NEW YORK — it is a sad and shocking — pitiful themselves, in many cases — how Arab leaders portrayed in the US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks earlier this week.
A couple of points about the Arab leaders conduct comes to mind, as we learn new details about what the tr?de, said and did in various diplomatic moments. these points are on the jurisdiction, accountability, accuracy and dignity in the realm leadership — or, as we have here, the lack of these qualities in so many cases.
The most shocking revelation — not a revelation, really, as many of us had warned about this in decades — is that the Arab Governments, which has spent hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars on the purchase of American and other foreign weapons still find themselves totally helpless, vulnerable and afraid of what they see as growing Iranian power and influence in the region.
The various Arab leaders quoted that ask the United States hurry up and do something about Iran's growing nuclear technology capabilities reveals an apparent inability to care for their own countries and citizens.
Those who called on the private or expected, Israel and/or the United States to do their dirty work for them, did so because of their own ability to make decisions, and pursue policies that could have transformed their countries to more viable States that could undertake the tasks of statesmanship — about diplomacy or war — with some credibility.
It is bad enough that a host of the Arab countries have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on "security" systems that ultimately saw them ask others to make preemptive attack against neighboring Iran, a country, which should have been a partner, friend, and even ally.
It is worse to the Arab leaders, who looked to the United States and Israel to protect them by attacking Iran requested this approach calmly, hidden, without standing up for their positions in the public.
But it is far, far worse that all this should have taken place in a context where the Arab leaders seem to have had zero weighty evidence — zero — that Iran planning to produce nuclear weapons. can actually their policies, rather than ask Iran to consider this option.A collective Arab politics of hidden appeal for American and isr?lske foreigners to carry out aggression against a (Muslim) neighbour without evidence to a neighbour's sake — confirms that one's own enormous, almost incalculable, Arab national wealth spent on security in the end is not in a position to provide this safety — are a sad testament to the poor quality of leadership in the national security realm to say the least.
Arab leaders in the Gulf and elsewhere have had many opportunities in the past half century forge mutually beneficial working relationships with Iran, to remove the few political obstacles that stood in the way of healthy mutual ties and to develop security safety, commercial and infrastructural connections that would have made for the Golf and the wider Middle East region, what the European Union and the European Union has made in unifying and strengthening a prosperous Europe.
Why the Arab leaders, who had the legitimacy, the means, motive and opportunity to do so did not can so in recent decades some day be explained by the historians.
For the moment we have modern events and revelations of these leaks remind us of what happens when the overall political, economic and military power in the hands of the small number of men (here no women) is shielded from any kind of routine accountability by nationals and citizens of these same countries.
The reason why democracy is a desired and effective governance system is that national policies are often wide mirrors public sentiment, which gives the national leaders of credibility when you talk and negotiate with or sometimes even true, other leaders.
As these leaks shows Arab leaders mostly seems to be missing kind of credibility, which sometimes cause them to say one thing in public and anything else in private when talking to foreign powers.
The public in the Gulf, Egypt, Jordan and other Arab countries is varied, not monolithic. many Arabs support Tehran's policies, and many others against them. Some Arabs to covet u.s. support, others distrust. Some Arabs want to make peace with Israel, others want to fight it.
This variety is, however, completely detached from the policies and the public or private statements about Arab leaders — which weakens the leaders, the Arab countries, vulnerable, and leads to the kind of sad, shocking and even pitiful examples of behavior now we read about.
Wasted billions, perpetual vulnerability, chronic-credibility, ambiguous strategifastl?ggelsen and, ultimately, no success to display all these adds one more serious and priceless if intangible, accident in the list: national dignity.
Rami g. Khouri is editor at large-The Daily Star and Director of the Issam Fares Institute for public policy and international affairs at American University in Beirut.
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