Expert advises 'from the bottom up' work in Mideast

The effect of upheaval in the Arab world on fuel prices will eventually moderate, but democracies and the current autocracies will have the same long-term positions about oil, said Elliott Abrams, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations after a presentation at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

There’s a premium in the price of petroleum related to the turmoil in the region, but when the active chaos in Libya ends the price should settle back some, he said.

In the long term, though, any democratic regimes that emerge in the region will want to maximize the money they make on oil by getting a fairly high price that is sustainable.

“If [the Saudis] were replaced tomorrow by Thomas Jefferson, he’d ask for the same price,” Abrams said.

In general, the revolutions in the Muslim world have the potential to shake the region, and many of America’s opponents, he said in his Friday talk , which drew an overflow crowd.

“I think we’ll see a great debate about Islam and democracy,” he said.

He said he thinks the American intervention in Iraq has had some effect to encourage the revolutions, but added that it was impossible to measure. He also added that the focus of each revolution has been very much domestic, with little flag-burning or rhetoric about other countries.

“Tunisians want to talk about Tunisia, and Egyptians want to talk about Egypt,” he said.

Abrams also spoke extensively about the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

The focus, he said, must be on creating improvements on the ground in Palestine to foster the development of a self-governing nation, not on holding endless rounds of negotiations.

“The Palestinian state has to be built from the ground up by patriotic Palestinians, not received as a gift,” he said.

The Palestinian territories are currently split, with Fatah running the West Bank and Hamas running the Gaza Strip.

Abrams said the decision by Fatah to postpone elections in the West Bank when Hamas did the same in Gaza was an error. He said the best way for Fatah to threaten Hamas is to demonstrate a preferable alternative.

“That’s the best way to put pressure on Hamas, I think — from the inside, from the bottom up,” he said.

At the same time, he said that the government in the West Bank has only had about six years of democracy, but is making great strides.

“People get traffic tickets,” he joked. “That’s a real sign of civilization, right?”

William Taylor, a regular attendee of the Miller Center’s forums, praised Abrams for his level of practical experience with the matters at hand. Abrams was deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser under President George W. Bush and spent eight years in the State Department during the Reagan years.

Neighbors Penny Holt and Bill Sampson disagree about the Israeli-Palestinian situation, but attended Abrams’ talk together anyway.

“I pretty much agree with everything [Abrams] said,” he said.

“I think that it was a complete distortion,” she said.

But the two agree on many issues, including some aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian question. (Neither is a big fan of former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.)

Holt said she thought Abrams soft-pedaled Israel’s wrongs against Palestinians, among other things.