A real war on terror would be a campaign built on justice, peace and development and would target Washington's allies as much as its foes, writes Amr Elchoubaki* Five years is not such a short time and the impact of Bush's war against terrorism in this region during this period has hardly been negligible either. Just as people regard the US in terms of the changes it has undergone since 11 September, a similar before-and-after comparison reveals much about the nature of the change that the Middle East has undergone since then. Specifically, it shows us whether the war against terrorism has made significant inroads towards the realisation of one of its stated aims: spreading democracy to this region. That the answer to this is clearly in the negative demands a re-examination of the conceptual foundations of this war, if only in the hope that some future administration in Washington will avoid the same pitfalls. The most striking shortcoming of the current American approach to the war against terrorism is its oversimplification of both terrorism and democracy. To the Bush administration, terrorism was a collection of evildoers and murderers who had to be hunted down in the mountains of Afghanistan, fought on the fields of Iraq and thrown into the cells of Guantanamo. The alternative was new noble democratically minded rulers airlifted into Afghanistan and Iraq along with American forces. No thought was given to the fact that democratisation is a process that the West needed to support over time and that fighting terrorism was more of a question of fighting the despotic national environments that bred it and the iniquitous international environment that contributed to spreading it. Because of its overly simplistic approach, the US forfeited an actual opportunity to transform Iraq into a model of democratic government that would inspire other nations in the region. Its mistake was compounded by flagrantly short-sighted policies, beginning with the dismantlement of the military and security agencies with no plan of its own, or even a conception, for running a country that was more than 2,000 years old (as opposed to barely a couple of centuries) and that contained a demographic mesh of Sunni and Shia Muslims, Kurds and Christians. The result, therefore, was an enormous power vacuum. Washington's "government substitution" formula was virtually destined to inflame this volatile situation. From the outset, the dismantlement policy appeared to target, not so much the former Baathist edifice of the state, but rather a particular religious group. This, combined with the rapidity with which the occupation attempted to overhaul the political, social and cultural structures of the state, produced deep fissures in the Iraqi social fabric. Thus, the American battle in Iraq was not purely a military/political one; by seeking to supplant a ruling order that had been dominate by Sunnis for decades with another that was automatically regarded as Shia dominated, the Americans embroiled themselves in a battle that also precipitated or exacerbated far- reaching social and religious tensions. In Lebanon, after the civil war, the Taif Agreement created a denominational governing system intended to maintain a balance between the Christian and Muslim sectors of the population. As it was realised that the legacy of Maronite control could not be so easily overturned in favour of the de facto Muslim majority, the Taif Agreement ensured that the highest position in government remained a Maronite preserve. Something of the opposite arose in Iraq as the result of American policies towards Iraq. In addition to its over-simplistic approach to fighting terrorism, the Bush administration compounded its error through its blinkered handling of other sensitive issues in the region, notably the questions of Palestine and Lebanon. Washington has remained staunch in its refusal to draw a distinction between terrorism, as epitomised by Al-Qaeda and its numerous cells, and militant national resistance movements such as Hizbullah in Lebanon and the Palestinian Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades organisations (even if one often condemns their methods). Washington and Tel Aviv's deliberate blurring of the distinction between terrorism and resistance not only flies in the face of universally accepted principle, in practical terms it turns a blind eye to the political issues that compel resistance movements to resort to armed force. By, for example, reducing Hamas to a "terrorist organisation", the US and Israel are attempting to draw attention away from the crucial question of the Israeli occupation, which, in turn, compounds the frustrations of all eager to bring an end to the injustices perpetrated by that occupation. What the US refuses to understand is that the existence of Hizbullah and Hamas is politically and socially necessary. At a time when the Arab people see themselves under assault by foreign regional projects that are taking advantage of their weakness and the weakness of their governments, they need to hear a voice that has the courage and ability to say, "No." The prevailing popular mood can no longer tolerate Arab rulers who execute or tow the line with American policy but nor do they wish to perpetuate the Saddamist or Assadist alternatives that "resist" with slogans and hot air while persecuting their own people. Rather, the Arab people are longing for the type of politicians who can interact critically with the world and with American policy; politicians of the sort that have risen to power in many Latin American countries as the result of democratic mechanisms that allowed the people to register their vote in protest against American hegemony. One of the most crucial questions facing the Arab world at present is whether there exists the opportunity for an Islamist or leftist movement to voice through peaceful democratic means general opposition to American policies. Clearly, at present, this opportunity does not exist. Instead, the region is torn between militant resistance and protest movements, such as Hizbullah and Hamas, and non-democratic Arab governments that are allied to the US and that have systematically closed off all peaceful political avenues for challenging their age long domination. Unfortunately, the current US administration is unable to perceive the political significance and value of an organised protest voice, whether of the militant stripe of Hizbullah and Hamas or of the more pacifist hue of the Muslim Brotherhood. The real danger of this blindness is that the longer Washington persists in its policy of targeting these rational outlets of protest on the grounds that they are "terrorist", the more it moves towards the proliferation of real terrorist groups. For this reason, perhaps the one positive aspect about UN resolution 1701 is that it did not come out fully in favour of the American-Israeli definition of the "war against terrorism", for if it had and had this definition then been applied to Hizbullah, Lebanon would have degenerated into another Iraq with disastrous repercussions for the whole region, including Israel. Five years down the line from Bush's declaration of war on terror, the Middle East is a more dangerous place then ever. Since the American occupation of Iraq, in the name of the fight against terrorism, terrorist acts in this region and elsewhere in the world have multiplied exponentially. A real war against terrorism -- as opposed to a war that has fed terrorism -- can only be fought by reforming the political, social and international climate that has bred terrorism. The fight against terrorism begins by ending the Israeli occupation of Arab land, by creating a more just international order through the impartial application of international law, by instituting true democratic reform in Arab countries and by generating a climate domestically and internationally that will encourage moderate Islamists to espouse democracy as a cherished value as opposed to a means towards an end. Only when the US and other powers are prepared to pay the necessary costs for a successful fight against terrorism will the balance of opinion in this region shift from the negative to the positive because then the people will have ascertained that the war against terrorism will usher in democracy, justice and development. * The writer is a political analyst at the Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies.
