BUILDING BRIDGES BETWEEN AMERICA AND ARABIA

BUILDING BRIDGES BETWEEN AMERICA AND ARABIA

The National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations: 1996-2001

A Report

PRIVATE SECTOR

From its earliest days, the National Council has believed that U.S. macro economic and defense interests in the Arab world as a whole, if not also a range of strategic and political interests, have been and are likely to remain sound at their core.

By contrast, American private sector links with the region in general, while in several cases impressive, are in need of continuing improvement. For many, it is this side of the relationship that requires the greatest commitment of effort and resources aimed at placing America’s relations with its Arab friends and allies on as firm a foundation as possible.

The reasons for the region’s ongoing importance also encompass the need for a suitable environment in which the formation of mutually beneficial joint commercial ventures can occur and flourish.

Anyone in doubt about the ongoing significance of the region to the United States need only consider the impact of the opportunities and challenges embedded in the Arab world’s international dynamics for as long as anyone can remember. These have often been at or near the root of what has occurred in boom times.

These same dynamics have also helped to sustain the well being of the United States and much of humanity as a whole in less favorable periods. In almost every way imaginable, from international financial markets to prices and the availability of energy supplies, the Arab world has been, is, and is likely to remain key to the need for corporate, financial, and other development strategists to be able to plan responsibly and effectively for the present and near-term future.

U.S.-GCC CORPORATE COOPERATION COMMITTEE

Established in 1986, the U.S.-GCC Corporate Cooperation Committee remains the main forum within which the National Council interfaces with the U.S. corporate community, often in conjunction with U.S. policymakers entrusted with advancing and protecting American commercial and economic interests.

Immediately upon its formation, the corporate members elected to have the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations serve as the Committee’s secretariat. The Council has been honored and proud to serve in this capacity. Not least among the reasons is the fact that, among the Committee’s members, are those that comprise a significant number of American corporate leaders. On balance, these leaders are notable not only for their having vision, leadership, and commitment, but also for their realizing the need, and being willing, to work continuously at improving the relationship between the United States and the American people, on one hand, and their official and private sector counterparts in the Arab world, on the other.

The Committee, for example, has made it possible for the National Council, in association with the Committee, to produce GulfWire (see below) and close to 50 other publications. The latter include Dr. Anthony’s writings on the annual GCC summits and numerous other issues that deal with one or more aspects of the GCC experiment as a whole, or with one of its member-countries.

Each of these publications has helped increase American knowledge of the GCC region and Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. As one of the Committee’s founding members, Parsons Corporation’s Joseph Volpe, put it, “We benefit from these countries. And we do so on a rather large scale. In this respect, we are the envy of every other country and foreign corporation in the world.”

In addition to publications, the Committee is the corporate backbone of the Council’s seminars and briefings, and, especially, the annual U.S. Policymakers Conference, of which it is a co-sponsor. The corporate members are: Boeing Corporation; Booz, Allen, Hamilton, Inc.; Bryan Cave LLP; Chevron Overseas Petroleum; CMS Energy; Conoco; ExxonMobil; General Dynamics; General Electric; Lockheed Martin; MPRI; Northrop Grumman; Parsons Corporation; Phillip Morris Companies, Inc.; Raytheon; SAIC; and TRW.

INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL COOPERATION

The famous movie, “Field of Dreams,” features a man who is intent on building a baseball stadium in a rural area in the middle of the United States. To his unbelieving wife and two children, the man says, “If I build it, they will come.” He did, and they came.

Similarly, on a winter morning in January 1992, with temperatures barely above zero and the streets of Washington dangerous with ice, the heads of all the non-ethnic Arab-U.S. organizations gathered at the National Council. The meeting was unprecedented. It was called for a simple purpose: to initiate regular meetings among the principals in which they would exchange information and analysis and explore possibilities for increasing cooperation. The goal, wherever possible, was also to share resources, minimize duplication, and, in general, be more effective supporters and participants in each other’s projects, programs, activities, and events.

In addition to the National Council’s cooperation with American organizations, it has also conducted joint programs and activities in association with non-profit associations in select Arab countries. Among the more important associations have been the following, cited in alphabetical order.

