Rami Khouri spoke with Democracy Now! on Wednesday July 5 about Qatar and foreign policy in the Gulf. He then spoke with host Amy Goodman about Syria and a history of failed state-building. The conversation spanned many topics, including leadership change in Saudi Arabia, the war in Yemen, and Iran. He discussed the refugee crisis in the region, constructive state-building, and U.S. policy in the region.

BOSTON — The election of Donald Trump as the next American president has added a major new element of uncertainty to a Middle Eastern picture that had already achieved its highest state of confusion, violence, and uncertainty in its modern history. The factors that will determine the policies Trump will pursue there are many, and they are all moving in unknown directions at the same time. Trying to predict the implications of the Trump presidency for the Middle East is a fascinating game that involves numerous Middle Eastern players and foreign powers, is mostly anchored in guesswork, wishful thinking, and conspiracy theories, and mostly ends up reflecting a lot of wild speculation.

The military campaigns in Syria and Yemen have been characterized by non-stop brutality and indiscriminate attacks from the air that have killed and injured huge numbers of civilians. Not only have we witnessed the deaths of hundreds of thousands in Syria and thousands in Yemen, but the destruction of civilian infrastructure such as water and health systems means that millions of other civilians will suffer death, disease and injury that will set back these countries for decades. 

The international community has been unable to achieve more than brief cease-fires that last just hours in most cases. Events in the past week have reached such a high point of inhuman warfare and civilian death and suffering that we have started to hear calls for action to investigate and hold accountable those who may have committed crimes against humanity or war crimes.

Is there a single thing that helps us understand why the Arab world has turned into such a horror show of dictatorships and authoritarian governments, state and private political violence, corruption on a massive scale, social polarization, state fragmentation, and the associated phenomena of terror organizations and huge flows of refugees and displaced people? We can point to many candidates for this dishonor, including the legacy of military and family rule, presidents for life, and continuous foreign military interventions. But one underlying issue is the most important one that must be confronted and changed: the right of individuals to speak their mind freely and participate in the mechanisms of decision-making and consensus-building in the public sphere.

"For 15 years, this has been an annual... reminder of the enormous moral power of the American way of life and system, the character its people, and the universal need for human nature to affirm life over death, light over darkness, and hope over fear.  All these things we see in the American spirit every day, in so many ways, and always on Sept. 11 in our time. Yet there remains a darkness that surrounds the 9/11 commemorations..."

"The unprecedented combination of political chaos, cross-cutting military confrontations, and strategic contradictions in northern Syria reached a record-setting point two days ago. That was when Brett McGurk, the U.S. special envoy to the coalition fighting the Islamic State, and the Department of Defense (DoD) said, 'we call on all armed actors to stand down and take appropriate measures to deconflict and open channels of communication.'"

"The sad spectacle of the truncated “summit” of Arab leaders in the Mauritanian capital Monday was even more embarrassing than usual for this recurring event. It highlights again the often-frivolous behavior of Arab leaderships, and the massive challenges they are failing to meet. The most troubling aspect of the event was its affirming again the capacity of Arab leaderships to ignore the actual, home-grown, causes of their countries’ problems, and instead to repeat clichés about fighting terrorism and seeking peace — two areas in which the Arab world has failed to make any headway..."

"The failed military coup in Turkey and the country’s many links with key regional actors in Syria, Russia, Iran, and NATO clarify how difficult it has become to achieve political solutions to individual conflicts, because local, national, regional, and global interests of any single party do not line up nicely in a coherent and clear balance sheet of desirables and undesirables..."

"The recent and ongoing spate of decisions by several Arab governments to dissolve and ban certain political groups (mostly Sunni or Shiite Islamists) is a reflection of two dynamics that need to be reviewed together: rising sectarian, political, and ideological tensions across the region, alongside continuing structural inabilities in every Arab country, except Tunisia to date, to accommodate a range of differing political views in a legitimate governance system..."