The US seems to enjoy sending its most hated figures to the Middle East to promote its most unpopular policies. Shipping Dick Cheney off to the region is like sending Danish cartoonists to Cairo to improve Muslim-Christian relations.
Cheney’s brief is clear – to create enthusiasm for the continued isolation of Iran and its nuclear program, to build support for the endless occupation of Iraq, and to convince everyone that the so-called peace process initiated at Annapolis has a chance of succeeding. He is unlikely to be any more successful in improving America’s image than Bush crony Karen Hughes during here term as Under Secretary For Public Diplomacy, especially since his agenda is “undisclosed, a word that could stand in for Cheney’s entire career in public service.
Bush dispatched the reclusive and sour-faced Vice President to the region amidst the ongoing catastrophe that is American Middle East policy, a disaster that has only grown more acute with the humanitarian crisis in Gaza engineered by the Administration’s dead-end isolation of Hamas. It’s not that some bridge-building wouldn’t do some good. But Cheney, the architect of the reviled and disastrous war in Iraq, is precisely the wrong person for the job.
The vice president takes so much negative baggage on the plane with him it’s a wonder it was able to take off at all. Memories are long here, and few have forgotten Cheney’s history of supporting tyrants and injustice at the expense of democracy and freedom, typified by Cheney’s undying support for the apartheid regime in South Africa as a congressman in the 1980s.
Incredibly, Cheney still stands by his vote against the release of Nelson Mandela in 1986.
It does not help that Cheney is visiting only US allies like Oman and Israel, while ignoring the plight of the Egyptian regime – which has been put in the impossible position of enforcing the despotic Israeli siege of Gaza. The Mubarak government has been forced to choose, once again, between the wrath of its own people in upholding the siege, and the economic and diplomatic consequences of defying its biggest patron.
While no one in Egypt really wants a major confrontation with Israel, there is widespread abhorrence at the human costs of Israeli policies in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. And though Cheney is likely to give lip service to the necessity of negotiations, there is no hope that he will put any pressure on the Israeli government to deal with the reality of Hamas or to move quickly toward final status negotiations.
For an administration that has always blamed extremism and terrorism on the lack of regional democracy and the disconnect between the dream of popular representation and the reality of continued authoritarianism, the ignorance of Egypt is a curious choice. Forcing the Mubarak government into this position only strengthens the position of the very extremists with whom the US is supposedly engaged in an ideological struggle. At least the US has finally spoken out against the imprisonment of members of the Muslim Brotherhood, but this issue is another one that Cheney won’t be touching.
Cheney’s itinerary only reinforces the widespread belief that the Bush Administration still has no intention of revising its policies on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or engaging with countries that are not in America’s good graces. This kind of diplomacy, in which other parties are not listened to or consulted but rather strong-armed into following America’s dubious path, is typical of Bush-era foreign policy. Think of it as “my way or the Highway of Death.
It also doesn’t help that every time Cheney has opened his mouth so far, he has said something spectacularly stupid. At an American air base near Baghdad earlier this week, he promised that he would not allow Iraq to “become a staging ground for further attacks against Americans. But if Iraq is anything right now, it is precisely that – the global ground zero for the killing of Americans. Just because those Americans are in uniform (whether military or Blackwater) doesn’t make them any less dead or any less American.
If President Bush really wants to change perceptions of American foreign policy in the Middle East, he might want to consider actually altering those policies and sending fresh faces to promote them rather than militaristic Cold Warriors who still don’t have a clue why their ideas are wrong.
David M. Faris is an American political commentator and Ph.D candidate at the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently doing research in Cairo.