Al-Ain (UAE) University

Approximately 75 American university professors have participated in the National Council’s Malone Fellows Program in Arab and Islamic Studies in conjunction with the United Arab Emirates’ National University at Al-Ain, Abu Dhabi. Professors from the Midwest region of the United States who visited the UAE were among the first to establish a state committee affiliate of the National Council. In addition, some among the Council’s Malone Fellow alumni have returned to the UAE to teach at the University.

The National Council has also conducted educational activities in the UAE with the Arab Cultural Foundation, the Emirates Centre for Strategic Studies and Research, the Emirates Cultural Club, the Zayid Centre for History and Folklore, the U.S. Business Councils in Abu Dhabi and Dubai, and the American Embassy as well as the U.S. Consulate in Dubai, where the Ambassador, the Consul, and their country teams have briefed the delegations.

The National Council has also been able to place recent graduates of American schools of journalism and mass communication at Gulf News, which has taken numerous Council Morris Arab World Journalism Intern Scholars. Moreover, several former Council employees as well as alumni of Council programs now work in American companies with business interests in the UAE.

In addition, through a special data exchange arrangement with the Ministry of Information, the National Council and U.S.-GCC Corporate Committee’s GulfWire have been able to provide, on a year-round basis, a broad range of information and insight about the UAE. All the Americans who, through the National Council, have visited, resided, and worked in the UAE, acknowledge that the UAE is the one Arab country that most resembles what the United States started out to be in the earliest days of the republic. That is, in its fledgling stage, the United States, like the UAE, was a confederation, the former of 13 and the latter of seven otherwise largely autonomous states. Students of both express appreciation and admiration for what, in the span of 30 years, has become the Arab world’s longest successful experiment in regional integration.

Kuwait University and Kuwait’s Society for the Advancement of the Arab Child

Both before and after the 1990-91 Kuwait Crisis, which many Americans refer to as Desert Shield and Desert Storm, the National Council has sought to increase American knowledge and understanding of Kuwait. The Council has been privileged to conduct more than two dozen people-to-people exchanges and various kinds of educational programs in Kuwait and the United States for American and Kuwaiti leaders from various sectors of the two countries’ societies.

Additional Kuwaiti institutions with which these programs have been held are the Kuwait-America Foundation (see below), the Kuwait Foundation for the Advancement of Science, the Islam Presentation Committee, Al-Athar Islamiyya Foundation, the Institute for Studies and Research, the Committee for the Repatriation of Kuwaiti MIAs, and the U.S. Ambassadors, diplomatic, and other officials posted to Kuwait

Oman Chambers of Commerce and Industry

During the period under review, the National Council was privileged to organize and escort a delegation of Congressional staff to the Sultanate. The members serve on such Committees as international affairs, commerce, appropriations, rules, and ways and means. In addition to the Oman Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Office of the Special Representative for Foreign Liaison, the Oman Council of State and Majlis ash-Shura (Consultative Council), and the American Ambassador and embassy staff played important roles.

In 1998, the National Council was the lead organization, in association with 33 other American institutions of higher education and national cultural as well as service academies, and U.S. companies with business in Oman, in a unique event that honored HM Sultan Qaboos Bin Said, the Ruler of Oman, for his long and distinguished contributions to peace.

Presenting the International Peace Award on behalf of the National Council and the associated organizations was former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Accepting the Award on the Sultan’s behalf was H. E. Yousef Alawi Al Abdallah, the Sultanate’s long-serving Minister Responsible for Foreign Affairs. The event was held at the Willard Hotel in Washington and attended by more than 400 guests from the U.S. Congress, the Administration, numerous foreign policy associations, and the media. In recognition of the event, the Government of Oman issued a special commemorative stamp, and the Sultan was congratulated at that year’s GCC summit by his fellow GCC Heads of State.

Qatar University

The National Council has organized and escorted several delegations of American university professors to Qatar to introduce them to the country’s cultural, historic, and increasingly prominent economic role in the international energy industry as well as its role, from 2000-2002, as chair of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, the Muslim world’s most important inter-governmental organization.

All of the participants have returned with newfound knowledge of what, until recent years, was one of the least well known among the Arab countries. The Council has also organized public affairs events for outgoing U.S. Ambassadors to Qatar and receptions for visiting Qatari dignitaries. Among the American professors taken to Qatar, one published a book on the country that is in wide use in American pre-collegiate schools.

