Global Policy Forum

By Walid Charara

The United States seems stubbornly determined to extend its current high-risk strategy of democratic destabilisation to the entire Middle East.

President George Bush was quoted as saying: "If you want a glimpse of how I think about foreign policy read Natan Sharansky's book The Case for Democracy... It's a great book. And I think it will help - it will help explain a lot of the decisions that you'll see being made - you've seen made and will continue to see made" [1]. He later told the New York Times the book [2] was "part of my presidential DNA" [3]. In it, Sharansky, a former Soviet dissident who emigrated to Israel and was until recently a minister under Ariel Sharon, argues that an overall Middle East peace and global security depend upon the immediate democratisation of the Arab world. To achieve this, the United States must be prepared to question the status quo that has existed in the Middle East for decades - whatever the risks, according to the US secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice.

Such ideas mainly derive from an orientalist [4] view of the Arab world as a patchwork of religious and ethnic minorities incapable of co-existing within nation states. The proposed solution is a strategy of constructive instability, which will exploit communal rivalries to promote democratisation and US interests, seen as inextricably linked. Those who inspire Bush call the Arab world "the sick man of the 21st century", presumably in the hope of seeing it suffer the same fate as the 19th-century sick man of Europe, the Ottoman empire, carved up after the first world war.

Sharansky denounces Islamism as a terrorist movement and a threat to the existence not just of Israel, but the entire West. He argues that terrorism cannot be eliminated by taking security measures against groups or blocking their sources of finance: its real, deeper causes are tyrannical, corrupt Arab regimes and the culture of hatred that they spread. In his view US policy in the Middle East and the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories bear no responsibility. According to him, Palestine is irrefutable proof that internal factors are the main cause of terrorism. By brainwashing the population through media and schools, the Palestinian Authority has encouraged suicide bombings and armed struggle against Israel. It has played on Palestinian public opinion, enraged by the PA's corruption and nepotism, and turned it still further against Israel.

The same old arguments
Though he claims to believe in the univer-sality of an aspiration for freedom and democracy, Sharansky asserts a radical incompatibility between Islam and demo-cracy. He repeats the usual arguments in support of this: the refusal of Muslims to separate the state from religion, their cult of violence and war, and the inferior status of women in Islam. In May this "freedom fighter" resigned from the cabinet in protest against the government's plan to pull out of Gaza. But Sharansky is not the US administration's only inspiration. Reuel Marc Gerecht is a neo-conservative thinker, an expert on Iraq and Shia Islam, and a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He suggests that Bush partly based his plan for a "greater Middle East" [5] on "the intellectual spadework done by such influential historians as Princeton University's Bernard Lewis and Johns Hopkins University's Fouad Ajami" [6].

The fiercely pro-Israel Lewis made his reputation soon after the 1991 Gulf war, when he was one of the first US experts to announce the death of the Arab world as a political entity. Arab states, he pointed out, had fought beside a western coalition against another Arab state, Iraq; the Palestine Liberation Organisation had marginalised itself by opposing the war [7]. Since then the expression "Middle East" has gained ground as an alternative to "Arab world".

In 2005 the executive director of the influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Robert Satloff, wrote an open letter to the under-secretary of state for public diplomacy, Karen Hughes, with this recommendation: "Banish the terms 'Arab world' and 'Muslim world' from America's diplomatic lexicon; be as country-specific as possible, in both word and deed. Radical Islamists want to erase borders and create a supranational world where the lines of demarcation run between the 'house of Islam' and the 'house of war' [meaning lands in which Islamic law is not applied]. Don't cede the battlefield to them without a fight" [8].

There is one Arab that Likud supporters and Washington neocons can approve of. Fouad Ajami is the leading voice among those who analyse Arab society and politics in sectarian terms. In a recent article he argues: "Lebanon had always been, at its heart, a 'Christian homeland'... Many Lebanese are convinced that this lack of sympathy [of Arabs towards Lebanon] derived from the fact that Lebanon is, in the main, a Christian country with heterodox communities. There is a great deal of truth to that charge" [9].

Stability is an obstacle
To be fair, there is more to US strategy than this; many other factors have influenced its development. But remarks by Bush and his circle indicate that such ideas offer them a global vision and a line to follow. Satloff dubbed the strategy "constructive instability" and insists that the search for stability has been a feature of US policy in the region. "In other regions . . . US strategists debated the wisdom of stability . . . but George W Bush was the first president to argue that stability was itself an obstacle to the advancement of US interests in the Middle East... In this effort the US has employed a range of coercive and non-coercive measures, from military force to implement regime change in Iraq and Afghanistan, to a mix of carrots-and-sticks first to isolate Yasser Arafat and then to encourage new, peaceful, accountable Palestinian leadership; to the gentle (and increasingly less so) use of the bully pulpit to nudge Egypt and Saudi Arabia down the reformist path" [10].

