Not up to the task
 Yossi Beilin

The Obama administration had no contingency plan for addressing revolutions in the Middle East. Intelligence officials explained that regime changes were possible: this particular country faced dangers of one kind, while that country faced different dangers. But all in all, the likelihood of change was not great and the regimes could be expected to manage with whatever challenges confronted them.

President Barack Obama entered office with the best of intentions. He wanted to end the American presence in Iraq, strike a blow at the Taliban in Afghanistan and then depart, make peace between Israel and its neighbors, improve the human rights situation in the Arab countries and strengthen their inclination toward democracy. If possible.

The uprisings in the Arab world have highlighted the limits of US policy and capabilities. First, the US, like many other governments and non-state actors such as al-Qaeda, was blindsided by these events. The youth bulge and its attendant pathologies--such as daily humiliation and brutalization of individuals by government officials, despondency and high unemployment among other forms of immiseration--were well-known features of the region. No one, however, could see that one spark in Tunisia would light the raging fire that these multiple uprisings now represent.

Second, the US response to these events can be characterized as erratic. In Tunisia and Egypt, Washington initially hedged by refusing to take sides until it became obvious that the incumbent leader was no longer tenable, whereupon it called for a transition to a new regime. In Yemen, the US does not appear to have a strategy at all because the alternative to President Saleh’s rule is likely to be a Somalia-like situation, full of chaos and opportunities for al-Qaeda to better entrench itself. In Libya, US policy has been more decisive in that it has finally called for the removal of Gaddafi from power, no doubt because even an unstable post-revolutionary Libya is better than the one being ruled by him. And in Bahrain, the US has adopted the opposite tack, namely that the ruling family should be kept in power, despite the obscene corruption of its prime minister and the government’s blatant discrimination against the country’s Shiite majority. Realizing the geostrategic importance of Bahrain, Obama has decided to stick with the status quo while trying to convince its more enlightened crown prince to reach a settlement with the Shiite-led rebels. As to whether such a compromise will be cosmetic rather than a real power-sharing deal remains to be seen, but the ruling family of Bahrain, the al-Khalifa, looks like it is here to stay.

Clearly, the US’ stated commitment to freedom and democracy has had to be weighed against its national interests, which include stability in the region and the projection of its influence. President Barack Obama seems to be torn between these two imperatives in part, no doubt, because he recognizes in the rebelling Arab youth echoes of the American civil rights struggle and sees in their social media tactics strategies that he himself used to great effect during the presidential campaign. He identifies with them, while also realizing that the Middle East is a complicated place, and that the US is very dependent on its hydrocarbon resources.

In fact, the recent events have highlighted more than at any time in the past how vulnerable the US, and indeed the entire world, is to the political fate of the Arab world. Everyone will pay a heavy price as long as the Arab world remains in turmoil. This is largely due to its massive hydrocarbon wealth, some 60 percent of proven global reserves. We all depend on the reliable supply of these resources and any disruption will severely curtail our way of life. It has been troubling for Libya’s 1.5 million barrels of oil to be disrupted, but it would be cataclysmic if the same happens to Saudi Arabia’s nine million plus barrels of daily production. As of this writing, Saudi Arabia appears to be relatively protected from the wave that is sweeping the region. This is due to the popularity and support enjoyed by King Abdullah, the enormous wealth at his disposal and the lack of realistic alternatives to the rule of his family. It is, however, important that Riyadh take careful note of the events convulsing the region and put into effect policies that will help alleviate the problems it too faces with its own youth bulge. The clarion call for greater accountability and transparency in governance, individual freedom and economic opportunity needs to be heeded by all the regimes in the Arab world and beyond. How the US can help bring this about while preserving its interests is the policy challenge of the moment and the decade ahead.-Published 3/3/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Bernard Haykel is professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and director of the Transregional Institute for the Study of the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia.

