We Need to See Beyond Al-Qaeda

David Ignatius is always good on the Middle East; he's obviously a man who spends time thinking about the issues there. He is quite right to say that military and intelligence operations against Al-Qaeda are not enough. No matter how many insurgents we shoot and training camps we blow up, there are always more. The Middle East seems to generate more violent malcontents as it there were a factory somewhere producing them.

But I don't think Ignatius quite gets how unimportant the Arab-Israeli issue is in most of the Middle East. It's important, all right, but most Yemenis have concerns closer to home than Gaza or Hebron. Yemen has a lousy government which has never really integrated North Yemen and South Yemen into a coherent administration. Yemen is poor, very poor, in a region of oil-rich countries. Yemen's educational system may be worse than others in the Arab countries. So there is a continual flow of the undereducated, the overeducated but unemployed, the poorly educated and rootless, and those educated in all the wrong things by madrassahs and imams.

So, in addition to George Mitchell and Hillary Clinton spending some time working the Middle East, and beyond the arm-twisting President Obama needs to administer to Bibi Netanyahu and Abu Mazen, we need to be undertaking a broader effort to improve education, governance, civil society, and economic conditions in the countries of the Arab Middle East.

For a really good starting place for a discussion of these issues, try Kenneth Pollack's A Path Out of the Desert: A Grand Strategy for America in the Middle East. I read it last year, and now I have my own copy ($18.00 in trade paperback from Random House). In particular, read Part Two: The Problems of the Modern Middle East.) It consist of two powerful chapters on what is wrong in the Middle East. These are the problems that underly the issues we in the U.S. have been trying to deal with. In Pollack's view, we need to dig deeper, stay longer, and take a broader view. Sounds like work, doesn't it?