The recent attacks on American and
European embassies and the riots throughout the
Muslim world are bringing home what the summit of
the Non-Aligned Movement in Tehran failed to get
across: that much of the world strongly resents
Western hegemony. Amid chants of "Listen, listen,
oh Obama! The entire nation is Osama!" and
placards stating "Our dead are in paradise. Your
dead are in hell" even Americans are waking up -
with a start - to this uncomfortable reality.
The reasons for these sentiments are
complex, and some of the hype is overblown. There
are plenty of legitimate complaints and
resentments that people in the developing world
harbor against the West; there is also a fair
amount of scapegoating involved. As
Foreign Policy analyst
James Traub put it, "Blaming the West, and above
all the United States, allows leaders to distract
attention from their own failings, ordinary
citizens to live with their sense of humiliation,
and Islamist and anti-Western parties and factions
to burnish their 'resistance' credentials." [1]
The absurd nature of the cause for the
riots - a movie allegedly made by an
Egyptian-American serial fraudster who hired a
1970s soft-core porn director and tricked the
entire cast with a fake plot - adds emphasis to
the latter point. So does the observation of the
US-based intelligence analysis organization
Stratfor that "Egyptians were unaware that the
video even existed until a talk show host named
Sheikh Khalid Abdullah devoted his two-hour
program to the film Sept. 8 . ... As a Salafist,
whose beliefs run counter to those of the ruling
Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Abdullah may have
screened the film to incite chaos and complicate
Egypt's newly elected president's attempts to
consolidate power."
In and of themselves,
the riots are less dangerous than they seem.
Speculation that Obama is facing a "1979 Iran
moment", despite the many superficial
similarities, [2] probably has more to do with the
American presidential election than with reality
on the ground. Previous episodes of similar
violence wound down on their own - for example, in
2005-2006 after the publication of a series of
cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish
newspaper and in 2010 after an American pastor
(who is also involved in the current affair)
threatened to burn the Muslim holy book, the
Koran.
As the prominent conservative
analyst Robert Kagan wrote in the Washington Post,
"Some conservatives are starting to make a glib
comparison between the evolution of Egypt today
and the Iranian revolution of 1979. This is a
faulty analysis. Egypt is not declaring jihad on
the West, and [Egyptian President Mohammed] Morsi
is not Ayatollah Khomeini." [3]
The crisis
is likely to even have some positive effects: at
the very least, it will bring to the urgent
attention of policy makers the many lapses they
have made since the start of the Arab Spring.
Development efforts, for example, have attracted
plenty of criticism for poor planning and lack of
sufficient political commitment. Security
cooperation and intelligence gathering, as the
events in Libya showed, also lag behind.
However, given the larger geopolitical
stand-off in the Middle East and the many
extremist factions that have been unleashed and
armed to the teeth in the course of several recent
civil wars, a different danger lurks. The riots
could serve as a cover for a more serious
operation that could ignite the region. The highly
professional attacks on the American consulate in
Benghazi, Libya, last Tuesday and on the
international peacekeeping force in the Sinai
peninsula on Friday illustrate this threat.
(Subsequently over the weekend, the Sinai
militants reportedly downed an Egyptian military
helicopter and besieged several Egyptian military
bases.)
Moreover, the sentiment behind the
riots will not disappear, even though it may
become less visible again. Given that the road of
many Arab countries to democracy is likely to be
long and tortuous, it is likely to reappear in an
even more virulent form in the future. Therefore,
it is of little consolation to the West that
another Iran may not be in the making on the Nile;
we can easily imagine other hostile scenarios that
are no less dramatic.
Consequently - and
since US President Barack Obama's Muslim politics
over the past four years have demonstrably failed
to change this basic reality - the crisis will
also serve as a trigger for rethinking American
foreign policy. Underneath all the debate about
historic paradigms and values, we can see a more
basic policy argument re-emerging and certain
assumptions of the Obama administration about Arab
democracy come into question. The early rounds
of soul-searching in American policy circles seem
to have produced two main theories about what went
wrong: that the administration is not doing enough
in the Arab world, or that it is doing the wrong
thing altogether. These two hypotheses will be
applied not only to the general policy debate -
which will be immediately relevant in the
presidential election campaign - but also to
specific policy decisions in each country.
An early victim of this debate may well be
Washington's hands-off approach of "leading from
behind" (incidentally, this would be a way to
temporarily pacify both sides). While no tectonic
shifts may happen overnight, we can expect a rapid
correction, at least in countries such as Egypt
and Libya, where subtler engagement is possible.
In the mid-term, it remains to be seen how US
policy on Syria and Iran will change.
For
now, greater engagement appears to mean greater
cooperation with the newly emerged regimes. As
Stratfor argues in another recent report, "The
high-profile death of Washington's top diplomat in
Libya will pressure the United States to assist
the government in Tripoli's security efforts to
combat jihadists in Benghazi."
Egypt's
president undoubtedly rubbed Obama the wrong way
with his encouragement of demonstrations and
delayed condemnation of the embassy attacks -
causing the latter to proclaim that "I don't think
that we would consider [Egypt's government] an
ally, but we don't consider them an enemy" - but
the Americans hardly have much of a choice.
As Kagan put it, "If Egypt's economy
crumbles, is the nation going to become less
radical? Is it more likely to uphold the peace
treaty with Israel? Is it more likely to be a
force for moderation in the greater Middle East?"
It bears noting that Turkey announced
Saturday a loan of US$2 billion to Egypt. [4]
Down the road, however, the US president
will face a greater pressure to either lead a more
assertive policy or change his course altogether.
In fact, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, who is engaged in an argument with
Obama over the Iranian nuclear program, felt no
qualms stepping right into this debate in
interviews with several American TV channels on
Sunday. "It's the same fanaticism that you see
storming your embassies today," he told NBC,
referring to the Iranian leaders. "You want these
fanatics to have nuclear weapons?"
Netanyahu's comments, a direct appeal to
the American public in the middle of a heated
election campaign, underscore just how bitter the
disagreement between the Israeli and the American
leaders has become. (On Friday, US Secretary of
Defense Leon Panetta rebuked the Israeli requests
for "clear red lines" on Iran, telling Foreign
Policy Magazine that "Red lines are kind of
political arguments that are used to try to put
people in a corner.")
The Israeli prime
minister's interference into this internal policy
debate may be brazen, but he has a point. For him,
the attacks on American embassies in the Middle
East appear as a d้jเ-vu: exactly a year ago, a
mob burnt the Israeli embassy in Cairo and only
the last-minute intervention of the authorities,
spurred on by repeated Israeli and American
requests, prevented the harming of Israeli
staffers. Arguably, back then Netanyahu's mistrust
of the Arabs paid; Israeli and American analysts
are asking now if the US administration could have
been more vigilant.
According to the
Israeli daily Ha'aretz, for example, American
officials repeatedly ignored the warnings of their
Israeli counterparts about "radicalizing trends"
in the Arab countries. "Only now, after what
happened to their embassies, the Americans are
beginning to understand the situation," an
anonymous Israeli official told the newspaper.
It is hard to imagine a more sober
awakening for the US president spurred by such a
ridiculous affair as the cheap, distasteful movie
"The Innocence of Muslims." While the debate about
the course of US foreign policy is only just
starting, it is overdue and will likely be
dramatic
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