Foreign Policy In Focus

Cross-posted from Foreign Policy in Focus sister publication Right Web.

As revolutions erupted across Tunisia and Egypt, one of the first questions that arose in the West was the effect of the newly-energized Arab democratic movements on the state of Israel. The Washington establishment has generally accepted the view — promoted by the likes of Dennis Ross and Elliott Abrams — that the uprisings were solely based on domestic concerns and had no relation whatsoever to Israel or the United States. However, other observers who carefully monitored the protestors have gleaned a strong and persistent anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian position throughout the regional upheavals. There can be no question that the Arab Spring will have a considerable impact on Israeli regional calculations, including the viability of the occupation.

While the ultimate impact of these developments will be difficult to determine for some time to come, one question in particular must be addressed to frame the potential long-term effects of the Arab revolutions on Middle East peace: what do these revolutions mean for Palestine? By and large, the effect on Israel is manifested mostly by the changing dynamic of its relationship to Palestinians, which formed the basis of Israeli policy toward its allied neighbor states of Jordan and Egypt, and its enmity to Syria. If the Arab revolutions empower Palestinians to build a mass movement for independence, and if the new Arab governments push Israel’s neighbors to play a more active role in the Palestinian struggle, then Israeli regional hegemony may well be significantly compromised.

Visit Right Web to read Is It Palestine's Turn? in its entirety.

(Pictured: U.S. embassy outside Tunis.)

A bit of disconnected, but not irrelevant, history

Many years ago – 43 to be exact – Phil Jones and I, both Peace Corps volunteers stationed in Tunis at the time, walked into a reception in the garden of the U.S. embassy there where Hubert Humphrey was doing his best to give a pro-Vietnam War pep talk, trying to explain how the February 1968 Tet Offensive wasn't a U.S. military setback despite Walter Cronkite's suggestion on national television that indeed it was.

As Humphrey launched into his remarks, Jones and I, somewhat nervous and uncertain as to our impending fate, took out our anti-war posters from under our sports coats and held them high in the air. Humphrey immediately cancelled the talk and left the embassy as did everyone else. Left alone in the garden we looked at each other, placed our posters in an orange tree there in the embassy garden and casually left.

Much later I learned the purpose of Humphrey's trip was to canvas European and North African allies as to the political advisability of the United States using nuclear weapons against the Vietnamese.

So much for Hubert Humphrey as the "gentle warrior" as some anti-war liberals once described him.

No one, including Tunisia's President Habib Bourguiba, supported a U.S. nuclear escalation. Many warned that if the United States proceeded in that direction, that their own political futures might be jeopardized. Soon thereafter, hamstrung on all sides, Lyndon Johnson announced he would not run for another term of the presidency.

So much for nuking Vietnam although 'conventional' weapons – napalm, agent orange, phosphorous and cluster proved that with modern weaponry effects as devastating can be achieved without triggering much moral outrage.

At the time, the U.S. embassy, then one of the largest buildings in Tunis, sat on Avenue de la Liberte, close to downtown. We Peace Corps volunteers didn't visit the embassy often, but it had a snack bar/restaurant and especially during the first few months when I was still dreaming of cheeseburgers, I did indulge. As those dreams faded and a taste for Tunisian food grew – still love the stuff – my embassy visits, other than the Jones-Prince foray, pretty much ceased.

During the June 1967 Middle East War, the Tunisian military was out on the streets in force (as were enormous crowds in solidarity with the Arab cause). Soldiers with bayoneted rifles stood every 25 feet or so. I was told – never able to confirm or deny – that their rifles lacked ammunition and that the ammunition was instead stored for safe keeping (from whom?) in the very same U.S. embassy. Rumor for sure, but one that suggested the growing influence of the United States in Tunisian affairs, welcomed to a certain extent by the then President Habib Bourguiba as a counterweight to French diplomatic clout, still strong some ten years after Tunisian independence.

