More communication and understanding is needed between the US and the Arab world if there is to be peace between the two cultures, the Managing Director of the Arab American Institute in Washington, DC, said to a near empty Cabot Auditorium Wednesday.
AbiNader said that the central problem of US-Arab relations was that the US government does not fully comprehend the situation in the Arab world, and therefore miscalculates its policies.
How the US perceives the Arab world and plans to capture its "hearts and minds," AbiNader said, "has not been discussed in this country." Despite the high levels of US spending in the Middle East, there are rarely serious foreign policy debates, he said.
AbiNader characterized the switch from a doctrine of non-intervention to preemption as part of a larger foreign policy shift by the Bush administration. The US relies on certain paradigms, or models, to guide how the country will respond to each international event, AbiNader said.
The problem with using models, according to AbiNader, is that the values and assumptions of Middle Eastern peoples are fundamentally different than American ones. Because they do not understand Arab priorities, US policy will not capture the "hearts and minds" of the Arab people, he said.
This failure to understand Arab culture can be seen in the US's push for democracy across the region. "If you go to the Arab world, ask any Arab, the top of his list is not going to be elections," AbiNader said.
Instead, with the exception of an increased emphasis on religion, many Arab values are similar to American ones, with items like health care and free speech at the top of the list.
The US needs to get more involved, AbiNader said, so that it can keep the lines of communication open and allow the Arab world's needs, wants, and values to get through to the US government's policies. After Sept. 11, the US increased its presence in the region, and now it must decide to continue that involvement or fall back to traditional isolationism.
But the problems do not all lie in how the US deals with the Arab world, AbiNader said. There also needs to be a realization from Arab leaders and governments that they need to focus more on their domestic issues and problems, and less on foreign affairs related to the Middle East's balance of power.
The problem is aggravated by high population growth rates and low economic growth, which combine to help create a massive unemployed and poor population. "The Arabs have to start looking at themselves as works in progress," he said.
He said that many Arabs rank the Palestinian issue as one of their highest "personal" problems, which is a serious hurdle if the US wishes to be successful in recruiting the average Arab citizen to its cause. This is why the Israeli-Palestinian issue needs to be dealt with before any other movement can be made in the region, according to AbiNader.
Before getting into the heart of his speech, AbiNader spent a good deal of time going over the history of US involvement in the Middle East in order to set the stage for the current issues. According to him, the US needs to examine its history with the Middle East to predict what will happen in the future.
AbiNader pulled three lessons from history that the US should do to improve relations with the Arab world: deal with the international opposition to the Iraq war, create and follow a road map for Palestinian-Israeli peace, and increase education in the Arab states.
He argued that any Middle East solution cannot be American-based, because the US government is too fickle and affected by domestic policies to create a long term strategic goal. "The UN can provide continuity to these projects that we can't," he said.
The event was sponsored by the Tufts' Arab Student Association.
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