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COMMENTARY
Rice and the Middle
East dream
By Sami Moubayed
DAMASCUS - During her recent
swing through the Middle East, US Secretary of
State Condoleezza Rice lectured Arab leaders on
democracy, reform and peacemaking. According to
Jihad al-Khazen, a veteran journalist with the
London-based pan-Arabic 
daily al-Hayat, "she left the rulers
discontent, without pleasing the masses".
Rice appeared before 600 students at the
American University of Cairo (AUC) and boasted of
the democratic system the Americans had created in
Iraq, saying that the Iraqis were greatly
satisfied with their newfound status, which should
inspire the Arab masses. As her speech was
transmitted live on satellite television, the news
bar on every channel across the globe was running
a brief about Iraqis killed in a car explosion.
The speech at AUC was symbolic for a
variety of reasons. First, it was the first time
that a US secretary of state pushed so strongly
for reforms and criticized a host country such as
Egypt, which is a good friend of the US, for its
democratic record. As she spoke, members of the
Egyptian opposition marched through Cairo,
chanting against their president, US-ally Hosni
Mubarak, saying: "Give him a visa Condoleezza -
and take him with you!"
The opposition,
unimpressed by her remarks, could not ignore that
the only reason Mubarak has remained in office
since 1981 is that despite his authoritarian
measures he has been backed wholeheartedly by
every US administration since Ronald Reagan.
Second, her visit carried a startling confession,
as Rice said: "For 60 years, my country, the
United States, pursued stability at the expense of
democracy in the region. And we achieved neither.
Now we are taking a different course. We are
supporting the democratic aspirations of the
people."
Again, Arabs remember too clearly
that it was the Americans who initially supported
Saddam Hussein's rise to power in 1979, simply
because he challenged Iran. It was the Americans
who orchestrated the first coup d'etat in Syria in
1949, toppling the democratically elected
president Shukri al-Quwatli and replacing him with
General Husni al-Za'im, a stooge of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), because the latter
promised to respond to US needs in the Middle
East. These were mainly a crackdown on communism,
a ceasefire with Israel, and privileges to
Tapline, a US oil company. The fact that Quwatli
had been democratically elected by his people
meant nothing to the CIA, the White House or the
Pentagon in 1949.
Third, Rice's visit
showed sadly how distant she is from the reality
of affairs in the Middle East and the Third World,
which is boiling with anti-Americanism. One day
after her tour ended, on Saturday, the Iranian
people responded through the ballot box to Rice's
democratic promises. They voted hardliner Mahmud
Ahmadinejad into the presidential office - a
victory that has been interpreted as the beginning
of brinkmanship and an end to constructive
diplomacy in Iranian-US relations. The Iranians
were saying: "We don't want American solutions to
this part of the world." Many in the Arab world
are echoing this call, not necessarily because
they don't like the Americans, nor because they
don't want democracy, but because they no longer
believe or trust the Americans.
President
George W Bush once asked Rice, in early 2004, what
the single obstacle was to peace in the Middle
East. Without hesitation, she replied: "Yasser
Arafat." Well, Arafat died in November 2004 and
the Arabs waited to see what Rice and Bush could
offer the Middle East in the post-Arafat era. On
November 12, 2004, Bush shattered Arab hopes for a
new approach to the Middle East crisis when he
avoided answering a question during a press
conference with British Prime Minister Tony Blair,
on the freezing of settlements in the West Bank.
Instead, he put full blame on the
Palestinians, saying; "I believe that the
responsibility for peace is going to rest with the
Palestinian people's desire to build a democracy."
Bush's answer, and Rice's previous one regarding
Arafat, confirm that unfortunately neither of them
has fully grasped the core of the problem in the
Middle East. They still miss, so does the entire
White House, the real problem facing the Arab
street.
Arabs will only begin to have
faith in the US and the Bush White House when
peace is brought to the Palestinians, security is
maintained in Iraq, and American statesmen and
women show more interest in real Arab domestic
issues and democracy. To date, apart from promises
to the masses, the US has not pressured Arab
regimes for democracy. The Americans have also
failed to portray themselves as honest brokers in
the Arab-Israeli conflict, which is the
cornerstone of grievances to the Arab majority.
The real problem that the Americans fail to
understand is not Arafat, nor terrorism, nor Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi, but land and freedom for the
Palestinians. Once that is secured, a majority of
Arabs will start to trust America.