Much later, in 2002, just after 9-11, the U.S. embassy moved from Ave. de la Liberte, not far from the center of the city, to a large complex in La Goulette, a Tunis suburb. A sprawling building with very much of a post 9-11 embassy-bunker appearance, it occupies a vast space that, besides the current ambassador, Gordon Gray, and his staff, also houses the offices of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Middle East Partnership Initiative the latter being little more than a way to entice Middle East nations to accept World Bank and IMF structural adjustment programs by offering them a few pennies of aid in return – short term gain, long term crisis.

From this description alone, one gets a sense of its political significance and influence in both the country and the region. If not as extensive as the U.S. embassy complex in Baghdad, than, nothing less than a city within the city, the Tunis embassy is imposing enough, a modern version of a crusader castle.

The U.S. Middle East strategy: buying time

Given its array of Crusader-like castle-embassies throughout the Middle East equipped with super duper modern communication systems, stuffed with various intelligence agency personnel both on the ground and in the air, with the inordinate amount of money and energy spent on 'protecting U.S. interests' (code for insuring the security of oil transit routes) it is logical to believe that the United States was well prepared, 'in the know' about the situation on the ground in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan and that they somehow anticipated the uprisings that the world is witnessing.

Add to this the fact that the signs of the political explosion which began in Tunisia a bare six months ago and has now spread region-wide have been long in the making:

• Long before WikiLeaks, 13 years ago, a U.S. ambassador to Tunisia warned of the dangers of spiraling unemployment rates, particularly youth unemployment.
• A series of reports – the Arab Human Development Reports – early in the millennium spoke of the dangers of growing youth unemployment, corruption and political repression. The fifth of these reports, published as recently as 2009, raised the same concerns in more worried and urgent language as does the 2010 version. These voices went essentially unheeded.
• A number of scholars, among them Georgetown's  Stephen Juan King and CCNY's David Harvey, have, in their work documented the erosive effect of World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs on Middle Eastern economies. Others – Chalmers Johnson, Tom Engelhardt, Michael Schwartz, Immanuel Wallerstein – have warned that U.S. Middle East policy, with its support of regional dictators, is unsustainable.

But who in this or former White Houses listens to academics, especially if their knowledge/insights fly in the face of Washington policy?

It happens only during those rare moments when the carefully contrived Washington consensus collapses, as it has now in Tunisia and Egypt, that these more critical voices are, temporarily heard before being unceremoniously shipped back to their former academic anonymity.

Obama administration: couldn't read the political map

Truth of the matter is that the Obama Administration was essentially blind-sided by the protest wave and is in deep trouble. Its main goal in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan and wherever else protests break out is in all cases: buying time:

• buying time to limit damage to U.S. strategic and economic interests (centering mostly around regional oil and gas flows),
• buying time to find suitable replacements for the regional dictators Washington has long backed,
• buying time to find figures who meet those increasing difficult standards – having mass appeal on the one hand, but willing to continue its military ties with Washington and not renege on World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs which have caused so much economic damage throughout the region.

It's not that the Obama Administration is unaware of the underlying socio-economic structural crisis which has plagued the entire region for some time now. Rather, it simply didn't know how to read the map or interpret events.

The Washington Media Group decides late in the game it can no longer put make-up on Ben Ali's political corpse

Instead Washington glossed over the simmering social storm about to break and magnified Tunisa's achievements while systematically playing down its growing failures. There seemed to be a consensus in Washington (and in Paris) not to see what was going on under the surface. In Tunisia's case, this was achieved until recently, with a little help from a Washington public relations firm, the Washington Media Group.

The Washington Media Group, which had to have known about the human rights violations in Tunisia, cancelled its contract with Tunisia on January 6, 2011. A question of principle or just a case of covering their butts?

Tunisia's 'positive p.r.' in Washington gravitated around two themes: Tunisia's women's rights policies (somewhat exaggerated by the way – it is something less than equal rights) impressed U.S. legislators. The more secular nature of the regime (also somewhat overstated) played well to American audiences inoculated since September 11, 2001 (and probably before) with the great fear of radical Islamic fundamentalism.

