'The US is the kiss of death' in
the Arab world By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON - After almost four weeks of
fighting between Lebanon's Hezbollah militia and
Israel, the US administration's ambitions to
transform the Arab Middle East into a pro-Western,
more democratic region are fading fast.
Not only is Washington's thus far staunch
support for Israel losing Arab "hearts and minds"
at an astonishing pace, but the "moderate"
governments and non-governmental forces the
administration had hoped would act as catalysts
for reform are increasingly isolated across the
region, according to Middle East specialists.
"I have never seen the United States being
so demonized or savaged by Arab commentators, by
Arab politicians," Hisham Melham, veteran
Washington correspondent for Lebanon's An-Nahar
newspaper, told a conference this week at the
Brookings
Institution, an influential
think-tank.
"People are clinging to
Hezbollah, clinging to Hamas, because they see
them as the remaining voices or forces in the Arab
world that are resisting what they see as an
ongoing hegemonic American-Israeli plan to control
the region," he said.
Shibley Telhami, an
expert on Arab public opinion at the University of
Maryland, observed at the same meeting, "Right
now, the United States is the kiss of death.
"If you really are trying to empower the
ruling elites and nudge them to reform and be more
representative, you have to deliver policies that
are going to empower," he said. "What we see in
Lebanon is a policy that is not empowering them.
It is widening the gap [between the moderate
elites and the people], and people are moving
toward the militants."
That point was
echoed by none other than King Abdullah of Jordan,
who, in the early days of the current round of
fighting, had joined the Egyptian and Saudi
governments in denouncing Hezbollah for
"adventurism" in attacking across the Lebanese
border, thus provoking Israel's devastating
military campaign.
"A fact America and
Israel must understand is that as long as there is
aggression and occupation, there will be
resistance and popular support for the
resistance," Abdullah, arguably Washington's
closest Arab ally, said on Thursday. "People
cannot sleep and wake up to pictures of the dead
and images of destruction in Lebanon and Gaza and
... say 'we want moderation'. Moderation needs
deeds.
"Unfortunately, Israeli policy ...
has contributed to the rise in the wave of
extremism in the Arab world, and this war has come
to weaken the voices of moderation," he went on,
warning that even if Israel destroyed Hezbollah in
Lebanon - an increasingly unlikely prospect - "a
new Hezbollah would emerge, maybe in Jordan, Syria
or Egypt" unless a comprehensive peace settlement
were reached.
Even before the outbreak of
this latest war between Israel and Hezbollah,
Washington's hopes of regional transformation
appeared to be dimming fast.
Besides
Lebanon, whose "Cedar Revolution" last year was
repeatedly cited by the administration US
President George W Bush as vindication of its
domino theory of democratic change, the two other
Arab polities in which it has invested most of its
hopes for transformation - Iraq and the
Palestinian Authority (PA) - were already in deep
trouble.
In the PA, not only had Hamas,
the Islamist party on the State Department's
terrorism list, won last January's parliamentary
elections, but a subsequent US-led aid and
diplomatic embargo against its government only
strengthened its popularity at home, partly at the
expense of Washington's preferred interlocutor,
the Fatah Party's Mahmoud Abbas, president of the
PA.
Moreover, Israel's US-backed military
campaign against Hamas, now in its sixth week,
does not appear to have reduced its hold on public
opinion.
In Iraq, where Washington is
currently spending nearly US$7 billion a month, a
series of US-organized elections appears only to
have hastened the country's descent into a brutal
sectarian civil war, a scenario conceded by two of
Washington's top generals on Thursday as having
become increasingly possible.
"Sectarian
violence probably is as bad as I've seen it, in
Baghdad in particular," General John Abizaid, the
head of Central Command, told a Senate hearing in
Washington. "If not stopped, it is possible that
Iraq could move toward civil war." His remarks
were echoed by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, General Peter Pace.
Meanwhile,
another leaked memo, this time from Britain's
outgoing ambassador to Iraq, warned Prime Minister
Tony Blair that "the prospect of a low-intensity
civil war and a de facto division of Iraq is
probably more likely at this stage than a
successful and substantial transition to a stable
democracy".
Now, Israel's onslaught
against Hezbollah, which has included the
destruction of key infrastructure throughout the
country, as well as Shi'ite strongholds in
southern Lebanon and south Beirut, has quite
possibly dealt a lethal blow to the government of
the moderate, pro-Western Prime Minister Fouad
Siniora, even as it has boosted the popularity of
Hezbollah - contrary to the initial expectations
in both Washington and Jerusalem.
Even
Hezbollah's fiercest Lebanese foe, Druze leader
Walid Jumblatt, who during the Cedar Revolution
praised Bush's transformation strategy as "the
start of a new Arab world" comparable to the fall
of the Berlin Wall, told the Financial Times this
week that he was forced to support the Shi'ite
militia against "brutal Israeli aggression" that
would result in the weakening of the central
government and the strengthening of Hezbollah and,
through it, Syria and Iran.
"All American
policy in the Middle East is at stake because
their failure in Palestine, then failure in Iraq
and now this failure in Lebanon will lead to a new
Arab world where the so-called radical Arabs will
profit," he said, adding that "this is ... not the
new Middle East of Ms [Secretary of State
Condoleezza] Rice".
Moreover, the
situation in Lebanon - particularly the
devastation wrought by Israel's military campaign
against Hezbollah and Washington's support for it
- increasingly threatens the US position in Iraq
by further alienating its majority Shi'ite
population and its leadership, many of whom have
close ties to their Lebanese co-religionists.
While faction leader Muqtada al-Sadr's
Mehdi Army, which battled US forces in 2004, has
been holding big anti-American demonstrations in
Baghdad since the Israeli offensive began in
mid-July, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, the
single strongest and most influential voice for
moderation in Iraq's Shi'ite community, warned
last Sunday after a particularly deadly Israeli
air strike in which dozens of civilians were
killed in Qana that "dire consequences will befall
the region ... if an immediate ceasefire in this
Israeli aggression is not imposed".
According to Juan Cole, a Middle East
expert at the University of Michigan and president
of the US Middle East Studies Association,
Sisanti's warning was aimed directly at the United
States. "Sistani could call massive anti-US and
anti-Israel demonstrations," noted Cole.
"Given Iraq's profound political
instability, this development could be extremely
dangerous," he wrote on his weblog,
www.juancole.com. "The US is already not winning
against a Sunni Arab insurgency ... If 16 million
Shi'ites turned on the US because of its
wholehearted support for Israel's actions in
Lebanon, the US military mission in Iraq could
quickly become completely and urgently untenable."
Meanwhile, Washington's most loyal
Sunni-led allies, as noted by King Abdullah, also
feel under growing threat by popular support for
Hezbollah and the radicalization among their
subjects provoked by the current Israeli campaign.
"Arab leaders are seen by the public as
American puppets who have no standing of their
own," said Hassan Barari, a senior researcher at
Jordan's Center for Strategic Studies, writing for
Bitterlemons-international.org.
"The
Americans and Israelis are once again giving
victory to extremists, thus critically
emasculating moderate forces and their allies," he
wrote, noting that Hezbollah "has managed to
expose the weakness and docility of Arab leaders".
At the same time, however, the very
weakness of these regimes, combined with the fact
that the gap between the rulers and the ruled has
now widened to such a dangerous extent, means that
the Bush administration's pressure on Egypt,
Jordan, Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian
states to implement political reform has come to
abrupt halt.
