Has Trump's Bizarre Win, Enabled An Even More Aggressive Putin?

In the last couple of weeks, Putin allies have come to power-- with his help-- in Moldava, Bulgaria and the United States. (Yes, Obama completely failed to protect America from that menace... and now I'm worried that the brutal Russian dictator will turn Ed Snowden over to Trumpanzee the first time el Presidente Pepe The Frog needs a rabbit to pull out of a hat.) This morning the Financial Times reported about Putin's ties to the neo-Nazi far right in an increasingly fascist Hungary (whose leader, Viktor Orban, and Trump have already forged a bond). Last week, The Guardian reported that some Russian agents were expelled from Serbia-- Russia's traditional ally-- for trying to implement a coup in neighboring Montenegro-- a coup that would have cost the lives of Montenegrin Prime Minister Milo Ðjukanović and Serbian Prime Minister Aleksandar Vučić.

The plotters were allegedly going to dress in police uniforms to storm the Montenegrin parliament in Podgorica, shoot the prime minister, Milo Ðjukanović, and install a pro-Moscow party.

The Russian fingerprints on the October plot have heightened intrigue about Moscow’s ambitions in a part of Europe hitherto thought to be gravitating towards the EU’s orbit.

A group of 20 Serbians and Montenegrins, some of whom had fought with Moscow-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, were arrested in Podgorica, the Montenegrin capital. In Serbia, meanwhile, several Russian nationals suspected of coordinating the plot were caught with €120,000 and special forces uniforms.

According to the Belgrade daily, Danas, the Russians also had encryption equipment and were able to keep track of Đjukanović’s whereabouts.

Diplomatic sources told the Guardian the Belgrade government quietly deported the Russians after the intervention of the head of the Russian security council, Nikolai Patrushev, who flew to Belgrade on 26 October in an apparent effort to contain the scandal. The country’s interior minister, Nebojša Stefanović denied the government carried out any deportations connected to the plot.

A source close to the Belgrade government said Patrushev, a former FSB (federal security service) chief, apologised for what he characterised as a rogue operation that did not have the Kremlin’s sanction. In Moscow, a Security Council official told Tass that Patrushev “didn’t apologise to anyone, because there is nothing to apologise for.”

The Serbian government was further rattled three days after Patrushev’s visit when a cache of arms was found near the home of the prime minister, Aleksandar Vučić. The weapons were discovered at a junction where Vučić’s car would normally slow down on his way to the house.

Stefanović said there were “strong suspicions” that an organised crime gang had been hired to kill Vučić for €10m, but he would not specify who was behind the alleged plot, saying further investigation would show whether people “outside the region” were involved.

...Đjukanović has been instrumental in pulling his country to the verge of Nato membership-- an accession protocol was signed in May-- which has dashed Russian hopes of securing a naval foothold on the Adriatic. According to the Montenegrin press, Moscow lobbied hard in recent years for transit and maintenance facilities at the ports of Bar and Kotor.

The importance of such facilities was demonstrated late last month when the Russian carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov and its battle group was denied refuelling in European ports along their way to support the Russian military effort in Syria.

In Serbia, Vučić has been seeking a delicate balance between Nato and Russia, and the country’s armed forces have conducted military exercises with both, although far more frequently in recent years with Nato. Vučić has also refused to grant diplomatic status to Russian officials staffing a Serbian-Russian humanitarian centre established in the city of Niš in 2012, infuriating Moscow.

...Maria Zakharova, spokeswoman for the Russian foreign ministry wrote on Facebook: “The publication in the Guardian with a link to ‘sources’ saying that Patrushev apologised for ‘Russian nationalists’ who had planned to kill the prime minister of Montenegro is a classic provocation aimed at spreading knowingly false information.

“I declare you “liars of the day”. You can sew your own hat.”

In an OpEd for Al Arabiya, Hisham Melhem asked the question about what a Trump presidency will mean for th Middle East, fretting that "given the paucity of President-elect Donald Trump’s clear views on the Middle East’s myriad crises and challenges, after a long campaign of contradictory positions and since he has not fully staffed his National Security team, it is difficult to analyze with great certainty how the 45th American president will deal with a rapidly changing region that has been accustomed to strong American leadership. The president-elect will soon realize that his outlandish claims and demands during the campaign, such as taking over the oil resources of countries where the US is engaged militarily or extracting protection money from other allies, are not feasible or realistic... Trump’s views on Middle Eastern crises and problems are vague," he continued, "incomplete or simplistic declarative sentences such as 'we will bomb the hell out of them.' However, he has stuck to few positions during the campaign and based on what he said and did not say, one can make some preliminary, tentative observations. Somewhat surprisingly, some of his views are in sync with the Obama administration. Mr. Trump, like President Obama, does not see the removal of the Assad regime as America’s first priority in Syria, but rather to continue the fight against ISIS until it ceases to be a 'governing' authority. One of the few consistent views of Mr. Trump during the campaign was his lavish praise of the leadership of Russian President Vladimir Putin, including in Syria, where he would like to collaborate with Russia to 'knock out ISIS together.'"

Melhem warms that Trump is ill-informed and his claims about "Russia, the Assad regime and Iran are carrying out joint military operations against ISIS" are just plain erroneous-- and Russian propaganda that no one but Trump and other Putin puppets seem to believe.

President-elect Trump shares President Obama’s refusal to get involved more deeply and militarily in the Middle East. President Obama is tired of the Middle East and has been critical of the Egyptian government’s violations of human rights and issues across the region. President Trump, on the other hand, wants to restore relations with Egypt including restoration of economic support. The initial studied welcome of Arab, Turkish and Israeli officials of the election of Mr. Trump is also due to the fact that Trump rarely spoke about the need to foster and support human rights and human dignity in the world, including the countries of the Middle East. The election of Mr. Trump, whose autocratic tendencies are well known and documented, has coincided with the rise of a confederacy of strong men and/or autocrats all over the world, including a number of them in western Europe, catapulted by populist movements and right wing parties and strong opposition to new immigrants and refugees from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. President Putin is actively supporting this worrisome phenomenon and is familiar with the major players in it. Democracy as a system of governance is in a state of retreat. The silence of Mr. Trump during his campaign in the face of violations of human rights in Middle Eastern societies and beyond can only be welcomed by the autocrats who will not be subjected in the next four years to the usual cajoling and pressure that previous administrations imposed on America’s allies.

That’s in part what the Trump presidency means for the Middle East.

