What’s in a(n American) name?

sp_aaib058_16x20immigrant-family-on-ellis-island-posters11252674815Be afraid.  After reading today’s New York Times off-lead piece “Border Sweeps in North Reach Miles in U.S.” how can anyone not?

“The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border…armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship…’Are you a U.S. citizen?’ agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo.  ’What country were you born in?’”

This comes just a few days after another NYT piece “New Life in U.S. No Longer Means New Name,” pointing out that immigrants to the United States are no longer “Americanizing” their names.  At glance these pieces are in contradiction, but upon closer observation they’re connected. Neither is good.

Unlike today’s article, “no new name” was meant to be a feel-good feature demonstrating America’s tolerance and diversity.

Here is why it wasn’t: There is no such thing as an “American” name.

That’s something I learned traveling from Sarajevo to the United States in 2004 when I was asked by a Dutch security official,  “Where are you from?”

“I’m American,” I replied.

The tall hazel-eyed Dutchman was not amused.  “No, you didn’t understand me, I want to know where you are from,” understanding all too well what he meant.

“Oh, I see, I’m from Brooklyn.” He clenched his jaw and continued to interrogate me about where my family was from, and finally where my name was from.  “Your name is not American.”  I told him that he was out of line.  He nearly hit me.  His colleagues restrained him.  I broke down in tears.

Letter after letter to Schiphol Airport and the Dutch Foreign Ministry, I demanded an apology – and explanation for such behavior.  “Never would I have expected,” I wrote,

“that in such an open and tolerant society (the Netherlands), which values self-determination, civil liberty and democracy, would I encounter such belligerent and horrendous behavior.  Questioning my identity as an American because of my name was inappropriate at best.  America’s wealth lies in the trove of its unique and diverse citizenship; there is no single definition or profile of an American.”

To which I received this reply:

“One of the signs our agents have been trained to scrutinize, (sic) is the surname of the passenger.  Your last name, although in your case belonging to a US citizen, probably has its origin somewhere in the Balkan region.”

Here’s why I wouldn’t accept that response:

“My name originates from Brooklyn, NY….  Bayrasli is every bit as American as Van Buren, Eisenhower, Powell, Chavez, Giuliani or Shinseki. We all carry the same passport, and allegiance to a government that is based on equal rights and equal protection, because our identities originate from a Constitution that knows only values, not ethnicity.”

Here’s why this is important:

We are currently living in a post 9/11, Glenn Beck-restore-honor-to-America-Sarah-“there will be no ground zero mosque” Palin-immigrants-are-not -welcome-in-Arizona world.  Anti-immigration and Islamophobia are escalating to the point where dark-skinned men are being violently attacked and  some believe that “it is impossible for a Muslim to be a good citizen in America.”

Declaring that people are no longer “Americanizing” their names leads one to believe that a single group defined the American identity – particularly those from that single group.  While it may be true that a single group first came to America, they built it so that no single group or single person could dominate it.  That, unfortunately, is at risk.  Just read the apology I eventually received from Schiphol Airport:

“One of the security measures, regarding U.S. flights, approved by the Dutch Government and the TSA is the procedure of pre-flight questioning, the so called profile check, in which numerous possible signs are listed. One of those signs approved in the procedure, is the surname of the passenger.”

When TSA approves racial profiling; when border patrol agents wake “foreign looking people” to question their citizenship, America’s own name is in jeopardy, not just those of its citizens – new or old.  And that’s certainly something to be afraid of.

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Inside the poverty puzzle: a plug for slum tours

imagesA year ago today, I landed in Mumbai, India’s bustling business capital.  I traveled there to spend time with 1298, a for-profit ambulance company that set up operations in response to the city’s lack of emergency care.  That’s right, India’s largest commercial center doesn’t have ambulances.  Mumbai simply lacks the capacity and resources for such a service.  Traveling around the city I could see why.

The “maximum” city, as one writer has dubbed it, *teems* with poverty.  Tin siding, blue tarpaulin and decaying wood dot every vantage point, from posh five star hotels to busy roadsides.  Restless barefoot children swarm stopped cars and tourists to beg for a Chicklet or a rupee.  Homeless men defecate on the street.  Mumbai’s poverty is raw and consuming.  I found it hard to handle.  No surprise then, I turned down an offer to visit Dharavi, the Slumdog Millionaire ghetto, for a “slum tour.”

