‘Arab’ presents moderate Mideast

By Arthur Goldschmidt

Most Americans have long pictured Arab leaders as military dictators like Saddam Hussein or religious fanatics like Osama Bin Laden. This image, useful to advocates of a U.S. foreign policy hostile to Arab interests, will be challenged by this book by an experienced and perspicacious Jordanian diplomat.

Educated at the American University of Beirut, Marwan Muasher served in the Jordanian delegation to the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference, later became Jordan’s first ambassador to Israel after the two countries had signed a peace treaty in 1994, then as ambassador to the U.S. from 1997 to 2002, foreign minister, and finally deputy prime minister.

He has been close friends with kings, ministers, ambassadors, politicians, and even journalists in the U.S., Jordan, and the rest of the Arab world.

Most Americans know little about Jordan, but “The Arab Center” opens by describing that small country’s influential role in Middle Eastern politics. Middle East experts used to write off the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as an anachronism, doomed to being taken over by “progressive” Arab republics such as Syria and Egypt.

Yet Jordan survives, despite its relatively small population, almost landlocked position and lack of natural resources, most notably oil.

Muasher gives much of the credit to the skillful diplomacy of Kings Hussein (who ruled from 1952 to 1999) and Abdallah II, his son, but it is clear from his later chapters that he, too, has played a vital role in bringing together Jordan and Israel, and the Arab monarchies and the revolutionary republics.

More facile than military dictators or aspiring Islamist leaders, he has helped to devise the Arab states’ peace proposal to Israel, first proposed by Saudi Arabia in 2002, and the “Road Map” to peace between Israel and the Arabs.

Although the author is remarkably sensitive to Israeli concerns about survival in the face of terror and critical of such radical Palestinian groups as Hamas for promoting suicide bombings, he does not show the same concern about the wants and needs of the Arab masses.

It is now obvious that neither Arab socialism nor radical Islamism will improve economic and social conditions or solve the political and cultural problems of the area.

What the Arabs want are leaders and governments who see and respond to the real needs of their people. They need rulers who are truly accountable to their “subjects” as voters, taxpayers and soldiers.

Muasher understands politics as the art of the possible, as his book proves again and again. I hope that his government will continue to profit from his advice and his talents.

But as ever more Arab men and women graduate from universities and polytechnic institutes, they will demand governments that are democratic, not to please the American neoconservatives, but to enable Jordan and other Arab countries to take their rightful place in the 21st century.

Arthur Goldschmidt is professor emeritus of Middle East history at Penn State.