Good piece from Financial Times on how ‘Arab moderates’ are viewed in the region. They’re most certainly not taken very seriously by most of their countrymen. Worth reading.

‘Arab centre’ needs introspection
Roula Khalaf

High-ranking Arab officials rarely record their experience in office.

For one thing, governments are like revolving doors, with many of the same faces moving from one portfolio to the other. As for leaders, well, most of them stay on for life, and so few have the chance or the time to write their memoirs.

The history of the Arab world is therefore left to be written by outsiders. And that has become a prolific trend in recent years, judging by the number of Middle Eastern books that land on my desk.

Now Marwan Muasher, Jordan’s former foreign minister, has broken the tradition of silence with an account of his time in office, written in English and soon to be translated into Arabic. His book, The Arab Centre, is shy on palace intrigue and short on direct criticism of Jordan itself.

But it gives an insider’s view of Arab dealings with Israel (where Mr Muasher was posted as Jordan’s first ambassador), and relates blow by blow the tireless – and largely futile – Arab lobbying of the Bush administration over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. One of its important contributions, however, is to question the meaning of an Arab “moderate” and the selective application of moderation to a single issue – the pursuit of a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict.
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