With all the excitement surrounding poverty alleviation efforts, including microfinance and social entrepreneurship, slum tours have exploded in popularity. This troubles many, including Kenyan native and Echoing Green fellow Kennedy Odede who recently wrote about his aversion in the New York Times.

“Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from.”

I’m not so sure.

I skipped the Dharavi tour because I couldn’t see how a “slum” was any different than the poverty spread throughout Mumbai.  In doing so, I also missed an opportunity, as writer Anand Giridharadas told me, to see promise.  (His The ‘Slumdog’ effect: Afflict the comfortable a must read).  Slum tours take visitors to see life, not desperation.  Yes, life.  Isolated from the markets and services available to mainstream society, many entrepreneurial slum dwellers are bring much needed products and services to their communities.  Poverty is a condition of being without resources and opportunity – not without talent and dignity.

For decades, Westerners only saw the poor through heart-wrenching images of fly-infested children with bloated bellies.  Traveling to the third world amid an East-West divide, civil wars and dictatorial regimes made it impossible for us to actually see or know these children.  And that made it impossible to know or understand their plight.  All we could do was believe that their lives were – not just worse than ours – but blighted.  Hence we helped – out of guilt, not conviction.  We opened our purses and wrote checks.  Then when our regularly scheduled programming resumed we complained that nothing ever changed with “those people.”  They were never real to us.

Today slum tours give depth and humanity to “those people.” These tours show how “those people” are changing their communities – and how we can help them.  Contrary to what Odede believes, it moves some to not only start a dialogue and conversation, but also to mentor and invest in these innovators – just ask the Acumen Fund and Vision Spring.

To be fair, Odede’s concern that slum tours are voyeuristic is valid.  No doubt there are those for whom it is a selfish exercise, a “look at me, I saved the world” pat on the back.  It is improbable, however, that anyone with an ounce of decency could be “entertained” by it.  He is also right that slums won’t go away because of these tours alone.   Yet, they most certainly won’t go away if we stay out of them.

In a globalized world where the gap between rich and poor is only growing larger; where we are self segregating into communities and networks based on similar values and beliefs, slum tours provide a platform to connect and turn poverty away from being a concept into a reality.  In doing so, they also show us that the poor are not helpless.  More importantly, they show the poor that they are not alone.

“Please tell them our story,” a Turkish villager in southeastern Anatolia told me on a visit three years ago.  “Tell them we are poor but not impoverished.  Tell them we are just like you.”  Indeed they are – go see for yourself.

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Rwanda: Progress or Democracy?

imagesRwanda is on everyone’s mind again.  Sixteen years after the country suffered through a civil war and endured the nightmare of a genocide, we’re once again concerned about the tiny east African nation, no bigger than Maryland.  This time our concern is over the country’s “democracy” in the hands of president Paul Kagame, who won a second seven-year term last Monday.

Kagame has been Rwanda’s unlikely ruler since 2003.  He is a soldier – a former guerilla to be precise, though his rail-thin frame and wire-rimmed glasses would lead you to believe otherwise.  He trained in Uganda, as did many of his ethnic Tutsi brethren.  Yup, the Tutsis – the Rwandan genocide’s main victims.  They’ve had, as most minorities do, a difficult time under the “strong arm” of the majority Hutus.

Strong arm is exactly how many describe Kagame’s own “reign” over Rwanda today.  He is accused of using “authoritarian” tactics to quiet, and thereby defeat any opposition to his rule.  Among the tactics he is accused of using is the arrest of challengers, the shutting down of critical media outlets and possibly, according to several human rights groups, the ordering of the assassination of rivals.  Kagame categorically rejects these “unfair” claims that “have no basis” or “evidence to back them up.”

Instead he points to his record from the past seven years – a record that shows Rwanda catapulting to become Africa’s safest, most prosperous and least corrupt.  It is a country where the number of women in government is the highest in the world, where foreigners are pouring in investments, Rwandans are becoming entrepreneurs and poverty levels are diminishing.  It is this record, Kagame claims, along with his strong leadership, that helped him get re-elected last Monday.

