'Nightmare scenario'

Dina Ezzat sets to decipher the ambivalent messages relayed by US President G W Bush during his State of the Union speech

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Bush

Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and the Gulf all featured in the State of the Union address delivered yesterday by US President George W Bush. The speech was broadcast during the early hours of the dawn, Middle East time. However, the emphasis rendered by the American president to the different issues varied: Iraq occupied first place, expectedly, while the Palestinian-Israeli struggle was last in terms of both emphasis and commitment. What was marked, however, was that whichever the question he broached, and regardless of the degree of importance that he gave it in his address, Bush seemed non-committal, sceptical and, sometimes even, hesitant.

Unlike in previous State of the Union addresses, where Bush made assertive statements and delivered clear promises, the White House chief often seemed unsure as to what exactly the message was that he wanted to relay to peoples of the region.

On the Palestinian-Israeli front -- one concerning which US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had only recently promised renewed and energised commitment by the US -- Bush made only one brief and generalised reference. "With other members of the Quartet, the UN, the European Union and Russia, we're pursuing diplomacy to help bring peace to the Holy Land, and pursuing the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state, living side-by-side with Israel in peace and security."

However, commenting on this, Adam Early, the London-based senior advisor to the US undersecretary for public diplomacy, said that such a narrow reference does not signal the US's declining commitment to forge peace in the Middle East. Early was speaking to a group of Egyptian journalists via satellite, at a venue hosted by the US Embassy in Cairo.

He said that the president "did not have enough time" to dedicate to the issue, given that he was addressing both home and foreign affairs in what was only a 50-minute address.

The State Department official reiterated Washington's keenness to work towards settling the Palestinian conflict. However, he did not announce any of the deadlines which Washington has traditionally scooped for Arab capitals . This includes the long-missed 2005 deadline stipulated in a vision declared by Bush in 2002.

In fact, Early distanced himself from any promises regarding deadlines, saying "Who knows when we are going to see a Palestinian state?" Like Rice, Early restricted himself with a reference to a vague and undetermined "political horizon". And, on an even more sobering tone, he alluded to the probability of negotiations possibly undertaking a time-span of "two or three years".

Early's explanation of dearth of time in the speech notwithstanding, the American president had seemed to find enough time, while delivering it, to engage in semantics and launch a verbal attack on Hizbullah, which he termed a "terrorist" group that comes "second only to Al-Qaeda in the American lives it has taken". Indeed, Bush also had the time and space to refer to developments in Lebanon in adequate detail, as well as pay tribute to the assassinated Lebanese minister, Pierre Gemayel.

On Iraq -- which is a pressing issue in the US, both domestically, and on the foreign front, Bush also had the time to amply talk. And, within such a context, he made the shockingly blatant reference to what he called "Sunni extremists" and "Shia extremists". The latter, he said, have the support of Iran and are "hostile to America and ... also determined to dominate the Middle East"; Bush then mentioned Al-Zarqawi and El-Zawahiri -- yet with no promises here to pursue them into surrender, as he often did in the earlier days of his presidency. Bush gave the GCC states as well as Egypt and Jordan the credit for cooperating with him in order to stabilise the situation in Iraq.

However, the US president's message remained an essentially hesitant one, if not also downright alarmist. While pleading with the Democrats- dominated Congress to support his much criticised new strategy on Iraq, Bush did not offer his audiences at large, be they inside the US, in Iraq or elsewhere, any of his previous characteristically firm and definite language that he had used -- before including his 10 January release of the new tactics. "It would not be like us to leave our promises unkept, our friends abandoned and our own security at risk... On this day, at this hour, it is still within our power to shape the outcome of this battle."

Was this a change of position from previous statements of standing ground till the enemy is defeated, no matter how long it takes? Basically yes, said Early. "We don't have forever to do it," he asserted. He also added that it is mainly the job of the Iraqi government to tackle the Iraqi problem. "Clearly, [the Iraqi government] haven't delivered what Iraqis expect: security... But to be fair [this government has] been only in office for nine months".

When it came to Syria and Iran, Bush's previously coined "members of the axis of evil", there was also nothing definite -- no particular threats or specific promises. Early aptly summed this as "no new initiative or new hit there".

Somalia, which had been recently bombarded by the US, received no mention at all, while only a general promise was made to address the problem in Darfur.

As for the much-touted cause to promote democracy across the Middle East, this was now addressed in much softer semantics, and a looser syntax than it previously had. This 'mission' was portrayed as part of the war between moderation and extremism -- which, in its turn, had previously been coined as "those who are with us and those who are against us".

But, most alarming of all, was the unequivocal part in Bush's Middle East references in yesterday's State of the Union address: that if America lost its battle in Iraq -- a possible scenario, to judge by the tone and words of his speech -- the entire region would fall into chaos. "This is a nightmare scenario," Bush stated in no uncertain terms.