The political firestorm that erupted when Dubai Ports World purchased UK-based Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation and was poised to assume its leases at six American maritime terminals was quieted by the company's decision to drop its bid. However, in the wake of the terminal lease furor important issues remain. They include questions about US port security in light of attention given to the scant number of inbound shipping containers that undergo security inspections, the appropriateness of foreign ownership of critical US infrastructure and the lack of knowledge about America's allies in the Arab world. We were fortunate to have the opportunity to talk with Dr. David Long about the last of these issues, the question of what do Americans know about Arabs.
Dr. Long has compiled a remarkable record of government service and scholarship, especially in Middle East affairs and counter terrorism. We suggest you review the "About the Author" entry below as well as his contributions to SUSRIS on the Hajj in Saudi Arabia and his publications on the Middle East. They include his 2005 book,
"Culture and Customs of Saudi
Arabia," a source of otherwise hard to find information on the Kingdom.
Dr. Long was interviewed at his home in Northern Virginia on March 21, 2006.
SUSRIS: Thank you for taking time today to share your thoughts on an issue important to our readers, namely the relationship between Americans and the Arab world. Let�s start with Americans� perceptions of the Arab world, which were starkly exposed in the recent Dubai Ports World spectacle. What was your reaction to the way the issue played out?
DR. DAVID LONG: Well let me start with a general perspective and work down to a particular view. I believe that American attitudes towards the Arab world, in particular and to a degree the greater Muslim world are inversely proportioned to the amount of polarization of our policies toward the area.
So in a period when they are not polarized most Americans don't concern themselves with anything about the area anyway. They are not terribly interested in the area. Therefore their attitudes are benign -- passive at best. Not because they keep up with the issues. It�s just the opposite. They don't. When issues are polarized then the attitudes tend to be more negative. The public is more influenced by images from the media, which tend to, not because of any plot or anything, but tend to be sensationalistic because that sells.
So if you use 9-11 as a milestone you see that prior to that point the image of the Middle East and Arab world, and Saudi Arabia in particular, were almost non-existent among Americans. It wasn't good or bad. It was just not much of anything. Even in the area of energy costs there wasn�t much attention. I don't remember seeing anyone writing extensively about it. We were in a twenty-year oil glut, in which the prices of oil by the late 90's were actually cheaper than before the embargo in 1973.
After 9-11 there was a rapid turnaround because of two things. First, the traumatization. This could not happen in America and it did happen in America. For me personally, I was involved in counter terrorism back in the 1980�s and did a lot of public speaking for the State Department back then. I kept saying it�s not if it�s going to happen, it�s when it�s going to happen. But nobody believed it until 9-11 and it did happen. And it could happen again.
So that was a trauma- we were all traumatized. The administration was traumatized not unlike everyone else. However, their approach to the problem, in my view, raised a more negative perception because it was sort of black and white, good and evil, and it was laced with fear. We were going to fight a global war against terrorism and the President�s image was that of a war president.
Based on my experience in counter terrorism I don�t believe terrorism can be compared to contemporary conventional military war. There are no military objectives in terrorism. It is a psychological tactic that is used to try to terrify your enemy and it is usually a tactic of last resort by groups who are so hopelessly outgunned militarily by their adversaries that they use this because it�s the only way they can play. So, they are dealing in fear. But, the fear that Osama was trying to engender in our country fit in with, unknowingly to the Administration, the fear the Administration was engendering against the enemy. It�s an ironic situation where you had two fear mongers who couldn�t stand each other, who were opposed to each other, actually using the same tactics against the same people.
So then we get up to the Dubai ports deal. We should all realize that there is absolutely no relevancy in who owns the terminal and security. Another personal experience of mine -- after I finished my stint as Deputy Director for Counter Terrorism at State I asked to get a university assignment and was sent me to the Coast Guard Academy. It was a wonderful experience and while there I met a young lieutenant who was one of the most brilliant staff officers I�ve ever seen. After he finished his doctorate I recommended him for a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellowship. While there he examined at the war on drugs and the port security issues. And he has been looking at port security ever since. In my opinion he is the guru of the US on port security. From him I learned over the years -- when he was trying in vain to get the Congress interested, even after 9-11, in port security, without any success -- the structure of port security and it is �all-American.� It is not a matter of who owns the terminal, or who leases it. In fact, we have had foreign ownership of energy terminals for years -- foreign owned, some Saudi owned. Saudi Aramco owns a share with Shell in terminals.
