Opinion
An Arab Assessment of US Policy in the Middle East - Full Text
by Adib F. Farha

Full text of the speech delived at Harvard University's JFK School of Government on April 10, 2003

I am grateful to the JFK School of Government for inviting me to shed some light on how Arabs view US policy in the Middle East -- and to all of you for your presence here today. Indeed, the timing of this lecture could not have been more appropriate, coming one day after the fall of the regime in Baghdad when the US faces major decisions on its role in the world.
   
The ongoing war presumed that the coalition forces would be viewed by Iraqis as "liberators" and catalysts for democracy. Against a backdrop of two dozens years of tyranny by Saddam, this has been true to a large extent so far. But I am afraid it won't be long before this changes. The presumption was based on a misreading of facts that ignored or underestimated the suspicion of US schemes in the collective Arab mind as well as the minds of people across the globe. The ideologues behind this war were counting on the resentment of the Iraqis to the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein to offset Arab resentment to US policy in the Middle East. The final outcome will show that although Iraqis have suffered miserably from Saddam's reign of fear and firmly wished to rid their country of his rule, Arabs are equally firm in their mistrust of and contempt for US policy in the region.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if history repeated itself whereby developments in Iraq after the coalition finishes its job of replacing Saddam's tyrannical regime by a "coalition-friendly" US-dominated rule in Baghdad becomes analogous to developments in Lebanon after Israel ousted the PLO in 1982 and installed a friendly government in Beirut. Because of the resentment of the residents of south Lebanon to the excesses of the PLO between 1967 and 1982, local residents showered the invading Israeli troops with flowers and rice. However, once Israel had kicked out the PLO, the same people who had welcomed the Israelis became its staunchest enemies and put up a fierce resistance that eventually forced it to withdraw in May 2000. The excitement of getting rid of the PLO, which had set up a state within the state of Lebanon, quickly gave way to the historical resentment of Israel.

The resentment of US policy is not limited to the people of Iraq. It is widespread among most Arabs, including those who have great respect for American principles of freedom, justice, and respect for human rights and those who strive to emulate the so-called "American way of life". In fact, admirers of American values are perhaps the most vociferous critics of American policy in the Middle East. The root causes of their bitterness lie in what they see as a double standard wherein the US practices its noble values domestically but ignores them in its foreign policy. Crown Prince Abdullah, the de-facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, expressed the frustration of the many Arabs who have great respect for the United States very succinctly when he said a year or so ago, "It is difficult to be a friend of the US".

It is, regrettably, a little known fact to the average American that your values are no different than those of Muslim as well as Christian Arabs. The letter released on February 11, 2002 that was signed by 60 leading US intellectuals, most of whom are high powered academics who study ethics, religion and public policy at American universities and think tanks, entitled, "What We're Fighting For: A Letter from America", listed four principal values to which Americans adhere. The first was "the conviction that all persons possess innate human dignity as a birthright' based on the Founding Fathers' affirmation that it was "self-evident that all persons possess equal dignity". The second was the conviction that "universal moral truths exist and are accessible to all people". The third was the conviction that, "because our individual and collective access to truth is imperfect, most disagreements about values call for civility, openness to other views, and reasonable argument in pursuit of truth". Finally, the signatories cited "freedom of conscience and freedom of religion".

While this valuable document was published in the Arab press and became the subject of lengthy introspective discussions, the many thoughtful commentaries by Arab scholars in response went unheeded in the American press. In a nutshell, we saw no dissimilarity between the stated American values and ours. The combined Christian and Muslim Arab ethos holds the very same truths. Why then do Arabs feel such animosity toward US policy?

The simple answer is that Arabs feel that, when it comes to Middle East policy, the US does not apply these common values that we both hold so dearly. America is perceived to use double standards in its practiced policy regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular, and regional matters in general. What is good for the goose is not good for the gander.

Until 1956, the US was viewed as a friendly country by all Arabs. The commonality of values as well as interests represented a strong bond. The Wilson Doctrine had greatly inspired and impressed the Arabs, who saw in the US a beacon of democracy and a champion of human rights and fairness. Moreover, the noble US position under President Dwight Eisenhower who condemned the tripartite Israeli-British-French aggression against the Suez Canal and thus opposed direct colonialism had reinforced that bond.

