The Uses of Power

So what it comes down to is, it's about power and how you use that power in your vision of the future. In your book you devote a lot of attention to something that's being ignored, which is public opinion in the region. You argue that it's been mobilized, that the technology is informing people in ways that regimes of the United States don't control. Talk a little about that. If you suddenly have a situation where we are implementing power in a way that's inconsistent with our values, what is this going to do to the Arab public opinion?

States are still the key players in the Middle East, no doubt, and governments have developed a very effective oppressive mechanism, and they still have the capacity to control the public discontent, largely. Obviously, there are always exceptions to the rule. As you know, we political scientists haven't predicted revolutions very well, historically. They do happen, but they're rare in history, [at least] in the Middle East.

Let's start with that, that governments still have the capacity to control, and they probably will. Most of them will survive even when they do things that are unpopular. They do it through repression, but that doesn't lead to democracy, that leads to more repression. But there is a new dynamic that makes it a little bit uncertain for them and complicates their lives in ways that they cannot escape, and that is the new media.

Historically, governments nearly monopolized the media in the Middle East -- never fully monopolized it, but largely were the key players in every single country. The rise of the transnational media in the Middle East has been propelled by the technological revolution, particularly satellites, and the fact that prices dropped, and more people have them. As a consequence, you have a proliferation of stations, including stations that are not directly controlled by governments.

If you are an Egyptian or a Jordanian and you turn on your television set, if you have satellite service, you're going to have something like fifty different stations to choose from. You're not going to necessarily watch your government station, if your government station is the most boring. And in some instances, they are. They're showing the president or the king shaking hands with hundreds of people -- they have to show every single one of them for fifteen minutes as the top of the news. So you have options.

That opens up a different logic for the competitors. If you're a small station that wants to reach the entire world now, you can, by virtue of that technology. You say, "How am I going to get them to switch on my program?" So you say, therefore, "What does my consumer want?" And my consumer changed. If I'm broadcasting out of a little Qatar or the United Arab Emirates, I no longer say, "What does my Qatari want?" I now say, "What does my Arab consumer want?" Because everybody speaks Arabic, whether in Morocco or Egypt or Saudi Arabia. And that's a 300 million people market, as opposed 200 thousand people market. And so your consumer changed. It is now the Arab.

That's that the prototype that they try to reach. They try to craft the news in a way that resonates with that individual, that consumer that is called the Arab. Therefore, they try to find things that are in common, even if they conflict with the views of particular regions. In fact, in many countries, including Saudi Arabia, most people get their news from sources outside their own government.

So governments no longer have the monopoly to control the information because of this phenomenon. And that makes it a little bit more difficult for them in times of crisis. When they want to spin the news, it makes it difficult for them to do it. We have been seeing something very interesting in the past few weeks in the lead-up to a possible war with Iraq, particularly in Egypt. The Egyptian government has apparently decided that war is inevitable and that they can't stop it, and therefore they can't go against it, and therefore they're going to try to protect the strategic relationship with the U.S. And yet, public opinion is decidedly opposed to it for a variety of reasons. [The government] has decided to give the media a new spin, which is that now it's all up to Saddam Hussein, to shift the burden and say it's up to him, with the expectation that if there's a decision that he hasn't performed, then it will be okay to wage the war.

This will be a test. In Egypt, a lot of people have access to non-Egyptian television, but a lot fewer than in some other countries. Egypt still focuses on its own media more than any other in the Arab world. So if it succeeds, it doesn't mean that others will succeed. But if it fails, if this message doesn't hold -- and I'm actually conducting a public opinion survey, as we speak, in Egypt and Morocco and Saudi Arabia about attitudes, and we'll see how the public is actually affected by these attempts -- if it fails, it tells you that information is probably already outside the control of the governments.

One last question requiring a brief answer: what would you most like to see changed in short-term U.S. policy to change the course we're presently on? Not necessarily just about war in Iraq, but with a broader view of what we might do differently?

Three things. In the Middle East, priority number one is Arabic-Israeli peacemaking. There's no way to avoid it. You can't postpone it. And no war with Iraq will make it irrelevant. It goes back to that square one, because that's still going to be the core issue that is going to define the relationship with the U.S. in the Middle East.

Second, multilateralism, because the issues that are at hand require legitimacy, and without that legitimacy, it's not going to work, particularly issues like terrorism.

And third, assurance. One reason why people oppose war with Iraq is not Iraq per se, but the notion that Iraq is representative of a broader threat presented by the new American foreign policy toward many other states, the unpredictability of who might be next -- if, in fact, there will be someone next. And, therefore, there's going to have to be a different tone, a different cooperative relationship. Coalitions are not ones that are counted by votes. Coalitions are ones that are counted by agreement as they go to vote. That is the big difference in terms of what might come out of the U.N. Even if we succeed in getting a U.N. resolution, for many around the world, this is going to be seen to be a coerced resolution, it is going to be seen as a small fig leaf for what is essentially a unilateral assertion of American power. So even the resolution itself isn't going to be enough to cover that appearance, because of the behavior so far, and that needs a fundamentally different approach.

Shibley, on that note, thank you very much for spending this hour with us, and giving us a breathtaking overview of our dilemmas in the Middle East, and an informed look at our policy. We highly recommend your new book, Shibley Telhami: The Stakes: America and the Middle East, published by Westview. Thank you very much for being with us.

Thanks. Thanks very much.

And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.

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