How Do Normal People View Trump And Trumpism In The Rest Of The World?

It's always worth hearing what people across the world are are listening to about our country. And when it comes to mainstream Arab coverage, al-Arabiya's Hisham Melhem's analysis is especially worthwhile. Melhem has been trying to explain the Trump phenomenon to folks in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Palestine, Algeria and Kuwait. He explains Trump's rise in terms of angry masses of Republican voters. And he predicts that history show "that the United States of America, the strongest, most influential country in history circa 2016 held an election unlike any other. That the nominee of one of its two major political parties was a well-known charlatan, a vulgar, narcissistic, misogynistic and chauvinistic scoundrel who conned his way in his business affairs, and shady relations with dubious associates throughout his life." Anyone who follows U.S. politics should read Fear And Loathing In Trump Nation.

Unlike mainstream American corporately-owned media, Melhem has no problems pointing out that Trump is a classic bully and that that has worked for him against an incredibly weak and incompetent GOP field, the so-called Deep Bench. "During his meteoric rise to political prominence," he wrote, "[Trump] fully employed the tools of intimidation that he had honed in his personal and business dealings, slicing his opponents mercilessly and mostly with sadistic relish, he insulted their physical attributes, distorted their records, denied their experiences, coined epithets for each one, and lied repeatedly about his record and never presented a single coherent policy position, and always, always played on people’s fears and anxieties by manufacturing boogeymen of all sizes and promising to slay them if he is elected." And that was Melhem just starting to warm up!

The nomination of Trump is unprecedented; he was never elected to any office, and his “Republican” credentials are very thin, and throughout his adult life he was not driven by political or ideological considerations but by opportunistic impulses and by his boundless greed. This is a wealthy man-- no one knows the size of his wealth, but certainly it is not as big as he claims-- who prides himself of rigging the system to avoid paying taxes trough declaring bankruptcies, and establishing fake enterprises like his infamous “Trump University”; Trump is the product of the very economic and political establishment that he is telling us now he is running against.

The fact that less than 11 million citizens voted for Trump in the primaries and caucuses representing less than 5 percent of eligible voters is no consolation to those opposing him, because the popular passions he has unleashed by his shameless fearmongering of “others,” be they immigrants, Hispanics, Muslims, Arabs, or Mexicans, his naked exploitation of legitimate economic dislocations, and the alienation of large swath of Americans from the dysfunctional two party system, and his defamation of whole communities inside and outside the United States has already intimidated many of his early critics. There is more than a whiff of George C. Wallace, the late racist governor of Alabama and three-time presidential hopeful, permeated Trump’s rallies, and the threats that he and his supporters have issued against those who dare to demonstrate against them could conceivably lead to bloodshed.

In recent weeks the Republican Party and most of its pliant leaders and many of Trump’s rivals have rallied around him, including Senators Lindsey Graham and Marco Rubio who exchanged personal insults and invective with Trump during the primaries, and other party luminaries like Senator John McCain whose record as prisoner of war was dismissed by Trump. They have invoked party unity and the visceral opposition to the likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. Rubio is now volunteering to speak on behalf of Trump at the Republican convention.

...If Trump is elected, his executive and political power will be so immense and incommensurate with the number of those who voted for him. Historic political hinge moments, good or ugly, are not necessarily achieved by huge majorities of people. In fact small enthusiastic numerical minorities driven by political, ideological or religious passions and led by strong and charismatic leader or leaders have been shaping, building and destroying civilizations since the beginning of organized societies.

The conventional explanation of the rise of Trump nation, (and the Bernie Sanders’ phenomenon on the Left) which reduce his appeal to political alienation from Washington and the economic disparities of many Americans, particularly middle aged white men who are either unemployed or underemployed has merit, but Trump (and Sanders) are about much more than that.

The American society-- because of shifting demographics, the digital revolution and the economic and political impact of globalization and in the wake of the two longest wars in American history-- is changing in a dizzying and on almost every level, and many people are unwilling or incapable of adjusting to these tectonic shifts. By their nature, transitional times are uncertain. The fears and anxiety they create provide fertile land to cunning opportunists like Trump.

When faith in established institutions fades, as represented by the dysfunction of the two party system in Washington, and when governance on the federal, state and local levels fails to efficiently address the people’s expectations particularly in times of economic uncertainties, the appeal of a strong savior willing to act in unorthodox fashion becomes very attractive. Hence, Trump’s appeal to many social constituencies; White low income voters without college degrees, as well as some professional and upper middle class voters, also very conservative voters as well as moderate Republicans flocked to his campaign. Even surprisingly-- given Trump’s ostentatious and promiscuous life style-- some Evangelical groups found in him the answer to their prayers.

Trump nation could not have risen if the Republican Party did not create the toxic environment for such phenomenon. In recent years the Republican tent of olden days has all but disappeared; the socially moderate but fiscally conservative Republicans have been declared extinct. The old healthy conservative skepticism of centralized power was gradually turned into hostility to federal authority. In this environment a trend of anti-intellectualism sets in. Science and the Humanities, as well as critical inquiry, are seen as secular anti-religious tools. About 74 percent of Republicans in the U.S. Senate and 53 percent in the House of Representatives deny the existence of climate change despite overwhelming scientific proof. A Public Policy Polling poll early this year showed that 49 percent of Republicans say they do not believe in evolution. Only 37 percent say they do. And a whopping 57 percent of Republicans would support establishing Christianity as America’s "national religion" which reveals a shocking ignorance of the American Constitution. During the Obama years, these trends became more pronounced.

The leadership of the Republican Party did not challenge the “birther movement’s” implicitly racist claims that President Obama was not born in the United States, or that he is a closet Muslim. The rise of the so-called Tea Party with its armed demonstrations and provocative rhetoric, made the Republican Party more and more entrenched in its ideological rigidity. Donald Trump is in part the product of this Republican universe. Is it Trump that we don’t understand? Or this latest skewed version of the Republican Party that we don’t understand? It is both.

It is a political heresy to question the decisions of the people, or the will of the masses even when the choices of the multitudes are puzzling or disastrous. But it is true that masses in the streets or even at the polling stations make uninformed decisions and vote for illiberal politicians or vote against their economic interests. It is also true that political idiocy and cultural ignorance should not be ruled out when complex political events or phenomena are analyzed.

Every time Donald Trump opens his mouth he celebrates his anti-intellectualism and revels in his parochialism. In Trump nation, supporters are seen as fans, and those who flock to his rallies are expected to act like spectators at a sport stadium. In Trump nation, vulgarity, obtuseness, and implicit racism are seen simply as expressions of political incorrectness.