It was only when then US Secretary of State John Foster Dulles blocked aid for Egypt to build the Aswan Dam, which was a critical project for Egypt social and economic development, while the USSR jumped on the opportunity and offered Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nasser the necessary funding that alliances started shifting. Technical advisers soon followed, then military and political support, and the rest is now history. This fateful shift has had regrettable results for the Arabs as well as the US and laid the foundation for growing anti-US sentiment.

With Nasser's swing toward the Eastern bloc, Israel presented itself as America's solid friend in the region and guardian of its interests. Since then, successive American administrations have gone to great lengths to support Israel, even as the latter continued to annex additional territory by occupation and while it has continued to treat Israeli Arabs as second class citizens. The questions that come to the Arab mind is, "What happened to the Founding Fathers' belief that "all persons possess equal dignity" or to the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Article 1, which states that "human beings are born free"?

When desperate Palestinians after decades of US acquiescence to Israel's occupation of their land, took up arms to reclaim their land and their dignity - and I am not referring here to suicide bombing of civilians that has been condemned by Arab political and religious leaders, the US repeatedly condemned their struggle as acts of terrorism. Yet when Israel practiced its policy of targeted killings, the US administration merely found it "regrettable".

While Israel is a self-proclaimed theocracy, the US administration repeatedly refers to it as the "only democracy in the Middle East". How, wonder the Arabs, can a theocracy be an exemplary democracy? And while the theocratic state of Israel discriminates between its first class Jewish citizens and its second class Christian and Muslim Arab citizens, the US condemns the lack of democracy in some Arab countries and pressures Arab regimes that incorporate religion into its constitution or their laws to disengage religion from state governance.

Yasser Arafat, hardly a model leader but nevertheless the elected president of the Palestinian Authority, is considered "irrelevant" by President Bush for failing to end so-called Palestinian terrorism although Israel has demolished all his police stations and all but wiped out his forces and rendered them incapable of any level of effectiveness. Yet Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who watched from a nearby building Israeli-allied militias butcher hundreds of innocent Lebanese and Palestinian men, women and children in the Sabra and Chatila districts of Beirut over the course of two days in the summer of 1982 while his forces were in total control of Beirut and was later found guilty of complicity in the massacre by Israel's own Kahane Commission in 1983 is proclaimed by President Bush as "a man of peace". Yet, the US administration insists that it is an honest broker in the regional conflict and expects Arabs to believe it!

Syria is reprimanded for hosting information offices of Palestinian resistance groups yet the US for many years allowed the IRA to collect funds under various disguises in American cities to support its terrorist activities. More recently, and under President Bush's simplistic doctrine of "with us or against us" that leaves no room for a third option, Syria has been reprimanded by the US and threatened for siding neither with the war on Iraq nor with Saddam Hussein.

The UN Security Council had as far back as 1967 called for the withdrawal of Israel from the territories it occupied after the so-called Six Day War and little tangible results have taken place. Rather than punishing Israel for its continued occupation, against the will of the international community, Israel remains the largest beneficiary of US financial aid and military support.

Although it was the United States that sponsored Security Council Resolution 425 in 1978 calling on Israel to withdraw "immediately and unconditionally" from territory it occupied in Southern Lebanon, the Israeli occupation stayed on for 22 years until Israel finally withdrew under the pressure of the Lebanese resistance, the US did little to ensure its enactment and merely repeated statements calling for respect of international resolutions while condemning acts of resistance by the Lebanese who were under occupation.

Yet when the Iraqi regime occupied oil-rich Kuwait in 1990 and a subsequent UN Security Council resolution called for Iraq's withdrawal, the US solidly backed the resolution and thankfully assembled a coalition of 31 countries to implement it. It put the lives of some of its young men and women at risk to do so and expediently got the job done. Can you blame the Arabs for wondering why the occupation of Kuwait deserved the risk of American lives while the occupation of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and Southern Lebanon went unabashed, other than the fact that Kuwait is an oil-producing country and its occupier was another Arab country while the occupier of Palestinian, Syrian, and Lebanese territories is Israel?