It never seemed to occur to U.S. policy makers that secular regimes, even one that to a certain degree supports women's rights, can be otherwise pervasively oppressive. But then, that just doesn't fit the State Department's cookie-cutter radical fundamentalist model. So how bad could it be?

Nor has the Washington establishment provided much of anything in the way of offering solutions to the crisis. Pretty impressive ostrich approach all in all. It is scurrying to put together an approach to the changes sweeping the region that in many fundamental ways were triggered or exacerbated by U.S. security and economic policies, to mention two specifically – the war on terrorism and U.S.-encouraged World Bank and IMF structural adjustment policies.

Even as the Obama Administration suddenly tries to distance itself from Mubarak, and nudge him from power, the fact remains: he was the U.S. man in the Middle East par excellence.

It is not only his regime which has been discredited, but 32 years of U.S. support of that regime. Don't think that the people on the streets of cities all over Egypt are unaware of this fact.

3. From Sidi Bouzid to Tunis and Sfax, from Ma'ad to Cairo and Alexandria

As the revolt moved east from the streets of Sidi Bouzid, Sfax and Tunis in Tunisia to Ma'ad, Alexandria and Cairo, its center of gravity shifted to the very edge of the Middle East oil producing region. And now the world's military heavies weigh in:

• NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen suggests that the current Arab revolt puts both the world economy and the world order 'at stake'. (This is a bit of an overstatement, suggesting the degree to which NATO was 'ambushed' by events.)
• Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mike Mullen related that due to the events in Egypt the U.S. Army has been 'put on alert', "and also that we've got our military ready, should any kind of response or support be required," he said. "That isn't the case right now, but I'm very focused on that."

The stakes for the United States (and Israel) in Egypt are considerably higher than in Tunisia. For Washington Ben Ali is expendable. The Obama Administration did little to help him in 'his moment of need.' Indeed there are some reports (in the French press) that the Tunisian Chief of Staff Ammar was in telephone contact with the head of AFRICOM, U.S. General William Ward, at a rather sensitive moment in the Tunisian crisis.

But Egypt is an entirely different matter. If Tunisia got $20 million in military aid over the course of Ben Ali's time in power, Mubarek has received $2 billion annually since 1979 – most of that for military purposes. Martin Indyk, former U.S. ambassador to Israel, now the Brookings Institute Vice President ,is certainly right to underline the many services that Mubarek has provided U.S. strategic interests in the region.

Key elements of the strategic relationship include:

• keeping the Suez Canal open and safe for oil tankers from the Persian Gulf heading for Europe (and the Americas),
• assuring the flow of oil through oil pipelines from the Red Sea to the Mediterranean through Egypt,
• cooperating with Israel on the blockade of Gaza,
• actively supporting the United States in the war on terrorism, participating in extraordinary rendition.

in making peace with Israel at Camp David in 1978, Egypt essentially permitted the Israel's to tighten their grip over the West Bank and Gaza, and concentrate their military ambitions elsewhere – Lebanon, and perhaps sometime in the future, Iran.

Finally, although it is sometimes forgotten, Egypt is not only Israel's neighbor, it is also Saudi Arabia's. Mubarak may not yet have joined Zine Ben Ali in Jeddah (Saudi Arabia) but Aqaba, where he seems to be hiding out at the moment, is a five minute walk into Saudi territory. While both the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea separate Egypt and Saudi Arabia, the distances (especially across the Gulf of Aqaba) are minimal, the point here being that the kind of revolt taking place in Egypt will invariably have echoes in Saudi.

Right now, without much of a roadmap, the main U.S. goals are to buy time to insure damage control, to slow the processes of change everywhere in the region, hoping to minimize the damage to U.S. strategic interests (meaning specifically its control of the region's energy resources).

None of the Arab Revolts of 2011 have played themselves out as yet. So it will be a while before the Obama Administration can assess the damage to its interests: a setback or a debacle?

Rob Prince is the publisher of the Colorado Progressive Jewish News.

(Cross-posted from FireDogLake.)