Strong leadership is something Kagame takes seriously.  “The genocide that took place here in Rwanda,” he said the day after the election, “was due to bad politics; was due to weak leadership.” Weak leadership is something Kagame is not willing to risk.  But how strong is too strong?

In the wake of the failed Ottoman Empire, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk barely wrestled a homeland for the Turks out of the colonial hands of the British, French, Greeks, Russians and Italians.  Tasked with building not only a modern day state but also a single Turkish identity, he shut down mosques, banned women from the wearing of the Islamic veil and denied the formation of opposition parties.  They were tactics, among others, many regarded as “authoritarian.”  Ataturk felt they were a temporary necessity in order to propel Turkey forward to realizing its place as a European state.  Today Turkey is a full-fledged democracy, a member of the G20 and is represented on the UN Security Council.

Authoritarianism is just as bad as weak leadership and anarchy.  It creates fear.  And as Rwanda saw in 1994, fear leads to unimaginable chaos and tragedy.  But it is dangerous to accuse strong leadership of being anti-democratic.  Strong leadership is the basis for security and trust – the root of any democracy.   We see how the lack of those two elements has virtually destroyed Pakistan and Afghanistan and how it cripples Iraq today.

There is good reason for human rights groups to keep a close eye on Rwanda, just as there is good reason for Paul Kagame to take his landslide victory and continue leading his country into progress.  There is less reason – or justification – for Western concerns about democracy in Rwanda, especially in the face of the West’s uneven history there.

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What is the middle class?

Last Saturday, the NYT ran a piece on Indonesia’s economic miracle.  “After Years of Inefficiency, Indonesia Emerges as an Economic Model.”  That the South Asian island nation is rapidly growing wasn’t much of a surprise.  How the piece defines middle class was:

“In Jakarta, worsening traffic and a proliferation of megamalls are seen as signs of the growing strength of the middle class.”

Is the middle class traffic and megamalls?

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The color of writing

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Announcing HYBRID AMBASSADORSa blog-ring project of Dialogue2010 You met our multinational cultural innovators this spring in a roundtable discussion of hybrid life at expat+HAREM. Now in these interconnected blog posts they share reactions to a recent polarizing book promotion at the writing network SheWrites.Join the discussion on Twitter using #HybridAmbassadors or #Dialogue2010

I loved the Brady Bunch.

Never wanting to miss an episode, I’d rush home after school each day and hurriedly plough through my homework. I didn’t want anything to prevent me from spending an hour with the all-American clan and their three lovely girls, Marcia, Jan and Cindy. How I longingly envied these golden locked sisters and their blue eyes. Blonde hair and blue eyes were, I believed, what made someone American. And I desperately wanted to be American.

But changing my almond shaped brown eyes was, along with my olive skin, not possible, even if dying my dark hair was. Like it or not, I was stuck with this “foreign” look, that prompted almost everyone to ask, “Where are you from?” Even though I was born in Brooklyn, somehow I felt my features, along with my name and religion, kept me from saying “I’m an American.” Nothing gave me the right to that appellation.

In time I saw that I was wrong. Hair, eyes, names and race don’t make someone American. Values and vision do. So imagine my confusion in reading Lori L. Tharps’s blog post “Wanted: White Ambassadors to Help Me Cross Over,” in which she appeals to “White (sic) people”, whom she points out that she “loves”, to help her get “White” readers to buy her book.

“The sad fact is,” Tharps writes, “I can’t change anything without some white friends. It is a statistical impossibility that Substitute Me, (the book Tharps has written) will have a chance to shine if only my Black friends spread the word.”

It is an unfortunate reality that “black” writers are pigeonholed as such. They are set apart from their “white” peers whose books are categorized as “literature” – without adjectives. That has not, however, stopped whites from “crossing the divide” and picking up works by African American writes such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Richard Wright or James Baldwin. A reader, by its very definition, is someone on a journey, eager for new discoveries or answers to curious ones. Barriers are inherently contrary to that.

