 | Last Thursday President Barack Obama delivered his speech about his administration’s policy towards the turmoil of the MENA region, or Middle East and North Africa. |
The US president outlined the strategy his administration intends to adopt to help the revolting peoples of the region to build democratic states, as he said. He also set forth a starting point to the negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis. | |
The Obama administration’s initiative in fact aims at finding a raison d’être for the United States in the post-revolution MENA region. Media and politicians in the United States are worried about the future of their country’s interests, and are afraid of the idea that these revolutions have come to pull the region out of the American sphere. 0n February 4, 2011, Liz Sly wrote an article entitled “Amid Arab protests, U.S. influence has waned”, Sly noticed that “[a]t the pro-democracy demonstrations on the streets of Cairo and elsewhere, references to the United States have been conspicuously absent”, and she interpreted that as “a sign of what some analysts are already calling a "post-American Middle East" of diminished U.S. influence and far greater uncertainty about America’s role”. This speech outlined the role of American in the region, which will not be a “post-American Middle East”. On the contrary, the region will need a strong American role to endorse the newly-born democracies, to help isolate the agonizing autocracies, and to give a push to a peace process between the Palestinians the Israelis, a peace process that has been at stalemate for a long time.
President Obama’s speech, however, was another instance of that incongruity between rhetoric and policy in the American politics. He said “[w]e have embraced the chance to show that America values the dignity of the street vendor in Tunisia more than the raw power of the dictator”. However, a considerable body of historical evidence testifies to the fact that America can turn a blind eye on the humiliation, not only of a street vendor, but of a whole people if need be. The U.S. foreign policy record in the region itself endorses this claim. President Obama showed a palpable admission of this when he said: “after decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be”.
In fact the United States was not accepting the world as it was. Rather, it was making use of the world as it was. American administrations supported not only Tunisia’s dictator; they had supported such brutal regimes as the Philippines’ Marcos, Chile’s Pinochet, Indonesia’s Suhartu and many others. And in the region, they had supported the Egyptian dictator, the violations of human rights in Yemen, Algeria and many other countries ruled by friendly autocrats. Even worse, John Pilger’s documentary, War on Democracy, contends that the United States toppled down legitimate regimes and set up dictatorships in Latin America, its backyard, during the 70s and the 80s.
Obama showed a great generosity when he promised to “relieve a democratic Egypt of up to $1 billion in debt, and work with our Egyptian partners to invest these resources to foster growth and entrepreneurship”, and to work with Congress “to create Enterprise Funds to invest in Tunisia and Egypt”. What Mr. Obama did not say is what these huge financial aids are paid for.
According to an article of Noam Chomsky, it’s not radical Islam that worries the US; it’s independence. The post-revolution MENA region, therefore, should not be independent; instead, it should be dependent on US generosity and financial aids. And it is this dependency that would sustain the American control over the region. Egypt is the cornerstone of the American policy in the region. And an independent Egypt means much trouble both to the United States and Israel. But an Egypt dependent on American aids will have to be cooperative with the Americans and the Israelis, and will be useful to the American agenda in the region.
The demonstrators who have been going out demanding democracy in their countries, especially in Tunisia and Egypt, should hit the streets again demanding that their governments' decline of Obama’s offer to grant them financial support. This offer is a troll that will enable the United States to take the region hostage for the next decades. Social reforms in the region should depend on its peoples’ assets, not on foreign charity.
The peoples of the region will be naïve if they blind themselves to the agenda hidden behind Obama’s generous offers. If the region suffers from social problems, the United States is no better. Dennis Kucinich, a US Congressman from Ohio and a former presidential candidate in the United States, wrote an article in which he criticizes Obama’s initiative. Kucinich said that “[t]he President wants to ‘advance economic development for nations that transition to democracy.’ It would be good to advance economic development in the United States, since there are over 14 million Americans are out of work. Such a high level of unemployment degrades our own democracy”.
The talk about the thorny issue of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is the occasion in which Obama looked less hypocritical. This is due to two reasons. The first is that Obama, as usual, admitted that the American “commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable”, which makes his attitude clear and understandable even to his Arab partners. The second reason is that the task of defending Israel’s untenable policy towards Palestinian civilians, and attitudes towards the peace process, needs a bald faced, rather than a hypocritical, politician.
Insofar as he was less hypocritical, Obama’s double standards towards the Palestinians and the Israelis were blunt. An instance of these double standards is that while “Israel must be able to defend itself – by itself – against any threat”, the Palestinian state should be “non-militarized”. Will Palestinians accept to live side by side with a state like Israel in a non-militarized state? If they do, they will make their national security at stake, not because the Israelis are untrustworthy, but because Israel is a state unlike the states. All over the globe, there are states having armies. Israel, by contrast, is an army that has a state.
We have already heard Obama’s nice words in Cairo a few years ago. And nothing has changed since then. The Middle East and North Africa do not need fine words; they need fine actions. As Churchill said, “words are easy and many, while great deeds are difficult and rare”. And as long as America’s commitment to the security of Israel is unshakeable, all American presidents’ promises and nice speeches will remain invitations to eat a pie in the sky.