The
road to peace in the Middle East runs through
Jerusalem, not Baghdad. Mixed feelings exist in
the Arab world toward Iraq. Some are in favor of
the post-Saddam order and American schemes, while
others are overwhelmingly opposed. On the issue of
Palestine, there is more of a consensus among the
200 million Arabs. Since September 2000, more than
5,000 homes have been destroyed in the Palestinian
territories, while about 35,000 people have been
left homeless in Gaza alone. Since his election in
March 2001, Israeli premier Ariel Sharon
personally saw to it that settlements in Gaza
increased by 51%. The Occupied Territories
currently suffer from 30-40% unemployment, and in
Gaza alone it is over 50%. When the intifada broke
out in 2000, the poverty rate was 21%, and by
December 2002 it had increased to 60%.
In
Gaza, poverty today is estimated at 80%. Due to
terrible conditions, food consumption in the
Occupied Territories has dropped by 25%, and half
of the population currently lives off United
Nations aid. Malnutrition among infants is 22%,
the highest in the region, matched only in the
Sahara Desert.
The Israeli Defense Army
has generated losses in Palestinian infrastructure
estimated at US$1.7 billion in 2002 alone. And
that number is likely to increase, given the US
alliance with Israel and its generous donation of
arms and money. When former secretary of state
Collin Powell announced his plan for "democracy in
the Middle East" in late 2003, he promised $29
million to promote a democratic culture to the
Arabs. Whereas at the start of 2004, the White
House gave Israel $300 million in donations to
"help combat terrorism".
This is the real
problem Rice failed to address at AUC. She failed
to trigger enough confidence in US policies
vis-a-vis the Middle East. The fact that she
criticized US allies such as Saudi Arabia and
Egypt meant nothing to the Arab street. Nobody
believed her, and that is why when she spoke about
democracy, nobody in the audience clapped. They
clapped on another occasion, however, when a
member of the audience asked her why the US did
not condemn Israeli attacks on the Palestinians,
maltreatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in
Iraq, or at Guantanamo Bay.
In an
interview with the Israeli daily Yediot Aharanot,
Rice once said: "I first visited Israel in 2000. I
felt I was returning home, despite the fact that
this was a place I have never visited. I have a
deep affinity with Israel. I have always admired
the history of the state of Israel and the
hardness and determination of the people that
founded it."
No remark could have a worse
effect on the inhabitants of the Middle East. Rice
wrote her doctoral dissertation on the Cold War
era and the USSR, and although she has a
prestigious background in academia, she sadly has
not read her Middle East history correctly. To the
Arab street she is trying to appeal to today, the
"founders" that she admires in Israel are nothing
but invaders who realized early on that in order
to survive they must uproot, kill and terrorize
the Palestinians.
Joseph Weitz, head of
the Jewish Agency's colonial department, said in
1940, "We shall not achieve our goal if the Arabs
are in this small country. There is no other way
[other] than to transfer the Arabs from here to
neighboring countries - all of them! Not one
village, not one tribe should be left." In 1948,
there were 475 villages in Palestine, 385 of which
were bulldozed to the ground by Israel. In 1938,
the "founder" Ben Gurion told the World Council of
Poale Zion, "The boundaries of Zionist aspirations
include southern Lebanon, southern Syria, today's
trans-Jordan, all of the West Bank and Sinai." Ten
years later, as premier of Israel, he said, "Our
aim is to smash Lebanon, trans-Jordan and Syria.
We shall establish a Christian state [in Lebanon],
and then we will smash the Arab Legion, eliminate
trans-Jordan, then Syria will fall to us. We then
bomb and move on and take Port Said, Alexandria
and Sinai." (Taken from Michael Bar Zohar's Ben
Gurion: A Biography). These words have had
more of an impact on Arabs, even those who are
moderate and Westernized, than the democratic
promises of Rice.
As an African-American
who grew up inspired by the American revolution
against colonialism, and as someone who has read,
if not memorized the Bill of Rights of the US
constitution, how can Rice admire a people
uprooting, terrorizing and "smashing" another
people? This is a question asked all over the
Middle East, shedding a lot of doubt on Rice's
credibility when talking about democracy at AUC.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are the
trinity that holds the US together and defines its
democracy, yet it has not been applied by the US
when dealing with the Middle East.
Rice
grew up in Alabama, one of the states to witness
the greatest persecution against blacks, and was
certainly influenced by the civil rights movement
of the 1960s. In fact, she was born in 1954, the
year education was desegregated in America.