Regardless of which candidate wins the election come November, Donald Trump will remake the Republican Party and will change America, after an election like no other. Welcome to the strangest and most perplexing election in the world.

Being prepared to effectively resist Trumpism doesn't include Republicans, of course. They had their chance and they blew it-- shamefully and spectacularly. This is brand new (today). This is what it includes... Welcome to the ActBlue #NeverTrump Thermometer, whether you are a Bernie supporter or a Hillary supporter... Trump and Trumpism must be stopped for real:

One Full Century After Sykes-Picot And The Middle East Is In Worse Shape Than Ever

In the Arab world Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot are major historical villains at the heart, most say, of all that troubles the Middle East today. Most Americans would be hard pressed to tell you who either of them is or why their names are historically significant-- and that probably includes Donald Trump, candidate for president of a party that once took foreign policy and national security seriously. It's the 100th anniversary of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and Lebanese Al Arabiya journalist, Hisham Melhem explained it in language even Trump-- if not his followers-- could understand, although not in terms that simplistic interpretations of history tend to embrace.

Short version: the secret agreement between Britain and France during World War I plotted dividing up the crumbling Ottoman Empire was negotiated between 1915 and 1916 and shared with the Tsar's government. When the Communists took over Russia in late 1917, they published it, much to the embarrassment of the imperialists. Ironically, the original agreement awarded Istanbul and the Bosphorus to Russia. It was seen at the time-- and still is-- as the ultimate betrayal of the Arab people by the West, with France gobbling up what is now Syria, Lebanon and part of Iraq and Britain grabbing Palestine, Jordan. Kuwait, most of Iraq and northeastSaudi Arabia, drawing arbitrary boundaries to suit their own needs. To this day, ISIS lists reversing the Agreement as one of its top policy goals. "For my generation of Arabs," wrote Melhem, "the 'Asia Minor Agreement', better known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, came to symbolize imperial betrayal and treachery... In the collective mind of the peoples living in what used to be called Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent, Sykes and Picot became names that shall live in infamy, for they imposed an imperial construct by etching arbitrary lines and coloring zones of influence on a map, and establishing artificial entities over these regions that have been inhabited by a rich mosaic of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, and religions over millennia of successive civilizations."

The Sykes-Picot scheme, like the subsequent agreements, deals, declarations, conferences born out of the crucible of the First World War to create a new order in the land then known as the Near East, were predicated on denying the agency of the human beings who called these regions home. In the decades following the agreement, “Sykes-Picot” became a convenient excuse, and an attractive shorthand used by successive Arab autocrats, despots and ruling elites to justify their disastrous failures at providing good governance, and to explain all the political and economic ills of the region for a full century. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the fault is not in the borders, arbitrary as they may have been, but in what the Arabs have done and not done within the borders.

Huge amount of ink has been shed on the centennial of the map that was born out of the ashes of the First World War and seems to be unraveling now in a crescendo of similar violent upheavals, calamities and disastrous dislocations. But does “Sykes-Picot” deserve this pride of place in the hierarchy of modern Middle Eastern disasters? To begin with, the Sykes-Picot borders and zones of influence have very little in common with the current borders in the Middle East.

But what makes the Sykes-Picot scheme to slice the carcass of the Ottoman Empire stand out is the fact that it was the first of subsequent attempts by Western powers in the decade that followed the war to divide the region. The British issued deceptive and contradictory promises and declarations (the McMahon–Hussein Correspondence and the Balfour Declaration) for the Arabs and the Zionist movement, and in a series of post-war conferences held in locals with strange names for the peoples of the region; The Versailles Peace Conference, The Treaty of Sèvres, the San Remo Conference and the Treaty of Lausanne, most of the current borders of the Middle East were finalized. Again with no regard whatsoever, to the wishes of the peoples whose futures were being shaped by imperial writ.

But the imposition of these maps did not go unchallenged and in fact inspired Arab and Turkish nationalisms. The Turks under the capable leadership of a former Ottoman officer, Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk) undermined both the Sykes-Picot agreement and the Treaty of Sèvres which sought to dismember Anatolia. However, the Arabs led by Faisal Bin Hussein who established the independent Arab Kingdom in March1920 encompassing modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and parts of Turkey, could not defend their new brittle realm against the onslaught of France’s Army of the Levant at the battle of Maysalun near Damascus four months later. The French sought to weaken the nationalist impulses in Syria, by the creation of sectarian statelets for the Alawites on the Mediterranean coast, and for the Druze in the South as well as around the historic cities of Damascus and Aleppo. But these cynical plans for divide and rule were resisted by most Syrians.

During the last century the legacy of the “artificial” borders spawned by Sikes-Picot was repeatedly assaulted politically and in some places were changed by military force, as was the case following the Arab-Israeli wars, and recently with the rise of the self-declared Islamic State (ISIS) which following its control of large swaths of land in both Iraq and Syrian, bulldozed the earthen berms marking the border and declaring “the end of Sykes-Picot.” But decades of grievances against Sykes-Picot elevated it into a mythical status in the minds of many Arabs, a malignant milestone in their modern history, a scapegoat explaining the perennial question asked by generations of Arabs in the last hundred years: what went wrong?

True, the current borders of the Middle East are “artificial,” but most borders in the world are artificial, they are drawn by agreement or as a result of conflicts and don’t necessarily follow natural boundaries like river basins or mountain ranges; and most midsize and large states are heterogeneous with diverse ethnicities, religions and languages. And while the borders of the modern Middle East were arbitrarily drawn, they were not totally without basis, and in fact some borders were somewhat based on the Ottoman vilāyet (from the Arabic Wilaya) administrative system.

Arab and Syrian Nationalists in Syria and Iraq would always complain that they were living in truncated states; but if mandated Syria had included Northeastern Lebanon, Northern Palestine and Alexandretta (in present day Turkey), areas Syrian Nationalists craved because they were at times ruled by Damascus, does that mean that Syria would have developed a just, modern, viable and better representative polity? If the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq had included the old Trans-Jordan and Kuwait, would it follow that Iraq would have followed a radically different political trajectory? We cannot say for sure. But it is very likely, that a larger Iraq and a larger Syria would have ended up where their truncated versions are today. If the Arab Kingdom was not dismantled by the French, in one fell swoop, chances are that it would have gradually unraveled by Turkish Nationalist opposition, and its rejection by the non-Muslim and non-Arab communities within its “artificial“ borders. Creating countries with diverse communities, particularly in the aftermath of upheavals and wars, is always arbitrary, violent and messy, particularly if the new entities are led by oppressive or non-representative regimes and if the basic political and cultural rights of the various communities are not recognized. This is the modern tale of Syria and Iraq. The Ottoman Empire ruled the region for four centuries, before the return of the European armies to the Middle East for the first time since the Medieval Mamluk dynasty that ruled Egypt and Syria drove the Crusaders from their last coastal outpost in Acre, in 1291, thus ending their long occupation of parts of Anatolia, Syria and Palestine.

