BOSTON — This is a moment of potential change in Washington and its foreign policy, for two main reasons: domestic pressures, legal problems and strengthening opposition may reduce the president’s power in the last years of his second term, and new approaches or tactics may be sought to address some of the nagging issues that challenge the U.S. abroad, especially in Iraq, Iran and the declared American policy of promoting democracy and freedom.
The Middle East has been the focus of the Bush team’s foreign policy since September 11, 2001, and it continues to define important aspects of America’s engagement with the world. Viewed from both the United States and the Middle East alike, the relationship between these two regions seems to touch on a series of issues that is each important in its own right. Together, they comprise a rich and compelling agenda of mutual engagement that offers both befuddling challenges and historical opportunities. And into this broad tapestry of issues has now been added the striking and important announcement that was made in Washington earlier this week, that efforts “to bolster the growth of democracy” are now among the top three missions for American intelligence agencies around the world.
This is intriguing, to say the least, and a very positive development in many ways, but also perilous in others. It has to be viewed within the wider context of the multiple big issues that define U.S.-Middle East relations, which I would list as follows: Iraq; Arab-Israeli peace-making; Iran’s nuclear industry; terrorism; weapons of mass destruction proliferation; promoting democracy and the rule of law; enhancing socio-economic development and meeting basic human needs; Turkey and its moves towards the European Union; global diplomatic intervention in the Lebanon-Syria arena via the UN Security Council; and, securing energy supplies.
Other issues in the region also deserve our attention, such as Darfur, women’s status and rights, youth conditions and prospects, minority rights, migrant workers’ rights, and water and other environmental issues, to mention just a few. But the ten issues I mentioned above resonate widely around the region and the world, and in most cases have already generated serious interventions by foreign powers. The United States, whether one likes it or not, remains the major power that usually tries to define the agenda, and the means, of foreign intervention in the Middle East. This is done through war and occupation, regime change threats or implementation, economic pressures and embargos, diplomatic action, or positive economic and other inducements that aim to foster changes in the behavior of various Middle Eastern governments or political movements.
At this moment of subtle reassessment in how it intervenes and engages diplomatically in the region, Washington is also absorbing the important lessons of several parallel dynamics: its difficult military and political experience in Iraq, the more successful effort to pressure Syria via UN Security Council resolutions, the ongoing diplomatic engagement of Iran via the Europeans, the apparent breakthrough on nuclear issues with North Korea, and the still strong backlash around the world to U.S. attempts to define a global agenda in fields like fighting terror, promoting democracy and holding accountable perpetrators of war crimes or crimes against humanity.
So when Washington’s new strategy document formally makes promoting democracy among the top three missions for its intelligence agencies (the other two are to counter terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction), we in the Middle East should judge this in the wider context of the issues that concern us and the dynamics that bind us to the U.S. and other foreign powers. In this respect, it is certainly good that Washington now institutionalizes democracy and the rule of law as primary, long-term goals of its foreign policy, moving beyond only the rhetorical flourishes of presidential speeches aimed mainly at domestic audiences.
It is more problematic that this is to be done in part through the work of the CIA and other intelligence agencies. This is not unusual for the United States, though, which normally talks about and dances around the challenge of promoting democracy and freedom in the Middle East, rather than grappling with it directly through a more consistent set of policies that seek freedom in Palestine as well as Iraq, and democracy in Tunisia as well as Lebanon. It is somewhat awkward for the U.S. to promote democracy through spies and spin doctors, i.e., its intelligence agencies, and its rather naive public diplomacy efforts now headed by the heroic Karen Hughes, who carries the burdens of her impossible mission on her strong Texan shoulders.
Despite these misgivings, the world should seriously explore this new American strategy. We should welcome the professed American goals to promote democracy, especially throughout the Middle East, but we should also make it clear that this policy will fail if it is implemented with the same inappropriate tactics and tone — unilateralism, militarism, selective and erratic implementation, dictating goals, trying to buy partners and friends — that have plagued other American efforts in this respect.
We who are the intended beneficiaries and targets of this policy should engage the U.S. and others in the West to ensure that this policy achieves the results of flourishing Middle Eastern democracies that we have long sought for ourselves. Such success requires a change in traditional American diplomatic policies, tactics and styles, as well as a change in Arab attitudes that have generally shunned or discounted the seriousness of American efforts in this direction.
An American intelligence agencies strategy document on promoting democracy and the rule of law around the world is a lot more meaningful in my book than a speech by the American president. We must move quickly to find out if this is another Western or American deception, or a serious strategic shift. We must call America’s bluff on this, to determine if it is, indeed, a bluff or not. If it is serious, however, we would be criminally negligent to ignore what may be a historic opportunity for Arabs, other Middle Easterners, Americans and the Western democracies as a whole to work together — perhaps for the first time in the past century — for goals that would generate a win-win situation for all concerned. We have work to do.
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star newspaper, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2005 Rami G. Khouri
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Released: 29 October 2005
Word Count: 1,037
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