The death throes of the Mubarak regime in Egypt signal a new level of crisis for a U.S. Middle East strategy that has shown itself over and over again in recent years to be based on nothing more than the illusion of power. The incipient loss of the U.S. client regime in Egypt is an obvious moment for a fundamental adjustment in that strategy.

But those moments have been coming with increasing regularity in recent years, and the U.S. national security bureaucracy has shown itself to be remarkably resistant to giving it up. The troubled history of that strategy suggests that it is an expression of some powerful political forces at work in this society, as former NSC official Gary Sick hinted in a commentary on the crisis.

Ever since the Islamic Republic of Iran was established in 1979, every U.S. administration has operated on the assumption that the United States, with Israel and Egypt as key client states, occupies a power position in the Middle East that allows it to pursue an aggressive strategy of unrelenting pressure on all those “rogue” regimes and parties in the region which have resisted dominance by the U.S.-Israeli tandem: Iran, Iraq, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq was only the most extreme expression of that broader strategic concept. It assumed that the United States and Israel could establish pro-Western regime in Iraq as the base from which it would press for the elimination of resistance from any of their remaining adversaries in the region.

But since that more aggressive version of the strategy was launched, the illusory nature of the regional dominance strategy has been laid bare in one country after another.

• The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq merely empowered Shi’a forces to form a regime whose geostrategic interests are far closer to Iran than to the United States;
• The U.S.-encouraged Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 only strengthened the position of Hezbollah as the largest, most popular and most disciplined political-military force in the country, leading ultimately the Hezbollah-backed government now being formed.
• Israeli and U.S. threats to attack Iran, Hezbollah and Syria since 2006 brought an even more massive influx of rockets and missiles into Lebanon and Syria which now appears to deter Israeli aggressiveness toward its adversaries for the first time.
• U.S.-Israeli efforts to create a client Palestinian entity and crush Hamas through the siege of Gaza has backfired, strengthening the Hamas claim to be the only viable Palestinian entity.
• The U.S. insistence on demonstrating the effectiveness of its military power in Afghanistan has only revealed the inability of the U.S. military to master the Afghan insurgency.

And now the Mubarak regime is in its final days. As one talking head after another has pointed out in recent days, it has been the lynchpin of the U.S. strategy. The main function of the U.S. client state relationship with Egypt was to allow Israel to avoid coming to terms with Palestinian demands.

The costs of the illusory quest for dominance in the Middle East have been incalculable. By continuing to support Israeli extremist refusal to seek a peaceful settlement, trying to prop up Arab authoritarian regimes that are friendly with Israel and seeking to project military power in the region through both airbases in the Gulf States and a semi-permanent bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, the strategy has assiduously built up long-term antagonism toward the United States and pushed many throughout the Islamic world to sympathize with Al Qaeda-style jihadism. It has also fed Sunni-Shi’a tensions in the region and created a crisis over Iran’s nuclear program.

Although this is clearly the time to scrap that Middle East strategy, the nature of U.S. national security policymaking poses formidable obstacles to such an adjustment Bureaucrats and bureaucracies always want to hold on to policies and programs that have given them power and prestige, even if those policies and programs have been costly failures. Above all, in fact, they want to avoid having to admit the failure and the costs involved. So they go on defending and pursuing strategies long after the costs and failure have become clear.

An historical parallel to the present strategy in the Middle East is the Cold War strategy in East Asia, including the policy of surrounding, isolating and pressuring the Communist Chinese regime. As documented in my own history of the U.S. path to war in Vietnam, Perils of Dominance, the national security bureaucracy was so committed to that strategy that it resisted any alternative to war in South Vietnam in 1964-65, because it believed the loss of South Vietnam would mean the end of Cold War strategy, with its military alliances, client regimes and network of military bases surrounding China. It was only during the Nixon administration that the White House wrested control of national security policy from the bureaucracy sufficiently to scrap that Cold War strategy in East Asia and reach an historic accommodation with China.

