Concocting a 'Greater Middle East'
brew By Safa Haeri
PARIS -
After the trauma and psychodrama between the "old
Europe" led by the "French fogies", and the "new Rome"
of the globe parading its English "poodle" around over
the invasion of Iraq, the players are now engaged in
another ambitious game: defining a "Greater Middle East"
(GME). They have already begun putting their drawings
and plans on the table, and have dispatched
representatives to the region to sell them, all in an
effort to rally supporters.
Architects at the
State Department, National Security and Department of
Defense in Washington on one hand, and in Le Quai
d'Orsay and Auswartigen Amt in Berlin (respectively
France and Germany's foreign affairs ministries) on the
other, are busy writing projects for the GME of their
liking to be debated at coming summits of the European
Union in late March and at the G-8, to be held latter in
June.
"The expression spread like a wild fire,
with leaders, diplomats and experts in international
relations all talking about the Greater Middle East,"
observed the influential French daily Le Monde under a
six column banner announcing "The United States Launches
Its Project of 'Greater Middle East".
A
high-level European Union delegation has already headed
to Washington this week in which the central topic of
discussion was expected to be the US's controversial
plan for the modernization of the GME. But EU officials
in Brussels appeared skeptical, suggesting that the US
plan may clash with a number of key EU projects and
concerns. The EU's foreign policy chief, Javier Solana,
Irish Foreign Minister Brian Cowen and the EU's external
affairs commissioner, Chris Patten, are among those that
have travelled to Washington. EU officials, briefing
reporters ahead of the trip, indicated that the bloc's
full backing for the US initiative is unlikely at this
stage.
The American vision of the GME includes
all Muslim nations, from countries of North Africa
bordering the Mediterranean Sea to Pakistan, including
Turkey and Israel. It is expected to be presented to
Washington's partners at the next G-8 Summit due on June
8 in Sea Island, Georgia.
More or less, the
American plan for the GME aims at filling the gaps that
had been highlighted in the Arab Human Development
Report (AHDR) compiled for the United Nations concerning
the situation of freedom, knowledge, democracy, economy
and women emancipation in Arab nations. It calls for
economic development based on the free market, mass
education and bold political, social and cultural
reforms, including more freedom, equality and
opportunities for women. According to the reports,
revenues in all Arab countries, some of them among the
richest in the world, are less than that of Spain, where
the number of the books published in one day is superior
to all those printed in the Arab world in an entire
year.
"In Arab countries, with a combined
population of 284 million, a 'best seller' may have a
print run of just 5,000 copies, due to censorship and
other constraints on independent publishers.
Translations of foreign works into Arabic lag far behind
figures in the rest of the world: five times more books
are translated yearly into Greek, a language spoken by
just 11 million people, than into Arabic. Just 53
newspapers per 1,000 citizens are published daily in the
region, compared to 285 papers per 1,000 people in the
developed nations, and there are only 18 computers per
1,000 people in the Arab world, as compared to the
global average of 78 per 1,000," the AHDR 2003 report
stated.
According to the American GME plan,
"Until a population deprived of economic and politic
rights increases, we would see an increase in extremism,
terrorism, international criminality and illegal
immigration," the text says, citing the "liberation of
Afghanistan and Iraq" as "historical occasions".
In January, *US Vice President Dick Cheney
outlined the American vision of fighting international
terrorism in a speech at the World Economic Forum of
Davos, saying: "Encouraging the spread of freedom and
democracy is the right thing to do - and it is also very
much in our collective self-interest. Helping the people
of the Greater Middle East overcome the freedom deficit
is, ultimately, the key to winning the broader war on
terror."
Germany, one of the first initiators of
the idea, immediately welcomed the American project, as
at the last "Atlantic" meeting held on February 7 in
Munich. Joschka Fischer, Germany's Grunen (Green)
foreign affairs minister had already developed a blue
print of a GME based on the ongoing "Barcelona
Initiative" inked in 1995 between the European Union and
southern and eastern Mediterranean countries.
"Together with out friends and allies in Europe
and in the Great[er] Middle East, we would closely
coordinate our efforts to respond to calls for reforms
in the region and develop specific proposals that would
be submitted to the G-8 summit and to the Euro-American
summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO),
both scheduled for June," said a joint statement
published on February 27 after the meeting at the White
House between Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and President
George W Bush, a meeting that observers said was set up
for "smoking the pipe of peace", referring to more than
a year of unprecedented tensions in Berlin-Washington
relations over the American military intervention in
Iraq, with Germany standing firmly against the
operations - alongside France and Russia.
The
GME plan offered by Fischer is in line with his peers,
mostly Hans-Dietrich Genscher's old vision for giving
Germany's "dwarf" diplomacy the same weight as its
economic power, starting from the Middle East, where he
chose Iran, the region's most dynamic nation and not
officially aligned to any existing world pacts and
alliances, as a "jumping springboard".