The defeated Ottoman Empire left behind a devastated Levant and Mesopotamia as a result of war, and famine where whole communities were uprooted and turned into refugees, while others were subjected to mass killings. During the Ottoman centuries the region was controlled by the Sublime Porte in Istanbul through the vilāyet system centered on the historic cities of Damascus, Mosul, Baghdad, and others. Local communities were left to their own devices as long as they paid taxes and did not undermine order. Some communities like the Druse and Maronites of Mount Lebanon enjoyed considerable local autonomy and sometimes decades would pass without these communities encounter a single Ottoman soldier. The various peoples of the region; Arabs, Kurds, Muslims, Christians, Jews and others did mostly co-exist, although there were occasional spasms of religious and ethnic violence and mass killings particularly during the long decline of the Empire in the 19th century. Local leaders representing powerful, domineering feudal families working on behalf of the Sublime Porte, maintained order with an iron fist, and they showed no mercy when confronting social and political protests.

The demise of Ottoman rule exposed a region bereft of political traditions, modern governing institutions and skilled and experienced political elites capable of immediately taking charge of large and diverse societies still reeling from the horrific ravages of a world war. Although the war ravaged and partitioned Anatolia, the emerging Turkish Republic was able to drive the foreign armies from its territories and establish a modern nation-state in part because it was able to rebuild its state institutions and economy and fostered a strong sense of nationhood and quickly established a strong centralized authority. Most of these attributes were lacking in the fragmented lands of the Levant and Mesopotamia. One cannot but ask an intriguing question in this context. What would have happened, if the British/French mandate system was not imposed on the region following the end of the Ottoman centuries? Would it be a stretch to answer: chaos and violence? We will never know for sure, but given the history of the region, the lack of viable institutions, its breathtaking diversity and its tragic conditions after the war, chaos and violence were likely to ensue in the absence of a dominant power exercising control.

In the last five years, with Syria and Iraq unraveling and spewing epic catastrophes, and Sunni-Shia sectarian bloodletting is covering an arc stretching from Beirut on the Mediterranean to Basra at the mouth of the Gulf (not to mention Yemen), predicting the demise of Sykes-Picot has become the default position of many analysts of the region. And one could easily see why. There are powerful forces on the ground trying to demolish the old borders or establish new ones by fire and iron. In the past Arab and Syrian Nationalists considered the imposed borders as the original sin committed by the Europeans against the Arabs, and in the process called into question the legitimacy of the new fragile nation- states that were trying to forge distinct national identities. But now disparate forces, some with legitimate grievances like the Kurds who constitute one of the largest ethnic groups in the world without a state, and who were denied independence after WWI, and terrorist groups like ISIS, are chipping away at the old borders. One could say with considerable certainty that Iraqi Kurdistan has begun its long journey towards independence in 1991 and it is a question of time when the journey will reach statehood. Vice president Joseph Biden, who proposed a decade ago to divide Iraq into three autonomous regions: Kurdish, Shia and Sunnis, told American diplomats and military personnel in Baghdad recently and without a hint of irony, that the U.S. is trying to keep the peace in “places where, because of history, we’ve drawn artificial lines, creating artificial states made up of totally distinct ethnic, religious, cultural groups, and said: ‘have at it. Live together.’”

Scholars and historians will be writing and speculating about the causes of the current convulsions and the absence of good governance in many Arab lands, not only in the Levant and Iraq, but also in Libya, Yemen and beyond for years to come. What is clear is that borders in themselves, are not the causes of Arab dysfunction, or the reasons why Arab civil societies were stunted and never allowed to develop into vibrancy, even in those countries that had nascent civil societies, a modicum of state institutions and relatively modern educational systems, such as Egypt, Iraq, Syria during the period between the two World Wars. In fact there was in these countries from the 1920’s until the late 1940’s and early 1950’s before the onslaught of the Arab militaries against state and society, a semblance of political life, the beginning of admittedly wobbly parliamentary traditions, vibrant cultural debates, considerable artistic creation, a growing space for free expression with noticeable participation of women and minorities in all of these spheres.

But these fragile societies were not allowed to strengthen their state institutions, allow political parties to fully function as legitimate political forces, and the Judiciary was never allowed by the ruling elites to become truly independent.

Then winter descended on the Arabs in the form of military coups masquerading as revolutions claiming to redress the loss of Palestine, to undo the vestiges of colonialism and imperialism, to revive the glory days of the Arabs of medieval times, to build powerful militarized states, and strong economies. These Arab praetorian forces failed in all endeavors. The leaders of these societies where transformed from autocrats, some of them benign, who would not countenance widespread terror or mass killings, into ruthless and vengeful tyrants more than willing to engage in wanton and gratuitous terror against their own peoples and commit crimes against humanity as we have seen in Iraq, Libya and Syria.

These are the men who waged war on the minorities, some of them with deep roots in the region that predate Arabs and Muslims. In recent decades and long before the season of Arab uprisings, we have witnessed the diminishing of what was left of public spaces, the suffocation of what was left of the basic civil rights of the peoples and even the withering of culture. Those who argue that a different set of borders would have given us different outcomes and good governance should tell us how.

One century after Sykes-Picot we are facing a long nightmare: maintaining the old borders, without a radical rearrangement of the political and social contract in these societies and sawing the seeds of good governance, means perpetual conflict. The paradox is if political solutions are predicated on the reconfigurations of the current borders of Iraq and Syria (the same goes for Libya and Yemen), such change could conceivably spark ethnic and sectarian cleansings, claims and counterclaims and new cycles of violence. The breakup of Sudan is very close to home. Breaking up countries with diverse groups is as messy, violent and uncertain as creating them.

Of course, it could get worse... even much worse.

