Rami Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune. He is an internationally syndicated journalist, author, and director of the Issam Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. He is currently a visiting fellow with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at Stanford University.
Mr. Khouri will speak about the war in Lebanon this summer. He will provide an analysis of the Israeli-Hezbollah war and discuss its fallout for Lebanese society and government, and its impact on the region's power dynamics. He will also comment on escalating violence in Iraq, Afghanistan, and heightening tensions between the U.S. and political movements in the region, including Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas.
Building 420, Room 40
As a model of a democratizing and secular Muslim state that has been a stalwart ally for more than 50 years, Turkey is of enormous strategic importance to the United States and Europe, especially at a time when the widening chasm between the West and the Islamic world looms as the greatest foreign policy challenge. Yet Ankara's relations with Washington are strained - over Iraq, Cyprus, Syria, Iran and Hamas - and Turkey's prospects for joining the European Union remain uncertain.
As Washington prepares for a visit Wednesday by Turkey's foreign minister, Abdullah Gul, the United States and Turkey should explore three initiatives to repair and revitalize their relationship.
First, although the United States and Turkey share broad goals in Iraq, the situation there threatens a potential breach in relations. The Turks feel the war in Iraq has undermined their security by stirring Kurdish nationalism. It also coincided with renewed terrorist attacks mounted by the Kurdistan Worker's Party from inside Iraq. To address this challenge, the United States should initiate a trilateral dialogue on the future of Iraq with Turkey and representatives of the Iraqi government, including Kurdish leaders.
If the effort to build a functioning Iraqi government is successful, this trilateral consultative process will support the common goal of a unified and sovereign Iraq; should the Iraqi government fail, the dialogue will provide a mechanism for managing some of the worst potential consequences.
Second, Washington must make it a diplomatic priority to persuade skeptics in Europe to take a more positive approach toward Turkey. Peering into the future and considering the strategic implications of a Turkey unmoored - or, more darkly, a Turkey that turns against its traditional partners, aligning itself more closely with Damascus, Moscow or Tehran - should be instructive.
Washington needs to make the case to its European allies that delaying Turkey's accession to the EU could harm their security. The longer accession takes, the more likely it is that Turks will become disenchanted with the EU and look elsewhere for opportunities; it is also more likely that Turkey's impressive political reform process, which began in 2002, will stall.
Further, Washington should take a leadership role in working to resolve the Cyprus conflict, which threatens to create further obstacles to Turkish EU membership. Rather than waiting for a new UN or EU initiative on the future of the island, America should catalyze a renewed negotiation process. A special Cyprus coordinator would work with the UN and EU to develop a new plan for reuniting the island, encourage European leaders to use their collective clout to require more constructive behavior from the Cypriot government, and coordinate Washington's political, diplomatic and economic steps to break Turkish Cypriots from their international isolation.
Third, the United States and Turkey should establish a high-level commission that meets twice a year and provides a structured mechanism for interaction across agencies of government, nongovernmental organizations and the private sector. At the outset, three working groups should be launched, focusing on security, economic and commercial ties, and educational and cultural exchanges.
A U.S.-Turkey cooperation commission could facilitate the re-establishment of the sustained interaction that characterizes America's strongest partnerships, and provide a foundation for keeping Turkey aligned with the West should Ankara's bid for EU membership ultimately fail.
As tensions over the outcome in Iraq mount, the prospects for generating positive momentum in U.S.- Turkey relations are diminishing. The consequences of a disoriented Turkey would be even greater than a failure in Iraq. America and Europe must do everything they can to ensure that Turkey remains firmly anchored in the West.
Steven A. Cook and Elizabeth Sherwood-Randall are fellows at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The emerging schism between the West and the Islamic world makes America's relationship with Turkey--a Western-oriented, democratizing Muslim country--more important than ever. Unfortunately, despite the long history of close collaboration, U.S.-Turkish relations have deteriorated markedly over the last three years. The U.S. invasion of Iraq--and the potential consequences for Turkey with its large Kurdish population--is the primary issue that divides Washington and Ankara, but there are also differences regarding Cyprus, Syria, Iran, Israel, and Hamas, as well as a rising tide of anti-Americanism in Turkey. To repair this important alliance relationship, Washington should establish a regular trilateral dialogue involving the United States, Turkey, and Iraqi Kurds; play a leading role in seeking a settlement to the long-standing dispute over Cyprus; be more active in supporting Ankara's bid for EU membership; and work to create a U.S.-Turkey Cooperation Commission that would meet on a biannual basis to provide a structured forum for government agencies, NGOs, and private sector leaders from both countries to discuss matters of mutual concern.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War. Mr. Hitchens, longtime contributor to The Nation, wrote a wide-ranging, biweekly column for the magazine from 1982 to 2002. With trademark savage wit, he flattens hypocrisy inside the Beltway and around the world, laying bare the "permanent government" of entrenched powers and interests. Mr. Hitchens has been Washington editor of Harper's and book critic for Newsday, and regularly contributes to such publications as Granta, The London Review of Books, Vogue, New Left Review, Dissent and the Times Literary Supplement.
