Humiliating Our Friends

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Humiliating Our Friends
by Marc Lynch

What happened to the White House goal of helping Arab moderates?

http://tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/10278

Marc Lynch is assistant professor of political science at Williams College and the author of State Interests and Public Spheres: The International Politics of Jordan's Identity.


Two years ago, George Bush stunned and outraged virtually the entire Arab world by warmly describing Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon as a "man of peace" at the height of the brutal Israeli reoccupation of the West Bank. Last week, Bush did it again, endorsing Sharon’s demands to end the right of Palestinian return and legitimizing decades' worth of illegal West Bank settlements. He did so even as Israeli assassinations of Hamas leaders and the bloody American campaign in Iraq had Arab anger at an almost unprecedented pitch. And he did so without any coordination with moderate Arab leaders or any attempt to explain himself to Arab audiences. When the final damage is calculated, the greatest victims of Bush’s latest episode of public non-diplomacy may well be a group which Bush himself claims to most want by his side: Arab moderates.

The impact of the furious humiliation of Arab moderates has already begun to surface. King Abdullah II of Jordan—probably the most friendly of all Arab leaders—postponed a scheduled meeting at the White House. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak warned that Arab views of the United States had plummeted to unprecedented depths. Even more ominously, independent Arab moderates who had tentatively embraced Bush’s calls for democratic reform—often at great personal and political risk—spoke with one voice about their humilitation and outrage. The Arab media now routinely equates the American occupation of Iraq with the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and it has become a consensus view that America has lost all credibility in the region.

These outbursts of fury from America’s few remaining friends epitomize one of the greatest ironies of the Bush administration’s policies towards the Middle East. While Bush has waxed eloquent over the need for democracy in the Arab world, his policies can only be described as a systematic campaign of alienating and humiliating any Arabs who attempt to speak out on behalf of the United States. It has never been clear how the Bush administration has reconciled its rhetoric about empowering Arab publics with its policies which drive the hostility of those publics to ever greater heights. And even on its own terms, Bush’s promotion of democratic reform in the region has been a dismal failure: even if some Arab regimes have begun to relax the extraordinarily high levels of control imposed during the dangerous days of the Iraq war, not a single Arab country can be honestly described as more democratic today than it was four years ago.

The Bush administration has never been especially serious about promoting democracy in the region. Despite Bush’s highly publicized speeches, funding for democracy-promotion initiatives remains miniscule. Few Arabs failed to notice that in Libya the Americans happily bargained away democratic reform in exchange for Moammar Qaddafi’s abandonment of an already-moribund WMD program, or that Bush officials have avoided real criticism of allies such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The much-ballyhooed Greater Middle East Initiative is little more than a patchwork of existing programs, underfunded and ill-conceived. While the furious response from Arab regimes might be dismissed as driven by their own feelings of insecurity, the lack of enthusiasm from Arab civil society reformers suggests the extent to which an association with America has become poisonous.

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