So then you ask yourself why all of this brouhaha about Arab terrorism and port security? And my answer is this. There are elections coming up next November. The population of this country has been submerged in fear mongering about terrorism, coming both from al-Qaeda as well as from the Administration. When this came up it struck a fear in them that I think was not even thought about either on the �Hill� or by the Administration.
I believe the Administration had not considered it was such a bombshell. They just casually announced this thing. Once it came up Congress was inundated with constituent feedback. Congress was upset at being out of the loop but they were more concerned when they were bombarded by their constituents -- people who were downright scared to death that somehow Arabs would be a security threat at the ports. So the bottom line was this was really a domestic political problem, not a security problem.
The depressing thing about it is that having gotten through the political element of the problem we still have not addressed the security element of the problem because port security is still in crying need of upgrading.
SUSRIS: Can you talk about the notion that the public has built-in images that they reflexively call up when they have to deal with new information especially during, as you called it, times of issue polarization? It seems that leaders who try to work with America�s Arab allies have to fight against the popular concept of Arab as a �four letter word.�
DR. LONG: What you just said is absolutely true and it resonated here because the catalyst was an Arab company in the Gulf having ownership of terminals, not ports, but terminals. But that was just the catalyst. And when there isn�t a catalyst, as they started off with, then usually attitudes towards the region are slightly negative but mostly neutral. When you have a catalyst -- something that raises the fear level -- that is when all of this negativism comes streaming back because it is latently there. Those are the predominant images that are projected in the media and when they are projected to a very fearful people that is the result you get.
SUSRIS: It may be too complex a question to ask how these negative images developed when a more timely question would be what remains to be done. Is it the responsibility of the policymakers to address the issue of prejudice to prevent alienation of our Arab allies?
DR. LONG: There are two elements in the answer to that question. One is separating the political problem from the security problem. In any event Americans need to have safer ports than we do, and that has nothing to do with foreign ownership. So let�s leave that aside for a minute and look then at the political problem.
The perceptions which support our policies over the last fifty years in the Middle East have been pro-Israeli. This goes back to the Holocaust and to the shock at seeing the outrages in WWII. It particularly came to the fore in the partition of Palestine in 1947.
Since that time images of the US in the Arab world were very, very positive because most of the Arab states were under colonial rule, either by France or by Great Britain up until WWII. Saudi Arabia was an exception -- never having been colonized by the Europeans -- so they did not have all the baggage of anti-colonialism of most of the Arab states.
Now my personal view is this. The members of Congress, the Senate and the House, would never endanger the United States by supporting policies they felt were dangers to the national security. The problem is they have to be convinced of that. If they are not convinced of that -- either because of ignorance or some sort of rationalization or whatever other reason -- then there is a tendency, and it is a natural tendency to assume that anything that doesn�t have any foreign policy cost to it is more or less free action. So if you want to dump on �Bongostan� and there is no cost to doing so, then do so. And all the more, if your constituency is very much anti-�Bongostan.� The problem in the Middle East is we are not talking about �Bongostan� here. We are talking about one of the most strategically important areas in the world because of energy.
When we say over and over again that we must lower our dependence on Middle East oil there is a lot of truth to that. However, what we have always done in our oil strategy is to have a supply driven policy because up until the end of the 1960�s we were net exporters of oil. We could regulate price by how much we pumped or didn�t pump. Since then we have been net importers of oil. We are net importers of oil at such a level that at this point there is no possible way we can ever produce the amount of oil that we need to fuel our economy, particularly our transportation sector. We must, like it or not, import oil unless we drastically cut down on consumption.