Which brings us to the current crisis in Iraq. Against this backdrop of continued blind support by the American government for Israel and disregard for Arab rights, it is hardly surprising that anti-American sentiment is on the rise and that US and allied troops were not welcomed as liberators. American moves have become suspect. Of course, it only exacerbated Arab suspicions when Secretary of State Colin Powell recently stated that among the US goals in the war on Iraq was to "reshape the region" to better serve US interests.

What started out after the horrible atrocities of 9/11 as a justified war against terrorism quickly and inexplicably shifted to a war against Iraq. In his recent book, Bob Woodward reported that at a meeting with his aides after 9/11, President Bush asked them what the next step should be. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld quickly responded, "We should attack Iraq". The reason, asked the President? "We already have the plans for it", Woodward quotes Rumsfeld's response to have been. Indeed, the Arab public is aware that the ideological team of Vice President Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliott Abrams, et. Al. had long planned this war and patiently awaited the right moment to implement their Domino Theory, wherein Iraq would be the first domino while its neighbors would follow.

But they had wrongly assumed that Iraq was akin to the former Berlin Wall, which had prevented the democracy-seeking Eastern Europeans from reaching their dreams. Once the wall fell, the rest indeed fell like pieces of domino. They assumed that the Arab masses were keen on replacing their leaders by ones that would be more American-leaning.

To the public, the stated reason for the assault on Iraq would one day be Iraq's alleged possession of weapons of mass destruction. Then the purpose would suddenly shift to an alleged and hitherto unproven link between the Iraqi regime with Ossama bin Laden. From that, it shifted into bringing about democracy in the Middle East. Then it changed again to regime change, an act that is construed by most countries to be in breach of the UN charter and the sovereign rights of nations.

The multiple and rapidly-shifting stated goals have only raised already existing Arab suspicions from the US further. The Arab mind has combined Powell's statement about reshaping the region and America's steady support of Israel to conclude that, whatever the real goal was, it certainly was not in the Arab interest.

Where the authors of the Domino Theory went wrong was that, if anything, the Arab masses were becoming increasingly agitated against perceived US bias and viewed their leaders to be too American-leaning and not the other way around. It is primarily the pro-American leaderships in the region that do not practice democracy. They rule countries where the population is increasingly upset by American policy and progressively more resentful of American support for their autocratic leaders.

Moreover, there is great resentment among Arabs for the notion of democracy imposed by a foreign power through B-52 bombers and Tomahawk missiles and it is met with great suspicion.

If democracy is to come to the Arab countries that are behind in this regard, and it should, it must rise up from the people living in those countries. Importing governments from exile or propping up cronies will only exacerbate the situation and have disastrous results. Needless to say, any notion of an interim foreign military government will have catastrophic repercussions, both for the US as well as for the Middle East region. Iraq is neither Germany nor Japan.

Countries that are sincerely interested in promoting democracy in the Middle East can help this noble cause by fostering economic and social development and prodding their allies to use their countries' resources toward that end. "Gentle persuasion" worked before and it can work again.

On the other hand, persistently offending the people of the region by what they view as blatant intervention in the internal affairs of their countries that is perceived to have imperial motives will indeed topple certain regimes in the end. It will bring about democracy. But the democratic regimes that will emerge in the process would be overwhelmed by fanatics and religious fundamentalists who will not necessarily further the cause of stability and the war on terrorism. If the hope is to bring about friendly governments who adhere to the common societal values we both cherish, the result would assuredly be the opposite.

There is no fundamental reason why Arabs and Americans should become enemies. We have a great deal more in common than meets the eye and most Arabs admire and respect the American way of life. We don't hate you, as President Bush suggested in the aftermath of the tragic events of 9/11 nor do we hate your way of life. We want very much to be friends, but we also want to reclaim our land, our dignity, and our pride. The only obstacle to renewed friendship has been the blind bias of the successive American administrations for Israel at the expense of Arab rights. This regrettable constant in US policy is pushing some Arabs to become anti-American and fueling fanaticism.

An even-handed policy founded on traditional American values and respect for international legitimacy is all the Arabs ask of the US. It is also all it would take to win back their hearts and minds.

This is the third of three speeches by Adib F. Farha, a member of Lebanon’s Higher Media Council,  delivered recently at Harvard University. Lebanonwire published the full text of first two speeches on April 21 and 23. Mr. Farha can be reached at adibfarha@yahoo.com.

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