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Last update - 16:08 05/07/2009
Books / Middle East
Report from the wrong side of history
By Oren Kessler
Tags: Mideast, Mideast, Israel News 

The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday: Unexpected Encounters in a Changing Middle East by Neil MacFarquhar; PublicAffairs, 359 pages, $26.95

Neil MacFarquhar's "The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday" is really two books in one. The first section is a kind of travelogue, in which the author presents the underexposed side of the Middle East - not "the constant, bloody upheaval that captures most attention," but vignettes of everyday life he witnessed during the period when he headed the New York Times' Cairo bureau, between 2001 and 2005. In the book's second half, MacFarquhar pushes deeper into political territory, offering a nuanced analysis of the current political climate in the region and prospects for its democratization, development and reform.


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acFarquhar (pronounced mac-FAR-kwar) boasts a familiarity with the Middle East few Western journalists can match. He spent 10 years of his childhood in the Libya of the 1960s and early '70s, where his oilman father was stationed with the Esso Corporation. The author's account of his privileged expatriate upbringing in the North African desert is compelling. If there was one thing missing from the idyllic Libyan landscape, he writes, it was Libyans. His family lived in the port of Marsa Brega (the author describes it as a North African Texas), a ready-made oil town which rose from the sand at the northern terminus of the country's oil pipeline. His command of Arabic, he laments, was not acquired during his childhood but only through rigorous study in his college years in the United States. The access this gave him to the ambitions, affections, quirks and fears of the Middle East's ordinary people - unfiltered through a translator - is one element that sets this book apart from so many others by foreign journalists who sojourned in the region.

The book's title refers to a birthday e-mail MacFarquhar unexpectedly received from Hezbollah while reporting from Beirut. Its unwieldiness aside (might "Happy Birthday from Hezbollah" have been catchier?), the title is unfortunate in that it misrepresents the book's aims. "The Media Relations Department" does have its share of "Innocents Abroad"-type travel anecdotes, but the bulk of them serve the well-defined purpose of illuminating some aspect of the society he is leading us through. Throughout the Arab states and Iran, MacFarquhar finds people struggling to reconcile tradition with political openness and economic development, and reaching for modernity on their own terms, while generally suspicious of the motives of the West. Neither the title nor the subtitle, "Unexpected Encounters in the Changing Middle East," hints at the formidable political analysis that marks the book's second half.

MacFarquhar spent two years in Israel in the 1990s as an Associated Press correspondent, a period that receives surprisingly short shrift in the book, presumably because any mention of Israel in today's Middle East inevitably turns to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The author may be downplaying the importance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the regional political discourse, but there is logic to it. The region's regimes use the Israeli-Arab conflict as a pretext for clinging to power and clamping down on dissent, he writes, and as a reporter, he "didn't want to write only about Iraq or the West Bank or the latest terrorist bombing. Much as the cataclysms of violence had the potential to change the region, there was so much more there."

Talking about jihad

The book's chapters are broadly split into the various locations from which the author has reported, with each setting skillfully employed to present a certain theme. Amman is the backdrop for an examination of the influence of the secret police, an oppressive fixture in virtually every Arab country, and no less so in the "moderate" kingdom of Jordan. Cairo is the stage for a look at the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose influence MacFarquhar is convinced would be diluted if fair elections were held and Egyptians exposed to a wider array of political platforms. Other stops include Beirut, Damascus, Saudi Arabia and Morocco, as well as a return to Libya, now the home of a full-fledged personality cult based around the eccentric "Brother Leader" Muammar Gadhafi.

MacFarquhar's affection for the Middle East is obvious, though it does not blind him to its manifold ills. The region, he writes, "has been on the wrong side of history for about the past 100 years. A deep cultural chasm separates it from West; it is mired in suffocating bureaucracy, unhealthy nationalism, and a sense on some days that progress is unattainable." Despite the differences between the various countries of the Arab world and Iran, he writes, common problems plague them all: despotic or dynastic rule (often of a single tribe or minority), the involvement of the secret police in everyday life, the absence of the rule of law, limits on political organizing and freedom of assembly, and, of course, religious extremism and the lack of women's rights, to name a few.

