Monday, February 07, 2011

America's future role in the Middle East


"There are forces at work in any society, and particularly one that is facing these kinds of challenges, that will try to derail or overtake the process to pursue their own specific agenda.... [That is] why I think it is important to support the transition process announced by the Egyptian government, actually headed by now Vice-President Omar Suleiman." - Hillary Clinton, US Secretary of State

When will Washington learn that you cannot simultaneously proclaim your commitment to democracy and freedom and then insist on dictating who is allowed to win? - Stephen Walt

It's worth remembering what has led to the rise of Islamic extremism and anti-American rage in the Middle East. Arabs see Washington as having supported brutal dictatorships that suppress their people. They believe that it ignored this suppression as long as the regimes toed the line on American foreign policy. If Washington is now perceived as brokering a deal that keeps a military dictatorship in power in Egypt, de jure or de facto, the result will be deep disappointment and frustration on the streets of Cairo. Over time, it will make opposition to the regime and to the United States more hard-line, more religious and more violent. - Fareed Zakaria

"In this world, it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, but to be a friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger
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It would appear that not only is Israel the Middle East's sole vibrant democracy, the United States is sparing no effort, leaving no stone unturned, to keep it that way.

Seeing how the US administration is handling the grassroots rebellion in Egypt (it is much too early to call it a "revolution"),  it would appear that except for supporting  the region's necklace of military dictatorships and their mukhabarat state security forces, the USA has no role in the Middle East other than  to assist Israel in killing people and blowing things up.

American pronouncements about democracy, its institutions and the rule of law sound more and more like the following video:
At this point the conflict of interests between America's realpolitik-geopolitical-superpower necessity to dominate and control the world's access to the oil reserves of the Middle East and the purely domestic, but no less  plumbean, imperative to defend à outrance Israel's right to maintain an atomic-apartheid, Club Mediterranee in the midst of such spectacular and oil-soaked misery, seemingly has the United States paralyzed in its hypocrisy. DS

1 comment:

stunted said...

The US role in the Middle East is that of a client state of Israel and will remain so, given MuBarak Obama's lecturing Egyptians on the necessity of maintaining the 30 year peace accord with Israel as his immediate response to their astounding, peaceful overthrow of Hosni Mubarak. The mere fact that Obama could not simply congratulate the Egyptian people on their amazing achievement, or express humble stupefaction in regards to their non-violent insistence to be heard without sullying his response with the standard US pro-Israeli line says nothing is to be expected from the US in relation to "peace" in the Middle East. Would that he practiced a tad of the non-violent force for change that he gave lip-service to in his shallow response to Egypt's huge accomplishment (regardless of how it will now play out) in his approach to Afghanistan. For American media, the Egyptian uprising was almost soley presented through an Israeli lens and the usual fear-mongering about radical Islam takeover. It seems, as someone pointed out, that for Americans to support democracy, we have to bring it through military intervention; brown people can't do it on their own. Their is no role for a country so lost in its own delusions or that of its client state, Israel.