So it would be logical to have a demand driven strategy because we are the largest consumer of oil and both in aggregate and per capita of any country in the world, so we should be able to do something about demand, not enough to get energy independence but certainly enough to lower our dependence.
That is a sensitive political issue, domestically, for the American public because they don�t want higher gas prices. Funny thing is when you do have gas prices go up people get out of their SUV�s and get into Hondas. Nevertheless this is a domestic problem so in two areas, very key areas here, domestic policies trump foreign policies.
One is our attitude toward being anti-Arab, as the enemy of Israel, particularly since 1948, and the other is our resistance to conserve the amount of gasoline we use in our gas-guzzling cars, either through a tax on horsepower or a tax on gasoline, or whatever you want to do. So we have two classic cases coming together, in my opinion, of domestic policy trumping foreign policy, which is not in the American national interest.
SUSRIS: What is the prescription? The politicians, as you pointed out, are going to do whatever is in their political interest to demonize �Bongostan� or wherever, but what can be done, if anything, among the American public to provide a balanced view of reality?
DR. LONG: In answering your question we need to acknowledge that it is a lot older problem than 9-11 and it fires up when there is a polarization, and it calms down when there is a lack of polarization. So the simple answer is, if you can keep the Middle East area politically unpolarized you can go a long way in allaying the fears that drive these hostile attitudes.
Polarization -- be it Arab-Israel, Arab-Iran, whatever -- is something that fires the fears that drive the hostilities. Polarization is the simple answer. Now how do you go about doing something about that? That changes with history. For example, Saudi Arabia was not considered a part of the anti-Arab attitudes that arose in the Nasser period. Although King Faisal started off to admire Nasser he quickly changed because he saw he was too socialist in playing �footsy� with the communists and the Saudis have always been very anti-communist. So the negative images of the Arab world during the Nasser period were more aimed at radical Arabs and not at the conservative Arabs such as Saudi Arabia and states like Morocco and others.
Then came the 1973 Arab-Israeli war when the oil embargo was laid and Saudi Arabia was seen then as the threat because of the power that it had to be able to embargo us in a time when supply/demand made a shortage of oil and the price went up. After 1980 there was a crash in the price and it stayed low for years. Therefore all the vitriol that came out about Saudi Arabia and the other Arabs, mainly the oil producing Arab states at that time got very quiet.
Then in the late 1980�s the Cold War ended. And at the end of the Cold War there was no longer any strategic threat which could be brought to the fore to show why the Arabs who had ties to the Soviet Union all had to be dealt with harshly. There was no longer a Soviet threat. At that time there was some image making to show the new threat was the threat of terrorism. It was consciously aimed at Arab terrorism, Islamic terrorism.
As I said earlier I was involved in counter terrorism in the 1980�s and the largest amount of terrorism going on back then, and up until just recently was in South America, not in the Middle East. To this day -- they are trying now to arrange a peaceful settlement � the organization that has been responsible for the most casualties, terrorist casualties, is not a household name in this country, it is the Tamil Tigers. If you ask someone on the street, have you heard of the Tamil Tigers they will likely say �Who?�
So we had a very slanted view of terrorism and now with the trauma of 9-11, terrorism has taken on a fear factor that reminds me somewhat, not in the virulence of it, but somewhat of McCarthyism. Where there was a �Red� under every bed now there is a terrorist under every bed.
I worked in anti-terrorism and terrorism is a threat. WMD terrorism is a terrible threat and it must be taken very seriously. But at the same time it must be put into perspective. The terrorists do not own thousands of nuclear weapons that could cause a global war that would turn the whole globe into a cinder. Bad, of course they�re bad, but so are deaths due to drunken driving every year in this country.
One of the things that we could do to lower the fear factor and lower the negative image factor is to put terrorism in the proper perspective. Do not ignore terrorism � it�s too dangerous, but put it into proper perspective. It will never be eradicated. It�s too easy, too available and too tempting for small groups, ever to eradicate this. It goes back to the assassins, the �Hashashin� and farther back than that if you want. We must therefore try to put it into manageable proportions where we can live life without fear. And to me that comes to the answer to your question. The formula to me should be not to ignore terrorism but not to turn it into a monster way out of proportion to the nature of the threat.
