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While many consider the domestic policies of Arab regimes to be an internal matter, a keen understanding of those issues is essential to developing proper American policy on the region, a former ambassador to the region said.

"They are problems that are essentially internal in nature, but there's no question that those problems have been exacerbated both by foreign colonialism and domination and often by the policies of external actors, including our own policies," Daniel Kurtzer told an audience at Rutgers University Sept. 9.

Kurtzer, the former U.S. ambassador to Egypt and Israel, who currently holds the S. Daniel Abraham Chair in Middle East Policy Studies at Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, delivered the inaugural lecture of the 2009 series at the Alan and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life at Rutgers University.

In the lecture, "Terrorists, Tyrants, Tycoons, and Theocrats: American Challenges in the Middle East," Kurtzer gave a broad assessment of the problems and pitfalls that have engulfed the region for the past 60 years, which he characterized as "persistent and endemic."

"I'm going to talk about a serious subject tonight even though the title I have given it may sound somewhat frivolous. I like the alliteration of it; I thought it would be a way to catch your attention," Kurtzer joked at the opening.

Kurtzer described how when he was U.S. ambassador to Egypt (1997-2001), he would invite Americans to come to speak to Egyptians about their own society.

"I felt that the best way to challenge Egyptians to think about their own society was not to lecture at them about their problems, but rather to share some of the issues that we have faced as a country and to have them think through with us how we addressed some of those issues," he recalled.

The first person Kurtzer invited was Charles Hamilton, a noted expert on the civil rights movement and contemporary American history at Columbia University, who spoke to the Egyptian audience on the important role that legal reforms played in ushering in civil rights in America.

"He surprised the audience by telling the audience in Cairo that one of the key successes of the civil rights movement was not so much in getting change into people's hearts as it was changing laws," Kutzer said. "Changing the laws would affect the behavior, which over time would presumably over time affect the attitudes."

It was a subsequent invitee, however, whose message generated considerably more consternation from the audience: New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who had recently published his book on globalization and developing countries, "The Lexus and the Olive Tree."

While Hamilton's message was met with approval by the audience, "Friedman apparently challenged them right between the eyes because he said to them that societies today really will not prosper and will not advance unless they find their niche in the international economy and international society."

This resistance to globalization is one of the major stumbling blocks for progress in the Middle East, according to Kurtzer.

"The single idea that came through that night was that this would be another form of cultural imperialism," he said of the Egyptians' concerns.

While Kurtzer acknowledged that critics of globalization are correct in suggesting that such a system disproportionably benefits advanced industrial nations, he argued that they are on the whole wrong to blame the international nature of the economy for their failings.

"Unless a country can find something that it contributes to the international system, it cannot produce enough economic output to raise itself out of poverty, distress, out of the misery that many countries face because of economic problems," Kurtzer said. "In the Middle East, including in Egypt, while rich in fossil fuels, in oil and gas, produces almost nothing else of value to the rest of the world."

Kurtzer highlighted the lack of any significant regional trade, financial transparency, and strong legal system as causes of the weak regional economies. Furthermore, he explained how little of the oil and gas revenues collected are reinvested into the countries.

The issue, he explained, is not that those in the Middle East are unaware of their problems, but rather that "no one has done anything about it."

Kurtzer cited a report first issued in 2002 by 100 Arab intellectuals through the United Nations Development Program that outlined the problems facing the region and what must be overcome before any meaningful change is seen. Kurtzer called the report "stunning."

The report located three "deficits" in the Arab world: a deficit of freedom, a deficit of knowledge, and a deficit of women's empowerment.

The deficit of freedom refers to democratic freedoms such as the freedom of press and religion; the deficit of knowledge, to the shortage of students questioning the assumptions of their teachers; and the deficit of women's empowerment, to the fact that roughly 50 percent of the population is not a productive part of society.

The last major problem facing progress in the Middle East is the sheer amount and sustained nature of conflict in the region, according to Kurtzer.

"This is a region on top of everything else where there is a persistence of conflict, not just terrorism directed at Westerners, Americans, and Europeans, but conflict within the region," he said.

Kurtzer ended his talk with some developments that should provide some hope. One is the establishment of local educational institutions not only modeled, but actually bought, from Western countries, particularly the United States. In Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, for example, campuses of Georgetown, Rice, and Southern Methodist universities have opened that combine local and American faculty and curriculum. A branch of the Weill Cornell Medical School, affiliated with Cornell University, has also opened a campus in Qatar.

"Is this the beginning of addressing the deficit of knowledge?" Kurtzer asked, somewhat rhetorically, "Maybe. I don't know, but maybe."

He also pointed out how some countries in the region, particularly some of the Gulf states, have begun to develop social welfare infrastructure in order to aid the poorest in their societies, as Western countries already have.

"Now, I don't want to leave you too optimistic, but I think we need to analyze this region with a little more sense of hope than simply the despair I have been describing," he added.