CAIRO - Since coming to power, the US
administration of President George W Bush has
largely shunned diplomacy with those it perceives
as enemies. Ensconced in a moral certitude that is
belied by its attachment to any number of allies
of ill repute, the administration has sat in the
corner holding its breath, hoping that those who
oppose its stated goals - foreign monsters such as
Syria, Iran and North Korea - will simply vanish
if they cannot be forcibly removed.
There
is apparently no setback grave enough to persuade
the
administration to change
course and opt for dialogue over
confrontation. Take North
Korea's recent testing of a nuclear bomb. It would
seem that this reversal - nuclear proliferation to
a founding member of President Bush's "axis of
evil" (along with Iraq and Iran) - would inspire a
rethink of the refusal to hold bilateral talks,
part of Pyongyang's price for forgoing its weapons
program.
Instead, Bush quickly restated
his conviction not to hold talks with North Korea
and worked to tighten sanctions and further
isolate a country that is already so isolated that
it might as well be on Mars.
Even to some
of Bush's closest allies, the current policy seems
self-destructive. Former US secretary of state
James Baker, now heading the Iraq Study Group,
appointed by the president to re-evaluate US
policy in Iraq, recently called for the
administration finally to stop cutting off its
nose to spite its face.
"I believe in
talking to your enemies," Baker said, in reference
to North Korea. "It's got to be hard-nosed, it's
got to be determined. You don't give away
anything, but in my view, it's not appeasement to
talk to your enemies."
Six years of
uncommon obstinacy has been particularly corrosive
to the administration's stated goals the Middle
East. In short, Bush's vanity has set Iraq on
fire, sentenced the Arab-Israeli peace process to
death by neglect, indirectly sparked a nascent
civil war in Palestine, and ushered in the
destruction of Lebanon.
The administration
has played off these crises as the "birth pangs of
a new Middle East", as Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice stone-heartedly said during the
Lebanon war, or more recently, as Bush has said of
the near-genocidal violence in Iraq, "just a
comma" in history.
The "creative chaos"
theory that some believe underpins
neo-conservative-inspired administration thinking
in this regard was explained by Bush during the
Lebanon war. "This moment of conflict in the
Middle East is painful and tragic," he said. "Yet
it is also a moment of opportunity for broader
change in the region. Transforming countries that
have suffered decades of tyranny and violence is
difficult, and it will take time to achieve."
Whether the administration buys its own
rhetoric is an open question. What is not in
question is that these crises have strengthened
those it views as the dastardly representatives of
the "old" Middle East - Iran, Syria, Hezbollah,
Hamas and anti-American Islamist opposition
movements from Cairo to Casablanca. In two years,
Bush will himself be a "comma" in history, and his
successor will inherit this ill-favored wind.
Continuing to ignore Syria and Iran seems
particularly foolish, given how badly pressure on
them has backfired. Syria has shrugged off US
sanctions, weathered investigation into last
year's killing of former Lebanese premier Rafik
Hariri, and reaped enormous political capital from
Hezbollah's victory over Israel. In the meantime,
Iran continues to ignore US-led demands that it
cease its nuclear program and ups its rhetoric
against Israel. And both, of course, savor no
small measure of Schadenfreude at America's
failure in Iraq, even if its instability troubles
them.
But there remains an obstinate, if
misguided, logic to US policy, as summarized by
Syria expert Dr Joshua Landis: "The resistance to
opening the door to discussions with Syria [and
Iran] stems from the stubborn hope among Bush
advisers that it is not too late for this plan and
that a turnaround in their Middle East fortunes
may yet materialize," he wrote. "They hope it is
not too late for a regime-change opportunity in
Syria.
"The Bush administration clearly
believed the war in Lebanon this summer could have
developed into just such an opportunity. This is
why Rice made her famous faux pas that the
bombing of Lebanon and the screams of its citizens
were simply 'the birth pains' [sic] of a new
Middle East."
The political isolation of
America's enemies is accompanied by attempts to
persuade the international community to adopt
Washington's own economic sanctions against them,
as it recently did against North Korea. And in
each case the US has made it clear that the
isolation of its enemies will only end when they
fulfill a set of political demands steep enough to
ensure that they are one of the good guys, albeit
with little guaranteed in return save America's
good graces. Thus, even after the debacle of
removing Saddam Hussein, the US in essence
maintains an across-the-board policy of "regime
change" with those that oppose its stated foreign
policy.
Condi's long, strange,
diplomacy-free trip The topsy-turvy logic
of US policy thus allows the nation's chief
diplomat, Rice, to tour the Middle East as she did
early this month, without ever talking to anyone
with whom she has serious differences. Rice's
itinerary did not include Damascus or Tehran or a
meeting with Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail
Haniyah of Hamas, or with Hassan Nasrallah, the
leader of Hezbollah, the most powerful figure in
Lebanon. As a result, Rice's trip produced no
tangible gains.
Her visit was billed as an
attempt to re-energize the "peace process", but
Rice spent her vacation trying to isolate Syria
from America's Arab allies and to scare the Sunni
regimes into uniting against the chimeric
Iranian-led "Shi'ite crescent". Her goal, as she
put it, was to strengthen as a bloc US allies,
whom she called "the moderate forces" - Jordan,
Egypt, and the Arab states of the Persian Gulf -
in common cause against the "extremist forces".
Syria, to get out of the red and be graced
with a visit from Condi next time around, must
fulfill a by now familiar laundry list of demands.
In essence it must stop supporting Hezbollah and
Hamas and give the US carte blanche in Lebanon and
Iraq, all without the promise of talks with Israel
on the return of Golan.