The present strategic crisis can only be resolved by a similar political decision to reach another historical accommodation – this time with the “resistance bloc” in the Middle East. Despite the demonization of Iran and the rest of the “resistance bloc”, their interests on the primary issue of al Qaeda-like global terrorism have long been more aligned with the objective security interests of the United States than those of some regimes with which the United States has been allied (e.g., Saudi Arabia and Pakistan).

Scrapping the failed strategy in favor of an historic accommodation in the region would:

• reduce the Sunni-Shi’a geopolitical tensions in the region by supporting a new Iran-Egypt relationship;
• force Israel to reconsider its refusal to enter into real negotiations on a Palestinian settlement;
• reduce the level of antagonism toward the United States in the Islamic world and
• create a new opportunity for agreement between the United States and Iran that could resolve the nuclear issue.

It will be far more difficult, however, for the United States to make this strategic adjustment than it was for Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger to secretly set in motion their accommodation with China. Unconditional support for Israel, the search for client states and determination to project military power into the Middle East, which are central to the failed strategy, have long reflected the interests of the two most powerful domestic U.S. political power blocs bearing on national security policy: the pro-Israel bloc and the militarist bloc. Whereas Nixon and Kissinger were not immobilized by fealty to any such power bloc, both the pro-Israel and militarist power blocs now dominate both parties in the White House as well as in Congress.

One looks in vain for a political force in this country that is free to press for fundamental change in Middle East strategy. And without a push for such a change from outside, we face the distinct possibility of a national security bureaucracy and White House continuing to deny the strategy’s utter failure and disastrous consequences.

(Pictured: Denver protesters.) 

It is not just the governments of different Arab countries that are in crisis as the media would have us believe. U.S. and European Middle East Policy is also suffering from the events. For Washington, London, Paris and Berlin, the current upsurge of region-wide protests in the Middle East is something between a setback and a debacle, the extent of which remains to be seen.

And right now the Obama Administration is scrambling to scratch together a policy to keep up with events, that change daily. 

Protests that began in Tunisia with the immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, a university graduate reduced to selling fruit and vegetables in Tunisia's interior city of Sidi Bouzid, have now spread like wildfire throughout the Middle East.

As I write:

• Demonstrations are taking place for the third consecutive Friday in Jordan demanding the prime minister, Samir Rafai to step down; a slogan emerging from the street is "Rafai go away; prices are on fire and so are the Jordanians."
• In Yemen's capitol, Sana'a, for the second time in a week thousands are protesting against President Ali Abdullah Saleh, demanding an end to his rule of three decades.
• And in Egypt, the government of Hosni Mubarek has called out the army to quell angry demonstrations that the New York Times describes in a headline as 'a fury that has smoldered beneath the surface for decades. Building on the unprecedented Tunisian protest movement, Egyptians are calling for Mubarek's removal from power; they are also opposed to his son taking over the presidency in his stead. Some news reports suggest that already thousands of people have been arrested. 
• In Algeria and Libya protests erupted targeting socio-economic conditions – promises for public housing made a long time ago.
• There were even protests in Saudi Arabia against the presence of deposed Tunisian president Zine Ben Ali and his wife Leila Trabelsi. 

Obama rides…and tries to shape the democratic wave

In the past few days, U.S. President Barack Obama has made several statements praising the Tunisian democratic upsurge, including a few sentences in his state of the union message, giving the impression that the protests are in line with calls for greater democratization throughout the region made over the past ten years from different U.S. administrations.

Tonight (Friday, January 28), he continued along these lines making remarks suggesting that the U.S. supports the democratic wave and making mild criticisms of Egypt's president Hosni Mubarek.

But one senses an American malaise and the mood in Washington is far from joyous as this 'democratic wave' extends throughout the region. Whatever Obama's public pronouncements, under the surface, it is not just Middle Eastern geriatric authoritarian regional leaders who are nervous, but policy makers in Washington DC as well.

Tunisia, Egypt, a setback for U.S. foreign policy

While many here in the United States greeted Obama's blessing of the Tunisian events as evidence of the administration's backing for democratic change, actually, the Tunisian protests represent nothing short of a setback for U.S. foreign security and economic policy.