“There is nothing in me that is not in everyone else,” remarked African-American writer James Baldwin in 1985, long after the civil rights movement. He was being questioned, not for his skin color, but his homosexuality. Did Baldwin’s sexual orientation separate him from other writers, the questioner wanted to know. To which Baldwin replied, “There is nothing in everyone else that is not within me.”

There is nothing in blacks that is not in whites and in whites that is in not in blacks. That’s what Martin Luther King Jr. was referring to when he dreamed that his children would be judged not by their skin color but the “content of their character.” What would he make of Tharps’s appeal, particularly at a time when the barriers dividing “blacks” and “whites” have largely been eroded? At a time when the U.S. President is a man of color?

Not too long ago, my little sister and I were considering what to watch on television. “Oh look,” I remarked elatedly, “the Brady Bunch!” My sister, who is fifteen years my junior rolled her eyes at me. “What?” I asked. “What’s wrong with the Brady Bunch?” “It’s not real,” she replied. Neither is Tharps’s appeal or assumption. Just as blonde hair and blue eyes don’t make an American, “White” friends or “white” word of mouth won’t make Substitute Me shine. Tharps’s own writing will. She should let it stand and be judged by all, no substitutes.

This post is one of in the Hybrid Ambassador series, written in response to a post on SheWrites asking for ‘White Ambassadors’. You can read the other posts below:

Sezin Koehler’s Whites Only?

Rose Deniz’s Voice Lessons from a Hybrid Ambassador

Anastasia Ashman’s Great White People’s Book Club

Tara Lutman Agacayak’s Circles

Catherine Bayar’s Thicker Skin

Jocelyn Eikenburg’s The Problem with “Chinese Food”

Judith van Praag’s Hope-filled Jars

Catherine Yigit’s Special-ism

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Should food be a right?

Photo from the New York Times

Photo from the New York Times

Today’s NYT runs an off-lead story “Looking at Aid, India Asks, Should Food Be a Right?” It’s a rich piece that lays out the challenges of a government continuing a food distribution system to feed its poor, or perhaps developing a different system that doles out food coupons or cash, versus a government conceding to market forces in order to solve its hunger problem.  This line in particular caught my eye:

“India’s ability, or inability, in coming decades to improve the lives of the poor will very likely determine if it becomes a global economic power, and a regional rival to China, or if it continues to be compared with Africa in poverty surveys.”

Market-based solutions have become the darling of the development world.  But the reality is government, its platform and laws, still plays a role in poverty-alleviation efforts.  Is it flawed? Absolutely.  Is it dead?  No way.  Until we realize that government along with market-based solutions together will help end poverty, people like Ratan Bhuria and his malnourished children will continue to suffer.  Let’s stop the debates and get into action.

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The Billionaire’s Giving Pledge: A letter to Bill Gates and Warren Buffett

Dear Bill and Warren:

Congratulations.  Getting 40 of the world’s wealthiest to sign away a significant amount of their fortunes is a tremendous feat.  As a non-profit worker who has struggled to drive in donor dollars from this target group, I’m impressed, though not surprised.  None of us are.

Not surprised because very few of us have your collective star power.  Nor do we hold Net Jet accounts, making it difficult to run into Sergey and Larry at the nearest hangar.  Oh to be in the billionaire’s club! What an incredibly effective platform from which to raise money.  After all, how can the likes of Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg, and my former boss Ronald Perelman say no to you?  How uncomfortable would THAT make it in the skybox of the next U2 concert?

You know that they’re uncomfortable right?  They’re uncomfortable for the same reason you decided to undertake this initiative: charity ineffectiveness.  They know that the majority of charities, while well intentioned, have not radically impacted the world’s greatest challenges – and they don’t like that.  Ineffective is not how they operate.

One of the reasons charity ineffectiveness exists is, as Luke Johnson pointed out in yesterday’s Financial Times, because there are too many of them.  Too many that are too small to have significant impact.  Just as in entrepreneurship, scale is what philanthropy needs.  But you know all this, so forgive me for pointing out the obvious.

