Cutting through the Fog of Politics in the Middle East

Dr. Robert D. Crane

Posted Jul 15, 2006      •Permalink      • Printer-Friendly Version
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Cutting through the Fog of Politics in the Middle East:
The Role of Self-determination through Economic and Political Justice?

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

  The current regional war in the Middle East is best explained at one level by Uri Avnery’s article, “Israel in Lebanon: What’s Really Behind It.”  He makes the persuasive case that the Israeli military objective is to replace the governments of both Lebanon and Palestine, and perhaps later Syria, with quisling governments, a project once tried by the Americans in Iraq. 

  The question is what is behind such a policy at the truly strategic level of basic foreign policy premises, not at the tactical level of policy practice.  Ever since the first foreign policy think-tank, The Center for Strategic and International Studies, was founded in Washington shortly before the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, the eggheads have debated foreign policy without any regard for the premises underlying their competing prognoses and recommendations.  They sat in their “workshops” and either agreed essentially on everything of decisive importance even though superficially they seemed to disagree, or else they simply talked past each other because neither was aware of the opposing premises or cared to admit one’s own.

  The conflict of premises in the current Middle East war is between power and justice, but these premises are never addressed, nor have they ever been since the founding of Washington’s first think-tank.

  On July 14th, 2006, the New York Times published three articles that highlighted these opposing premises without making them explicit.  The first one, by Thomas Friedman, entitled “The Kidnapping of Democracy,” suggested that if democracy threatens the existing power structure, then democracy has to go.  His logical conclusion is that democracy is unfit for Arabs and Muslims are unfit for democracy.

  The second one, by Michael Young, editor of The Daily Star in Lebanon, addresses the issue of justice by calling on Israel to release the thousands of political prisoners that it has held in its micro-prisons (not the macro one known as the territories) for up to 25 years.  But Young does not specifically call for justice as a premise of policy.

  The first of these two prescriptions for policy is a non-solution, whereas the second is more tactical than strategic.  Both fail to cut through the fog of establishment thinking.  They both operate within the current paradigm of reality, which is based exclusively on politics.

  The third article, “Left Behind Economics,” by Paul Krugman, uses the latest statistics to show that the wealth gap is growing in America (and even faster in the rest of the world), but he offers no solutions.

  At least Krugman is identifying a global problem, which is usually ignored because to do so would unsettle the power structure.  The first two pundits, Friedman and Young, reflect the real failure of geopoliticians to see that the cause of so much conflict and festering hatred is economic not political.  Politics is a means to maintain the existing economic paradigm.  And, of course, neither can see that Iraq can be a cure rather than a cause of the growing confrontation between the haves and the have-nots.

  A strategy to address this economic source of conflict by broadening personal ownership of future productive wealth without taking away from existing owners is easy to develop and indeed has been developed as the cutting edge of global strategy. 

  Scenarios abound on how to apply an economic strategy to overcome the limitations of political tactics.  For example, the economic solution to political problems could and should be pioneered by a decision by the new Iraqi government to divest itself of the American occupation by uniting all the persons and peoples of Iraq behind the proposal to privatize Iraq’s oil not to multi-national petro-giants but in equal shares of voting and inalienable stock ownership to every person in Iraq, so that every person would have not only a good earned income as a stockholder but an incentive to back the government that gave them economic independence.  This should have been the very first priority of the U.S. occupation authorities in April 2003.  It was urgently recommended and backed by both American experts and soon thereafter by Iraqi opinion leaders.  It may not be too late even now, more three years later.

  The prototype of the economic premise as a solution to intractable political problems has been developed by The Center for Economic and Social Justice in its position paper, “The Abraham Federation” A New Framework for Peace in the Middle East, http://www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/abrahamfederation-nk.html.
 
  The paradigmatic solution that is understood by most of the peoples in the world is justice.  Justice, as understood by more than a billion people, was developed in classical Islamic jurisprudence as a set of human responsibilities and rights, known as the universal principles, the maqasid al shari’ah.  One third of this code of human rights focuses on self-determination, both economic and political, known respectively as haqq al mal and haqq al hurriya. 

  The basic premise is that there can be no political independence without economic independence, because power follows economic ownership.  This is the big picture.  It is high time to pursue appropriate strategies based on such universal premises as laid out by The American Revolutionary Party, http://www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us/partyplatform.htm, and its linked think-tanks. 

  The best solution to the problems of the world is more democracy, both economic and political, not less.  This should be America’s global strategy.  Prosperity and peace can best be pursued through the diffusion of power to the level of the human person, where all sovereignty originates, subject only to the sovereignty of God.  This is the essence of justice and was the very purpose of America’s founding as a model for the world.  It is the long lost premise of everything American and is the lost found premise of the awakening Muslim world.

 

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