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First the stick, now the US offers
carrots
By Jeffrey Donovan
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration, eager for
good news from the Middle East, has announced a major
new effort to persuade authoritarian Arab governments to
adopt political and economic reforms. The plan, the
"Greater Middle East initiative," was made public on
Tuesday in a report in The Washington Post. It will be
unveiled officially in June.
The new initiative,
still being crafted, will call for Arab and South Asian
governments to adopt major political reforms, be held
accountable on human rights and introduce economic
reforms, the newspaper said, citing US and European
officials. As incentives for the targeted countries to
cooperate, Western nations will offer to expand
political engagement, increase aid, facilitate
membership in the World Trade Organization and foster
security arrangements, the newspaper report said.
State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said
that the plan was loosely based on the "Helsinki Pact"
signed in 1975 by 35 nations. The signatories included
the United States, the Soviet Union and most European
nations. Human rights became a key part of the Helsinki
accords, which gave Washington leverage to speak up for
dissident groups in communist Europe and to lobby for
greater freedoms.
Boucher told a briefing that
the Middle East appears to be better prepared for
democratic progress now than the Soviet bloc was back
then. "There are a number of things - elections,
judicial reforms, democratic reforms, civil society
growing up - a number of things that are actually going
on in the region," he said. "The goal is to see how we
can support those. [With] Helsinki, sadly, other than
perhaps [the] Solidarity [trade union movement in
Poland], the effort in the region was not there. Now we
do have an effort in this region to reform and move
forward. And we want to be able to support that."
Unlike Helsinki, however, the US
administration's initiative seeks to avoid setting up
committees and structures to strictly monitor progress
and issue report cards, US officials said. It also seeks
to avoid "appearing to dictate" to the Islamic world,
the paper said.
US officials say that they have
begun talks with European allies to get their support
for the plan, to be announced this June at summits of
the Group of Eight nations, the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) and the European Union. "It's a
sweeping change in the way we approach the Middle East,"
a senior State Department official told the newspaper.
"We hope to roll out some of the principles for reform
in talks with the Europeans over the next few weeks,
with specific ideas of how to support them."
Officials suggest that incentives could include
free-trade deals, such as the ones already enjoyed by
Jordan and Bahrain. They also say security cooperation,
along the lines of NATO's Partnership for Peace, could
be extended to Arab nations.
But critics are
quick to take issue with key parts of the plan. Steven A
Cook is an expert in Arab political reform with the New
York-based Council on Foreign Relations. Cook told
RFE/RL that he disagrees with Boucher's assessment that
the Middle East is better prepared for reform than was
communist Eastern Europe.
"I would be very
suspicious of reforms coming at the behest [of] Arab
authoritarians. I don't see that they have any incentive
to go about doing this. And what incentive they do have
is to please the United States, and that's easily done
by playing at the game of reform, establishing human
rights boards that practically have little or no power,"
Cook said.
As an example, Cook says that US ally
Egypt recently announced it is undergoing judicial
reforms. And yet, Cook says, at the same time, Egypt has
just passed an emergency law that basically puts the
country under martial law for the next three years.
Another critic is Ted Galen Carpenter of the
Cato Institute. Carpenter says that in contrast to the
Middle East, many parts of communist Europe - such as
Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary - had democratic
traditions before being sucked into the Soviet bloc.
Therefore, it was reasonable to assume that such
traditions could be revived during the Cold War.
"The differences are absolutely profound," he
said. "Most of the Central and East European countries
had at least some Western democratic traditions. The
countries of the Middle East have almost none. And even
within the former Soviet empire we have seen highly
uneven progress toward democracy."
The Bush
administration had predicted that the war in Iraq would
set off a wave of democratic reform across the region,
and made this a key reason for overthrowing Saddam
Hussein. But Cook says that wave has not materialized,
nor has the Iraq war given an impetus to resolving the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, as some war supporters had
hoped.
Given the failure to find weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq - one of the main reasons for the
war - Cook says that the new plan may be tied to the
Bush administration's efforts to seek further
justification for its engagement in Iraq, especially in
this presidential election year. "As the weapons of mass
destruction issue has not panned out the way the
administration would have liked [it] to pan out, the
justification of promoting democracy in the Middle East,
and Iraq as a pivot for promoting democracy in the
Middle East, has come to the fore as an issue," he said.
"And I certainly think this proposal is part of that,
without a doubt."
President George W Bush first
hinted at a major plan to bring democracy to the Arab
world in a speech at the National Endowment for
Democracy last November when he announced an initiative
to reward reform with trade.
Vice President Dick
Cheney picked up on the theme last month at the World
Economic Forum in Switzerland. "Our forward strategy for
freedom commits us to support those who work and
sacrifice for reform across the greater Middle East," he
said.
Copyright (c) 2004, RFE/RL Inc.
Reprinted with the permission of Radio
Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut
Ave NW, Washington DC 20036
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