@@ U.S. is spreading something, all right @@
- From: "Arash" <A7000@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2006 18:35:08 -0500
International Herald Tribune
January 31, 2006
The Gap Between U.S. Rhetoric and Reality
By Anatol Lieven
The victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections ought to lead to a fundamental
rethinking of U.S. strategy in the Middle East, especially since it follows electoral
successes for Islamist parties in Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.
The most important lesson of the elections is that the United States cannot afford to
use the rhetoric of spreading democracy as an excuse for avoiding dealing with
pressing national grievances and wishes. If the United States pursues or supports
policies that are detested by a majority of ordinary people, then these people will
react accordingly if they are given a chance to vote.
Above all, U.S. policy makers must understand that other peoples have their own
national pride and national interests, which they expect their governments and
representatives to defend. In Russia in the 1990s, the liberals helped to destroy
their electoral chances by giving Russian voters the impression that they put
deference to American wishes above the interests of Russia.
Today, Americans who want to support liberal revolution in Iran as a way of making
Iran more responsive to U.S. and Israeli demands are making the same mistake.
And in order to understand this, it is hardly necessary to study Russia or Iran. In
the United States, if a political party were supported by a foreign country, and gave
the impression of serving that country's interests, would it stand any chance of
being elected to anything?
But in truth, the present centrality of the "democratization" idea to administration
rhetoric does not come from any study of the Middle East, or of reality in general.
Rather, the Bush administration has fallen back on this rhetoric in part because all
other paths and justifications have failed or been rejected. The administration
desperately needed some big vision that would give the American people the impression
of a plan for the war on terror, promising something beyond tighter domestic security
and endless military operations.
Thus spreading democracy was always one of the arguments used for the Iraq war, but
it only became the central one after the failure to find the promised weapons of mass
destruction. As a result of the Iraqi quagmire, the language of preventive war and
military intervention, so prevalent in the administration's National Security
Strategy of 2002, has also become obviously empty, requiring a new central theme for
the forthcoming security strategy of 2006.
The road map toward a final settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been
shelved, and Bush has admitted that his promise to create an independent Palestinian
state by the end of his second term has been abandoned. Building Palestinian
democracy therefore became in effect a diversion from a failure or refusal to make
progress on addressing real Palestinian grievances.
Finally, demands for democratic regime change in Iran have been used as a way of
avoiding making the very painful U.S. concessions that will be necessary if Iran's
nuclear program is to be stopped by diplomatic means. These will have to involve U.S.
security guarantees to Iran, a leading place for Iran in any Middle Eastern security
order, a role for Iran in shaping the future of both Afghanistan and Iraq, diplomatic
recognition and open trade and investment. Any Iranian government would have to
demand all this in return for giving up the future possibility of a nuclear
deterrent.
Given the mixture of extremism and chaos in the new Iranian government, such a deal
may now be impossible as long as the popularly elected President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
remains in office. But as Flynt Leverett, a former director for Middle East affairs
at the National Security Council, has revealed, in 2003 the administration received a
credible Iranian offer of comprehensive negotiations, which it brusquely rejected.
Democratic Party leaders, too, have failed utterly to support a diplomatic
alternative to the failed strategy of the Bush administration, partly because they
are too scared to confront the bitter anger among powerful groups in the United
States that would attend any radical change of U.S. policy toward Iran.
The administration has also been able to neutralize domestic opposition to its
"strategy" because its rhetoric appeals to a deep American belief in the U.S. duty to
spread democracy and freedom. This is indeed in itself a noble aspiration, and has
been until recently the source of much of U.S. moral authority in the world.
But the Bush administration's combination of preaching human rights with torture, of
preaching democracy to Muslims with contempt for the views of those same Muslims, has
not helped either the spread of democracy or U.S. interests but badly damaged both.
In fact, the distance between Bush administration rhetoric and observable reality in
some areas is beginning to look almost reminiscent of Soviet Communism. And as in the
Soviet Union, this gap is also becoming more and more apparent to the rest of the
world.
* Anatol Lieven, a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation
(http://www.newamerica.net), Washington, is the author of ''America Right or Wrong:
An Anatomy of American Nationalism''
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/019530005X).
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0131-21.htm
.
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