On Force And Fear Alone
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By Tom Porteous
February 27, 2006
http://tompaine.com

(Tom Porteous is a freelance writer and analyst on the Middle East who was formerly with the BBC and the British Foreign Office).

In September 2002 Secretary General of the Arab League Amr Moussa warned that the Invasion of Iraq would "Open The Gates Of Hell."

Here's a vision of that hell as reported this month by Journalist Tom Lasseter of Knight Ridder newspapers, embedded with the US Army in Samarra:

Five soldiers from 101st Airborne Division scrambled down, pulled two of the Insurgents' bodies from the reeds and dragged them through the mud.

"Strap Those Motherfuckers To The Hood Like A Deer," said staff sgt. James Robinson.

The soldiers heaved the two bodies onto the hood of the Humvee and tied them down with a cord. The dead Insurgents' legs and arms flapped in the air as the Humvee rumbled along. Iraqi families stood in front of the surrounding houses. They watched the corpses ride by and glared at the American soldiers.

This stark image is as good a metaphor as any for the current military and political posture of the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East.

Across the region--and beyond--Arabs and Muslims are now glaring at U.S. power in the same way as those Iraqi families glared at the soldiers of the 101st Airborne.

With its war on terror, the U.S. is frittering away the last vestiges of its moral authority in the Middle East. Its influence increasingly rests on military might alone--and that is not enough to ensure a peaceful end to all this, as the deteriorating situation in Iraq demonstrates.

After the events of the past week it should be clearer than ever that Washington and London's fanciful political strategies in Iraq and the region are as full of vitality and potential as the limbs of those dead Insurgents flapping in the air atop a U.S. Army Humvee.

Iraq's real power brokers--the clerical and militia leaders, more than the weak politicians who make up the government--may yet prevent an all out sectarian conflict between Shi'a and Sunni from being triggered by the bombing of one of Shi'a Islam's holiest shrines on February 22.

But if they do it will be no thanks to the U.S., whose military presence in Iraq is providing nationalist legitimacy to the most extreme Iraqi political tendencies and a magnet for the most militant and dangerous groups in the region.

Blaming terrorists for the attack on the Askariya Mosque in Samarra, President Bush said on February 24 that the sectarian violence it had sparked was "a test for the Iraqi security forces"--as though the U.S. government had no role in Iraq's affairs and bore no responsibility for the current situation.

But the increase in Sunni-Shi'a violence (and Kurd-Arab violence in the north) has exposed the flaw in Bush's mantra "as the Iraqi security forces stand up, we stand down," on which the U.S. exit strategy is based.

Equally prone to ethnic, sectarian and tribal divisions as the rest of Iraqi society, the Iraqi police and army, so far from being able to stop this kind of civil conflict, are drawn into it, bringing with them their equipment and guns paid for by the U.S. tax payer.

If the civil war in Iraq escalates, the chances of regional contagion are high: Middle East powers, including not only Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, but also Turkey and Israel, would get drawn even further into the Iraqi mess in what would become a new regional power struggle.

Al Qaeda would fan the flames and use Iraq as a base from which to launch operations in the neighborhood. It claimed the February 24 suicide bombing at the huge and tightly guarded Abqaiq oil facility in Saudi Arabia, which did no serious damage to the plant, but pushed the price of oil up by more than two dollars a barrel. Sectarian violence in Iraq is also straining relations between Sunni and Shi'a communities elsewhere in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, last week's tour of the Arab nations by Bush's transformational diplomat-in-chief, Condoleezza Rice, demonstrated the extent to which another pillar of the U.S. strategy in the Middle East--the push for democracy--is collapsing under the unbearable lightness of the strategic thinking on which it rests.

Yes, a push for political pluralism may well be a good way to lance the angry boil of extremism in the region, as Bush says. But only if it curtails the power of the "tyrannies"
(Bush's word) which have served Western interests so well for so long, only if it brings to power representative governments which will certainly--in the current circumstances--want to renegotiate the terms of U.S. and Israeli influence in the region.

Since the victory of the Islamist Hamas in the Palestinian elections, the U.S. and Israel have indicated clearly that they are ready for no such renegotiation. Indeed the New York Times has reported they are now colluding to suffocate the Arab world's first democratically elected government.

Rice's Middle East tour was aimed at convincing Arab leaders that they should not fund a Hamas-run Palestinian Authority (a "terrorist authority" according to acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert). But Arab leaders are understandably reluctant to concur.

This is not because these Arab leaders love either democracy or Hamas, whose Islamist colleagues are threatening their regimes by winning similar victories wherever elections are held in the Middle East. But Arab rulers are all too aware that a U.S. diplomacy which calls for sanctions on the victims of Israeli military occupation is not only hypocritical but a gift to opposition forces across the region.

Washington's new-found coolness towards Arab democracy was on display during Rice's stopover in Egypt. Her last visit in June was all about pushing for greater democracy. Since then the Muslim Brotherhood has won a stunning 88 out of 454 seats in parliamentary elections that was heavily weighted against them.

Last week in Cairo, Rice publicly made little of the fact that local council elections had Just been postponed for two years. Nor did she seem keen to bring up the fate of the Jailed secular opposition leader Ayman Nour, whose cause she had taken up in June, let alone the estimated 15,000 political prisoners (mostly Islamists) in prolonged detention without trial under draconian colonial-era emergency laws.

The impression given is that the U.S. only wants political freedom in the Middle East on its own and Israeli terms--"designer democracy," a Egyptian broadcaster Mervat Mohsen described it bluntly in an interview with Rive--No acceptance of Islamist victories at the polls, as this would amount to appeasement of terrorists. No compromise with any political development, however democratic, that might challenge absolute U.S. dominance of the region.

If Washington continues in this direction, U.S. influence in the region will cease to depend on any kind of political accomodation, and come to hang on military force and fear alone.

That coupled with a civil war in Iraq, would make a military confrontation with the holocaust deniers in Tehran over Iran's alleged nuclear ambitions a slam-dunk.

The gates of hell are already ajar. All the U.S. needs now is kick them wide open and blame it on the terrorists.