What I would like to point out are two things that might come in handy as you head out to save the world:

  • Billionaires are businessmen/women
  • Development workers are not

Why is this important?  Let’s start with how you both convinced your rich pals to sign on to your pact: The media.  How clever of you to use public pressure to strong arm the likes of Boone Pickens to say “I do.”  (Bristol take note.)  Yet be careful not to let the media’s propensity for the feel good anecdotes and images that pull at our heart strings prevent your friends from making tough decisions about charity efforts that are not working.  Those anecdotes and pictures may justify a charity’s existence but they do not give us real insight into the plight of the poor, hungry or diseased.  They spark guilt over our own privilege. It is precisely that privilege – and not guilt – that the 40 or so billionaires bring to the table that you should tap into and leverage.  Allow them to use their business savvy to identify the weakest links – and stand behind them when they do it.

Let them do it, rather than MBAs.  The craze of hiring from Harvard Business School to run a charity, while understandable, is, frankly, misguided.  (Offside everyone should read Nancy Lublin’s Zilch). No, this isn’t the “charities and non-profits are not businesses” refrain, however true that is.  It’s about having confidence in non-MBAs who have demonstrated a commitment to development – and who, thereby, understand that effective change doesn’t come from some slick, quantifiable spreadsheet.  Change is qualitative.  And qualitative is learned on the frontlines, in the slums, ghettos, cassava fields and war zones – not from carefully edited case studies.  Case studies provide no insight or depth into the complicated conditions that make development a harrowing and draining existence and not a formula.  Preparation is merely a tactic in the third world; results a day without a death.  Given such circumstances, it’s not calculation but conscientiousness and commitment that make the difference.

Many mistake the development worker’s commitment as Pollyannaish idealism.  As Bill Easterly points out in his superb book, White Man’s Burden, “many people who work on world poverty are distant from the fantasies and really just want to help the poor and try hard to do their jobs well.”  We do it, not because we can’t get a job on Wall Street, but because we have the compassion and capacity to put up a good fight.

Oh yes, this is all a fight.  There isn’t anything pretty or glorious about saving the world (no matter how sexy Nick Kristof makes it out to be).  And it’s never ending.  There is no exit, no IPO or plaque at the end of it.  Hopefully, however, because of your efforts it will be, finally, a fight where the enemy is outmatched.

Yes, the enemy is bigger than anything you’ve ever seen.  Worse yet, it is ruthless and deadly.  Surprised?  None of us are.

Warmest regards,

E.

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Profit: A dirty word?

Photo by Elmira Bayrasli

Photo by Elmira Bayrasli

Is it okay to profit off the poor?  I, along with a number of other development junkies, debated this point over Twitter on Friday.  It came at the behest of the inimitable Matthew Bishop, co-author of Philanthrocapitalism.

He did so following a blog post he and co-author Michael Green wrote following Muhammad Yunus’s reaction over the news that Indian micro-lending outfit SKS raised close to $350 million in an initial public offering.  Yunus, the godfather of microcredit, alarmingly quipped that the IPO, “is pushing microfinance in the loan sharking direction,” and “endangering the whole mission.”

When Yunus, following the example of Opportunity International, initiated micro-lending in his native Bangladesh in 1974 he meant it to be a resource where the poor, despite lacking the collateral, could borrow small amounts to start activities and not be subject to for-profit terms.  “Microcredit was created to fight the money lender, not to become the money lender,” Yunus said.

To be fair, the Nobel Laureate isn’t against the private sector.  Yunus engages with corporations such as Danone on various poverty alleviation efforts.  He just doesn’t think it belongs in the micro-lending business.  He doesn’t believe it’s okay to “profit off the poor.”  Certainly when posed in that way, it’s hard to disagree.  Yet I daringly and respectfully do.  Like Matthew and Michael, I see the SKS IPO as an “important step toward fully engaging the mainstream capital markets in the fight against poverty.”  Here’s why:

Without question micro-lending has succeeded in improving the lives of the poor.  It has not, however, succeeded in pulling poor countries out of poverty.  Yunus’s own Bangladesh, as World Bank stats show, is evidence.  That’s because entrepreneurship – and particularly micro-entrepreneurship – itself isn’t enough to end poverty. A micro-enterprise yields one, two or, at the most, three jobs, allowing a single family to gain control over its own income.  It does not, however, allow money to circulate through a community.  The difference between developed and developing countries isn’t the capacity for its citizens to innovate.  It’s in the ability for money to flow through the system, through taxes and disposable income.

