Oh noes! Its a paradox!

Much of the president's speeches during his tour of the Middle East have involved rallying the Arab states to guard against the threat of Iran. However, according to Shibley Telhami at the Brookings Institution, Iran is indeed a threat to many Arab regimes, but not in the way you think. Although the article looks more at how Arab-Israeli peace making is the key to security rather than countering Iran, I'm going to focus on the disparity between the publics and their governments.

Its safe to say that there are more dictatorships disguised as democracies in the Middle East than there are actual democracies. Each of these regimes sees a common threat in Iran, Islamic fundamentalism. But they are not threatened by in the same way we here in the West are. The Iranian Revolution has been a scary thing for many nation states in the Middle East. Perhaps the only thing scarier than free elections for these governments is the idea of another Islamic revolution happening within their own borders.

The more the autocrats try to hold on to power by supressing the more radical Islamist movements, the stronger those movements become. And in many cases, as with Hamas and Hezbollah, those movements begin to provide the populations with what the government does not: hospitals, education, etc.

A US military presence is required to provide security for the governments, but as Telhami points out, those forces are not there with the mission to protect anything other than American interests. And then we come to a paradox. Military bases in the Middle East protect countries from militants (in theory at least) but the American presence creates a lot of resentment amongst the public and provides fuel for the militants who can say, "Look, Americans are everywhere, they're evil overlords who control everything." So the threat, or perceived threat amongst the people, isn't Iran, it us.

I don't have the answer to that puzzle yet. But I'll let you guys know when I do. In the meantime, add your own thoughts.

Too little too late?

Today, Mr. Matthew Price from BBC News wrote a nice little article expressing his views on the nuanced nature of Bush's visit to the Middle East. A very important question was asked in the midst of his article, is it too late for Bush to make any kind of a difference?

My answer is a very loud yes. Many people in the Middle East feel like one little tour isn't going to undo the damage of the last nearly eight years that Bush has been in office. The bunglings of the War on Terror, including the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the continued support of Israel especially during the summer 2006 war between Israel and Lebanon, and the list just goes on and on. All of these grievances cannot be mended by the time Bush leaves office, and I find it highly unlikely Bush will attempt to do anything of the kind once he is out of office. I expect we'll see footage of him clearing brush in Texas till at least 2010.

And that is hopefully as bad as any Bush bashing will get on this blog. I don't like the guy, but still, constant insults get boring, and it turns a lot of people off to what you really have to say.

So my dear little readers, what do you think? Is it too late for Mr. Bush to make a difference for American foreign policy in the Middle East? And why does this topic make that silly JoJo song run through my head?

Bush's Wild on the Middle East Tour...some issues

I just read a great article in Time about Bush's Middle East tour and why many Arabs are skeptical of his urges for peace. The article describes the exact sorts of concerns I have with Bush's visit.

1. Helping the Palestinians....
Arabs cynically see Bush's endorsement of Palestinian statehood as part of the White House's effort to win Arab support at the time for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Arabs note that until 2007, Bush shunned active Arab-Israeli mediation; he had refused to deal with Arafat, even though he was the elected president of the Palestinian people (as well as the symbolic leader of the Palestinian revolution), and still refuses to deal with the Islamist Hamas group, which won the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary elections. Even though Bush calls the November Annapolis peace conference a "major breakthrough" and says he's an "optimistic guy" about the chances of an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement by 2009, he refuses to lay out his administration's vision of a fair final settlement — something many experts see as an essential diplomatic step in breaking the long impasse between the parties. As Arabs see it, Bush's failure over the last seven years to exercise decisive U.S. influence over Israel, a close American ally, has simply enabled the Jewish state to expand its settlements throughout the occupied West Bank and made a viable Palestinian state much harder to achieve.

I too am pessimistic about what an independent Palestinian state would look like given the current occupation, as yesterday's post can attest to.

2. Promoting democracy. There are certainly people in Iraq, Lebanon and a few pockets here and there who are grateful for Bush's call for liberty in the Middle East. The problem is that it is widely seen as being insincere at best and hypocritical at worst. Few doubt that toppling Saddam Hussein's dictatorship was more about breaking Arab military strength and projecting American strategic power than fighting terrorism, much less creating Iraqi democracy. While Iraq is no longer a one-man show, it will be a very long time before anyone considers the country, now dominated by Shi'ite Muslim gangs, Kurdish warlords and Sunni terrorists, emblematic of an emerging democracy.
If the Iraq war was about Bush's freedom agenda, Arabs wonder, why has the White House stood by so quietly as pro-American authoritarian Arab regimes have jailed democracy activists, as happened to former presidential candidate Ayman Nour in Egypt? The White House stresses Bush's admiration for Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz and the country's baby-step municipal elections in 2005, yet Washington is silent about the systematic repression of women and minorities permitted in the name of religion in the Kingdom.

Yes! And don't forget the American support for Musharraf, though not Arab, is Muslim, and embodies the tendency of the US to support dictators in exchange for loyalty to the "war on terror".

3. Confronting Iran. The Arabs are afraid of Iran, especially the Saudis and the emirs who rule the small oil-rich states situated just across the Gulf from the Persian giant. They are inclined to agree with Bush's worries about Iran's nuclear intentions. But they are even more concerned about another U.S. war in the Gulf-this time against Iran, to wipe out its nuclear program. That could bring a swift backlash, either through direct Iranian military retaliation against Washington's regional allies, or in the form of fomenting long-term political unrest and terrorism among Shi'ite minorities in those countries.
Arabs were relieved when the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iran said that the Islamic regime had shelved its nuclear weapons program in 2003. But a major aim of Bush's tour is to rally Gulf Arabs into an anti-Iran bloc bent on further isolating Tehran diplomatically and economically, without giving up the option of a military attack on Iran, on the grounds that Iran remains a dire threat to regional security. To such logic, Gulf leaders are tempted to reply, "Duh, it was your ousting of Saddam Hussein's regime that enabled Iran to expand its influence in the first place." Arabs would never want Washington to get too cozy with Tehran. But they've had enough Texas gun slinging.

Like duh,gag me with nuclear warhead, Iran totally benefitted from the Iraq war.

Sorry, that was uncalled for.

Yay Time!