Saudi Arabia’s Committee for the Development of Foreign Trade

Since the early 1980s, the National Council has worked with the Committee to bring American leaders to the Kingdom and, from time to time, Saudi Arabian leaders to the United States. The range of cooperation has been broad-based and multifaceted: everything from academic exchanges to joint participation in seminars and briefings, to full-fledged study visits for Americans eager to meet with the Kingdom’s public and private sector leaders and to visit the country’s numerous cultural and historical sites as well as development centers.

The Committee is comprised of nearly three dozen Saudi Arabian business leaders who have in common the fact that they received a significant portion of their advanced education in the United States and, in so doing, realized and wanted to support the important need to deepen and broaden the people-to-people relations and dynamics between Americans and Saudi Arabians.

To this end, the Committee, an autonomous unit within the Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce and Industry, has made it possible for numerous Americans to visit the Kingdom. In countless instances, it has also gone out of its way to promote greater knowledge and understanding among the peoples of the two countries.

Additional major contributors to the National Council’s programs in the Kingdom have been the Chambers of Commerce in Dammam, Jeddah, Riyadh, and Taif, Saudi Aramco, Arab News, Riyadh Daily, King Abdalaziz University, King Saud University, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, King Faisal University, the American Business Group of Riyadh, the American Business Association in Jeddah, the American Business Association in Al-Khobar, and the U.S. Ambassadors, Consul Generals, and country team staff.

Tunisia’s Hannibal Club

For a decade and a half, the National Council has also helped to administer a range of cross-cultural educational activities that bring together a diverse group of Tunisian and American leaders. The Hannibal Club, which is headquartered in Tunis and has a branch in Washington, D.C., is the embodiment of a range of social and cultural events designed to enrich the people-to-people relationships between Tunisia and the United States. To this end, the Council was pleased to serve as the Club’s Washington branch secretariat en route to its securing a more permanent status as a non-profit organization in the nation’s capital.

Additional Tunisia-based organizations through which the National Council has conducted educational programs for visiting delegations of American academics, students, and museum directors have been the Universities of Sousse and Tunis, the American Field Service Committee, AMIDEAST, the Chambers of Commerce of Sousse and Tunis, the American-Tunisian Business Association, the Council’s Tunis field office, and the American Embassy.

University of Aleppo

Beginning in the late 1980s, the National Council has conducted nearly two-dozen educational programs in Syria, all under the auspices of the Office of International Relations and the Center for English Language teaching at the University of Aleppo. The participants have been American university professors, high school teachers, and college students (see Summer in Syria Program below).

A culminating achievement of the many years that the National Council has conducted educational programs in Syria is the recent formation of a Syria-oriented consortium of American universities with which the Council is associated. The consortium is committed to offering a semester abroad and longer academic exchange program for American undergraduates interested in spending part of their university studies in Syria.

In addition to a program of lectures and specialized briefings at the University, the participants get to travel throughout Syria to visit the country’s renowned architectural and cultural sites, meet with numerous public and private sector leaders in Aleppo as well as Damascus, and be briefed by the American Ambassador and country team at the U.S. Embassy.

An additional reciprocally rewarding offshoot of the National Council’s Syria programs for American professors has been the multi-year faculty exchange award that the United States Government awarded to Old Dominion University (ODU), of Norfolk, Virginia, in association with the University of Aleppo. Through this program, nine American professors from ODU partnered with nine professors from University of Aleppo – each taught, lectured, or conducted research at the other’s university – over a three-year period.

University of Bahrain

Since the late 1980s, the National Council has brought more than two-dozen delegations of American public and private sector leaders to Bahrain. Most have been hosted by the Bahrain Petroleum Company in conjunction with the local American business association, the Ministries of Defense, Development, Education, Industry, Information, Labor, and Petroleum, the National and Islamic Museums, and the American Embassy as well as the headquarters for the forward-deployed American Fifth Fleet and the U.S. Navy’s Command component of U.S. Central Command.

Among the alumni of the National Council’s programs in Bahrain are American professors who have returned to teach at Bahrain University as Fulbright Fellows. Numerous U.S. Air Force Academy, U.S. Naval Academy, and Virginia Military Institute Cadets that visited Bahrain with the National Council are also currently pursuing careers in the U.S. armed forces. In addition, the Council has been a regular participant in the educational activities of the Bahrain-American Friendship Society since the Society’s establishment.

