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Can the US recover its position in the Middle East?
Instead of understanding that resolving conflicts on the basis of justice is the only way to address Arab and Muslim grievances, the Bush administration is compounding it with its unjust policies
- By Patrick Seale, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:00 January 20, 2006
Not so long ago, the United States was seen by many Arabs and Muslims as a relatively benign power. Today, feared and detested as never before, it is widely viewed as hostile to Arab interests and an enemy of Islam. Responsibility for this drastic deterioration must be laid largely at the door of the Bush administration, which is now facing an unprecedented catalogue of policy failures in the wider Middle East.
Previous American administrations were far from blameless, but the mindset of President George W. Bush and of his key colleagues, Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, as well as the pernicious influence of neoconservatives, inside and outside the administration, have made the problem infinitely worse.
Not only has the US aroused the ferocious enmity of radical Islamic movements, such as Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaida, but it has also deeply offended official Islam in countries supposedly friendly to the US, such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. At the close of the pilgrimage to Makkah earlier this month, Saudi Arabia's top religious leader, Shaikh Abdulaziz Al Shaikh, declared that "the West has declared war against our creed".
Such statements should ring alarm bells in Washington, but it is doubtful whether the US administration is willing or able to effect the radical correction of aim required to regain some of its authority.
The Muslim ummah or community of the faithful numbers some 1.3 billion people. The vast majority are peace-loving citizens of the countries in which they live, but many of them feel strongly that Muslims are victims of the conflicts in Palestine and Iraq, but also in Afghanistan, Chechnya, Kosovo, Kashmir and elsewhere, and that it is time for Muslims to resist occupation and oppression. The Arabic word is jihad.
At the heart of American difficulties is the view that terrorism can be defeated by military means and that the Middle East can be reshaped by force to suit American and Israeli interests.
Preached by the neoconservatives, this view has led to the smashing of Iraq, to many mishaps in the so-called Global War on Terror, to the dangerous confrontation with Iran over its nuclear programme and to the tolerance, even encouragement, given over the last four years to Israel's Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as he sought unilaterally to impose his harsh terms on the Palestinians.
Instead of understanding that resolving conflicts on the basis of justice was the only way to address legitimate Arab and Muslim grievances, the Bush administration has recklessly poured oil on the fire by its military interventions and its uncritical support for Israel.
Around the core conflicts of Iraq, Israel-Palestine and Iran are a cluster of other actual or potential battlefields in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Syria, to name only three all of which require urgent de-escalation and peacefully negotiated settlements. None can be solved by bullying, by threats or by the use of force.
Air strikes
Just this past week, two unmanned drones of the CIA fired 10 missiles into houses in the Pakistan village of Damadola, close to the Afghan frontier, killing 18 civilians. The Americans hoped to kill Ayman Al Zawahiri, Osama Bin Laden's deputy. But the intelligence was wrong.
On a visit to Washington this week, Pakistan's prime minister lodged a firm protest, but the US has neither apologised nor offered compensation to the victims' families.
Such air strikes fuel hatred for America, violate Pakistan's sovereignty, undermine the US-Pakistani strategic alliance, weaken President Pervez Musharraf, strengthen his fundamentalist Muslim opponents and add to Al Qaida's mystique of invincibility.
But even if Al Zawahiri had been killed, this would not have crippled Al Qaida but, on the contrary, would very probably have incited it to strike back. Most terrorist experts agree that Al Qaida has "franchised" a world-wide network of autonomous cells, all driven by the perceived need to resist the military assaults of America and its allies.
In Afghanistan, violence is now at its highest level since 2001, with suicide attacks being increasingly used to devastating effect, as in Iraq. The Taliban are recovering from their defeat.
Imminent danger
An imminent danger is the blurring of the distinction between, on the one hand, America's combat mission of 20,000 men, known as Operation Enduring Freedom, which is busy tracking down Taliban fighters in the south and east of the country and, on the other hand, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), made up of 20 small teams of civilian and military personnel which are attempting to help with reconstruction.
To the despair of aid workers, the US wants ISAF to deploy its teams in combat areas, and indeed to join in the fighting a clear recipe for still greater insecurity and a collapse of the aid effort.
The insurgency in Iraq, the stalemate in Israel-Palestine and the looming confrontation with Iran all require urgent attention to head off catastrophe but, in all three theatres, Washington seems to be thrashing about without even a semblance of a strategy.
Probably the only way forward, at this eleventh hour, would be for Bush to define the parameters of a settlement as Bill Clinton did in the dying weeks of his presidency and use America's muscle to ensure its implementation. This would mean defying the lobby and other hardline friends of Israel, which Bush seems little inclined to do.
At a press conference this week, Israel's acting prime minister Ehud Olmert was asked about Iran's nuclear programme. He replied, "Under no circumstances, and at no point, can Israel allow anyone with these kinds of malicious designs against us to have control of weapons of mass destruction which can threaten our existence."
Does this mean that Israel is planning to attack Iran? Does the US endorse a policy which will bring death and destruction to the whole region? This most dangerous of confrontations requires a forceful American intervention to defuse it, rather than to exacerbate it.
The US must put a halt to its pressures, rein in its Israeli ally and, in spite of Ahmadinejad's inflammatory statements, engage Iran in negotiations on the security situation in the Gulf, Central Asia and the Middle East. Only if Iran is reassured that it will not be attacked and that its interests are recognised and protected, will there be any chance that it might give up its uranium enrichment programme.
Patrick Seale is a commentator and author of several books on Middle East affairs.
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