Managed Democracy: How Far US Will Succeed in Its Plans for Arab World?

Ramzy Baroud, Aljazeera.net English.


US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s highly publicized tour of the Middle East, Asia and Europe carried with it little or no surprises. The Middle East leg of her journey, which lasted from June 17-20, was saturated with the same kind of duplicitous rhetoric that defined her legacy during President George W. Bush’s first term in office. She verbally reprimanded and threatened Syria and Iran for not fully and unconditionally embracing democratic reforms, while expressing “encouragement” regarding the Palestinian, Iraqi and Lebanese endeavor for democracy, following the supposed democratic elections in these countries.

However, those who are even slightly familiar with the logic of US foreign policy in the Middle East need not bother to decode Rice’s rhetoric.

While, on the other hand, the sins of America’s foes are augmented, embellished and often right-out fabricated to necessitate diplomatic pressure, economic sanctions and, as a “last resort”, war. Iraq was an example of the latter, while Iran’s current political attitude toward US interests in the region is qualifying it for the important role of being the Middle East’s most formidable bogeyman that must be taken down.

This logic, simply put, is absurd. Who can possibly contest that Iran, despite all of its blunders, has taken more steps toward democracy than Egypt has? Yet while Iran received disproportionately higher criticism than any other country during Rice’s trip, Bush’s closest trustee strangely declared that Egypt’s “President Mubarak has unlocked the door for change.”

It appears Washington’s new style manual is based on its comprehension of two inevitable scenarios. First, there is the Arab Human Rights Development Report of 2004, which warns that “power will be transformed through armed violence” if Arab states don’t adopt serious political reforms and significantly raise the margin of freedom in their societies.

But the second scenario is equally harmful to the US Middle East policy, for a genuine democracy will most likely bring to power the repressed anti-US forces dotting the Arab world. After all, the Egyptian opposition that are very much pro-democracy and reforms as well as strong advocates of civil society, refused to meet with Secretary Rice during her stopover in Egypt.

“We are against the US policies in the region and we cannot have any negotiations with them, and all the opposition parties in the country agree on what I’m saying,” Georges Isaac, a co-founder of the Egyptian Movement for Change, known as Kefaya (Enough), told Arab News. “If we want political reform to be implemented in the country we want to do it ourselves; not to be imposed or to be even discussed with Rice.”

Washington’s undeclared new dogma professes a new Middle East policy that works both toward avoiding complete political meltdowns, chaos and violence throughout the Arab world — evidently very harmful considering the United States’ disastrous debacle in Iraq — while trying to maintain the presence of the friendly faces of the friendly regimes. In short, a managed democracy.

Managed democracy was in fact the subject of awesome experiments immediately following the end of World War II, initiated in Europe, extending to Central America and was later utilized in Eastern Europe following the collapse of the Soviet Union. But in the Middle East, there is the formidable problems of cosmetically reforming a plethora of countries all at once as well as the zero credibility that Washington enjoys anywhere in the Arab or Muslim world. Washington seems to be thinking that the Arab peoples are willing to forge alliances with whomever to get rid of these oppressive and degenerate regimes. But the oppressiveness of the regimes can hardly be separated from Washington’s own regional designs that compelled a decades-long sinful matrimony between oppressive rulers and equally domineering American foreign policy.

Thus American withdrawals from Iraq and an end to the unbalanced policy toward the Palestinian-Israeli conflict are often amalgamated with the Arab peoples’ most pertinent demands for political rights, human rights and civil liberties.

Rice’s Middle East trip was tantamount to an official declaration of Washington’s prospective Middle East approach. This approach, as I see it, is a blend between the US’ traditional policies of designations — friendly allies vs. evil enemies — and carefully premeditated “democratic” reforms that uphold the status quo without tipping the political balance in favor of those critical of Washington’s regional role and foreign policy. And in the Middle East, they are many.

— Ramzy Baroud is editor in chief of PalestineChronicle.com.