So rigid is the US
position that it has consistently pressured Israel
not to talk peace with Bashar al-Assad, as a
recent article in Ha'aretz confirmed. "A few short
weeks ago, [Israeli] Public Security Minister Avi
Dichter told Army Radio, with regard to peace
talks with Syria, that 'if it turned out that
there was someone to talk to and something to talk
about, the idea would be right'," recounted Shmuel
Rosner. "On Tuesday, however, after his meeting
with US National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley,
Dichter sounded somewhat different." Dichter then
parroted verbatim Washington's conditions for
engaging Syria and said that as long as the US
opposed Israel engaging Syria, "Israel could not
ignore it".
The extremist forces also
include Hamas, a rare elected government in the
Arab world despite the terrorist acts of its
military wing. The US has tried to bring down
Haniyah's government by decidedly anti-democratic
means, such as support for Israel's blockade of
Gaza, its bombing of government institutions, the
arrest of Haniyah's cabinet, and the recent
revelation that it will sponsor Hamas' bested
opponents, Fatah, to the tune of US$42 million in
future elections. All Hamas has to do to end its
isolation is to change the entire platform on
which it was elected.
In the end, the war
on Hamas could backfire for the United States. For
one, it could radicalize Islamist parties that
conclude that winning at the ballot box will only
bring about Washington' s wrath. And a Palestinian
civil war, if it develops, might not cause Bush to
cry in his beer, but would undoubtedly further
destabilize the region.
Then there is
Hezbollah. Despite having attempted to integrate
into the Lebanese political process and moderate
its ideology to forgo the goal of an Islamic
state, the Shi'ite militia found out courtesy of
one month of US-supported Israeli bombing that
what is required of it is not participation but
submission. In the end, not only has Hezbollah's
victory severely dented US credibility, but the
war capsized Bush's goal of creating a pro-US
democracy in Lebanon, where the March 14 forces
have been weakened vis-a-vis Hezbollah and other
pro-Syrian factions.
But the greatest
challenge facing the US administration undoubtedly
comes from an ever more strident Iran. While Iran
has long sought to open the kind of broad-based
talks that might lead to the restoration of
diplomatic ties, Washington has made it clear that
there is no hope of this unless it attains
satisfaction on the nuclear issue.
"We've
said to the Iranians, there's a way for us to
talk: suspend your enrichment and reprocessing
capabilities so you don't have the technologies to
have a nuclear weapon, and we will have
negotiations," said Rice recently. "But so far,
they've not taken up on that offer."
There
is little possibility that the Iranian government
will risk losing face by giving in to Washington's
diktat in advance of negotiations - especially
since Iran claims the right to enrich uranium
under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. At the
same time, Tehran has received no assurance that
regime change is not Bush's ultimate goal, even if
the nuclear issue is resolved.
Washington
also demands that Iran adopt the quietist approach
of its Arab allies toward Israel. But in the
absence of even a semblance of an Arab-Israeli
peace process, Iran's hardline President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad has no incentive whatsoever to modify
his uncompromising stance.
Of all the
regional players, ignoring Iran holds the greatest
possible peril for the US and the region. Iranian
influence is undoubtedly being exaggerated to
scare the Arab states into aligning more closely
with the US, but the issue of Iran's nuclear
program is vital to the regional balance of power.
At the moment any hope of a resolution is being
held hostage to the Bush administration's
petulance.
Likewise, ever-worsening war in
Iraq is unlikely to be settled without Iran's
cooperation. While there are reports that Baker's
group will recommend bringing Iran and Syria
directly into attempts to stabilize Iraq, it is
unlikely this level-headed suggestion will win the
day. Even limited, low-level talks on Iraq between
the US and Iran were scuttled in June, apparently
because Iran objected to US attempts to use the
talks to press its demands on the nuclear issue.
If Iraq is all but lost, Afghanistan is
now teetering on the edge, even according to the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization commander. And
yet official policy remains to try to kill off the
Taliban, rather than to engage them. Bill Frist,
the US Senate majority leader, recently recognized
the futility of this strategy and suggested that
the Taliban, since they represent the majority
Pashtun in some regards, should be brought into
government. Frist may have been talking sense, but
it was bad politics in an election year, and he
was pilloried by Democrats and Republicans alike.
In any event, there is little danger that Bush
will follow Frist's advice, since war, even if it
means eternal war, is evidently always preferable
to peace.
In search of 'moral
clarity' The Bush administration's
determination to shun its enemies would be
justifiable and perhaps even laudable, regardless
of the costs, were it truly based on principle.
The stated rationale is wrapped in the singularly
Manichaean language of good versus evil that it
uses to explain all US foreign-policy decisions.
The United States must not talk to North Korea,
for example, a recently leaked internal
administration memo stated, to maintain "moral
clarity".
It is demonstrably not based on
principle, however, since those that do merit
talking to, America's friends, include dictators
and regimes decidedly nervous about elections (all
of the Arab leaders Rice did meet on her trip),
while its enemies include at least nominally
elected leaders. A cursory look at the rogues'
gallery of the shunned and ignored demonstrates
rather decisively that the correct criterion for
discerning good from evil is opposition to US
foreign policy.
In the post-diplomacy era
in US foreign policy, however, transparent
hypocrisy is no inhibition to pigheadedness, and
the Bush administration is unlikely to change
course and begin, at long last, speaking to its
enemies.
Ashraf Fahim is a
freelance writer on Middle Eastern affairs based
in New York and London. His writing can be found
at www.cairofile.com.
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