As revolution has spread from the Maghreb to the Gulf and back again, President Barack Obama has stuttered and fumbled and sometimes fallen strangely silent. What can explain this from a man whose manner is always smooth and whose oratorical gifts propelled him from utter obscurity to the White House in four short years?

Upon entering office, Obama slammed the door on his predecessor’s policy of promoting democracy in the Middle East. The American government’s rhetoric was shorn of references to freedom and human rights, and programs to aid dissident groups in Egypt and elsewhere in the region were cut back or canceled outright.

As the candidate of “change,” it was natural that Obama would want to distinguish his policies sharply from those of George W. Bush. But there was a more obvious way to do this than to jettison democracy-promotion altogether. He might have said, in effect, “Bush had a good idea, but he made a botch of it. My administration will show how to do this right.” Such a stance would have resonated with Americans and Middle Easterners.

Instead, he threw out the democracy/human rights baby with the Bush bath water. This was doubly odd because on other subjects he presented himself as the most soaring of visionaries. Upon winning the presidential nomination, he had declaimed: “this was the moment when . . . our planet began to heal.”

In contrast, in foreign policy he encouraged his administration to be described as adhering to “realism.” His number-one goal was to improve America’s image after the damage done by Bush’s policies. But real “realists” do not care much about image.

So if he is not a plausible realist, why has Obama seemed so indifferent to democracy in the Middle East? I speculate that he is allergic to American triumphalism. This may be in reaction to Bush and neoconservatism. Or it may have deeper roots in the president’s youthful radicalism of which we got a glimpse, in the rear-view mirror so to speak, when Michelle Obama allowed that the first time in her life that she felt proud of her country was when it chose her husband as its leader.

Deplore Bush all you will, you cannot be a cheerleader for democracy without in some sense celebrating America, the original model. America has been good for democracy, inspiring and sometimes directly impelling its spread around the world. And democracy has been good for America, giving it many allies and a safer world.

It is past time for Obama to absorb this lesson and to make himself heard clearly and often in the Middle East. He has higher standing abroad than any US president since John F. Kennedy; and he has a wonderful ability to articulate ideas. He should be scourging the dictators and encouraging the people. Such “mere words” will have a material impact, for example, in Libya where military and security officers face a choice of which side to take. The words will be all the more persuasive if they are backed by the imposition of a no-fly zone, grounding Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s aircraft.

More dictators will fall in the months ahead. Difficult though they may be to overthrow, the harder job will be to construct democracies in their aftermath. The US should seek a partnership with Europe and Japan in ramping up assistance, mostly in the form of training programs to help newly-liberated peoples develop the “human capital” to sustain democracy.

We have know-how that can be shared. In countries where the press has been subservient to government, we can help teach journalists the methods and canons of independent reporting. Where “parliaments” have been rubber stamps, we can teach legislators and their aides the arts of crafting legislation. Where elections have been rigged, we can share some of the tricks of campaigning (hopefully not the dirty ones). In countries where police methods consist mostly of torturing suspects until someone confesses, we can offer to train officers in how actually to investigate a crime.

The Obama administration had placed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations at the center of its approach to the Middle East. Its recent veto of a United Nations Security Council resolution one-sided in its condemnation of Israel, after Obama failed to persuade Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to have it withdrawn, put an exclamation point on the failure of this project.

Now, it is hard to see how peacemaking can proceed when the identity of virtually every Arab government, including even the Palestinian one, is uncertain. Obama might improve the long-term prospects by encouraging Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to change his tone about the Arab upheavals. Israelis are understandably frightened, but such fears can become self-fulfilling. “Bibi” would be wiser to salute the Arab world’s struggles for freer, more humane political systems and express Israel’s hope for a shared better future.

The train of Arab revolution has left the station. However belatedly, Obama should jump on with both feet--and see if he can bring Netanyahu with him.-Published 3/3/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Joshua Muravchik is the author of "The Next Founders: Voices of Democracy in the Middle East".