What Would A Trumpist Foreign Policy Be Like? No One Really Knows... But There Are Some Unfortunate Clues

Trump keeps going on TV and claiming that foreign policy experts have given his maiden foreign policy speech high grades. As with most of what Trump says, that isn't true. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Trump is a guy who doesn't understand the difference between a business negotiation and a negotiation with sovereign powers (watch the video of him up top on ABC's This Week yesterday. "One of the things that worries me," said Gates, "is that he doesn't appear to listen to people. He believes he has all the answers. That he's the smartest man in the room. I've worked with different presidents. Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Barack Obama. One thing they all had in common was a willingness to listen to people who had experience and then make their own independent judgments... I think [foreign leaders have] spoken for themselves. Many have said publicly, how worried they are about the possibility of Mr. Trump becoming president. His unpredictability. His lack of understanding of the complexity of international affairs. His threats. His claims that he's going to make other countries do things when, in fact, the president of the United States does not have the power to make them do things. So, I think-- I think a lot of leaders around the world, both among our friends and potential adversaries, are quite concerned."

Conservative pundits pointed out that the speech was "incoherent and shallow" and "filled with internal contradictions, falsehoods and genuinely crazy assertions." But Ryan Lizza noted that the speech "was hardly a break with current conservative thinking about foreign policy. Anyone who has listened to conservative talk radio or read prominent conservative columnists, such as Charles Krauthammer, condemn President Obama’s foreign policy as weak and feckless would recognize Trump’s speech as a standard list of grievances and proposals on the right. On foreign policy, just as he has done on immigration and crime and race, Trump has been paying attention to the base of the Republican Party. He has simply distilled the base’s grievances into something like a platform." Nonetheless, Krauthammer found it a jumble that offered no clarity.

Fareed Zakaria demolished the speech and called it an embarrasment-- populist pandering masquerading as a strategy... "anti-immigrant and nativist... largely isolationist but if and when engaged abroad militaristic and unilateral. In trade it is protectionist and on all matters deeply suspicious of international alliances and global conventions."

Writing for the Brookings Institute, Thomas Wright found the speech "contradictory in parts and repeated standard Republican criticisms of President Obama, but there was a clear message that is consistent with what Trump has said before. It was not the shift in substance that some predicted. There were several notable takeaways, most of which confirmed what we already knew.

1. Trump will end U.S. alliances in Europe and Asia

2. Trump has an isolationist mindset

3. Trump wants to do a deal with Russia and China

4. Trump’s audience was the Republican political establishment, not its foreign policy elite

5. Trump views foreign policy very personally

"Nothing in this speech will ease widespread international concern at Trump’s foreign policy," he concluded. "If anything, concerns will grow as Trump demonstrates an ability to present an isolationist 'America First' vision as a more mainstream realist foreign policy. We are headed for an election on fundamental questions of America’s role in the world."

Much of what he said, he just pulled out of his ass-- or off the Hate Talk Radio airwaves. USAToday fact-checked his assertions and found many of them just plain false.

In his foreign policy speech, Donald Trump claimed that “now ISIS is making millions and millions of dollars a week selling Libya oil.” But an expert on Libya’s oil operations told us there’s no evidence that the Islamic State is producing or selling oil out of that country.

Trump also repeated false and misleading claims that we have vetted before on the NAFTA pact, Iraq War and the U.S. trade deficit:

• Trump said NAFTA “literally emptied our states of our manufacturing and our jobs.” Actually, economic studies say NAFTA’s impact on U.S. jobs has been small.

• Trump claimed he was “totally against” the Iraq War and warned “that it would destabilize the Middle East.” There is no public record of him being against the war before it started.

• Trump said President Obama “crippled us” with “a huge trade deficit.” Actually, the trade deficit has gone down under Obama.

Trump also criticized Hillary Clinton’s response to the Benghazi attacks on Sept. 11, 2012. We address one of the Benghazi claims below, and in a separate article-- “Trump on Clinton’s ‘3 a.m. Call’”-- we write about Trump’s claim that Clinton failed to take charge during the Benghazi attacks, and instead “decided to go home and sleep.” The evidence shows Clinton was actively involved in responding to the attacks, and subsequent investigations concluded the government response was appropriate.

Hisham Melhem, one of the most respected Middle Eastern journalists based in America is the Washington bureau chief for Al Arabiya and yesterday warned his readers what they should expect were Trump to get into the White House, accurately dubbing the speech "a toxic brew of distrust, ignorance and isolationism" and pointing out that "the America that Trump wants to revive is a power that is unto itself, unwilling to be magnanimous, or benevolent, while at the same time serves and protects its interests as a sovereign nation."

It was a strange sight to be marveled at and remembered in amazement. Donald Trump addressing the foreign policy establishment in Washington, reading from a prepared but meandering speech, obviously written by a committee of advisors. The man who mocked President Obama for delivering his speeches by reading them with the help of a teleprompter, stood behind a teleprompter, and was ill at ease reading for 40 minutes without wildly gesticulating, or making exaggerated poses, and refraining from hurling insults at large groups of people.

The man who personifies anti-intellectualism was talking to the scholars, journalists, and pundits he usually revels in denigrating them. This was part of a long held tradition in presidential campaigns; every candidate has to deliver a ‘major’ foreign policy address to establish his knowledge of world affairs and his understanding of the complex national security challenges he is likely to face as a president. But the presidential veneer did not hide the real Donald Trump who gave us an incoherent collage of inconsistencies, superficial slogans, dangerous and simplistic solutions to complex issues, misstatements, and downright falsehoods.

The speech betrayed a shocking ignorance of the intricacies of the international system that the U.S created after WWII and the new European dynamics that emerged after the end of the Cold War. In Trump’s world, globalization is seen only as a negative force, and not as the engine of growth that the US ushered in, and mega deals can be struck with Russia and China regardless of their belligerent behavior, and alliances should be based solely on transactional and not value-based considerations, and autocratic regimes can be tolerated if they are good business partners, regardless of what they do to their citizens. He naively believes that the US has already surrendered to the ‘false song of globalism’, as if globalization could have been conceived without America at its core.

Trump chastised America’s allies supposedly because they are not paying enough for American protection, while he showed deference to America’s adversaries. Trump probably did not know that the major theme of his speech ‘America First’ is a slogan with an ominous history. In the 1930’s and early 1940’s, ‘America First’ was the name of an isolationist movement that did not want to help England and the other European countries fighting Nazism and Fascism.

