The credibility of Bush's concern for the democratic rights of the peoples of the Middle East must be tested against his record in office and the rhetoric of his buddies. It doesn't look good, writes Mohamed Hakki There is an old Syrian joke about a highwayman that stops a simple traveller on a hill. He threatens him with a gun and demands money or his life. The peasant says, "But I have no money." The bully insists, "Give me your watch." The peasant says, "But I have no watch." The bully replies, "Then give me your clothes." The peasant pleads, "But aren't these rags but suitable for the trash?" In anger and frustration the bully then demands, "Are you Muslim or Christian?" The poor peasant answers, "Christian". So the bully points the gun again, saying, "Then you have to become Muslim." Facing nothing but certain death, the peasant succumbs -- "Okay, tell me how? What can I do to become a Muslim?" The bully scratches his head, confused, and says, "By God, my son, I don't know!" Something similar, if not exactly, but which has the same echo of illogic and incredulity, is happening now between America and the Arabs. After watching Israel's occupation and destruction of Palestinian land, homes and crops, and excusing it as Israel's right to defend itself, and after his troops invade and occupy Iraq, President Bush suddenly turns around and says: The problem with the Arab countries is that they lack democracy! In order to give his words the ring of truth, he had to admit that for the last 60 years, all the past US administrations, including his father's, and other Western nations, were "excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East". No one in the Arab world disagrees with President Bush about the lack of freedom. Neither the rulers nor the people. What is absent from the speech, but necessary for understanding, are the reasons. As the late Professor Edward Said stated, "In more than 50 years since America assumed world dominance, and more so after the end of the Cold War, it has run its Middle Eastern policy based on two principles, and two principles alone; the defence of Israel and the free flow of oil, both of which involved direct opposition to Arab nationalism. In all significant ways, with few exceptions, American policy has been contemptuous of and openly hostile to the aspirations of the Arab people." However, one has to admit that the president's speech was a very important one. Some critics saw in it the same rhetoric of his neo-conservative entourage who have obviously hijacked, and are in total control of, US foreign policy. We may agree on the freedom deficit, but the truth is that it is this neo-con elite who have used this agreement to deflect any possible backlash against Israel who is behind all Arab anger and frustrations, and is the root cause of anti-American feelings around the world. But wait: the speech also included an important departure from neo-con logic. In it, Bush admitted to the American public, which is subjected to the most persistent anti-Muslim propaganda, that Islam is not incompatible with democracy. His neo- conservative entourage has repeatedly made it sound that Islam is synonymous with terrorism, stagnation and violence. It may be true that Arab countries and societies have a lot of catching up to do, both economically and culturally, but they are all fighting terrorism and violence and some are suffering directly from these two scourges against humanity. A few days later, Bush followed his speech with another in London, wherein which he levelled some mild criticism at Israel. But as the British writer Robert Fisk reminds us, Bush only said that Israel "had to 'freeze' settlements on Palestinian land -- not close them down -- and only dismantle what he artfully called 'unauthorised outposts'. 'Outposts' is Israel's word for the most recent land seizures in the West Bank, while the word 'unauthorised' suggests that there is some legality to the massive settlements already built on Palestinian land." Actually, the Israelis scoffed at the speech. They made it sound as though they knew Bush would have to say something in London for the sake of his embattled ally, Tony Blair. I was pleasantly surprised later when I read a small news item in The Financial Times that the US will penalise Israel for settlement activity and the separation wall. It quoted an Israeli official saying that Washington will make cuts in its $9 billion loan guarantees to Israel following continued Israeli investments in Jewish settlements and the construction of a separation barrier. The Israelis said the cuts would be "small and only symbolic". They knew it even before it was inserted into his speech. There are several reasons that most intellectuals in the Arab world did not receive Bush's speech with the enthusiasm or even the seriousness that Washington expected. For one, the president went out of his way to warn the European countries against dealing with Yasser Arafat. Whether the president likes him or not, Arafat is not only democratically elected, he is also a Nobel Peace winner, unlike Ariel Sharon who, but for the dubious impunity awarded to sitting heads of state, would have been prosecuted in Belgium as a war criminal. So, if Bush is asking for democracy, and the Arabs freely elect a leader, who, like Arafat, may not be "simpatico" in Bush's eyes, what is America going to do? Invade them? The other suspicion is that he gave the speech to stymie his detractors with a noble reason for the unnecessary and illegal invasion of Iraq. Okay -- we did not find weapons of mass destruction (WMD). We could not find any credible link, either, between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qa'eda, or between Iraq and 11 September (despite all the remarkable attempts of Secretary of Defence Douglas Feith to convince us otherwise). The stories about plutonium cake in Niger and the secret meetings between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officers in Prague have been debentured