U.S.-Morocco Affairs Committee

As Secretariat of the U.S.-Morocco Affairs Committee in the 1990s, the National Council introduced close to 70 Members of Congress and their key staff to Morocco. Such activities built on the fact that Morocco, the first Arab country to recognize the newly forged American republic in the late 18th century, remains America’s oldest ally. These activities also complement the National Council’s annual Passage to Morocco Program (see below).

Additional associations with which the National Council has conducted programs and activities in Morocco are Rabat Al-Fath Association, the American Language Institute in Fes, AMIDEAST, CMS Energy, the Moroccan Jewish Federation, Al-Akhawayn University, Université de Marrakech, the Tangier American Legation Society, and the American Embassy’s Ambassadors, Consul Generals, and public as well as cultural affairs officers.

Yemen Language and Area Studies Center

From the mid-1980s onward, the National Council has conducted nearly a dozen study visits to Yemen for Congressional leaders and American professors and students through, first, the American Institute for Yemeni Studies and the Yemen Chamber of Commerce, and, more recently and extensively, the Yemen Center for Language and Area Studies.

Additional institutions with which the National Council has shared educational activities in Yemen as well as in the United States have been the Yemen Women’s Association, Yemen Times, the American Embassy, the National Democratic Institute, and the International Republican Institute.

One of the most rewarding features of the National Council’s educational activities in Yemen has been its cooperation with the Yemen Language Center whereby the Center has provided first class professional training and further Arabic language development for numerous Council staff and program alumni in exchange for the participants’ serving as part-time administrative assistants at the Center.

INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS FELLOWS

For more than a decade, the National Council has been pleased to award an International Affairs Fellowship to one or more outstanding individuals who personified the Council’s vision. The fellowships carry no material remuneration. They signify to the individual, and to the community of U.S.-Arab relations specialists, the Council’s appreciation of important contributions that particular individuals have made to the causes that the Council and the U.S.-GCC Corporate Cooperation Committees were established to promote and serve.

To date, the Fellows have ranged from:

The highest-ranking Saudi Arabian in the United Nations Secretariat,
An Adviser to the Ministry of Petroleum in Kuwait;
A former Ambassador of the Sultanate of Oman to the United States;
The Director of the Office of International Relations at the University of Aleppo, Syria;
The former Chief Executive Officer of Bahrain Petroleum Company Refinery;
A leading female professor and one of her fellow scholar male colleagues at Al-Ain University in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates;

A former Commander of all U.S. defense forces in the Arabian Peninsula and the Gulf;

The current Fellow, Mr. Kevin Taecker, is former Senior Economist at the Saudi American Bank in Riyadh and former U.S. Treasury Attaché in Riyadh. He is also the first to serve as both the Council’s International Affairs Fellow and the U.S.-GCC Corporate Cooperation Committee’s Joseph P. Volpe, Jr. International Corporate Affairs Fellow.

COMMUNITY AND PROFESSIONAL OUTREACH

The National Council has always sought to assist when and where it could in national and grassroots educational activities. The criteria for doing so has been the dedication of such groups to enhancing American awareness of the importance of the Arab world to numerous U.S. national interests, and the need to strengthen and expand the people-to-people ties between our two societies and cultures.

The Council has proceeded to do so in various ways. One proven method of success has been working with students and teachers among America’s 3,600 universities and its many thousands more secondary schools. In both arenas, the access to quality materials, on one hand, and the chance to participate in U.S.-Arab educational, professional development, and leadership training activities, on the other, is minimal. In many instances, it is nearly non-existent.

In the absence of such programs and activities in quantity and quality, it is little wonder that millions of Americans form their ideas and attitudes about Arabs and Muslims primarily through the pervasively negative and pejorative stereotypes promoted by the film industry and much of the media.

The National Council does what it can to provide alternative frames of reference through the educational empowerment of grassroots leaders and public affairs specialists in the social sciences, arts, and humanities. To this end, the Council has taken more than 800 American academic, civic, business, and professional association leaders to the Arab world to introduce them first-hand to the richness of Arab and Islamic culture.

Upon returning to the United States, these individuals share their newfound knowledge and understanding with others in their communities. They also serve as year-round sources of empirically based information and perspective on issues of importance in the Arab-United States relationship. The educators among them alone teach more than 225,000 students annually. Many of the educators and students live in parts of America that are little exposed to international affairs in general and even less to the dynamics of U.S.-Arab relations.