Pity these strange American times, when the presumptive nominee of a major political party after delivering such a hollow speech, is given a cover of legitimacy by the likes of Republican senator Bob Corker, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee who described the speech as ‘very thoughtful’ and praised the candidate for 'challenging the foreign policy establishment.’ Jacob Heilbrunn the editor of the National Interest Magazine which hosted Trump extolled the candidate because he ‘was quite disciplined’ and ‘more retrained’.

Al Arabiya, a Saudi-owned pan-Arab version of CNN based in Dubai but broadcasting to millions of people across the Arab world, it's top markets being Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Israel, Bahrain and Qatar.

If Trump's Mission Is To Destroy The Republican Party, He's Certainly Succeeding Brilliantly

Note: this morning, a brand new Reuters-Ipsos poll of Republican voters showed only 3 top tier candidates left:

• Trump- 32%
• Jeb!- 16%
• Carson- 8%

Yesterday we saw how Trump has forced the GOP dangerously rightward on the anti-Hispanic racism that the party was determined-- after their 2014 autopsy-- to avoid. Trump may be able to fill half a football stadium in Mobile, Alabama, in the KKK heartland, but dozens of GOP congressional careers are now in jeopardy-- not to mention the eventual Republican presidential nominee-- because of Trump's cheap shots against millions of Latino Americans. 

Also yesterday, Emily Greenhouse, writing for Bloomberg, pointed out that this Republican lurch to the far right isn't helping them with the women voters that the autopsy concluded had to be appealed to. The gender gap is the biggest it's been in two decades, and thanks to Trump, Huckabee, Jeb, Rubio, Santorum and the rest of the weak Republican presidential contenders it's growing, not narrowing.

The last presidential election illuminated a stark gender gap; Mitt Romney was victorious among male voters, but lost among women by 11 percentage points. Among single women, he lost by 36 points. The following year, the National Republican Congressional Committee, wanting to improve on these numbers-- and avoid repeating damaging lines like former Missouri Rep. Todd Akin’s on “legitimate rape,” uttered three years ago this week-- held sessions with Republican aides on how to talk to and about women. Speaker John Boehner noted that, “when you look around the Congress, there are a lot more females in the Democrat caucus than there are in the Republican caucus.” He encouraged members of Congress to “be a little more sensitive.”

...Three out of four Americans say a woman should be able to obtain a legal abortion if she becomes pregnant as a result of rape. Since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade, in 1973, not a single Republican presidential nominee has opposed exceptions to abortion in cases of incest, rape, or threat to the life of the mother.

And yet, as we roll toward the 2016 presidential election, the Republican Party seems to have undergone a vigorous rightward turn on the subject of abortion. Whether because of deeply held beliefs or the tactical imperatives of the GOP’s primary season, many of the candidates are taking surprisingly unyielding positions-- ones that are well out of the current American mainstream.

Perhaps Janell Ross got to the bottom of the GOP's self-inflicted-- or Trump-inflicted-- wounds, which are further damaging the Republican brand with wide swathes of voters. She pointed out in yesterday's Washington Post that Trump's appeal and surge is all about appealing to less-educated Americans-- people who get their news and opinions from Hate Talk Radio and Fox News. "Trump," she wrote,

has certainly distinguished himself as the candidate willing to express outrage and horror about the nation's immigration challenges. He has also espoused a range of demonstrably false, unproven and outright conspiratorial ideas about immigration. Those ideas might sound outrageous and even xenophobic to some Americans. But when you look at who told pollsters that they share at least some of Trump's concerns, that same pattern mentioned up above-- white, Republicans with more limited education-- shows up in a slightly more subtle way.

According to a recent ABC News poll, about a third of Trump's supporters come from a group of Republicans with high school diplomas but without college diplomas. Only 8% of Trump's supporters are Republicans with college degrees. "In a nutshell," Ross concluded,

the people pushing Trump to the head of the polling pack in the very crowded Republican field, the people who have assured Trump a position on the debate stage next month and the people fueling Trump's candidacy are-- overwhelmingly but not limited to-- white, Republicans with limited education.

These are people who are forced to compete with immigrants for low-skill/low-wage jobs. Hisham Melhem is the respected Al Arabiya correspondent in Washington, DC. His insights into American politics are insightful and worth paying attention to. Yesterday his column  explained the Trump Nation phenomenon to his readers back home.

In recent election cycles we briefly encountered the quick rise and the quicker fall of the candidate-de-jour phenomenon, particularly on the Republican side, represented by an assortment of eccentric, colorful, narcissistic scoundrels, usually charismatic, attractive and articulate men and women who control the early stages of the race by sheer aplomb and character. Think of Herman Cain, Michele Bachmann, Rick Perry, Ron Paul and Newt Gingrich in 2012.These self-appointed saviors of Western Civilization always cast themselves as the outsiders holding the keys to quick fixes, or having the divine vision to deliver us from the political wilderness and put us on the righteous path. Never mind that most of them are the creation of the same political culture and the very economic system that they supposedly abjure. In America of late, every politician denounces ‘Washington’, while barely hiding his/her yearning to embrace it.

Trump is now one of them. His detractors say that he is this summer’s fling for angry and alienated Republican voters who will repent in the cold days leading to the first Republican Caucus in Iowa on February 1, 2016. It is very unlikely that Trump will be the next Republican nominee, but surely he has more staying power, than the previous shooting-star candidates because of his wealth, celebrity and his so far, masterful exploitation of the visceral fears that are weighing heavily on many Americans; a seemingly insoluble immigration problem resulting in more than eleven million undocumented immigrants, almost 15 years of unending wars abroad, rising racial tension and small scale riots in American cities that could turn into major ones , and what many see as America’s retrenchment in the world in the face of a rising China and the bloodiest terrorist entity in the modern world, the so-called ‘Islamic State’, a new threat driven by apocalyptic visions of End Time. Trump also is benefitting from the disillusionment of many voters over widening income inequality, stagnant salaries, and the disappearance of many jobs in the new economy, not to mention the squabbling professional politicians and a dysfunctional government in Washington and an election cycle that seemed only few weeks ago destined to be dominated by two candidates representing two political dynasties.

Enter Donald John Trump, once again. Americans have known Trump for decades. You could not ignore him even if you wanted to. He is loud, crass, bombastic, a mendacious swashbuckling tycoon and a misogynistic man who mastered the art of the scheme. This is the man who bragged that he used the laws of the land to amass huge sums of monies in tax breaks to finance his real estate holdings ( a whopping $163.775 million on Trump Tower, in New York according to a recent report in the National Review) The man, who wants to fix a broken wasteful government in Washington, has reneged on paying his debts because of the way he engineered four corporate bankruptcies, and he lived to brag about it. He tweeted recently ‘Stop saying I went bankrupt. I never went bankrupt but like many great business people have used the laws to corporate advantage-- smart!’