His Tunisia remarks could be interpreted as little more than Obama's Mayaguez speech, a form of 'damage control', his attempt to spin economic and political rejection of U.S. policies into some kind of victory. Facing defeat, declare victory and move on as fast as possible. Blame it on our geriatric Middle East allies rather than on policies that emanate from Washington. One notes, to date, very little sense of self criticism of Washington's partial responsibility for the current mess.

What is it in U.S. foreign policy that is being rejected from Tunis to San'aa that to date the U.S. media tends to skirt? 

• Economically, the whole region is rejecting the results of nearly 30 years of U.S. supported World Bank/IMF structural adjustment programs that have not produced growth but social polarization, growing impoverishment, bankruptcy of domestic economic enterprises and now higher prices for basic goods. It was rather amusing and pathetic to see both Ben Ali in Tunisia and now Mubarek in Egypt offering their people 'reverse structural adjustment policies' (re-instituting subsidies on basic foods, government jobs programs) in an effort to retain power.
• While singing democracy's song, U.S. policy in the Middle East as in fact supported authoritarian regimes and autocracy, and has done so consistently since World War II. It is only changing gears now, ever so gingerly, due to unprecedented mass pressure from below, that it has always essentially ignored or downplayed.
• The United States has long opposed all manifestations of Arab Nationalism, which it first mistakenly interpreted as “pro-Communist” and now confuses with radical Islamic fundamentalism.
• Because its analysis of the crisis in the region is off base – exaggerating the breadth of Islamic fundamentalism – the United States did not see or appreciate either the scope or nature of the crisis until Washington got hit square in the face with it.
• The United States anticipated an Islamic fundamentalist-led uprising that would call for the institution of shari'a. This Washington was preparing to crush with the aid of the same local allies it is now criticizing and abandoning left and right. Instead it is facing essentially secular movements against high unemployment, inflation, corruption and repression.
• The United States has ignored, almost completely, or written off  as irrelevant those few critical voices here in the United States and elsewhere who 'saw what was coming' and now Washington is paying the price. 

Real change or makeup on a corpse?

Obama's support for the democratic upsurge cannot wipe away with yet another fine speech that has no teeth 65 years of a policy that went in the opposite direction and that contributed greatly to the crisis that has exploded in its face.

The path now taken appears to one of damage control. Obama has decided simply to face reality – to ride the democratic wave sweeping the region but at the same time try to maintain U.S. strategic and economic interests in the region. Change might be in the offing, but perhaps the changes can be tailored to suit U.S. policy. That appears to be the approach taken in Tunisia, and it seems also now in Egypt. 

But is it supporting the kind of deep-going needed changes that can lead to both greater development and more democracy…or rather is simply an exercise of putting make up on the corpse that has been 65 years of post World War II foreign policy?

Rob Prince is the publisher of the Colorado Progressive Jewish News.

For over sixty years, the U.S. and the West wanted stability in the Middle East while dividing and conquering the area. They installed and supported puppets, despots,  and corrupt and totalitarian regimes as long as they did our bidding. The West had no plans to bring freedom and democracy to Middle Eastern countries. Granting sovereignty to Middle Eastern countries was furthest from the minds of Western leaders.

The immolation of a street merchant December 28 last year brought Tunisia to the front of the line of Arab countries trying to break free. Now people around the Arab world are lighting fires to the powder keg of Middle Eastern misery: abject poverty, corruption, and violation of rudimentary elements of human rights.

The brush fire spread to Egypt, Jordan, Algeria and Yemen with thousands of young and old demonstrators, not belonging to any specific group, demanding the ouster of their corrupt regimes. In Jordan, the demonstrators demanded that the Prime Minister step down. In Yemen, the demonstrators demanded the ouster of the corrupt President ruling the country for three decades. 