In the current regional context, one US priority is to curb Iranian influence to make Tehran more susceptible to international pressure to abandon its nuclear project or at least to limit its ability to respond to any attack on its installations. This depends upon forcing Syria, Iran's last regional ally, to break the alliance and disarm Hizbullah. But Syria has refused to cooperate unless it gets something in return, such as an Israeli undertaking to resume negotiations on the Golan Heights. So last September the US and France asked the UN security council to vote on resolution 1559, calling for the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, the disarming of militias, Lebanese and non-Lebanese (Hizbullah and the Palestinian groups), and the deployment of the Lebanese army [11].

Many political and community forces in Lebanon saw the vote as a declaration by the international community that the Syrian mandate in Lebanon, which it had accepted 15 years ago, was over. The Lebanese opposition responded by mobilising against the presence of Syrian troops. The assassination of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri on 14 February, now the subject of an investigation, sparked huge demonstrations against the Lebanese regime, calling for the withdrawal of Syrian troops, while international pressure on both countries intensified. This cedar revolution had much in common with the "democratic revolutions" in Serbia, Georgia and Ukraine. Thanks to US and French support, it attained its main goal: Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon.

These events exemplify a new form of foreign intervention that Gilles Dorronsoro calls "a strategy of democratic destabilisation" [12]. This consists of "exploiting elements within society that are calling for change; supporting their actions by mobilising local and international media in their favour; inventing a figurehead behind whom they can unite; and increasing international pressure on the powers to whom they are opposed. In Lebanon the implementation of this strategy has aggravated sectarianism and set different elements in the country against each other."

This orchestration of community rivalries also happens as part of a campaign of constructive instability against other countries in the region. Regime change seems to be on the agenda in Syria where, as Satloff points out, "the US has no interest in the survival of the Assad regime . . . a minoritarian regime built on the fragile edifice of fear and intimidation. Cracks in the regime may quickly become fissures and then earthquakes" [13].

Satloff proposes three US priorities. It should gather as much intelligence as it can on the political, social, economic and "ethnic" forces at work in Syria. It should conduct a campaign around democracy, human rights and the rule of law. And it should offer the Syrian regime no lifelines, unless President Bashar al-Assad is prepared to go to Israel as part of a peace initiative or unless he expels "all anti-peace terrorist organisations and their members from Syrian territory" and publicly renounces violence -"armed struggle or national resistance in the local lexicon".

The US has supervised the reconstruction of Iraq's political system on the basis of community and ethnic representation. In the process it stirred tensions between different interests. It may genuinely have wanted to introduce a relatively representative government, but the fact that legislative elections went ahead despite a massive boycott by the Sunni Arabs suggests that the US is also pursuing a strategy of fomenting community rivalries, as outlined before the elections by Gerecht: "Allawi [then Iraqi prime minister] and the Americans ought to make it perfectly clear that the Shias are coming . . . and the Arab Sunni elite has at most a year to join the new Iraq. In the meantime he and the Americans . . . should talk openly and regularly about how the new Iraqi army will be overwhelmingly Shia and Kurdish since the Sunni Arabs have given them no choice... [They] have to know, they have to feel it in their bones, that they are on the verge of losing everything in Iraq" [14].

Most Sunni Arabs got the picture, which explains both the radicalisation of anti-US resistance and the increased violence between Sunnis and Shias, which presages a bloody civil war. The US has not only played the sectarian card to weaken countries and forces opposed to its hegemony, but has also set itself up as the instigator and arbiter of low-intensity civil wars. It will find it difficult to control the chaotic forces it has unleashed.

Footnotes:
[1] Washington Times, 12 Jan 2005; see http://www.washingtontimes.com
[2] Natan Sharansky, The Case For Democracy, Public Affairs, New York, 2004
[3] See Aluf Benn, "A scorned idealist", Newsweek, 7 March 2005; online at http://msnbc.msn.com/id/7037096/
[4] See Edward W Said, Orientalism, Penguin, London, 2003
[5] See Gilbert Achcar, "Greater Middle East: the US plan", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, April 2004
[6] Ruel Marc Gerecht, "The struggle for the Middle East", The Weekly Standard, Washington, 3 January 2005; see http://www.aei.org/publications/
[7] Bernard Lewis, "Rethinking the Middle East", Foreign Affairs, New York, autumn 1992
[8] Robert Satloff, "Memo to Karen P Hughes", The Weekly Standard, Washington, 28 March 2005. See http://www.washingtoninstitute.org/
[9] Fouad Ajami, "The Autumn of the autocrats", Foreign Affairs, New York, May/June 2005
[10] Robert Satloff, "Assessing the Bush administration's policy", Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 15 May 2005. Part 2 online at http://www.metransparent.com/texts/
[11] See Alain Gresh, "Lebanon: an illusion of unity", Le Monde diplomatique, English language edition, June 2005
[12] Libération, Paris, 10 March 2005
[13] Robert Satloff, op cit. Part 1 online at http://www.metransparent.com/texts/
[14] Ruel Marc Gerecht, op cit.

FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. Global Policy Forum distributes this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. We believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C íŸ 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond fair use, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.