Opinion Editorials, October 2003, www.aljazeerah.info
Human Price of the Israeli Occupation of Palestine
Israeli daily aggression on the Palestinian people
Mission and meaning of Al-Jazeerah
Cities, localities, and tourist attractions
American security and Arab self-determination
Waleed Hazbun
Jordan Times, Monday, October 27, 2003
IN RECENT weeks President George Bush and other top officials from his administration have embarked on a public relations offensive to defend their policies in Iraq. Without acknowledging any mistakes or misjudgements, Bush administration officials have reiterated their view that in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, the United States has been compelled to project American military power abroad in an effort to eliminate threats to American security. As evidence that Iraq posed an imminent threat to the United States goes lacking and as public insecurity in Iraq continues, the administration has emphasised in even more simplistic terms that it views US policy goals as defined by countering the threats posed by “terrorism”. American officials and commanders even refer to their military operations and reconstruction efforts in Iraq as part of the post-Sept. 11 war on terrorism, suggesting that they are “bringing the war to the terrorists” so that the terrorists will not be able to attack the United States again.
Lost in the rhetoric defined by the “you are with us or with the terrorists” worldview is the fact that the administration's efforts to make Americans feel more secure risks making millions of people outside US borders feel less secure. While many Iraqis and other Arabs may have welcomed the downfall of Saddam Hussein and supported the expansion of democracy in the region, the administration's efforts to restore order in Iraq and reshape the political landscape of the Middle East have failed to take into account how Iraqis and others in the Middle East perceive their own political and security interests.
This feature of American Middle East policy is, of course, not new. In trying to makes sense of the irony of the current administration's seeming embrace of the notion of promoting democracy in the region, I was recently reminded by historian Douglas Little that Mark Twain once suggested that the American relationship with the Middle East is “a by-product of two contradictory ingredients: an irresistible impulse to remake the world in America's image and a profound ambivalence about the peoples to be remade”.
As Professor Little recounts in his recent book, `American Orientalism', since the end of World War II, the United States has engaged in numerous efforts to transform the region from economic modernisation projects into peace making summits. Many of these were well intentioned efforts to support friendly regimes, but they failed to promote long-lasting political change (and often backfired) because they failed to appeal to broader societal understandings of the requirements for national self-determination and sovereignty. In other words, US policy has not bothered to understand how Arabs view the threats to their own security.
Like the British and French at the end of World War I, the United States today is poised to reshape the future course of Middle East politics. But by relying on military force to impose the Bush administration's own vision of a democratic government and free market economy in Iraq, the United States risks becoming responsible for installing an externally dependent government with limited legitimacy in the eye of many Iraqis and most other Arabs. This strategy will likely provoke the further mobilisation of militant elements within Iraq and the wider Arab world against the American reconstruction project which many in the region view as threatening to their own security and quest for self-determination.
Instead, the United States could redefine its policy in Iraq from a frontline battle against terrorism to a long overdue backing of the Iraqi struggle for national self-determination. To do this, the American policy will need to insure that the reconstruction effort and the instauration of a new political system in Iraq are being governed at every step by the Iraqis themselves, so that they realise the Iraqis' own collective sense of popular sovereignty.
The new Iraqi political system should be crafted by popularly selected representatives, and the new government must be given the freedom to decide its own national security policies, economic system and political alliances. Such a policy might even require accommodating political forces whose vision of Iraqi self-determination opposes what they view as American domination of the region.
Such a choice will require the United States to forego fulfilling its grandest hopes for a new regional order, but in return, American policies would gain wider legitimacy in Iraq and across the Arab world. The development of an indigenously generated political system in Iraq which is viewed regionally as sovereign and independent, rather than as an American-created client state, will generate pressure on regional elites to reform their authoritarian systems to make them more responsive to the popular will. Moreover, this path will encourage more Arabs to view closer political, economic and cultural ties to United States as consistent with their own self-determination rather than as acquiescing to American hegemony.
Reshaping how America is viewed across the region might better spur on local democratic forces and marginalise anti-Americanism. Only then will the United States have turned the corner in its war on "terrorism."
The writer teaches international relations at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.
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| Earth, a planet hungry for peace |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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| The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03). |
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