History-makers in Alabama such as Rosa Parks or
Martin Luther King, certainly had a profound
effect on her life. Rosa Parks laid the
cornerstone for national myth in the US by
symbolic defiance and refusal to give her bus seat
to a white man on that great and fateful day in US
history; December 1, 1955. Is her story any
different from that of the thousands of
Palestinians who have become symbols of defiance
in Arab society? This has nothing to do with the
armed resistance in Palestine. Arab society is
divided on how to deal with militants such as
Hamas or Islamic Jihad. While many support them,
others are opposed to armed resistance.
To
the Arab street, the symbols of resistance are the
Palestinian women kept waiting at checkpoints for
hours, the stone-throwing children and the aging
men being shoved around by young Israeli soldiers.
After all, Parks was arrested and they were
arrested. Isn't defiance the natural reflex to
humiliation? Or, Arabs are asking, was Rosa Parks
a terrorist? Arab intellectuals and activists have
read the famed speech by Reverend Martin Luther
King, and like him, have often said that he had a
dream of emancipation, and they had a dream of
emancipation, from Israeli occupation and
oppression of Arab regimes.
The Arabs had
a dream that their children would one day live in
a nation where they would not be judged by their
leaders as inferior to the powerful elite; "not by
the color of their skin but by the content of
their character". Like King, they had a dream that
"with this faith we will be able to work together,
to pray together, to struggle together, to go to
jail together, and to stand up for freedom
together, knowing that we will be free one day".
The US, in Rice's own confession, has not
responded to Arab dreams and calls for democracy -
for the past 60 years, US administrations have
favored "stability over democracy".
Rice
was nine years old on September 15, 1963, when her
schoolmate and friend, Denise McNair, was killed
in the infamous bombing of the black 16th Street
Baptist Church in Alabama - by a white man from
the Ku Klux Klan. Twenty-two people were badly
injured and four young girls were killed. Rice
surely knew most of them well. How ugly was it to
lose a beloved friend, daughter or son, especially
if they were little children?
Since
September 2000, Arabs have suffered the deaths of
545 children in Palestine at the hands of the
Israeli army, 266 of whom were below the age of
14. Most of them were the same age as Denise
McNair. The remaining 279 were aged 15-18.
The Arabs reacted to Rice's appointment as
secretary of state with mixed emotions. They
feared her, knowing that she was something of a
hardliner, yet respected many things in her as
well. A report published about her in a leading
Arabic newspaper shortly after her appointment
said that she had been influenced during her youth
by great men such as Mozart and Beethoven, and
that she wanted to become a concert pianist. A
genius by all accounts, she entered university at
the age of 15, and obtained her master of arts
degree at the age of 20. The greatest influence in
her life was Joseph Korbel, a professor of
international relations at the University of
Denver.
She once described him by saying,
"He was one of the most central figures in my
life." A Czech, Korbel fled his country when it
was invaded and occupied by Nazis in 1939. The
Nazi occupation influenced Korbel's life and
mentality tremendously. Korbel was a man who
championed freedom and loved the ideals of
American democracy. (He was given asylum in the US
and then citizenship in 1957.)
He welcomed
women into the work force, encouraged them to
obtain a good education and to enter public life
as equal to men. Many observers today are drawing
a resemblance between Rice and Korbel's daughter,
ex-secretary of state Madeline K Albright. Yet
apart from the fact that both are women, and both
rose to senior posts in the US government, the
similarity ends there.
Albright had an
independent agenda, especially for the Middle
East, and so should Rice. At this stage, the State
Department needs to generate new ideas for this
part of the world, to regain the confidence of the
Arabs and live up to the American presence (and
duty) in the Middle East. Albright, like her boss
Bill Clinton, was a believer in Palestinian rights
to statehood, showed little bias toward Israel,
and worked hard to achieve that, especially during
the final months of the Clinton presidency.
She believed in diplomatic means to solve
international crises, and voiced that very clearly
during the Iraq war in 2003, when she was out of
office. Meanwhile Rice was one of the strongest
advocates of militarism. Through her numerous
visits to the region, Albright came to understand
how the Middle East operated, and how Arabs
thought. The bottom line: they wanted a stable
Middle East where justice is done for the
Palestinians and the Iraqis. They also wanted
democracy. Rice promised to achieve that, but
Arabs have a long history of not believing what
Americans promise, since all the US has done is
support Arab regimes against their own people,
because they guaranteed stability for the Middle
East. Now Rice says that this has changed.
Sami Moubayed is a Syrian
political analyst.
(Copyright 2005
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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