BEIRUT — As I listened carefully to George W. Bush and Tony Blair during the past week, Israeli bombs were dropping all around us in Beirut and other parts of Lebanon. I had become slightly concerned that their enthusiastic plans for my freedom and democracy in the Middle East were becoming incongruously riddled with wars, private militias, terror plagues, and crumbling societies. Then when I learned that the American secretaries of state and defense agreed to help train Lebanon’s army — I really got worried.
I say this because I am not impressed when I look around our region and assess the pros and cons of the Bush-Blair policy of promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East as an antidote to terrorism and dictatorship. Their “forward strategy of freedom” approach is mostly a calamity to date. The last thing we need is a new chapter in its growing book of horrors.
I should add that I agree with the Bush-Blair concept of promoting freedom and democracy in the Middle East, which I and many others here have devoted most of our adult lives to achieving. Yet their militaristic, aggressive approach that is umbilically linked to Israeli priorities is proving to be messy and counter-productive. Instead of promoting free and democratic societies that are peace-loving and prosperous, Bush-Blair are midwiving the birth of new failed states, narco-states, militia-based statelets, and terror havens.
Consider just one day this week — one day, Thursday, August 3 — and look around Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon — the four countries where Anglo-American policies have used military force and diplomatic muscle to push for a new order based on free elections and democratic governance. All four are in the throes of severe cycles of violence, and partial disintegration. Their central governments enjoy only thin impact and legitimacy, and are widely challenged by political militias, sectarian and ethnic groups, and ordinary criminals. Here’s a quick snapshot of events Thursday, a day in the life of the Bush-Blair freedom strategy:
* In Washington, the general who commands American forces in the Middle East frankly warned a Senate committee that sectarian violence in Iraq, especially in Baghdad, had become so severe that all of Iraq was in danger of sliding into civil war. The UN had reported a few days earlier that an average of more than 100 civilians per day were killed in Iraq last month. Two bombs exploded in a Baghdad soccer stadium that day, killing 12 people. A senior British diplomat in Baghdad told Blair in a private memo that “the prospect of a low intensity civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is probably more likely at this stage than a successful and substantial transition to a stable democracy.”
* In Palestine, Israeli troops again raided southern Gaza with tanks and aerial bombardments, killing seven Palestinians. In just over a month, Israel has killed at least 158 Palestinians, more than half of them civilians, while Palestinians continue to fire rockets into Israel and still hold a captured Israeli soldier.
* In Afghanistan, a suicide bomber blew up his car in the center of a small-town bazaar in the south of the country, killing 21 civilians. Hours earlier, 4 NATO soldiers were killed and 10 wounded in two attacks in the same area.
* In Lebanon, Israel bombed many targets and pursued a ground invasion, while Hizbullah fired scores of rockets at Israeli towns, with dozens killed and injured on both sides.
All of this, remember, is the harvest of just one day in Bush-Blair’s march to freedom in the Middle East. On that Thursday, Blair in London again stressed the same theme he and Bush touted last week: The United States and Britain were committed to fighting for a “vision of the Middle East based on democracy, liberty and the rule of law,” to transform the Middle East in order to prevent future terror attacks such as those that had ravaged the United States and London in 2001 and 2005.
The government systems in these four countries certainly needed changing and improving. Homegrown legacies of warlords, private militias, criminality, corruption, and brutal abuse of power were slowly turning these countries, or parts of them, into freak societies that were as unattractive to their own citizens as they were potentially dangerous to the rest of the world. Yet Anglo-American policies seem only to perpetuate new forms of violence, corruption, and mass suffering in Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon.
Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that traditional autocratic Middle East governance systems and the Anglo-Americans’ militarily-installed instant freedom antidote are both unattractive options for the vast majority of decent human beings in the Middle East. This majority just wants to live normal, uneventful, peaceful lives, rather than be perpetual subjects for novel and sometimes grotesque experiments in governance dreamed up by local despots and Western warriors alike — as Thursday’s one-day balance sheet suggests.
More Anglo-American plans to train more Arab armies are likely to make the problem worse, not better. How about if we simply agree to implement all UN resolutions simultaneously, in Israel and Arab countries, thereby restoring legitimacy to governments and security to countries, and eliminating the need for ethnic militias, resistance movements, missile wars, and Anglo-American invasion forces?
Rami G. Khouri is editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, published throughout the Middle East with the International Herald Tribune.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 04 August 2006
Word Count: 873
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