Stability is the least understood and most derided of the trio of strategic interests pursued by the United States in the Middle East since it became the region’s sole superpower. Vexing, because it is patently obvious code for coziness with kings, presidents-for-life and other unsavory autocrats. Perplexing, because it seems to involve only cost, lacking the material benefit of protecting oil deposits or the domestic political profit of backing Israel, the two other members of the troika.

For decades, idealists of the right and left have taken aim at the concept of stability, hoping to marshal disgust at its amoral nature or disillusionment with its blowback. Such are the impulses of activists for human rights and a just peace; such was also the thought underpinning then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s dictum that “for 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”

Such was not the thought that counted, however. The Bush administration, despite its willingness to part with stability in policy salons, proved quite happily married to the notion when elections in Palestine hinted that democratic polities in the Middle East would not be so pliable as the potentates when it came to oil and Israel.

For the bipartisan foreign policy consensus in Washington, which the Obama administration personifies, stability is not so hard to love or difficult to comprehend. Its ethical challenges, when they are bruited at all, are greatly outweighed by the geopolitical advantages. For 60 years, minus a few revolutionary interruptions here and there, stable regimes have pumped petroleum to the world market, keeping the price per barrel relatively low and allowing the US Navy to police the tanker lanes. For 40 years, with an occasional dissent, stable Arab regimes have acquiesced in Israel’s colonization of Palestine, some of them signing up as partners in the various US-sponsored “peace processes” intended to license the illegal facts on the ground. To these clear strategic benefits has been added the eagerness of stable Arab regimes to enlist in the US-led war on terrorism and repress the less militant Islamist movements that have long raised the most credible specter of disruption to the preferred order.

Now that non-religious popular uprisings have given flesh to the threat, it is still the commitment to stability that guides the White House. Where rebels rushed to the dictator’s ramparts, as in Libya, the US has cut its client loose, pursuing sanctions and indictments, in hopes of forging ties with a steady-handed successor government. Where the CIA calculates (so far) that despots can withstand the tide, as in Bahrain or Yemen, the US has confined its interventions to lectures reflecting the liberal distaste for violence. That unease is, of course, relative, expressed in much stronger terms to the “delusional” Col. Gaddafi in Libya than to the “moderate” al-Khalifa in Bahrain.

In Tunisia and Egypt, the Obama administration underestimated the power of the crowds, standing by its men Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak for unseemly durations before each in turn was ousted. The White House’s maneuvers in Egypt, in particular, revealed the grip of the stability cult in Washington. The administration’s more traditional realists gathered around Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and urged reassurance of Mubarak and his cronies, while the liberal internationalist wing pushed vague pro-democracy rhetoric while busily designing constitutional stratagems to help the octogenarian Egyptian president manage his own “orderly, peaceful transition” to retirement. In both cases, the underlying prerogative was to blunt the will of the street, which might take Egypt’s revolution in unpredictable directions. Barack Obama is the president who invited America’s predatory insurance industry to help draft his health care reform legislation; with regard to this key US ally, as well, his instinct is that deals with the forces of darkness are the best guarantor of minimal friction.

Stability, after all, is prized for its own sake, in addition to the succor it lends to other strategic goals. Historically, and particularly in the last 30 years, stable regimes in the Middle East have been malleable interlocutors with Washington--not puppets or yes-men in some crude sense, but reasonable sorts who, precisely because they were unaccountable to their populations, were willing and able to put free markets and “peace processes” above wealth redistribution and justice for the Palestinians. Revolutions in the Arab world cannot dislodge stability from its perch in US thinking. But if the revolutions are completed, and produce governments that derive their stability from genuinely participatory politics, Arab chanceries will drive much harder bargains--and Washington does not relish the prospect.-Published 3/3/2011 © bitterlemons-international.org

Chris Toensing is editor of Middle East Report, published by the Middle East Research and Information Project.