WASHINGTON - After posing as the champion
of democratic reform and the long-oppressed
Shi'ite minority in the Arab world, the
administration of President George W Bush is
reverting to Washington's traditional policy of
strong support for the region's Sunni-dominated,
pro-US authoritarian governments.
The
shift has evolved over much of the past year, as
elections in Lebanon, Iraq, the Palestinian
territories, Egypt and elsewhere demonstrated the
unexpectedly broad - and unwelcome - popularity of
anti-Zionist and anti-US Islamist parties, both
Sunni and Shi'ite.
Indeed, after Hamas won
January's Palestinian elections, Washington led an
aid boycott of the Palestinian Authority in an
apparent effort coordinated
with the government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert to bring about its collapse.
At the
same time, US pressure on its Arab allies to enact
democratic reforms - hailed by Bush himself as a
significant break with some 60 years of
traditional US diplomacy in the region - also
eased markedly.
But the administration's
retreat may accelerate as a result of the ongoing
conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon, where Israel has
launched punishing military campaigns against,
respectively, Sunni Hamas and Shi'ite Hezbollah -
both groups with a strong social base and
grassroots support.
Top administration
officials have repeatedly praised unprecedented
criticism by Sunni-led Saudi Arabia, Jordan and
Egypt of Hezbollah, in particular its
"adventurism", as evidence of a major change in
Arab attitudes toward Israel, in particular. A
Saudi spokesman, for example, charged Hezbollah
with "exposing Arab nations ... to grave danger
without these nations having a say in the matter".
"This marks a different era," stressed
White House spokesman Tony Snow on Tuesday,
"because it does mean that Arab nations and Muslim
nations have stood up and said Hezbollah is to
blame and its sponsors [Syria and Iran] are to
blame."
While that assessment may be true
of the autocratic leaders who have denounced
Hezbollah, it is much less clear in the case of
their populations, supposedly the chief
beneficiaries of Washington's efforts to
democratize the region, according to experts in
Washington and in the Middle East who say that, if
anything, their denunciations may have widened the
gap between the rulers and the ruled.
"I
don't think the Saudi government's statement is in
tune with how most Saudis feel about the Lebanese
situation," Bassem Alim, an activist lawyer in
Jeddah, told the Christian Science Monitor. "The
way they said it was damaging to their reputation
in the Islamic world."
Indeed, spontaneous
demonstrations in support of Hezbollah, as well as
Hamas, have taken place in many Arab capitals
where the two groups are widely seen as the
region's only Davids willing to stand up to the
Goliath of Israel's awesome, US-backed military
power.
"I worry about the silent
recruitments to al-Qaeda and its ilk being made
nightly on Muslim television screens as broad Arab
and Muslim publics take all this in," said Graham
Fuller, a former top Middle East analyst at the
Central Intelligence Agency and RAND Corporation.
"The targets increasingly will be these regimes
now perceived as craven and even apologists,
seemingly for the Israeli position."
The
Saudi, Jordanian and Egyptian autocrats'
willingness to criticize Hezbollah - as well as
the Bush administration's eagerness to extol them
- may also reflect a somewhat different, although
related, strategic calculation, coming as it does
amid growing concerns by the same three
governments regarding the possible emergence of an
Iranian-led "Shi'ite crescent" across the Middle
East that threatens the Sunnis' historical
dominance.
Indeed, the same three
governments had strongly opposed Washington's 2003
invasion of Iraq in major part because of concerns
that it would empower that country's Shi'ite
majority at the expense of its traditional Sunni
leaders. That the neo-conservatives who led the
drive to war in Washington explicitly desired such
a result in the mistaken belief that it would
promote "regime change" in Iran, in addition to
setting back Arab nationalism, naturally fanned
those fears.
Three years later, it now
appears that the Sunni leaders' apprehensions were
fully justified and that, contrary to the
neo-conservative calculation, Iran and its allies,
which include Syria, a major part of the Iraqi
government, as well as Hezbollah and increasingly
Hamas, have been emboldened.
"The Sunni
states do not seem to be as concerned about Iran's
nuclear program as about its new confidence, its
determination to speak for Shi'ite populations
everywhere, and its insistence that Iran be
consulted on major policy issues - or, if not, it
is prepared to make its own policies that others
can ignore only at their peril," said Gary Sick, a
Middle East expert at Columbia University.
"The Hezbollah attack across the Israeli
line is seen as a particularly disturbing case in
point," he noted, adding that what precise role,
if any, Iran played is unimportant. "It is being
carried out by a Shi'ite non-state actor who is
outside the ambit of the traditional Sunni
counsels of power, and its effects extend to the
entire region, like it or not."
In that
respect, the Sunni leaders' denunciations of
Hezbollah, particularly that by Saudi Arabia,
represent "an entirely new factor" in regional
politics by challenging "Arab conventional wisdom
that any opposition to Israel had to be
supported", according to Sick, who served as US
president Jimmy Carter's top Iran adviser.
"The rules of the game that they see
changing are less concerned with Israeli concepts
of strategic deterrence and much more concerned
with their own Shi'ite populations and the
emergence of a Shi'ite power axis extending from
Tehran into the heart of previously Sunni
Baghdad," Sick said.
In this context,
efforts by the US ambassador in Baghdad, Zalmay
Khalilzad, to impose a "government of national
unity", roll back the post-invasion
de-Ba'athification process, negotiate with Sunni
insurgents, and press the Shi'ite-led government
into major concessions sought by Sunni leaders
should be seen not only as a way to stabilize Iraq
and begin withdrawing US troops, but also as a way
of restoring the sectarian balance and reassuring
the region's Sunni leaders that Iranian/Shi'ite
threat will be contained.
While such moves
may provide some relief to the rulers, however, it
is not clear that their subjects see the threat
through the same sectarian lens - particularly at
a time when Israel is bombing both Sunni and
Shi'ite targets - making US pressure to pursue
democratic reforms increasingly problematic for
its geostrategic interests.
Indeed, in
what the Bush administration has hailed as the
Arab world's freest and most democratic state,
Iraq, Shi'ite and Sunni lawmakers voted
unanimously on Sunday to approve a strong
resolution condemning Israel's attack on Lebanon
without any mention of Hezbollah.
Sick
noted that the Saudi denunciation probably
challenged its public opinion, "which was almost
certainly more sympathetic to Hezbollah,
especially with around-the-clock TV pictures of
Lebanese children being slaughtered by Israeli
missiles".
"Sectarian fear may be stronger
at the regime level than at the popular level,"
said Fuller. "Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are
equally petrified at the emergence of now
'elected' Islamist forces who are more
nationalist/Islamist and popular than any of these
regimes.
"It is deeply worrying and
delegitimizing for them when Iran, Hamas and
Hezbollah all take a more 'pro-Arab',
pro-Palestinian position than these regimes dare
do," he said.