Egypt, the center of gravity for Arabs, has had the most vociferous demonstrations. In cities across Egypt, Egyptians are demanding the ouster of Hosni Mubarak – their ruthless ruler for three decades. Mubarak’s answer was to send his goons of security forces to intimidate the demonstrators without success. Mubarak’s final gambit was to appoint former top military professionals and loyal supporters such as Omar Suleiman as Vice-President. Suleiman’s brutality as the former head of security services known for the torture and rape of political prisoners helped to spawn large numbers of al-Qaeda leadership.

As an Arab-American raised in Middle East, I was always baffled by America’s claim of being the beacon of freedom and democracy while consistently supporting regimes in the Middle East headed by kings and dictators who killed, imprisoned, starved, tortured and on occasion raped their people in order to stay in power. Unfortunately, this policy remains the same today. The American people are ill-informed about the Middle East because of scant and biased reporting. So, it is not surprising that some of the mainstream media is surprised at the events in Middle East. At present, our media portrays the U.S. policy as balancing stability and support of corrupt regimes with instituting some reforms. But we need to recognize the need for true change in these regimes.

For decades, the pundits in America belittled the Arab streets’ reaction to political events. But, they are now silent since they never understood or did not want to understand the extent of oppression the Arab people are under with our active support. We gave these regimes massive military hardware; we trained their security services; and we provided them with intelligence information to suppress their people and remain in power. Today we are doing the same thing. If the U.S. policy towards Middle Eastern countries truly is changing, we need to have overt and covert operations congruent in goals and practice. For decades, the Arab streets were aware of our support of their regimes, and have held us complicit. This is the root of anti-American sentiment. We are reaping the results of seeds we planted long ago.

The Obama administration’s policy towards Middle East and Muslims in general has been slightly better than Bush’s policies in tone and substance since Obama’s speech at Cairo University in 2009. Secretary Clinton’s first reactions to the event in Egypt were muted and tilted towards stability. She shifted her rhetoric slowly to acknowledge the struggle of the Egyptian people and on Sunday (1-30-11) talk shows she actually admitted the need for a plan to “transition to a democratic regime.” President Obama gave mild support and later on a YouTube interview Mr. Obama’s position became more assertive as the events unfolded. The least helpful and inappropriate comment came from Vice-President Biden claiming that Mubarak is not a dictator. The Egyptian demonstrators are now demanding that the White House condemn Mubarak.

Our policies towards the Middle East are shaped by strategic needs, oil, and support for our friendly countries – primarily Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. After 9/11, our rhetoric and actions became even more abhorrent, as we labeled any Arab not in agreement with our policies in the Middle East as terrorists, in order to mute free-flowing discussions regarding our policies in the region. Our policy since 9/11 has added the requirement of collaboration with us against the terrorists as a litmus test to the strength of our relationship. Thus, regimes that are helping us weed out the terrorists receive strong support from us to help stabilize and remain in power by covert and overt means. Our policy is contradictory. The mere support of these corrupt regimes creates terrorists against the United States. Somehow we think if we perform these activities covertly and lie about it, the Arab people would not know about it. Of course, the unconditional U.S. support of Israel towards the Palestinians adds another complicating and negative dimension.

Our policy towards the Middle East should take a 180 degree turn. We should support, without any qualifications, the Arab people’s yearning for freedom and democracy. We should not support the corrupt regimes regardless of the short-range benefits. In the short run, we may not get every free Arab country’s friendship but in the long run we will get their friendship and will serve our strategic goals. For example, we react negatively to the Hezbollah-supported newly designated Prime Minister but in the long run we plant the seed of respect to the people of Lebanon to work out their differences. More importantly, the policy of supporting the people is the right policy consistent with our American values. 

The time for mere reforms in the Middle East has past. The choice is between lack of freedom and democracy, police-state, torture and rape on one side and the respect of human values that encompass freedom, democracy and sovereignty on the other. The U.S. has one choice to make of supporting the inevitable rise of the people for self-government. The U.S. must change its policy for our sake and the sake of the Middle East and more importantly it must be on the right side of history. The revolution may not succeed, or may get co-opted, or it may fail today but surely will succeed tomorrow.