American populations. Policies that reflect the will and rights of their citizens will enjoy deep support anchored in the best human and national values of both peoples, rather than the current uncomfortable public support for the vengeful policies of war and death.

3. Generate a powerful new spirit of cooperation among Americans and Middle Easterners by starting with the principle that all human beings and countries must adhere to a single standard of political morality and international law. Consistency is probably the single most important political value whose application now would help to start winding down, and ultimately reversing, the current trajectory of confrontation and war as the defining elements in American-Middle Eastern relations.

The people and civil society institutions of the Middle East and the United States, along with others in the world, must move quickly to engage one another, forge sensible policies that respond to their common needs, and move towards a more peaceful new order through the application of the agreed rule of law to all, without exception. The American presidential election is not the magic carpet that takes us on this journey. It simply reminds us how critically important it is to move in this direction, because the existing American and Middle Eastern political leaderships have failed us all so miserably, and repeatedly.