The heavily fortified Green Zone in Baghdad, from where the United States indirectly administers most things Iraqi, seems to have caught the fancy of the Bush administration. It seems to be repeating in the rest of the Middle East the same isolation from its surroundings practiced 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 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 region: many of the problems she says she wants to solve are usually exacerbated by American policies, especially Washington’s extreme support for Israel in lieu of evenhandedness in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Rice 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 approaches fail because they cut against the grain 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 U.S. There is a new regional cold war taking place in the Middle East, pitting pro-Western leaderships against those forces who defy and resist U.S.- and Israeli-led Western aims in the 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 majority sentiment in most Arab countries. The U.S. speaks about promoting democracy, but largely supports non-democratic Arab regimes. It has actively isolated and tried to bring down the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine, instead of engaging it and nudging it and Israel toward mutually rewarding peace talks. Washington looks very foolish or very naive talking about a plan to work with Arab moderate governments to check extremists. Its own policies have helped promote the extremism it now fears, and have weakened 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 U.S. 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. 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. Regimes 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 also generally 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: homegrown 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 US in recent decades, by the European powers before). Virtually all five of these forces would only be 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 swathes of Arab, Iranian and Turkish public opinion against the US, Israel and many Arab regimes. Please, somebody give Rice a modern Middle East history book or a tour of any Arab city outside the Green Zone.
Rami G. Khouri writes a regular commentary for THE DAILY STAR.