Born in 1949 in Portsmouth, England, Mr. Hitchens received a degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1970.
Event Synopsis:
In this presentation Mr. Hitchens presents a "balance sheet" from point of view of those, like him, who advocated regime change in Iraq and hoped that it would have positive effects in Saudi Arabia and Iran as well. He presents areas where progress has not materialized, such as attempts to revive Iraq's badly damaged oil industry. However, he points out political progress made by Kurds in the north of Iraq, and growing pressure on the regimes of Bashar al-Assad in Syria and Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. Attempts to "dry up the swamp" where terrorism breeds have not eliminated but have isolated Islamic fundamentalist terrorism. He urges the international community to "make friends" with moderate forces in Muslim countries which reject terrorism, and to pursue policies that continue to isolate extremist groups.
A discussion period following the talk raised such questions as: Is there a secular democratic alternative to Hamas? In light of difficulties encountered in establishing democratic governance in Iraq, shouldn't there be a reassessment of the belief system that led to the Iraqi operation? What evidence can be found that Iraq was on the verge of collapse prior to the recent military intervention? How do the happenings in the Middle East translate into a policy regarding North Korea, which is vocal about acquiring weapons of mass destruction? With Saddam Hussein gone, can Iraq remain one country? Is there a risk that intervention in places like Iraq has a galvanizing effect on other enemy groups?
Reuben W. Hills Conference Room
Commentators across the political spectrum have suggested that a profoundly confrontational clash between western and traditional cultures is taking place. Are modernity & religiosity in fundamental conflict? Are western values - equated with modernity and secularism - incompatible with orthodoxy? Are traditions - based in religion and emphasizing the importance of established practices - antithetical to "progress"? Is the conflict so profound that it has become our new "cold war"? Join our panelists to explore one of the more disturbing challenges facing our world today.
Coit D. Blacker is director, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Olivier Nomellini Family University Fellow in Undergraduate Education. He also serves as co-chair for Stanford University's International Initiative. Professor Blacker is the author or editor of seven books and monographs, including Hostage to Revolution: Gorbachev and Soviet Security Policy, 1985-91 (1993); Reluctant Warriors: The United States, the Soviet Union and Arms Control (1987); and, with Gloria Duffy, International Arms Control: Issues and Agreements (1984). During the first Clinton administration, Professor Blacker served as Special Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs and Senior Director for Russian, Ukrainian and Eurasian Affairs at the National Security Council. Professor Blacker is a graduate of Occidental College (A.B., Political Science) and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy (M.A., M.A.L.D., Ph.D.).
Amir Eshel is chair and associate professor of German studies and comparative literature, and director of the European Forum at FSI. His research focuses on German culture, comparative literature, and German-Jewish history and culture from the Enlightenment to the present. He is currently working on a book about the poetic figuration of historical narratives, and he is also involved in an interdisciplinary project on urban space in Berlin. At Stanford, he has taught courses on German Jewish literature, literature of the Holocaust, modern German poetry and the contemporary German novel. Before joining the Stanford faculty in 1998 as an assistant professor of German studies, he taught at the Universitaet Hamburg (Germany). He is a member of the American Comparative Literature Association, the Association of Jewish studies, the German Studies Association and the Modern Language Association. In 2002 he received the Award for Distinguished Teaching, from Stanford University's dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. He received an MA and PhD in German literature, both from the Universitat Hamburg. He speaks Hebrew, German and English, and has a good knowledge of Yiddish and French.
Robert Gregg is the Teresa Hihn Moore Professor in Religious Studies (Emeritus), and serves as Director of the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. His scholarship includes a book on philosophies concerning death and grieving in ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian communities; two volumes concerning struggles over orthodoxy and heresy in 4th century Christianity that are focused on the "arch-heretic" Arius and reactions to his teachings; a translation of Athanasius' Greek Life of Saint Antony - the famous account of his activities as one of the first desert monks; and a study of 250 Greek, Hebrew/Aramaic, and Latin inscriptions from the Golan that allow glimpses of interactions between Jews, "pagans," and Christians in the Golan Heights and Syria, 1st-7th centuries CE. Professor Gregg's current research treats several "sacred stories" which appear both in the Bible and in the Qur'an-and examines interpretations of these scripture narratives by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim writers and graphic artists in each of the religions' early centuries.
Paula M. L. Moya is Associate Professor and Vice-Chair of English at Stanford University, where she recently completed a term as Director of the Undergraduate Program of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE), and Chair of the Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity (CSRE) major. Her publications include essays on feminist theory, multicultural pedagogy, and Latina/o and Chicana/o literature and identity. She is the author of Learning from Experience: Minority Identities, Multicultural Struggles (University of California Press, 2002) and coeditor of Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism (University of California Press, 2000) and Identity Politics Reconsidered (Palgrave in 2006.) For the past five years, she has been actively involved as a founding organizer and coordinating team member of The Future of Minority Studies research project (FMS), an inter-institutional, interdisciplinary, and multigenerational research project facilitating focused and productive discussions about the democratizing role of minority identity and participation in a multicultural society. For more information, visit www.fmsproject.cornell.edu.
