A New Clarity for Washington – US support for democracy is a value honored in the breach

A New Clarity for Washington
by Chris Toensing – December 1, 2011 – MERIP

Bitter Lemons International

Conventional wisdom holds that Washington is one of the big losers in the 2011 upheavals across the Arab world. Two long-time allies, Tunisia’s Ben Ali and Egypt’s Mubarak, have fallen, and in their place elections have empowered Islamists, precisely as the deposed dictators had warned for decades. Another important ally, Israel, is nervous about the rise of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt and the tumult in Syria. Perhaps worst of all from Washington’s point of view, the Obama administration has appeared largely helpless as the revolts have spread, unable to engineer face-saving “orderly transitions” in Egypt or Yemen, and upstaged in diplomacy by regional players like Turkey and tiny Qatar. All of this transpires as American troops retreat from Iraq and double down in a doomed effort in Afghanistan. The 40-year hegemony of the United States in the Middle East is at low ebb.

And yet, if US strategists are sensible, they will be of good cheer. US hegemony, after all, has been one long, exhausting exercise in crisis management. Washington has balanced its twin prerogatives, securing the supply of Persian Gulf oil and protecting Israel, upon the beam of “stability” in Arab states, which became a third end in itself. But those states’ embrace of Washington — whether the US-sponsored “peace processes” with Israel or the neoliberal economic recommendations — continuously undermined their own stability. The result was a series of brittle police states spending heavily on the means of coercion and neglecting the imperative of popular consent. Radical, even nihilist, strains of political Islam grew in these environments.

In the spring, racing against the pace of events, the White House spun a tale of US interests aligning at last with American values of liberty and justice for all. The Libya intervention was to showcase this new commitment, but it is clear to Arabs and Americans alike that Col. Muammar al-Qaddafi was a target of opportunity and not an example to make other despots quail in fear. It could hardly have been coincidental that UN diplomats passed their resolution of de facto regime change in Libya on the same day that Saudi forces crossed the causeway to crush the pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain.

Rather than win the Obama administration credit, the Arab revolts have instead lent discomfiting clarity to American conversations of Middle East affairs. The Obama administration stood by Ben Ali and Mubarak, and then the Bahraini royal family, so it is plain that US support for democracy is a value honored in the breach. The extent of the US partnership with the most anti-democratic regime in the region, the Saudis, has rarely been more obvious and more clearly damaging. Obama’s rebuff of the Palestinian statehood bid at the UN — symbolically, Palestine’s right of self-determination, like Tunisia’s and Egypt’s — is likewise inexplicable in terms of values, except the Israel lobby’s. …more