That is significant.  Without the circulation of money, governments can’t pay teachers, provide clean drinking water or repair roads.  Communities don’t have access to innovations such as medicines.  Yes aid and charity provide necessary palliatives, but they’re not high-quality nor sustainable.  And sustainability is key.

“Sustained economic growth requires companies, writes The New Yorker’s James Surowiecki, “that can make big investments – building a factory say – and that can exploit the economies of scale that make workers more productive and, ultimately, richer.”

Secondly, if the goal is to eradicate poverty and turn the third world, as Yunus says, “into a poverty museum,” then it is impossible to avoid capital markets.  The private sector is an integral part of the developed world.  To imagine that one can take a country from rags to riches without incorporating the for-profit sector is naïve – at best.  Despite its faults, (and it has many) and (negative) history in the developing world, the private sector must play a role in development.   And that means the poor must play a role in the private sector.  Protecting them through aid and philanthropy is misleading.  For one, aid floods the markets, making them impossible to develop.  More importantly, both sustain the hierarchy between the “haves” and the “have nots.”  Handouts prolong dependency and create no incentives for entrepreneurial innovation. Finance, on the other hand, as we have witnessed in Silicon Valley, stimulates innovation and growth.  THAT is what the poor need more than anything else.

And that makes me wonder if the question of Friday’s debate should have been “is it okay for the poor to profit?”  Certainly when you pose it like that, it’s hard to disagree.

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Be careful what you wish for

The Turkish-based charity Insani Yardim Vakifi, known by the initials IHH, has come under heavy scrutiny since Israeli commandoes attacked the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara last week.  It was IHH funds that bankrolled the Mavi Marmara’s “humanitarian” voyage to deliver relief supplies to Palestinians in Gaza.  Was there more to it?

Israelis believe so.  “The IHH..is widely considered a terrorist organization by a number of bodies – including the Israeli government,” wrote Jerusalem Post’s Ben Hartman.  “Israeli authorities say IHH bolsters Hamas…It also charges that the group has links to al-Qaeda…”said the New York Times.

IHH officials deny this.  “IHH’s aims are humanitarian, not political,” said Omer Faruk Korkmaz, an IHH board member.  “We are Muslims that is all.”  And that is precisely what is raising eyebrows.

IHH was formed in 1992 during the Balkan wars to provide aid to Bosnian Muslims. It has since grown to become a multi-million dollar charity supporting Muslims in over 120 countries around the world.  Much of this support goes to orphan care, educational programming, including the building and repair of schools, and food aid programs.  It has several thousands of volunteers and supporters outside of Turkey, as demonstrated by the various nationalities aboard the Mavi Marmara.

“IHH’s funding is drawn from a broad base of middle-class donors,” Korkmaz told the Financial Times.  The middle class has become a significant economic and political force in Turkey, as the country’s ruling Justice and Development (AKP) party will tell you.

The AKP’s rise to power in the late 1990s came at the hands of a growing class of entrepreneurs from the Anatolian heartland.  These entrepreneurs, pious and traditional, made millions, with which they pursued policies that reflected their devout views.  Breaking the illegal blockade of Gaza is a recent example.

As the United States and leaders from other countries, including Israel, encourage young men and women, particularly in Muslim majority countries, to take up entrepreneurship as a means of lifting themselves of poverty and out of the grips of figures such as Hezbollah leader Nasrallah they should consider similar outcomes.

Just as in Turkey, the rise of a Muslim middle class will inevitably result in more and more philanthropic support for Muslim-based causes.  Not all these causes will be extremist or violent.  They will be, however, causes that, as the Mavi Marmara demonstrated, at times, will challenge Western policies – and might outright oppose them.  Does that make them wrong?

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U.S. to Iran: Let’s be friends

imagesBarack Obama shocked the Washington foreign policy establishment when, back in 2007, he said, “we’ve got to talk directly to Iran.”  It was a policy prescription that beltway insiders may have considered but certainly none openly discussed.  To do so would have been “naïve,” which is exactly what then candidate Obama was called.