Raena D. Saddler grew up in St. Louis and attended high school at Colorado Academy in Denver. She is currently a Junior double-majoring in Religious Studies (with a focus on Christianity) and Psychology on the "Health and Development" specialization track (focusing both on adolescent development and clinical psychology). She is also minoring in International Relations with a focus on aid to lesser developed countries--Africa in particular. Raena is planning to spend next fall semester in Rome and come back to work on an honors paper for Religious Studies. She enjoys traveling abroad, and spends a few weeks every summer doing aid-work in Mozambique, Africa. Since coming to Stanford, Raena has been volunteering for three years at Menlo Park Presbyterian Church (MPPC) working with junior high and high school girls as a youth leader and small group leader. In addition to that, she is the head coach for the Menlo-Atherton High School JV women's lacrosse team. Outside of coaching she loves to be around kids and babysits for several families in the area. When she isn't going to class, babysitting, or coaching, she spends the rest of her time with her closest friends and boyfriend of two years.She is very passionate about youth leadership and social justice, and hopes to work for an international aid organization in the future.
Jointly sponsored by the Stanford International Initiative and the Undergraduate Admissions Office.
Does the conflict in Iraq amount to a civil war? In many ways, the public debate over this question is largely political. Calling Iraq a "civil war" implies yet another failure for the Bush administration and adds force to the question of whether U.S. troops still have a constructive role to play.
Politics aside, however, the definition of civil war is not arbitrary. For some -- and perhaps especially Americans -- the term brings to mind all-out historical conflicts along the lines of the U.S. or Spanish civil wars. According to this notion, there will not be civil war in Iraq until we see mass mobilization of sectarian communities behind more or less conventional armies.
But a more standard definition is common today:
1) Civil war refers to a violent conflict between organized groups within a country that are fighting over control of the government, one side's separatist goals, or some divisive government policy.
By this measure, the war in Iraq has been a civil war not simply since the escalation of internecine killings following the bombing of a Shiite shrine in Samarra in February, but at least since the United States handed over formal control to an interim Iraqi government in June 2004.
Here's why: Although the insurgents target the U.S. military, they are also fighting the Shiite-dominated Iraqi government and killing large numbers of Iraqis. There is little reason to believe that if the United States were suddenly to withdraw its forces, they would not continue their battle to control or shape the government.
Political scientists who study civil war have proposed various refinements to this rough definition to deal with borderline cases. One issue concerns how much killing has to occur -- and at what rate.
2) For a conflict to qualify as a civil war, most academics use the threshold of 1,000 dead, which leads to the inclusion of a good number of low-intensity rural insurgencies.
Current estimates suggest that more than 25,000 Iraqis have been killed in fighting since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003 -- a level and rate of killing that is comparable to numerous other conflicts that are commonly described as civil wars, such as those in Lebanon (1975-1990) and Sri Lanka (beginning in 1983).
The organization -- or rather, disorganization -- of the warring communities in Iraq means that a large-scale conventional conflict along the lines of the U.S. Civil War is unlikely to develop. More probable is a gradual escalation of the current "dirty war" between neighborhood militias that have loose ties to national political factions and are fighting almost as much within sectarian lines as across them.
This is roughly what happened in Lebanon and at a lower level in Turkish cities in the late 1970s. Ethnic cleansing will occur not as a systematic, centrally directed campaign (as in Bosnia), but as a result of people moving to escape danger.
And there's another twist to the terminology:
3) If the conflict in Iraq becomes purely a matter of violence between Sunni and Shiite communities driven by revenge and hatred rather than by political goals, many political scientists would say that it is something other than civil war.
Almost no one, for example, calls the Hindu-Muslim violence in India a civil war.
A civil war has to involve attempts to grab power at the center of government or in a given region, or to use violence to change some major government policy.
In Iraq's case, however, the vacuum of power at the center means that communal violence will inevitably be tied to struggles for political power and control.
A final complication concerns the nature of international involvement. Some argue, for example, that the war in Bosnia should be seen as an interstate war rather than a civil war, since the Bosnian Serb forces were armed and directed largely by Belgrade. Post-Mobutu violence in Congo is often termed a civil war, even though fighters have been closely tied to armies from neighboring states.
4) A conflict may be both a civil and an interstate war at the same time.
The Vietnam War, for instance, clearly comprised both a civil war in the South and an interstate war involving the North, the South and the United States.
Iraq may be moving in this direction. The United States and Britain are already openly involved, and such neighboring countries as Iran and Syria are more covertly involved. Not that it matters to the people dying there, but the next debate here may turn on whether what is already a civil war in Iraq should be viewed as an interstate war as well.
