Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2020, p. 66
Book Talks
Diplomats, journalists and others interested in the region packed the Atlantic Council’s Washington, DC headquarters on Jan. 15 to hear nonresident senior fellow Nabeel Khoury discuss his new book, Bunker Diplomacy: An Arab-American in the U.S. Foreign Service: Personal Reflections on 25 Years of U.S. Policy in the Middle East.
New York Times columnist Tom Friedman conducted the interview, firing off questions on Khoury’s experiences serving in Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon, Egypt and beyond as a high-ranking American diplomat.
Wherever he was posted in his long diplomatic career, Khoury identified closely with the issues and “deeply tried to bridge the differences no matter how wide the gap,” the author explained. “And in Baghdad in 2003 the gap was certainly wide.”
The Lebanese-born Khoury regaled the audience with tales from his many postings and how over the years the Middle East changed, along with the security of the embassies in which he worked, turning many into “bunkers.”
In Yemen, where he had his own car, Khoury said he had to trick his security team in order to go out alone, telling them, “I just want to go out. I just want to meet people. And don’t worry, I’ll let you know where I am.”
The French, British, Chinese and Russians, he noted, did not take the kinds of security precautions that Americans did, and yet their embassies weren’t attacked. The Americans, he said, “projected an image of stupidity and arrogance that rubs people the wrong way.”
Referring to Kahlil Gibran’s 1920 poem “You Have Your Lebanon and I Have Mine,” which he quotes at the beginning of his book, Khoury said the celebrated poet’s insights into sectarianism, feudalism and corruption “might as well have been written yesterday.” The situation in Lebanon, he pointed out, has not changed, and “has gotten worse because the corrupt political elite has not only ruined the economy, but they have run the country into the ground physically.”
Khoury voiced support for the Arab youth currently taking to the street. “It has to be a good thing in the long term, but in the short term you are going to go through hell probably. The Arab in me detests the fact that most of the Arab world is ruled by dictators, and the Arab in me identifies with the youth that we see in the streets today in Beirut and Baghdad who want to get rid of this oppressive structure. The need for freedom is a very human thing....I think they finally understand that they are being abused by a corrupt political elite that eventually has to go.”
Elaine Pasquini, a recipient of the Fairness & Integrity in Media Award from the Council on American-Islamic Relations, is a correspondent for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.
