Conversations: An American in Beirut

When I heard John Waterbury was stepping down as president of the American University of Beirut, I phoned him to ask how his 10-year tenure had gone. I was slightly taken aback by Waterbury's gloom when I asked him how he saw things generally in the Middle East. He offered a long-term view that was disturbing but certainly thought-provoking.

"I have been working and living in the Middle East since 1959-1960," he said, "and I have never seen a period in which U.S.-Arab or U.S.-Middle Eastern relations have been at a lower ebb. What really has discouraged me and depressed me in this situation is that anything that the U.S. advocates, even policies that I think in other times would have been listened to seriously if not respected, are now denounced simply because they emanate from Washington. The whole democracy agenda is simply identified with the Bush administration. Democracy advocates can't hold their heads up. They are immediately accused of trying to carry out the Bush agenda in the Middle East and somehow being complicit in all aspects of U.S. policy. Liberalism has kind of disappeared as a force. It is very hard for a liberal or a democrat to advocate their agenda without being tarred with the brush of being a lackey of the Bush administration. The ground is shaking under their feet.

"Why I think relations are so bad, unprecedented in my experience," he added, "is that we have managed to alienate our friends. Over the decades, even in the police states of the Middle East, a rather large middle class has built up alienated from their own regimes. They were fairly well disposed towards the West and towards the United States. We have lost them. Either they are scared to speak up. Or they are flat out outraged."

I've always had great respect for the university and the man. AUB is one of the finest universities in the Middle East, and represents the best of what America has offered the Arab world. AUB began spreading American ideas and values well over a century before the Bush administration discovered the merits of doing so through Karen Hughes's public diplomacy or Liz Cheney's Middle East Partnership Initiative. Since it opened its doors in 1866, initially as a project of Presbyterian missionaries, AUB has educated tens of thousands of Arabs. AUB imbued its students with ideals such as open society, tolerance and free debate that were often lacking in their own countries. A list of AUB graduates is a Who's Who of the Arab world that includes leading government ministers, educators and businessmen. To name two: Ghassan Tueni, the legendary owner of the An Nahar publishing house in Beirut, and Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian deputy prime minister who has just been appointed senior vice president of the World Bank.

Americans like Waterbury have provided a tremendous service to the Arabs and to fellow Americans as well, often at great personal risk. Former AUB President David Dodge was held hostage by Iranian-backed Muslim radicals for a year. His brave successor was Malcolm Kerr, who was assassinated outside his office by a suspected Islamic extremist in January 1984. I was in Beirut at the time, a few blocks away, and can tell you that it was a very black day for Lebanon and for America. Kerr, who was born in Beirut of parents who taught at AUB, was a leading Arabist of his generation. Waterbury, originally a specialist on Morocco who taught at Princeton for 20 years, was the first president to take up residence again in Beirut after Kerr's death. Since 1998 he has revived AUB's fortunes and spirits, significantly upgrading academic excellence and campus facilities alike.

When Waterbury told me that despite AUB's success he saw the potential for worse in the region, I listened.

"There is more room to fall," he said. "We have taken moderate, middle-class professional people, who looked to the United States --not to come in and provide solutions, but to help them carve out some political space in their own countries-- and they now have given up hope and turned away from us. That's bad in itself. But why I think it could get worse is those are the very people who have the means to leave. They have connections abroad. My fear is that they are going to start bailing out and reestablish in Los Angeles, or Hamburg, or Paris, or Australia. So as a political force in the region for moderation and a reasonable dialogue with the West, they may begin to disappear. It happened in Iran after the 1979 revolution. It is happening en masse in Iraq. If there is reconciliation, I don't know who is left to reconcile. What you leave behind are going to be very difficult and ornery actors let alone elements that could sustain some kind of democratic system in Iraq.

"My fear is that we're going to see this constant erosion of a potentially pro-western middle class in the Middle East, as they are ground down by their own authoritarian regimes and a U.S. actor that has so far engaged with the region in forceful and muscular confrontation. I'm struck by how much change takes place from generation to generation. In any 20-25-year period, we can see rather dramatic shifts in mood and the way people think about things. I stress this because we have a tendency to fight the last battle and not anticipate the new one. It's extraordinarily hard to predict what we might be looking at in 15 or 20 years from now. Things may go much better than I'm anticipating, or they might actually go much worse."

What explains this situation? According to Waterbury, it is related to...

"...the current situation of confrontational politics between the United States and the Middle East. I think it's pretty simple. There are a number of policies which I would call the military-coercive policies of the United States which for whatever reasons are highly unpopular in the Middle East. The invasion and so-called occupation of Iraq. From the point of view of most Middle Easterners, a kind of blind U.S. backing for Israel's policies in the West Bank and the occupied territories in general. These are the two flash points. They are so deeply and hugely unpopular that it is quite easy for the major adversaries of the United States in the Middle East to associate anything coming from Washington with these unpopular policies.

"Anytime a non-Middle Eastern power puts troops on the ground, I think you can expect a huge reaction. The Middle East has been the subject of foreign invasion and occupation for a very long time. So it is a very gut instinct for Middle Easterners to react very negatively and suspiciously to a foreign force on its ground. When a 140,000 of those troops happen to come from the most powerful nation in the world, that kind of makes it even worse. It may have looked totally justifiable to us sitting across the Atlantic to have done so, particularly in light of 9/11, but it really was just a matter of time, and not very much time, before that presence would be resented, opposed, feared, denounced. That has enormously complicated a long ongoing situation of resentment of U.S. support for Israel and its struggle with its Arab neighbors."

Waterbury says he's seen the problem first-hand in the aftermath of Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution."

"The so-called opposition has to some extent successfully identified [Prime Minister] Fouad Siniora with a kind of blind loyalty or even lackeyism towards the Bush administration," he said. "It's an unfair portrayal of Siniora and his government, but it is one that I think has some resonance with many Lebanese. That is unfortunate, because Siniora's government was democratically elected, and yet the legitimately that should have come with that has been severely tarnished by his image as, to put it unkindly, as a puppet of Washington."

Waterbury's prescription?

"Not an easy one. I don't see how the damage that has been done can be rectified in any short period of time. I think it's the work of at least two or three administrations if all went well to begin to repair the damage. I don't want to be naive. At the end of the day, this is the greatest military and economic power on earth and I would never expect many people to love us or even welcome us into the neighborhood. Repairing the damage would be entering into a much less confrontational and more interactive and cooperative mode with the Middle East. With the understanding that no one is ever going to throw roses to Washington, no matter what administration is in there. We are just too big and frightening for that ever to be the case."

--By Scott MacLeod/Cairo