How to win friends in the Middle East

Date: April 15, 2005 at 11:51:52
From: VFP, [ool-18b96f53.dyn.optonline.net]
Subject: How to win friends in the Middle East - Rami G. Khouri

How to Win Friends in the Mideast
Rami G. Khouri

BEIRUT - The United States recently appointed Karen Hughes and Liz
Cheney to revamp two persistently enigmatic and largely failed
policies: global public diplomacy and the promotion of democracy
throughout the Middle East.

If these two able officials want to do a better job than their
predecessors in grasping why this noble American mission to promote
freedom is received with such skepticism, scorn and even resistance
around the world, and not just in Arab-Islamic lands, here's what they
should ponder:

* Style. As that great British thinker Mick Jagger once said: "It's
the singer, not the song." Washington's manner is often aggressive and
threatening. It uses sanctions and the military and unilaterally lays
down the law that others must follow or else they will be considered
enemies and thus liable to regime change.

People don't like to be bullied or threatened, even if change would be
for their own good.

* Credibility. The U.S. track record has hurt, angered or offended
most people in the Middle East. By primarily backing Arab dictators and
autocrats or supporting the Israeli position on key issues of Arab- Israeli
peacemaking, credibility has been lost.

The priority issue for most Arabs - whether Palestinians, Iraqis or
others - is freedom from foreign occupation and subjugation. If
Washington uses war and pressure tactics to implement United Nations
resolutions in Lebanon and Iraq but does nothing parallel to implement
U.N. resolutions calling for the freedom of Palestinians from Israeli
occupation, it will continue to be greeted with disdainful guffaws in
most of the Middle East.

* Consistency. The United States could have promoted freedom and
democracy in Iraq without waging war and spending $300 billion, getting
more than 1,500 Americans killed and 10,000 injured (and perhaps
100,000 Iraqis killed) and creating a massive anti-American backlash
throughout the world.

It could better promote democracy and rally Arab democrats by telling
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Tunisian President Zine el Abidine
ben Ali that being president without any meaningful legal opposition
for more than 20 years is long enough. The U.S. could support term
limits for Arab presidents.

* Motive. Perpetually changing the motive for the war in Iraq hurts
American credibility. We've been told that invading Iraq was about
weapons of mass destruction, links with Al Qaeda, imminent threats to
the United States, homegrown brutality against the Iraqi people,
stopping threats to neighbors and, now, spreading freedom and democracy
throughout the Middle East. Some of these rationales may one day prove
to be correct. In the meantime, the collection of half a dozen is
crippling to placing any trust in Washington.

* Context. The Arab states suffer massive internal pressures from
issues of population, identity, demography, economy, environment,
ideology, crises of citizenship rights versus statehood obligations and
secularism versus religiosity, and the perpetual pressure from foreign
armies. In this wider context, the issues of freedom and democracy are
dwarfed by the more pressing imperatives of stable statehood,
liberation from foreign occupation, meeting basic human needs, and
stopping foreign armies.

* Legitimacy. There is no global consensus that the United States is
mandated to promote freedom and democracy, or that this is the divinely
ordained destiny of the United States. There is such a mandate, though,
in the charter of the United Nations, in Security Council resolutions
to end foreign occupations and international legal conventions - most
of which the U.S. resists, ignores or applies very selectively.

No surprise then that virtually the whole world resists the United
States.

* Militarism. The American use of preemptive war for regime change
creates more problems than it solves. Promoting freedom and democracy
through the guns of the Marines doesn't work for many people outside of
Republican and neoconservative Washington circles.

* Relevance. The value of individual freedom as defined in American
culture runs counter to how freedom is understood in most of the Middle
East and the developing world. There, people sacrifice individual
liberties for the protection and the communal expression of belonging
to a bigger group - the family, tribe, religion or ethnic or national
group.

All of these are real concerns, derived from modern historical
experience, and they act as the primary constraint to any meaningful
Arab cooperation with the U.S. But the good news is that they all can
be overcome through better communications between Arabs and Americans
and more consistent, lawful policies by everyone concerned.

** Rami G. Khouri is a syndicated columnist. This piece is used by
permission of Agence Global.

Source: Los Angeles Times

Visit the website at: www.latimes.com

Distributed by the Common Ground News Service - Partners in Humanity.

Copyright permission has been obtained from the author for publication.

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