The Arab world must be careful not to get trapped between Israel and Iran as America re-articulates its regional policy, writes Hassan Nafaa* The New Year brings with it a markedly new American political climate that will have an immediate impact on the Middle East, the repercussions of which, in turn, will be felt around the world. The most significant gauge of this new climate is the recent US legislative elections, which ushered in a Democratic majority congress with a different agenda than that of the current Republican administration. Of course, there have been times in the past when the executive and legislative branches were dominated by opposing parties without this influencing the general course of American foreign policy. Foreign policy issues, however, topped the factors that determined voters' choices in the November elections, a rarity in American elections. As a result, the new Congress strongly feels it has a popular mandate to turn the administration's policy around, especially on Iraq. Not that this task will be easy, given that the Bush administration has entrenched itself behind chimerical ideological walls and still believes itself capable of winning an obviously losing battle. When pressure began to mount on Bush to find a way out of the Iraqi quagmire, the Baker-Hamilton report offering a bipartisan direction, the administration wriggled its way around the report's recommendations until ultimately Bush announced that he planned to increase American forces in Iraq instead of reducing their number and redefining their mission so as to permit a final withdrawal by the first quarter of 2008, as Baker-Hamilton suggested. Naturally, Congress was incensed and the two speakers issued their first letter of caution to Bush immediately after they were sworn in, signalling the onset of a battle between the legislature and executive that will probably last until the presidential elections in 2008. However, if this facedown over Iraq will seem to dominate the American political scene in the coming phase, at closer inspection one will undoubtedly find that it is only the tip of the iceberg. A much bigger battle has begun, one that revolves around the neo- conservatives' ideological vision, of which Iraq was to be the showcase. By its very nature, this engagement will be multi-faceted, covering such major issues as the legitimacy of pre-emptive warfare, Washington's attitude towards cooperative international action, the administration's stance towards such institutions as the International Court of Justice and the UN. Interestingly, too, some issues that had once been generally uncontroversial in American political and intellectual circles, such as America's special relation with Israel and the Arab-Israeli war, have also begun to stir heated domestic debate. Perhaps the study produced several months ago by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt on the influence of the Zionist lobby on American foreign policy best represents the mounting concern. The authors of this report concluded that the foreign policy decisions the administration has taken on the Middle East over the past five years reflect the disproportionate weight of the Zionist lobby on the American decision-making process and that for the most part these decisions tended to promote Israeli interests over American ones. There is also increasing dismay over Israeli attempts to impose de facto realities on the Palestinian people. Not the least alarmed is former president Jimmy Carter whose latest book bears the title, Palestine: Peace not Apartheid; a rare formulation in the US, especially coming from someone so respected in international circles of human rights advocacy as president Carter. Turning our attention now to Europe, President Jacques Chirac's recent comments on the failure of American policy in Iraq are worthy of note. The seasoned French statesman not only reminded the world of his government's opposition to the American war against Iraq from the outset, he also openly called for the withdrawal of foreign forces from Iraq in accordance with a set timeframe. To me, these statements suggest the French are reconsidering their rapprochement with the Bush administration soon after the fall of the Saddam regime. At the time, I thought this policy of accommodating to the new realities created by Bush was extremely opportunistic. In all events, Paris followed this road until its virtual collusion with Washington over Lebanon led it to another dead end following the failed Israeli attack on Hizbullah in July. But Chirac's statements indicate more than just a bout of French introspection. I believe they signal the beginning of a European drive to support the efforts of the Democratic dominated congress to pressure Bush to change direction, even if this drive will only gain impetus following the French presidential elections. Meanwhile, the Middle East remains a bundle of paradoxes. While the focal point of major shifts in attitude taking shape in the US and Europe, the Arab world still seems incapable of creating mechanisms for handling the potential outcome of this development and turning it to the advantage of Arab national and regional interests. True, events over the past few years have demonstrated that there are forces capable of obstructing the American and Zionist projects, but these forces have yet to prove themselves capable of defeating these designs. The true Iraqi resistance to the American occupation, which has so far claimed the lives of 3,000 American soldiers and has left some 30,000 wounded, has effectively thwarted the American project in Iraq. It has forced the occupation on to the defensive, thereby preventing the spread of American-led aggression to other parts of the "Greater Middle East". The Lebanese resistance, spearheaded by Hizbullah, performed what many had believed the impossible -- twice: first, to compel an unconditional Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in 2000; and second, was to withstand Israel's July 2006 onslaught. In Palestine, the resistance has so far succeeded in compelling Israel to dismantle all Israeli settlements in Gaza and forestall Israeli plans to impose a unilateral solution or Israeli conditions for a settlement on the Palestinian track. Still, all these forces remain surrounded inside their own countries by other forces whose agendas barely overlap and often conflict with those of the resistance movements. As for the countries that support these movements, notably Syria and Iran, they are relatively isolated at both the regional and international levels. This weakness, moreover, is compounded by the ambiguity and two-sidedness of Iran's regional policy, which has become one of the main breaches through which the US and Israel can penetrate in order to undermine the accomplishments of resistance forces and to reorder the axes of power in a manner that promotes US-Israeli aims. While on the one hand Iran, through its support for Syria and the Palestinian and Lebanese resistance movements, is a cornerstone for the alliance opposed to the American- Israeli project for the region, its manoeuvres in Iraq are advancing a sectarian project whose aims coincide with American-Zionist ends in the region. Clearly, the circumstances surrounding the trial and execution of Saddam Hussein have contributed to exposing some Iranian and Arab Shia circles as driven more by the instinct for revenge than by concern for the sensitivities of the Arab people and the unity of resistance forces in the region. To me, the most dangerous thing that can happen in the next two years is for Israel and the US to succeed in instilling the fear among Arab governments and predominantly Sunni societies that Iran has embarked on an expansionist project with the aim of creating a "Shia crescent" opposed to Arab interests, and in using this fear to rally a regional coalition against Iran. For some time Washington has been trying to promulgate the idea that Iran heads an "alliance of extremists" that includes Syria, Hizbullah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and that what is needed to confront it is an "alliance of moderates" -- Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. It takes no great feat of intelligence to understand that Israel will be America's natural candidate to lead the "moderates". Nor does it require great imagination to foresee that if this scenario comes into being, the Arab world will become sharply polarised Iran and Israel, and that whichever of these two sides wins, the Arabs will come out losers. What is certain is that the developments that will unfold over the next year or two will propel the international order towards a new crossroads. Because transitional periods are always the most precarious, the Middle East will probably be swept by any number of tumultuous storms before the next features of the American-dominated unipolar global order gel. * The writer is a professor of political science at Cairo University.