by the CIA. So how can the administration justify the war or the mounting number of casualties? First, it has to be the remnants of the Ba'athists: No, it is the infiltrators, the Jihadists, the Syrians and Iranians! But none of that sells well. So they had to devise a credible reason for this war. Ah, freedom! Democracy! Who can disagree with that? Who can argue with that? In fact, we shall make Iraq the beacon of freedom. Everyone should follow. This is the reason for the call for democracy in the Arab world. But what if President Bush really means it? What if we forget his track record and all the damage and suffering and horrendous casualties on all sides? What if he is trying to turn a new page, and help the Arab countries to modernise and democratise? Here it touches directly on the question of credibility. Zbigniew Brzezinski tells a wonderful story about this. He said (in an article in The Washington Post) that during the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy sent former Secretary of State Dean Acheson to President Charles DeGaulle to solicit his support during the Cuban missile crisis. At the end of the briefing, Acheson said to DeGaulle, "I would like to show you the evidence, the photographs that we have of Soviet missiles armed with nuclear weapons." DeGaulle simply said, "I do not wish to see the photographs. The word of the president of the United States is good enough for me." In this crisis, the whole world -- not only the Arabs, heard George Bush and all members of his administration saying, day after day, week after week, month after month, that Iraq was in possession of massive stores of WMD ready to be delivered in 45 minutes. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and even poor Colin Powell, sat at the UN with slides showing an empty truck, which he described as a lab to manufacture chemical and biological weapons. All this later proven to be a lie. The most delicious of these lies is owed to Donald Rumsfeld. "The message," he said, "is that there are known 'knowns' -- there are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns -- that is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown 'unknowns', things we do not know we do not know. And each year we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns." Come again? In fact, Harper's magazine published a serious of these lies in a story covering two full pages under the title, "The Revision Thing" -- no less a history of the Iraq war told entirely in lies. It contains verbatim lies from senior Bush administration officials and advisors. It can make anyone either laugh his head off, or weep for mercy from the onslaught of absurdities. The London Spectator reminds us, "if eliminating stocks of WMD and driving Saddam from power had been the sole American objective, the US would be leaving Iraq by now." On the contrary, they want to "establish a new international order that would entrench American world supremacy in perpetuity". The paper points to the real objective, which springs from the 2002 "US National Security Strategy" by which the Americans hope to reshape the international order. Anyone who wants to review American designs for the Middle East should go back to these documents and read again "neo-conservative" ambitions for Arab countries. The best description of why Bush redirected the war against terror to a war against Iraq and the Muslim Middle East is provided in Claes G Ryn's, America the Virtuous: Crisis of Democracy and the Quest for Empire. Here Ryn describes what he sees as a "neo- Jacobin" bent in the current administration, unrelenting in its will to power. Ryn charges that these abstract "moralists" seized the opportunity of 11 September, coordinating America's patriotic outpouring with the neo- conservative agenda of a "new American century". Having established a precedent in Afghanistan, and with the ideological justifications of imperialism firmly in place, the neo- cons shifted the operational theatre to Iraq. Now they are working to extend it further to Syria, Lebanon and Iran. Will Egypt be next, or Saudi Arabia? That is the plan. That is the blueprint. So when can we expect anything different from the Bush administration? Let me count: When they open up the space for public debate not only about Arab countries, but in America, too. To discuss the Middle East freely and honestly, without fear of Israel's friends, lobbying or thought police. When they invite back all the Arabists that have been weeded out of all official agencies -- the National Security Council, the CIA, the Department of State and Defence. Doing so would spare us, at least, the finer experience of having to witness the historical amnesia of inviting troops from Turkey and Mongolia to help the occupation forces in taming Iraqis. This proves without any doubt that those neo-conservatives do not have a clue about the history of Iraq or of Arab countries. When they stop pushing or expecting the newly elected Iraqi government to be "pro- Israel", or to start extending their oil pipeline to Haifa, as Mr Netanyahu is suggesting. When the US proves ready to stand by the reformers and not expect them to be quislings or agents, either for them or for Israel. When they can prove their fairness, and show the Arabs that they condemn aggression when it comes from Israel against defenceless Palestinians. When they stop their vetoes against the will of the whole world in siding with Israel. When President Bush stops considering all Palestinians as terrorists. Or, when he decides to send Condoleezza Rice to the West Bank and Gaza to see for herself the plight and utter oppression of the Palestinians. When President Bush suddenly realises that instead of allocating $87 billion for war it would be better to allocate the wealth of America in a Marshall Plan for Third World development. Or, when he suddenly says: what if I am wrong? Or, if he discovers that Arabs and Muslims do not really hate America and have always wanted to be friends.