The
French broadly agreed with Fischer, considered one of
Europe's most popular politicians, but opposed the
addition of NATO to other players of the GME game and
warned him that one should not put all of the Muslim
nations in one basket, and any project aimed at defining
a new order for the GME must be either separate from the
"problematic" conflict between Israel and Palestine or
based on solving this "essential" issue before any thing
"serious" could be put on the table regarding the
region.
"What Egypt has in common with, let's
say Afghanistan, is just religion, and still, their
Islam is not much the same. On the other hand, until
Israel blocks the road map, it is absolutely futile
talking about such grandiose projects. And for the time
being, the United States is not ready [to call] Israel
to order," pointed out a French diplomat speaking to the
Asia Times Online on condition of anonymity.
Writing in the English-language al-Ahram weekly,
Mohammad Sid-Ahmad, one of Egypt's most influential
commentators, wonders whether or not widening the Middle
East facilitates the control of its numerous conflicts.
"The question is, however, whether there is such a thing
as a Greater Middle East extending beyond the
traditional geographical boundaries of the region. And,
if so, what are the common features shared by the
different countries now identified as parts of a body
that would extend from Pakistan in the east to Morocco
in the west? Take, for example, the call for the
creation of an independent Arab state in Palestine. Does
it follow that there should be a similar call for an
independent Kurdish state or for an independent state in
Kashmir? If all these countries are parts of one entity,
should there not exist similar solutions for similar
problems?" he wrote in the weekly's latest issue.
Calling the shots, Dominique de Villepin, the
French foreign affairs minister, concocted his own brew
for the GME in a lengthy interview with the centrist
newspaper Le Figaro in which, careful of not provoking -
again - the Americans who have not yet forgiven him for
challenging them on the Iraq issue, succeeding in
aligning Berlin to his side and waving France's veto at
the United Nations Security Council, he took the middle
road, observing however that the West must respond and
fulfill the real needs of the people "and not impose any
ready-made solutions on them".
"One has also to
avoid a uniform approach, as one can not treat the
Maghreb with the same pattern as the Middle East or the
Persian Gulf states, nor can one concentrate everything
on the security issue. To be successful, our approach
must be global, taking into consideration all the
political, economic, social, cultural, educational
aspects," he said.
Both in an effort to overtake
the Americans and to persuade the Germans about the
"difficulties" the American project presents, mostly
because it would certainly be opposed by all leading
nations of the region - including Iran, Egypt, Syria and
Saudi Arabia - the French foreign affairs minister, whom
a British newspaper said "if there is a thing as a
diplomatic pin up, then it is Dominique de Villepin",
proposes that his GME to be presented at the next
European Union summit in March.
"We want to
engage quickly a large debate over the Middle East. With
our European partners first, then the concerned nations
in the region with the Arab League as their emanation
and our other partners in the framework of the G-8," he
pointed out, adding "the important thing is that the
Europeans and the Americans works together not only in
good intelligence, but also in close cooperation with
the regional countries."
Contrary to the
American plan, which is viewed as confusing, vague and
unrealistic given the huge area it places into its GME,
the French idea is less ambitious and more precise, as
it is limited to "good governance, advancement of
democracy, human rights, economic, social and cultural
development".
In contrast to Fischer, de
Villepin is adamant that allowing NATO into the plans
for the GME is not a good idea. "The arrival of NATO as
an actor in the Middle East would it be a factor or
stability or, to the contrary, of complication?" de
Villepin observed emphatically, cautioning that one must
be "very prudent in the face of something that could be
resented by some of the region's nations as an
aggression. Nothing would be worse than to activate a
sentiment of confrontation between the Arab world and
our countries, between Islam and the West".
With
the United States badly lost in the Iraqi quagmire, the
human and financial costs of the war, and doubts about
its true motives fueling domestic criticism of the Bush
administration, a good number of American analysts and
commentators - with the exception of the "neo-con"
hardcore - have been persuaded that Dominique de
Villepin had a point when, at the height of the Iraqi
crisis, he stressed that "war is always the solution of
failure. Even America's unprecedented might has its
limits."
Pierre Hassner, a respected French
political analyst and philosopher, commented: "France's
position during the Iraqi conflict had this great
advantage that it showed the Arab and Muslim worlds that
not all the West is against them ... however, it created
a sad and eventually lasting rift between the EU and the
United States on the one hand and among the Europeans on
the other."
Paul Rogers, writing for Open
Democracy Online on February 2, questions the motives of
the US, saying: "By way of compensation, visionary talk
of a Greater Middle East for a few months during
election year carries the hope of convincing the US
electorate, and possibly people across the region, that
such an initiative is genuine. It is possible that it
will have some effect in the United States, but
prospects of an impact in the Middle East itself are
remote."
But Dr Shahin Fatemi, an Iranian
professor of Economics at the American University of
Paris, says the American plan for the Greater Middle
East is not "specific" enough to have a purely electoral
purpose. "The Americans have reached the conclusion that
they do not need to align themselves with dictatorial
regimes, their interest instead lies with promoting
democracy, freedom, human rights and economic
development. Such a program, even if [Democrat front
runner John] Kerry is elected, would go on," he told the
Asia Times Online.
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