The US Democracy Initiative and Israel

The second Bush administration’s Middle East policy has caused a turmoil in the region. Speaking to a high-profiled audience in Cairo, the U.S Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice said:

"For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region, here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither,"

Truer words have never been spoken. The U.S foreign policy towards Mid-East is changing and ripples are to be felt in the U.S itself. Specifically, it will affect the gridlock held by the Pro-Israeli lobby on the U.S policy in the region.

It is generally believed that the U.S Mid-East policy is a prisoner to the Israeli interests. While this is largely true, people sometimes do not realise that this was not always the case. To trace the genesis of the U.S policy in the Middle East, one has to go back to the early post-war period when the region was just coming out of its colonial past. The United States showed admirable anti-colonial sentiments at the time and put some distance between itself and its European allies, Britain and France - the major colonial powers in the region. Britain then still wielded substantial influence in the Gulf states and considered Egypt and Palestine within its domain; France felt the same way about Syria, Lebanon and the Levant. Both countries still considered themselves to be major world powers and pound sterling was still an international reserve currency.

The United States was quite sympathetic to Nasser’s Egypt in the beginning and was hoping to rope him in as an ally in the cold war against the Soviet Union. In 1956, Nasser took control of the Suez canal from the Anglo-French consortium and the two countries attacked Egypt with the help of Israel. It was the United States then that opposed the attack on Egypt and it was instrumental in ending the deadlock. The U.S mediation earned it a lot of goodwill in the Arab world, including with Nasser. But it was short-lived. Nasser had grand plans for the expansion of Aswan Dam over River Nile and had asked for assistance for the project from the World Bank. That assistance was refused and Nasser turned to the Soviet Union for help. The Soviets obliged not only with assistance for building the Aswan Dam but also provided other military and technical assistance to Egyptians. Thus started Nasser’s and Arab intellectuals’ tilt towards the Soviets.

Abdul Gamal Nasser was a charismatic figure who held sway over young, educated Arabs. His notion of Pan-Arabism held a powerful appeal for the Arab masses. The West could not remain impervious to the gathering Pan-Arab movement. The Middle East, with its oil, was too important for the U.S and the West to ignore. To combat Nasser’s powerful appeal of Pan-Arabism, the West had to find an equally potent force, which they found in orthodox Islam. It was then that the U.S developed its Middle East policy with the following three pillars:

1. Stability
2. Uninterrupted oil supplies, and
3. Unstinted support for Israel

Under this policy, despots and dictators who depended more on the support of Mullahs than of civil society, were given support and military protection as long as they supported the West and opposed communists. Thus the concept of “He is a bastard but our bastard” took hold.

Israel became a lynchpin in this policy as its interests were irrevocably tied to that of the West. It had also shown a firm resolve and an ability to survive and defend itself in a hostile environment; ironically, it was also the only country in the region, which was then governed by socialists and ex-communists.

As with everything else, the Middle East could not remain unaffected by what happened in New York on September 11, 2001. The immediate effect might have been Palestinian children dancing in the streets of the West Bank but the Apple Cart was upset for ever. The United States did not admit then but realized that it could no longer remain immune to the seething anger against itself in the Arab world in particular and the Islamic world in general. It realized, too, that the two main sources of Anti-Americanism in the Arab world were its support of unpopular rulers and its support of Israel. Thus was added a fourth pillar to the earlier three pillars of the Middle East Policy of stability, uninterrupted oil supplies and unstinted support of Israel. This fourth pillar was Democracy.

The addition of this fourth pillar, namely Democracy, was however is not compatible with the earlier three pillars, at least in the short run. The U.S think tanks have recognise that free and fair elections in the Arab world would result in Pro-Islamic and Anti-American governments. They have also recognised that the Arab Anti-Americanism derives not so much from Islam as from the Arab-Israeli conflict and the plight of the Palestinians. A resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict thus becomes a pre-requisite for softening the Arab attitude towards America. To achieve such a resolution, the U.S has to be seen as more even-handed in its dealings on the Palestinian issue than it has been until now. This is why the U.S must drop its third pillar, unstinted support of Israel, if the fourth pillar is not to result in the establishment of Anti-American governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and the entire gulf region.

The way I see it, the days of the Israeli lobby’s gridlock over American foreign policy are over.