SUSRIS: Let�s talk about supporting moderate voices in the Arab world. Since it seems that voices on both sides, the West and the Arab world, are giving way to the extremes, what is the outlook for moderates gaining ground? How will we find common ground?
DR. LONG: My belief has always been let the truth ring out -- with all the warts. The United States certainly has warts, we certainly have a lot of things wrong with us. Our problem is we can�t keep them hidden because there are media like Al Jazeera who will tell the world about them.
The same is true going in the other direction. They�ve got plenty of warts too. But I feel transparency in the media, in perception making, where you look at people and say, �Yes they have a lot of bad qualities and good qualities. This is who they are. This is who we are.� Now, knowing full well who we are dealing with, how we get along, has a far better chance of success than a war of words and a screaming match on both sides.
Basic psychology posits that hostility comes from two sources. The first is fear, and we have talked about fear. The second is grievance, which comes from grief. And a sense of grievance comes from anger and from the sense of anger can come hostility. And from hostility comes violence. It is not inevitable but this is the road. And there is more than enough fear and grievance running around the world right now for everybody to be mad at everybody else.
If you remember the old Kingston Trio song, it ends, �Nobody likes anybody very much.� That to me is the first place to start -- not to say these guys are great or we�re great. No, none of us is -- we�re human beings -- but to stop demonizing each other and saying these are people that get up in the morning and go to bed at night, and have families just as we do and if they can portray themselves to humanize our perceptions of them and if we can do the same back I think that�s the place to start.
SUSRIS: Are we making any progress?
DR. LONG: Well, it�s cyclical. Right now I�m pessimistic but in the long run I�m an optimist.
SUSRIS: Thank you, again, for helping us put these recent events in perspective.
ABOUT DAVID E. LONG
David E. Long is a consultant on Middle East and Gulf affairs and international terrorism. He joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1962 and served in Washington and abroad until 1993, with assignments in the Sudan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. His Washington assignments included Deputy Director of the State Department's Office of Counter Terrorism for Regional Policy, a member of the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, and Chief of the Near East Research Division in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research Bureau. He was also detailed to the Institute for National Strategic Studies of the National Defense University in Washington, 1991-92, and to the United States Coast Guard Academy, 1989-91, where he served as Visiting Professor of International Relations and in 1990-91 as Acting Head of the Humanities Department.
A native of Florida, he received an AB in history from Davidson College, an MA in political science from the University of North Carolina, an MA in international relations from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and a Ph.D. in International Relations from the George Washington University.
In 1974 -1975, Dr. Long was an International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations and concurrently a Senior Fellow at the Georgetown University Center for Strategic and International Studies. While on leave of absence from the State Department, he was the first Executive Director of the Georgetown University Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1974-1975. In 1982-1983, he was a Senior Fellow of the Middle East Research Institute and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1987-1989, he was a Diplomat in Residence and Research Professor of International Affairs at Georgetown.
Dr. Long has been an adjunct professor at several Washington area universities, including Georgetown, George Washington and American Universities and the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies. He has also lectured extensively in the United States and abroad on topics relating to the Islam, the Middle East and terrorism.
His publications include: Culture and Customs of Saudi Arabia (2005), The Government and Politics of the Middle East and North Africa (co-editor with Bernard Reich, 4th ed. 2002), Gulf Security in the Twenty-First Century (co-editor with Christian Koch, 1998), The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (1997), The Anatomy of Terrorism (1990), The United States and Saudi Arabia: Ambivalent Allies (1985), Saudi Arabian Modernization (with John Shaw, 1982), The Hajj Today: A Survey of the Contemporary Makkah Pilgrimage (1979), Saudi Arabia (1976) and The Persian Gulf (1976, revised 1978).
Books by David Long
include:
Culture and Customs of Saudi Arabia
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0313320217/saudiusrelati-20
The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0813014735/saudiusrelati-20
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