Of all the ‘outsiders’ and the career politicians who set their eyes on the prize of the White House in recent years, Trump, maybe because of his brusque and brash style, his celebrity status and wealth has the most formidable built-in immune system against blunders, gaffs and doublespeak. Any other candidate committing a fraction of the slips, half-truths and the outrageous answers born out of ignorance and arrogance, committed by Trump in the last few weeks, would have been history by now. Consider this: when the man who would be the Commander-in-Chief of the American Armed Forces was asked by veteran reporter and anchor of the Meet the Press program on NBC television network, ’Who do you talk to for military advice right now?’ Trump had no coherent answer, but he quickly recouped and blurted out,’ well, I watch the shows. I mean, I really see a lot of great-- you know, when you watch your show and all of the other shows and you have the generals and you have certain people that you like.’ However, when Todd pressed him gently ‘but is there a go-to for you?’, Trump began to fall apart and obfuscate claiming that there are two to three such advisors, including John Bolton, a well-known civilian neoconservative, who talks like a tough General, but he is certainly not one.

Then, maybe to please Todd, Trump mentioned retired Army Colonel Jack Jacobs, a highly decorated officer and one of NBC’s best military analysts. Trump, with a straight face continued ‘Colonel Jack Jacobs is a good guy, and I see him on occasion.’ The problem with this tale is that it is tall. Colonel Jacobs told David Corn of Mother Jones magazine that the claim is not true. ‘He may have said the first person who came to mind, I know him. But I'm not a consultant. I'm not certain if he has a national security group of people. I don't know if he does or if he doesn't. If he does, I'm not one of them.’

Candidate Trump, in his own mind and in the collective imagination of his supporters is the American equivalent of the awaited Mahdi, the restorer of American greatness and righteousness. The problem is that Trump is not the politically pure outsider destined to lead the nation out of the desert; he is in fact the quintessential insider, the very privileged product of the political-economic structure that he pretends to be railing against. Trump’s crass and intimidating persona has fortified him against serious and tough questioning not only from most of his rivals, but also from most journalists who are in a stampede to interview the pretender-performer-cum-candidate as if he is the sage of these bad times. Trump has yet to propose anything serious to increase American economic growth and narrow the income gap, or how to fight the Islamic State better than Obama’s limited war, or how to deal with China’s belligerence in the South China sea, or how to break down barriers preventing better trade deals with China and Japan or how to deal with an irredentist Russia.

Trump so far has given us one liners such as: If I am elected, I will beat China and Japan on trade, I will build a huge 2000 mile wall on the border with Mexico to be as huge and imposing as the great wall of China, chiming at once that ‘it will be known as the Trump Wall’, while he is forcibly deporting millions of ‘illegal immigrants’ but without telling us how. Trump, as President, will literally steal oil from Iraq as he told Chuck Todd ‘and I said you take away their wealth, that you go and knock the hell out of the oil, take back the oil. We take over the oil, which we should have done in the first place.’ And as president, he says he will demand protection money from Saudi Arabia vowing that ‘they should pay us.’ Trump thinks, that such foreign policy demands and grunts will achieve the elusive victories of a bygone era that he and his supporters yearn for, ‘we have no victories. I mean, we just don't have victories anymore. As a country, we don't have victories anymore’. I am hoping that during the next debate, one of Trumps competitors could muster enough courage and be able to memorize a simple question to be directed to the American people ‘do you trust a man like Donald Trump to be the next Commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces?’

It is not an exaggeration to say that the current large field of Republican candidates is shockingly weak particularly on foreign policy. Their first debate exposed their limitations and lack of experience. There were those like Senator Ted Cruz and governor Bobby Jindal who criticized President Obama because he talks about violent extremism but not ’radical Islamic terrorism.’ Jeb Bush continued to struggle with the war in Iraq, still unable to extricate himself from his brother’s war. He is still his brother’s keeper. Ben Carson, a neurosurgeon, supposedly a healer, defended waterboarding. There were the usual ritualistic and obligatory lines about U.S. support to Israel, and Trump, was well, Trump. There were no serious proposals about any outstanding foreign policy challenge, from Iran, to Russia, to the Islamic State. No wonder the Republican candidates are in such disarray on national security issues.

This is not your father’s Republican Party. In the wake of the Tea Party and the rise of such luminaries like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul, this is no longer the home of George Herbert Walker Bush, Brent Scowcroft, James Baker or Colin Powell. It is doubtful that Ronald Reagan would be welcomed by the current custodians of conservatism. Dwight Eisenhower need not apply. The old healthy skepticism of Republicans and others of centralized Federal powers, has given way to very corrosive antipathy and even hostility to ‘government’ in general.

Trump screwing with the ole Red, White and Blue

Why Should The Arabs Continue To Roam Endlessly In A Political Wilderness Of Their Own Making?

Yesterday I happened to pass a TV set while a nice MSNBC was trying to get through her job by interviewing Hisham Melhem, the thoroughly Americanized Lebanese journalist and Al Arabiya News Washington bureau chief. She may not have known it-- trying desperately to keep whatever he was talking about inside the time she was allotted to to with this guy-- but it was an interesting interview, not the questions, of course, but what Melhem had to say.

As best I could tell, he wound up on her show because of an article he had penned for Politico last week, Within Our Gates-- Arab Civilization Has Collapsed. It Won't Recover In My Lifetime. That's certainly irresistible bait for TV news bookers! Especially since it was an American-oriented apology for Obama's decision to along with Military Industrial Complex demands to drag America into another war in the Middle East, or, as Melhem puts it "Obama is stepping once again-- and with understandably great reluctance-- into the chaos of an entire civilization that has broken down." Comfortingly, he's not a big fan of the world that once gave us algebra, astronomy, coffee, universities, guitars, military marching bands… and socialized medicine.

Arab civilization, such as we knew it, is all but gone. The Arab world today is more violent, unstable, fragmented and driven by extremism-- the extremism of the rulers and those in opposition-- than at any time since the collapse of the Ottoman Empire a century ago. Every hope of modern Arab history has been betrayed. The promise of political empowerment, the return of politics, the restoration of human dignity heralded by the season of Arab uprisings in their early heydays-- all has given way to civil wars, ethnic, sectarian and regional divisions and the reassertion of absolutism, both in its military and atavistic forms. With the dubious exception of the antiquated monarchies and emirates of the Gulf-- which for the moment are holding out against the tide of chaos-- and possibly Tunisia, there is no recognizable legitimacy left in the Arab world.

