How To Defeat The Terrorists

Rami G. Khouri
July 22, 2005

Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.

In the last 7 weeks, I have had the opportunity to make working visits to seven different Arab countries and to engage in political and other discussions with local officials, academics, journalists and opposition activists. The experience has been instructive, and simultaneously heartening and depressing, but has suggested obvious opportunities and dangers in the dual quest to respond to the rights of Arab citizens and defeat the global terror plague.

Based on my visits and discussions in Jordan, Bahrain, Yemen, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine and Morocco, along with meetings with colleagues from Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Libya, Algeria and Kuwait, I sense a common mood across the Arab world: the prevailing status quo is neither satisfying to the majority of citizens, nor sustainable for the rulers in its current state, but neither is it on the verge of revolutionary or violent change.