Roadmap to Mideast

U.S. envoy William Burns paid a visit to the region in a bid to make a case for the "road map" for achieving peace and establishing a Palestinian state by 2005.

Burns seems to follow the U.S. ritual for the region based on shuttle visits whenever tension is high, and the prospects of a crisis undermines American interests in the Arab world. But quite astonishingly, the Americans fail to notice that while the Arab world has changed greatly, U.S. diplomacy is still trapped in a logic already formulated by Henry Kissinger but which no longer fits with the new realities of the region.

Both the timing and the substance of the U.S. design carried by Burns dealt a blow to his mission. Two questions impose themselves. Why now, when the prospects of an imminent war against Iraq poisons the air? And whose purpose should a vaguely drafted plan, poor in details and commitments, serve?

The three-phase plan demands Palestinians create an "empowered" prime minister, draft a constitution, and declare a halt to the intifada. It also demands Israelis ease curfews, halt attacks on civilian areas and withdraw to positions held on September 28, 2000 and cease all settlement plans. The plan stipulates that such steps, if followed, could later bring both sides to tackle the disagreement over the final borders. And here lies its Achilles' heel.

The document has come under criticism from all parties. The Israelis said it is a deviation from President Bush's original June speech and turned it down. The Palestinians argued that it lacks three major component: enforcement mechanisms, time lines, and monitors on the ground.

Russia, the European Union and the UN are demanding changes in the provisions of the plan. Syria lashed out at the plan saying it "carries no important ideas". Saudi Arabia asked for more amendments in the draft. Far from bringing fresh hopes to the region, the new initiative added to the level of cynicism.

The Saudi initiative endorsed by the Arab summit in Beirut offers normal relations with Israel if it withdraws to the pre-1967 borders. The initiative, seen as a bold move by Western analysts, lost a lot of its momentum when the quartet devised a new plan that shied away from the original Arab move aimed at redefining the Arab-Israeli conflict. Until recently, offering normalisation with Israel was a taboo that would entail condemnation and outrage in the region.

The conduct of the U.S. in the Middle East since the World War II has triggered a lot of debate and controversy among Arabs. Now if you asked Arabs, whether the U.S. had been fairly backing Arab causes, a large percentage of them would say no.

U.S. politics in the region have always been driven by a desire to secure its own interests. Oil, Israel and "rogue regimes" have thus become themes, which now shape U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East.

The U.S. forged an alliance with Iraq to counter Iran. When Iraq became a threat to U.S. regional interests, it turned to Syria and Iran to counter Iraq. Was it a tactical alliance or disastrous ignorance of the socio-cultural patterns that underlie the nature of alliances and enmities in the Middle East?

While oil has undoubtedly changed the life of people in the region forever, it did not take the Americans long to realise that a destabilised Middle East would be a danger to the global equilibrium.

When Mohammed Mossadegh nationalised the oil industry in Iran, or when Gamal Abdul Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in the 1950s, the U.S. influence on the region and on the course of events was quite clear. The fifties marked the decline of colonial empires and the emergence of a new superpower. America was bequeathed the wealthiest and most volatile region in the world.

In his book Diplomacy, Kissinger refers to the Suez crisis as a turning point in U.S. policy in the Middle East, since then "America would not be permitted to remain pristine.

Suez turned out to be America's initiation into the realities of global power... Having evicted Great Britain and France from their historic roles in the Middle East, America found that responsibility for the balance of power in that region had fallen squarely on its shoulders".

A responsibility which has been clearly manifested through the 1967 and 1973 wars, the Camp David Accords, the Iran-Iraq war, the Desert Storm, the Oslo Agreements, the peace pact between Jordan and Israel, the new preparations for war to topple Iraqi president Saddam and the new "roadmap" plan.

After five decades of undaunted effort to secure U.S. supremacy in the region, Americans needed to devise a new "roadmap" plan based upon new bold ideas and depart from using the same Wilsonian rhetoric of promoting peace and implementing democracy when the real motive is to secure the flow of oil to its markets.

Sheldon L. Richman, a senior editor at the Cato Institute, wrote in an analysis on U.S. conduct in the Middle East: "If the natural resources of the Middle East were bananas, the region would not have attracted the attention of U.S. policy makers as it has for decades... nearly everything the United States has done in the Middle East can be seen as contributing to the protection of its long-term access to Middle Eastern oil, and through that control, Washington's claim to world leadership."

Now that the U.S. is engaged in a public diplomacy of a genre never seen before in a bid to refurbish its image in the region, a propaganda blitz would not do the job by itself. To achieve that goal, they first need to answer the question they have been avoiding: Have they really been embracing a "messianic" policy in the Middle East to spread the principles of freedom, peace and prosperity, or just to secure a balance of power?

Hashem Ahelbarra is an Abu Dhabi-based television journalist.