22 - 28 February 2001
Issue No.522
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 22 - 28 February 2001 Issue No.522 |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Cowboy politics
The United States gave itself a bad name yet again when Bush's new administration foolishly rushed to resume air raids on Iraq, thereby damaging US relations with the majority of the Arab world. The US, furthermore, was not content with routine operations over the area demarcated by the air embargo; it was necessary to go beyond this area, hitting some civilians and, in the process, defying millions of Arabs and others who see these raids as unjustified and criminal assaults on the Iraqi people.
Before coordinating their agenda or considering their priorities, Bush and his advisers were fixated on a single idea that, of all the issues at hand, monopolised their attention: the necessity of putting the Iraqi regime back in its place (that of the criminal), reviving the Iraqi opposition in order to get rid of Saddam, and forcing him to accept international observers. This evidently is the greatest threat posed to the Middle East, greater in magnitude than the systematic oppression of Palestinians, and daily bombings of Palestinian civilians at the hands of Sharon's new terrorist regime in Israel.
This abrupt act of aggression was a cold shower to those who were optimistic about Bush. These raids on Baghdad are a message not to the Iraqi regime, as Bush claims, but to Arab leaders at large. Timed to precede the Arab summit in March, the bombs have landed in a bleak atmosphere resulting from the failure of the peace process and the exhausting negotiations that continued for years, to no avail. In Israel, meanwhile, a war government has been formed to confront the crisis.
One would have expected the next Arab summit in Amman to witness the return of Iraq, with more vitality, to Arab ranks, with a view to resolving inter-Arab differences as far as possible and adopting a unified policy on the explosive conditions in the occupied territories. These developments would not have satisfied Washington at a time when dissatisfaction with American-British presence in the Gulf had reached such levels that it gave rise to unwarranted terrorist bombings in the most conservative Gulf societies.
Washington is perfectly aware of the fact that most Arab countries (including Egypt, Jordan and Syria), a large number of the Gulf states, as well as Turkey, France, Russia and China are opposed to sanctions and air raids against Iraq. But the cowboy mentality that governs American policy makes no provision for that; it was announced, with startling defiance, that the air raids would be conducted from American military bases in Kuwait. Yet there is a ludicrous belief that Colin Powell's visit to the region directly after the attack will be sufficient to smooth over the problems and reinstate the Arab-American alliance forged some 10 years ago during the Gulf War.
What is certain is that this political insincerity will complicate matters further, making the American position in the region more difficult and feeding difference and hatred between Iraq and other Arab countries, from whose territories the attacks were conducted. This is probably an American foreign policy objective.
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