Is it any surprise that, like the vermin that take over a ruined city, the heirs to this self-destroyed civilization should be the nihilistic thugs of the Islamic State? And that there is no one else who can clean up the vast mess we Arabs have made of our world but the Americans and Western countries?

No one paradigm or one theory can explain what went wrong in the Arab world in the last century. There is no obvious set of reasons for the colossal failures of all the ideologies and political movements that swept the Arab region: Arab nationalism, in its Baathist and Nasserite forms; various Islamist movements; Arab socialism; the rentier state and rapacious monopolies, leaving in their wake a string of broken societies. No one theory can explain the marginalization of Egypt, once the center of political and cultural gravity in the Arab East, and its brief and tumultuous experimentation with peaceful political change before it reverted back to military rule.

…The polarizations in Syria and Iraq-- political, sectarian and ethnic-- are so deep that it is difficult to see how these once-important countries could be restored as unitary states. In Libya, Muammar al-Qaddafi’s 42-year reign of terror rendered the country politically desolate and fractured its already tenuous unity. The armed factions that inherited the exhausted country have set it on the course of breaking up-- again, unsurprisingly-- along tribal and regional fissures. Yemen has all the ingredients of a failed state: political, sectarian, tribal, north-south divisions, against the background of economic deterioration and a depleted water table that could turn it into the first country in the world to run out of drinking water.

Just before his appearance on MSNBC he published an article, follow-up to the Politico piece, in Al Arabiya News that he wanted to talk about but that his host had no knowledge of. His critique of an Arab world that "continues to reproduce the values of patriarchy, mythmaking, conspiracy theories, sectarianism, autocracy and a political/cultural discourse that denies human agency and tolerates the persistence of the old order" sparked a huge response. Lucky for him, he's not living among beheaders. "The overwhelming response," he asserts "was positive, even though my analysis of Arab reality was bleak and my prognosis of the immediate future was negative."

Arabs were not the only victims of colonialism, and with the exception of Algeria which gained its independence from France after a savage war, colonialism in the Arab world was not as devastating as it was in Africa. Egypt and India were colonized by the same power and gained sovereignty after the Second World War. And both are plagued with demographic overweight. But for most of its independent life Egypt was ruled by a strong military leader, while India maintained its democratic rule-- strained at times-- even when its military achieved victories in wars with Pakistan and it managed difficult political transitions after the assassinations of some of its elected leaders. India, despite its economic and social inequalities, produces science and knowledge in its universities and in Bangalore, its high technology capital.

There are no such universities in Egypt. In 1960 the GDP per capita for South Korea and Egypt were almost equal, $155 and $149 respectively and their populations were practically identical, 25 million and 27 million respectively. By 2012 the gap is frightening. The GDP per capita in South Korea has reached $16,684 with a population of 50 million. In comparison, Egypt’s GDP per capita has grown only to $1,976, and its population has tripled to 82 million. What went wrong in Egypt and what went right in South Korea is a tale of political will and good and bad governance. South Korea invested heavily in education and in its corporations and revolutionized industrial productivity by empowering women and incorporating them in the labor force. By contrast Egypt did not improve the quality of its educational system, and invested heavily in non-competitive industries.

Arab states have had more than their share of military dictators who enforced their absolute authority and decimated their societies and ruined their economies even in those countries that enjoyed considerable hydrocarbon deposits such as Iraq, Libya and Algeria. They ruled in the name of Arab Nationalism and they manipulated religious authorities and symbols (Saddam Hussein was the most outrageous offender in this regard), while exploiting sectarian, ethnic and tribal fissures.

Others such as the Assads in Syria and Ali Abdallah Saleh in Yemen adopted the same ways. The military rulers and autocrats of Asia, such as Park Chung-hee of South Korea and Lee Kuan Yew, of Singapore, who are credited with putting their countries on a trajectory of industrialization and wealth, look very benign when compared with Arab despots like Hussein whose wars and invasions caused the death of at least half a million people, or the Assads, who are responsible for the death of more than a quarter of a million people. Even the awful depredations of Augusto Pinochet, the dictator of Chile, pale in comparison with the bloody deeds of his Arab contemporaries. At least Pinochet did not wreck the Chilean economy and some credit him with turning Chile into a major economic power in Latin America.

There is one benign Arab autocrat whose legacy in part explains why Tunisia, of all the countries that went through an uprising is on the path of good governance. Tunisia’s president Habib Bourguiba, abolished polygamy and enacted a series of laws and secular reforms in 1956, giving women the right to vote and access to higher education, the right to file for divorce, and access to employment opportunities. Modern Tunisia has maintained a secular tradition and a polity more tolerant than its neighbors. Bourguiba benefited from Tunisia’s legacy of reform which goes back to the reign of the reformer Khayr al-Din Pasha al-Tunisi in the 1870’s. Tunisia was a trail-blazer when it became the first Arab country to outlaw slavery in 1846, one year before Sweden and, astonishingly 17 years before the United States. This legacy of secularism and empowering women is one of the reasons why Islamists were kept at bay and prevented from monopolizing political power after the overthrow of President Bin Ali.

…During the heyday of Arab Nationalism, many Arab intellectuals entered into a Faustian deal with the custodians of power in their world. They accepted a deal in which they will not agitate for freedom and democracy, until the Nationalist fought their supposedly historic battles with the forces of Arab reaction, Israeli usurpation and Western imperialism. All the battles were lost, and with them the hopes of freedom and democracy.

Today, the world of millions of Arabs is collapsing; whole societies are consumed by the flames of sectarianism, political fragmentation and economic disenfranchisement. The indefatigable Sadik Al-Azm is still at it, always probing and always deconstructing. He is now part of a smaller minority of such intellectuals, living and writing and publishing mostly in the west. And unless Arab intellectuals and activists engage in a no holds barred debates similar to what happened in Beirut after 1967, in which all their political, cultural and religious inheritance is put to critical inquiry, the Arabs will continue to roam endlessly in a political wilderness of their own making. But if you are looking now for a vibrant debate, about what ails the Arab world today, and if you are searching for a liberal open Arab city for Intellectuals to engage in critical introspection, you will be searching in vain.