BEIRUT — The heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad from where the American administration indirectly administers most things in Iraq seems to have caught the fancy of the administration in Washington — which seems to be repeating in the rest of the Middle East the isolation from its surroundings that it practices in Iraq. This is evident in this week’s trip to the region by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who appears to be pursuing a fanciful strategy based on unrealistic American hopes rather than actual realities in the region.
Being clueless about Middle Eastern realities has been an occasional American official hazard; making this a chronic recurrence and operating procedure seems really stupid. Rice and American diplomacy in general fail to grasp a central point about U.S. policies in the Middle East: Many of the problems she says she wants to solve are usually exacerbated by American policies, especially Washington’s extreme support for Israel rather than being even-handed in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
She now markets the nice-sounding but rather unrealistic idea that Washington can help the “moderates” in the Arab world work together against the “extremists.” Specifically, American officials speak about supporting “the GCC plus 2” (the six Gulf Cooperation Council countries plus Egypt and Jordan) against the extremists (Iran, Syria, Hamas, Hizbullah and other Islamist or nationalist movements who resist American-Israeli pressures, policies, armies and threats).
Rice’s approach will flop just as did the equally dreamy American idea in the 1980s when U.S. Secretary of State Alexander Haig sought to forge an American-Israeli-Saudi-Egyptian coalition to counter Soviet-backed leftists or Iranian-backed Islamists. Such naïve approaches fail because they cut against the grain of trends on the ground in the Middle East, where public opinion and some political leaderships now mobilize actively to resist American and Israeli ideas and to challenge Arab friends and surrogates of the United States.
There is indeed a new regional cold war taking place in the Middle East, pitting pro-Western leaderships against those forces who defy and resist U.S.-Israeli-led Western aims in this area. The ideological polarization that has taken place in recent years, however, is partly, perhaps largely, a consequence of Washington’s use of its army, diplomacy and economy to push for Israeli strategic aims and to go against the grain of majority sentiments in most Arab countries, i.e., by speaking of promoting democracy but largely supporting non-democratic Arab regimes, and by actively isolating and trying to bring down the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine instead of engaging it and nudging it and Israel towards mutually rewarding peace talks.
Washington looks very foolish or very naive talking about a plan to work with Arab moderate governments to check extremists, when its own policies have helped promote the extremism it now fears, and also weaken the impact and credibility of the so-called moderate Arabs it now seeks to bolster. The GCC, Egypt and Jordan do not have the collective credibility or clout to have much impact beyond their own Green Zones in their own capitals; for they — like the United States in Baghdad — often tend to be out of touch and out of step with public opinion in their own societies.
The Los Angeles Times ran an article a few days ago wondering whether King Abdullah II of Jordan would suffer the same fate as the late Shah of Iran and be overthrown by his own people, because he paid more attention to American concerns than those of his own countrymen and women. I think that prospect is unlikely, for the Hashemite monarchy has much more legitimacy and support in Jordan than the Shah’s ever did in Iran.
Yet the underlying point is relevant, and applies to many Arab leaders: Middle Eastern governments will find themselves increasingly isolated and impotent if they prove to be more attentive to Washington’s strategic goals, Israel’s security concerns, or foreign investors’ competitive needs than to their own people’s political sentiments and sense of unfulfilled rights. The GCC plus 2 have actually tried to play constructive diplomatic roles in some of the region’s active crises, like Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon — but they have been a collective and glaring failure. Mobilizing them now with the backing of overt American support and implicit Israeli self-interest to counter Islamist and nationalist forces in the Arab world is the political equivalent of digging deeper to get out of a hole, or trying to douse a fire by throwing fuel on it.
The tides of extremism, violence and radicalism in the Middle East have always been the result of a deadly combination of five usually negative forces: home-grown emotional mass movements, irresponsible and often criminal national leaderships, stressful socio-economic conditions, brutal and predatory Israeli policies, and intrusive Western militarism (mostly by the United States in recent years, the Europeans before that). Virtually all five of these forces would be further fostered or exacerbated by a fresh American policy of mobilizing Arab “moderates” against “extremists.”
Rice’s attempt to do so will only prod a greater counter-reaction by large swaths of Arab, Iranian and Turkish public opinion against the United States, Israel and many Arab regimes.
Please, somebody give Dr. Rice a modern Middle East history book, or a walking tour of any Arab city outside its Green Zone.
Rami G. Khouri is an internationally syndicated columnist, the director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, and editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star.
Copyright ©2006 Rami G. Khouri / Agence Global
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Released: 03 October 2006
Word Count: 872
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