The New Middle East — what’s in a name?
An Arab Perspective on Democracy in the New Middle East
Fawwaz Traboulsi
Every time US policy-makers find themselves in dire straits in the Middle East, they come up with a new name for the region. There is no need to dwell much on what has become an alarming habit to create and manipulate national identities in this part of the world according to the West’s changing geo-strategic interests and plans. Let us only recall a few stages in this history.
At the onset of the Cold War, our region’s name changed from Near East to Middle East in order to incorporate Turkey, Iran and Pakistan into pacts opposed to the Soviet Union. The most prominent and short-lived of these was the Baghdad Pact. This designation lost some of its currency with the rise of the Arab liberation movements that imposed Arab World as a common name for both the Mashriq (the eastern part of the Arab World) and the Maghrib (its western part).
The end of the Cold War revived the earlier name Middle East, coupled with still persistent efforts to replace Arab World with Mena Region, the latter being an acronym for Middle East and North Africa. Thus, from now on, if we were asked about our identity, we shouldn’t perhaps forget to say we are Mena-ian or from the Mena Region rather than Arab!
After the Cold War and the floating of proposals for a peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Arab conflict, the signs of a New Middle East (yet another name!), centered around Israel and dominated by it, appeared in a book by Shimon Peres containing a whole program of highly ambitious if not utopian economic and developmental projects. However, in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the war in Afghanistan and the invasion of Iraq, they dropped New from our region’s name and preferred the term area. They thus bestowed on us the new designation of Wider or Greater Middle East which, in addition to the Arab countries of the Mashriq, included Israel, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The problem with such repeated renaming is that, as soon as we start getting used to a new name, those responsible for producing it proceed to replace it with something else. And every new designation for our region will sound emptier and more confusing than the previous one. Only a few years went by before Wider or Greater was dropped, and we found ourselves back again with New as the preferred qualifier for Middle East. The US-Israeli war on Lebanon in the summer of 2006 revived the designation of New Middle East once more, which Ms. Condoleezza Rice offered us when she proclaimed this war was part of the “birth pangs of the New Middle East.”
What’s new in this New Middle East?
Is it the burying of the peace process in Palestine by re-occupying most of the West Bank, killing any prospect for a Palestinian state and refusing to withdraw from the Golan Heights? Or is it the presence of two Arab camps competing over an illusion of bilateral solutions and failed plans? A Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian axis is seeking to keep the status quo which is nothing but a means to preserve despotic regimes ridden with corruption and exploitation. This is a status quo whose central goal is the protection of Israel’s borders and the elimination of instability surrounding it, be it in Lebanon or in Palestine. Facing the Saudi-Egyptian-Jordanian axis, we see a Syrian regime that viewed the war on Lebanon as an opportunity to engage in bilateral solutions by offering the US special favors, which the Syrian minister of communications enumerated as follows (al-Sahafa newspaper of 24 July 2006):
- Assisting the US in locating positions of the al-Qaeda organization in Lebanon. (We were under the impression that Lebanon, not the US, should be the first to receive such assistance, as dictated by mutual defense and security arrangements between Syria and Lebanon!)
- Getting ready to play the role of a broker between the US and Iran. (We were repeatedly told that there was a strategic alliance between Syria and Iran!)
- Last but not least, playing an “important role” in Iraq.
We are entitled to ask: All of this barter in exchange for what?!
There is indeed something new in the New Middle East. It is that the US has put an end to the pretense of promoting democracy in this region. It has done so not only by refusing to recognize the victory of Hamas in the Palestinian legislative elections, but also by tolerating the assassination of an elected prime minister on the pretext that Israel has the right to protect itself, by distorting the results of the Iraqi legislative elections, by sanctioning the sham of the Egyptian presidential elections, and by turning a blind eye on the renewal of a presidential mandate in Yemen that preceded and obviated the actual presidential elections. Not to speak of the bargains between the US and the family-based and oil-based dictatorial regimes that fear their own populations and obtain what they can of their legitimacy from the US to the detriment of their peoples.
Or is the new in this Middle East the accelerated slide into civil warfare in Iraq, where the US keeps on nourishing ethnic and sectarian fragmentations that can only serve to continue an occupation that it no longer knows how to escape or to pursue?
What is new is the Bush administration’s determined efforts to disarm Hizbullah in pursuit of a victory that will reverse a dismal record of continuing failures and destruction in the region, which includes an obvious stalemate in the campaign against al-Qaeda and fruitless efforts in “the war on terror”.
What is new is that the US and Israel, after their war of July-August 2006, have not succeeded yet in imposing their conditions on Lebanon and the US-dictated priorities of the “international community”, including the disarming of Hizbullah and implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 1559!
As for Lebanon’s “fragile democracy”, which Mr. Bush has proclaimed his ardent desire to defend, Israeli wanton bombardments only managed to undermine it. Nor did the Judah kiss, which Ms. Condoleezza Rice planted on the cheek of prime minister Fuad Siniora, help in any way — God only knows if that was her message that the Lebanese people will have to suffer on the cross for weeks and months ahead.
Moderation, not democracy
All that is left for US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is to add to her titles that of General Secretary of the Arab League. For that was the role she played during the summit of “moderate Arabs” represented by the foreign ministers of the six Gulf states (Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates) in addition to Egypt and Jordan. The summit was held in Cairo to address an agenda and division of responsibilities which Ms. Rice had partly revealed in a prior press conference in Jeddah.
Even without full disclosure and analysis of its deliberations, we can safely say that the Cairo summit pointed to a new approach that is being tested by Ms. Rice, namely, the implementation of American policies by means of the bloc of “moderate Arabs” that emerged during the most recent US-Israeli war on Lebanon.
It was no coincidence that this new testing phase dealt a deathblow to remaining illusions about the US campaign to spread democracy in the region. The priority is now for moderation, be it at the expense of democracy or even against it. In answer to a journalist’s question about the shift from democracy to moderation, Ms. Rice responded that “moderate forces will ultimately become moderate democratic forces.”
This admission that the forces of “Arab moderation” are not democratic does not need much elaboration, as it came straight from the horse’s mouth, as the saying goes. Yet here are some other feats of the “moderate Arabs”:
- Moderate are the rulers whose hostility towards Iran for its uranium-enriching program to produce nuclear energy exceeds their hostility towards Israel with its two hundred to three hundred nuclear heads.
- Moderate are those who are satisfied with the best terms offered by multinational oil corporations to exploit their oil resources as much as they are satisfied with investing the returns from these resources in the West.
- Moderate are those who welcome the presence of American military bases on their soil and do not oppose the use of these bases for shipping “smart bombs” to Israel during the recent war on Lebanon.
- Moderate are those who rule by means of armed militia that are exempt of international condemnation as long as they do not fight the US occupation of Iraq and do not fire at Israel with as much as flowers.
- Moderate are those who do not make a big fuss when “democratic” and “moderate” Israel arrests the majority of the elected Hamas legislators in the Palestinian parliament, while those same moderates scream out loud against the “adventurism” of the Lebanese Resistance when it kidnaps Israeli soldiers to seek the release of Lebanese prisoners and liberate remaining Lebanese lands.
This does not mean that the “non-moderates” are necessarily democratic. It rather means that “moderation,” which is another name for submission to the dictates of the American empire, will not give birth to democracy, neither now nor ever.
What remains is that some types of pan-Arab nationalists, Islamists, and even some leftists, have to be free themselves of the illusion that the US has an interest in imposing democracy on them as they go on expressing their opposition to US actions. Unless their opposition is in fact an opposition to democracy itself.