As the book progresses, its analysis grows more sophisticated, as chapters like "Thanksgiving" (on shuttling between the eastern and western sections of Jerusalem sticking holiday dishes in various friends' ovens when the handle on his falls off) and "Satellite TV" give way to "Talking About Jihad" and "Arrested Development." Throughout the countries he visits, MacFarquhar encounters deep-seated resentment of U.S. Mideast policy, which people he speaks to characterize as self-interested and hypocritical at worst and counterproductive at best. A Jordanian poet tells him Washington "gave the green light to all these Arab leaders to create police states, then the reaction to all these police states was religious extremism. You raise someone for fifty years to go the wrong way down a one-way street and then suddenly tell them they have to respect the law." In Lebanon's Bekaa, the author chats with farmers who once enjoyed the good life as hashish growers, but now struggle as dairy farmers thanks to a U.S.-funded program that seized their crops in exchange for surplus Midwestern milk cows ill-suited to the Mideast. "In the days of hashish we were so happy," says one farmer. Tongue firmly in cheek, he adds: "I once owned a car, but now, thanks be to God, I have a cow!" MacFarquhar offers meager praise for America's recent ham-handed forays in the region. The curse of dynastic or minority rule afflicts virtually every Arab country (with the possible exception of factious Lebanon) but Washington has more often than not propped up those regimes that serve its regional interests (Egypt, Jordan, Morocco), and its attempts at ousting those that did not were horribly bungled. The U.S. adventure in Iraq he calls "the biggest, messiest experiment in changing the practice of minority rule," and it, says the author, has convinced many in the region that regime change is simply too costly to attempt and that gradually effecting change under their current regimes may be wiser. Turning to Iran, he writes, "Arabs and Persians are ancient enemies. If Washington manages to defuse its image of targeting Islam, the appeal of the Islamic Republic will fade."

Although Arabs and Iranians, MacFarquhar finds, overwhelmingly support the kind of public reforms Washington seeks to promote in the region, conspiracy theories regarding the West continue to run deep. In Bahrain, a columnist tells him anyone supporting programs sponsored by the U.S. government is immediately labeled a "traitor," so that open U.S. support turns any efforts at development or reform into dust. The Iraq fiasco and Washington's failure to drain the Israeli-Palestinian swamp has rendered America's every move suspect, and MacFarquhar is convinced Washington's touch in the region must be cautious and light.

Prism of faith

MacFarquhar believes America needs to learn the region's lexicon if it intends to improve its fortunes here. If Barack Obama's appearance in Cairo last month is any indication, it seems Washington has belatedly reached the same conclusion itself, as the president's speech was replete with Arabic words (correctly pronounced!) and koranic injunctions about justice and peace. The author writes that U.S.-style separation of church and state is a uniquely Western concept that has little precedent, and even less chance for success, in the Mideast, where the majority of the public "survey their daily life through the prism of their faith." A more realistic goal is to end governments' manipulation of religion for their own ends, in the course of which they equate criticism of their own actions with smears on Islam. Religion is drilled into students' minds from an early age, as state-run schools employ koranic pretexts to demonstrate that obeying both God and government makes you a good Muslim. But MacFarquhar also sees religion's hold on Arab public life fading, if ever so slowly. He notes that in Egypt, the failures of Arabism and Islamism to bring freedom and prosperity have convinced many that the only "ism" worth subscribing to may be pluralism.

At the same time, MacFarquhar is convinced that for most Arabs and Iranians, democracy is not a high priority. In Syria, it is illegal for more than five people to meet without government authorization, and Facebook, Wikipedia and Yahoo are banned, with the claim they are channels for Zionist "infiltration." But for ordinary people, immediate concerns like poverty and unemployment loom largest, and abstract notions of democracy and human rights have little resonance. Instead, the reforms they desperately seek are an end to the culture of corruption and bureaucratic bribery. America has a knack for supporting agents of change with dubious reputations at home (think Ahmad Chalabi), and MacFarquhar argues the country must adopt a more nuanced, long-term approach to the region rather than endorsing those who simply utter the right slogans. The political societies of the Middle East have been suppressed for so long that the only groups organized well enough to win elections are fundamentalists.

"The Media Relations Department of Hizbollah Wishes You a Happy Birthday" ends on a weak note, with a breezy epilogue seemingly intended to provide a neat wrap-up to its political analysis and, in this age of online political commentary, make it as relevant to current events as possible. But the conversational tone - an abundance of "I think"s and worn-out Obamese cliches of "hope" and "change" - does a disservice to the sound, well-considered principles presented earlier.

"Not every society is a latent democracy just waiting to come out of the closet" is one such principle. MacFarquhar believes the United States would do well to plant the seeds of civil society before insisting on democracy in countries unready for it, and argues Washington must be committed enough to reform to condemn repression regardless of whether friend or foe is at fault. It seems that despite the apparent sea change in America's Mideast policy, this lesson has yet to be learned. Obama's choice of Egypt, ruled for nearly three decades by Hosni Mubarak, as the country where he presented his vision for the region sends the message that Washington will continue to endorse autocrats when such support is expedient. (Perhaps a braver choice would have been Lebanon, a rare example of regional democracy, however messy it may be.)

The changes in U.S. policy that MacFarquhar suggests could earn Washington credibility with the peoples of the Mideast and help bring the region in closer step with the wider world in terms of democracy and political reform. Then, perhaps, the West will gradually come to view those same peoples as having more to offer them than falafel and fatwas, oil and strife.

Oren Kessler is an editor, translator and writer at Haaretz English Edition.
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