In his new book, Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future, Stephen Kinzer argues why – and, more importantly, shows us how – that position toward the Iranians is worth pursuing.

Kinzer, a former New York Times reporter who reported from Iran, does so by writing not just about Iran.  Reset covers the greater Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia, Israel and Turkey.  Along with Iran, these countries, Kinzer says, hold the key to America’s foreign policy in the region.

They are keys, Kinzer says, that have been traditionally in the hands of Saudi Arabia and Israel.  That was when the cold war made the kingdom’s riches and the Jewish state’s anti-communism indispensible to America.  With the collapse of the East-West, however, those factors are less relevant.  In fact, Kinzer says they’re “undermining America’s own interests.”

Without overwhelming us with history, Kinzer skillfully chronicles Washington’s financial relationship with Saudi Arabia and military one with Israel.  Saudi Arabia’s “open checkbook” not only encouraged the United States to take a bold and active stand in the Middle East, it, along with America’s “distorted” bond with Israel, gave rise to the Islamic extremism that plagues the world today.

Kinzer calls America’s relationship with Israel distorted because it is not based on “historical reasons” or “regional peace.”  Until the end of the cold war, it was based on American military power.  “Eager to wage covert cold war battles in various parts of the world but were hampered by troublesome legal restrictions,” he writes, “Israel became a prized semisecret partner of the United States: a trainer of anti-Communist forces that the United States could not directly train, a conduit for arming regimes and rebel groups the United States could not openly arm, and a productive source of intelligence from around the world.”

The end of the cold war should have changed that relationship.  It didn’t.  Washington, Kinzer argues, continues to “treat Israel in a way that weakens Israel’s own security,” by promoting policies that lurch “helplessly from crisis to crisis.”  That is counterproductive for everyone.  The solution Kinzer proposes is for Washington to “reset” its foreign policy focus away from Saudi Arabia and Israel toward a closer engagement with Iran and Turkey.

Turkey, a place Kinzer lived for four years in the late 1990s, has always been an American ally, despite recent tensions in the relationship.  That Kinzer attributes to Turkey’s new approach to the world.  The country has “turned away from its traditional foreign policy, which was based on relations with Europe and the United States.”  Today, under an Islamic-inclined government, it is much more active in the Middle East, adopting a “zero problems with neighbors” policy.  Though Kinzer finds this encouraging, he acknowledges the discomfort that has given many in Washington who don’t like seeing Turkey engage with the likes of Syria and Iran.

Precisely because Turkey can engage with Syria and Iran is why, Kinzer writes, the United States should develop a closer alliance with Ankara.  As the only democratic Muslim country in the region, “Turkey can go places, engage partners, and make deals that America cannot.”

“But is the United States,” Kinzer asks, “so long accustomed to acting on its own, ready to be guided?”  Here, the Reset author, is less confident.  “America has little experience in listening to other powers.”  Given Hillary Clinton’s temper tantrum following the nuclear fuel swap deal Turkey concluded with Iran last month, with Brazilian support, this appears to be true.

Washington flatly rejected the very nuclear agreement it offered Tehran just six months earlier, but that the Islamic republic accepted when its western neighbor and Brazil proposed it.  Why?  Kinzer believes it’s because the United States shapes its foreign policy toward Iran based on emotion rather than logic.

“Some powerful Americans are still trapped by their anger at Iran, stemming from the deeply traumatic hostage crisis of 1979-81… These Americans have spent decades trying to punish Iran.”  Part of that punishment has been a refusal to negotiate with Tehran.   Yet after thirty years, that refusal hasn’t gotten America closer to the “peace” and “stability” it says it wants to see in the Middle East.

“The states have become too high for Americans to accept that option,” Kinzer writes.  The time has come for the United States to change its policy toward Iran and the entire region.  It must start by Washington distancing itself from Saudi Arabia and Israel and fortifying a new “power triangle” with Turkey and Iran.

Kinzer acknowledges that, “in order to become a reliable American partner, Iran would have to change dramatically.”  So too would the United States.  Barack Obama’s campaign comments are an indication it is ready to do.  Perhaps after reading Reset: Iran, Turkey and America’s Future it actually can.

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