How will Arab governments respond to the challenge of the Greater Middle East initiative? Burying their heads in the sand, however attractive, is not a viable option, writes Gamil Mattar* With Joschka Fischer's announcement of the proposal the US plans to put before the G8 Summit, the West has thrown down the gauntlet. Now the Arabs, especially their ruling elite, must decide, and quickly, whether to take up the challenge or pretend it doesn't exist. The challenge, this time, is both diabolically clever and ideally timed. I say "this time", because a similar gauntlet was cast down before the Ottoman Sultanate a century or more ago. Istanbul chose to ignore it and within a few years Turkey was walking the path the West had staked out for it. Both then and now, there was a ground swell for reform and in both instances there was a war that gave the West the opportunity to press for changes beneath a banner of reform. ". The proposal the US will present to the G8 is based on a series of reports to which a number of Arab intellectuals contributed. Most of these Arab intellectuals had come to the conviction that conditions in the Arab world have deteriorated beyond the point where gentle, or even exasperated, hints will do any good. It is time, these intellectuals thought, to tell it as it is, bluntly and without frills. At the same time, vast sectors of Arab public opinion had fallen into the grips of the blackest depression, which was the product of a sense of double defeat: defeat by outside powers -- notably Israel and the US -- and by forces at home that seized national wealth, smuggled it abroad and spread corruption in all quarters. This dire picture, in every detail, presented the West with the ideal opportunity to say to the Arabs, in effect, "You are in a serious muddle and you have failed to extricate yourselves from it and improve the lot of your people." The West, in throwing down the gauntlet, is also saying that the interests of the West and of Arab and Islamic governments converge in the need to hasten the processes of political, economic, social, religious and educational reform. The security of the West is at risk because of what existing conditions breed in those regions to the south and east, and those regions, themselves, are at risk of being destabilised by the rising violence against their governments and the peace and security of their peoples. The Western media is intently curious to know how Arab and Islamic governments will react to this new assault, and it is no secret that Western analysts and commentators are focussing on Arab nations in particular, and that their sights have homed in on the forthcoming Arab summit at the end of March and the foreign ministers meetings that will precede it. Observers at a distance predict that the Arabs might respond in a number of ways. One is to ignore the US initiative and the European positions that complement or soften it, as though they never existed. This would not be the first time Arab governments adopted a policy of "burying our head in the sand", which is the easiest way to avoid having to make difficult decisions under stress. After all, there is always the hope that troubles will pass with time, or at least there is the general Arab rule that while the passage of time may forsake the people it rarely forsakes their rulers. The reaction would also be motivated by another hope, which is that the American presidential polls will turn out against a renewed tenure for Bush, the commander-in-chief of the war against them. Then, there is that perennial hope that the adversary will fall into disarray and simply fade away, as though the West is too divided over the current campaign to put it into action. Personally, I believe that officials in the West are expecting this reaction and have already begun to lay the groundwork for it through official contacts with Arab governments. The message being conveyed in these contacts and through the media is that the Arabs will have no choice but to change and that the West will not stand by if the Arabs choose to ignore the challenge. A second possible reaction predicted by Western observers is also one that has many precedents in Arab dealings with the world abroad. This is that Arab governments will issue a statement agreeing to the reform project, but worded ambiguously enough to permit for differing interpretations and to leave room for the project to be ignored later on. In tandem with this agreement, Arab media will unleash an outcry against the initiative or it will convey to the public the message that Arab governments are resolved to participate in the programme for change, but refuse all outside intervention in domestic affairs. The media will go on to affirm that Arab governments, since the day they assumed the reigns of government, have been implementing reforms; that the West has not come up with anything new, but that to signal their good intentions they will cooperate. The third possibility is that Arab governments will ask for an official full-fledged deal. In other words, they will signal their readiness to enter into negotiations over putting the initiative into effect so that the required changes could be implemented gradually and in a manner appropriate to the so- called economic, social and religious circumstances of the region. At the same time, they will stipulate the condition, or lodge the plea, that the West must provide a clear timetable for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict and restoring the rights of the Palestinian people. Should things move in this direction, the US would probably leave it to its EU partner to come up with the ideas that fulfill the Arabs' condition, but formulated in a way that will not affect things one way or the other. After all, the opinion in the US seems to be that reform in the Middle East is the precondition for a solution to the conflict in Palestine and not the other way around. A fourth possibility is that Arab governments issue a statement or initiative preempting the resolution of the G8. This document would contain an explicitly worded commitment on the part of these governments to effect radical changes in their societies and to cooperate with the relevant international agencies in order to obtain the necessary foreign expertise to modernise their societies and rid them of their various ills. Such a preemptive move would kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, it would tell Arab public opinion that the resolutions adopted by the G8 are a response to decisions taken by the Arabs beforehand. Secondly, it would tell the West that the Arabs are ready to negotiate over how to best formulate the G8 initiative so as to avert any form of confrontation. To this the West will counter with some rather powerful arguments. It will say that most of the ideas in the initiative were derived from Arab intellectuals with prominent standing in their countries, most of whom do not belong to radical organisations opposed to existing governments. They will argue, secondly, that although the Arabs have already begun to implement a number of reforms, most of the measures that have been taken are ad hoc, weak, irresolute and, also, probably only taken in order to silence domestic public opinion and appease outside pressures. Thirdly, they will point out that Arab governments have opened themselves to various domestic and regional perils because of their inability to resolve problems that were, via neglect, allowed to escalate into chronic crises. The irony is that after the Arab League General Secretariat and others had worked so hard to persuade Arab governments and peoples of the need to reform the institutions of the Arab order and to develop channels of inter-Arab cooperation, and after all the hopes that had been pinned on the ability of the forthcoming Arab summit to adopt the appropriate resolutions, the US-European initiative, with all its grand ideas and plans for economic cooperation and collective experiments in the "Greater Middle East", now threatens to jettison the efforts of the General Secretariat and successive generations of intellectuals who have conceptualised the vision of Arab integration. In the end, Arab history will pay tribute to many of those intellectuals who have authored some of the world's worthiest ideas for regional integration. It will also censure those Arab ruling regimes and bureaucracies for having failed to put those ideas into action before the West came and demanded us to set aside any notion of Arab integration prior to implementing the integration projects stipulated under the new initiative. A second irony is that it is Turkey that is to host the rest of its fellow NATO to discuss in particular the future of the Greater Middle East. That this meeting should be held in Istanbul is significant. Just under a century ago, the Western campaign against the Ottoman Sultanate ended with the secularisation of Turkey. Istanbul, has become the model that the West hopes to see repeated in the largest number of Islamic nations possible, starting in the Arab world. I have little doubt that the Istanbul meeting will give special focus to military aspects without which the Western initiative would not be complete. The Americans know full well that Turkey's relationship with NATO has always been the guarantee that Turkey will adhere to the "reformist" path it chose, or that was chosen for it, in the last century. * The writer is director of the Arab Centre for Development and Futuristic Research.