Regional and State Committee Affiliates

No matter how ambitious it may be, no effort to ground the Arab-United States relationship in a reciprocity of respect for each other’s culture and heritage, and in the pursuit of a mutuality of benefit for their peoples, is likely to go far or succeed on vision and leadership alone. Key to its prospects for meaningful progress toward these goals is an ability to build and maintain and sometimes to tap into an already existing national, regional, state, and local network of people who identify with the vision, believe in the mission, and are willing to work towards its achievement. To this end, the National Council has worked to build up an array of grassroots affiliates whose leaders and supporters are active participants in pursuit of the Council’s objectives.

There are two main attributes to the leaders of each of the National Council’s regional and state branches. One is the extraordinary high level of their professionalism. The other is the width and depth of their commitment to education and cultural exchanges as primary tools for changing the way people think and learn about the Arab world and about America’s relationship with its peoples.

Kuwait-America Foundation (KAF)

From the moment Kuwait was invaded on August 2, 1990, and continuing through its liberation until the present, the National Council has been actively engaged in Kuwait-United States activities. It has sought to inform and educate Americans about Kuwait’s importance to vital American national interests along a broad and diverse front, and to underscore the out-sized role that Kuwait has long played in regional and world affairs.

Soon after the invasion, the Council’s leadership was one of the first to testify to the Congressional Joint Select Committee on Intelligence about the many additional interests beyond energy that America and its Allies have at stake in Kuwait. Over the course of the year following the aggression, the Council took a total of 12 delegations of American Congressional and other leaders to Kuwait. The participants were thereby able to see, hear, think, and feel the devastation wrought to the country’s economy, its financial, cultural, educational, and scientific institutions, the environment, and, most of all, to the people of Kuwait.

The Council worked with the Port of Baltimore, which agreed to dedicate a portion of its harbor to facilitate the re-supply of equipment essential to re-building Kuwait’s war-torn infrastructure. It also worked with a consortium of 48 American doctors who visited Kuwait shortly after its liberation, when two thirds of Kuwait’s children between the ages of six and sixteen were diagnosed as suffering from varying degrees of psychological trauma.

Subsequent to Kuwait’s liberation, the Council has continued to take a diverse range of American public and private sector leaders to Kuwait on study visits. It worked closely with the American Legion in organizing a visit of young Kuwaitis who came to the United States on a mission to say, “Thank You, America.” It helped enable these Kuwaiti youth to visit veterans’ hospitals to deliver their message directly to American soldiers who had been wounded in the effort to restore their country’s national sovereignty, political independence, and territorial integrity.

The Council also hosted and organized nationwide tours and public affairs activities for three different delegations of Kuwaitis. These young men and women as well as professors visited and spoke to dozens of American civic, education, and public affairs groups for the same purpose. In virtually all of the leadership visits to Kuwait, KAF has played a central role in bringing the country’s most prominent national leaders together to meet with the American guests.

Kuwait’s Do the Write Thing Program

Violence knows no nationality. To highlight this fact, the Kuwait-America Foundation has for more than half a decade sponsored a pioneering program for disadvantaged American youth. The youth, being barely teenagers, are doubly disadvantaged in that, in addition to living and going to school in some of the poorest sections of America’s cities, each is also the survivor of a victim of violence in their family. They write essays about the effect of violence on their lives and offer suggestions on how to help end or significantly reduce this scourge upon American society.

The authors of the best essays and their parents are invited to Washington, D.C. In the nation’s capital, and often literally in the Capitol itself, they read their essays to a galaxy of TV cameras, proud parents and teachers, and a host of American national dignitaries. The National Council’s leadership and staff have worked with the administrators of this program from the beginning, serving as judges, intermediaries with other organizations, and supervisors of student interns associated with the program.

Society for Gulf Arab Studies

The National Council has also enjoyed a close relationship with the Society for Gulf Arab Studies (SGAS). The Council’s president was the founding president of SGAS; the Council’s offices served for several years as the Society’s informal secretariat; and it continues to serve as the headquarters of the Society’s Washington Chapter, which co-hosts seminars involving scholars from the GCC countries and the United States interested in Gulf Arab issues. Two of the Society’s members, both scholars from the United Arab Emirates, were also elected International Affairs Fellows by the Council’s Board of Directors.

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