Shaping US Middle East policy amidst failing states, failed democratization and increased activism
Source: Middle East Report, Spring 2020 nbr 294 https://merip.org/2020/06/exit-empire/
By James M. Dorsey
The future of US engagement in the Middle East hangs
in the balance.
Two decades of forever war in Afghanistan and
continued military engagement in Iraq and elsewhere in the region have prompted
debate about what constitutes a US interest in the Middle East. China, and to a
lesser degree Russia, loom large in the debate as America’s foremost strategic
and geopolitical challenges.
Questions about US interests have also sparked discussion
about whether the United States can best achieve its objectives by continued focus
on security and military options or whether a greater emphasis on political,
diplomatic, economic, and civil society tools may be a more productive
approach.
The debate is coloured by a pendulum that swings from
one extreme to the other. President Joe Biden
has disavowed the notion of nation-building that
increasingly framed the United States’ post-9/11 intervention in Afghanistan.
There is no doubt that the top-down nation-building
approach in Afghanistan was not the way to go about things. It rested on
policymaking that was informed by misleading
and deceitful reporting by US military and political authorities
and enabled a corrupt environment for both Afghans and Americans.
The lesson from Afghanistan may be that nation-building
(to use a term that has become tainted for lack of a better word) has to be a
process that is owned by the beneficiaries themselves while supported by
external players from afar.
Potentially adopting that posture could help the Biden
administration narrow the gap between its human rights rhetoric and its
hard-nosed, less values-driven definition of US interests and foreign policy.
A cursory glance at recent headlines tells a tale of failed
governance and policies, hollowed-out democracies that were fragile to begin
with, legitimisation of brutality, fabrics of society being ripped apart, and
an international community that grapples with how to pick up the pieces.
Boiled down to its essence, the story is the same whether
it’s how to provide humanitarian aid to Afghanistan without recognising or
empowering the Taliban or efforts to halt Lebanon’s
economic and social collapse and descent into renewed chaos and civil war
without throwing a lifeline to a discredited and corrupt elite.
Attempts to tackle immediate problems in Lebanon and
Afghanistan by working through NGOs might be a viable bottom-up approach to the
discredited top-down method.
If successful, it could provide a way of strengthening
the voice of recent mass protests in Lebanon and Iraq that transcended the
sectarianism that underlies their failed and flawed political structures. It
would also give them ownership of efforts to build more open, pluralistic, and
cohesive societies, a demand that framed the protests. Finally, it could also
allow democracy to regain ground lost by failing to provide tangible progress.
This week’s sectarian fighting along the Green Line
that separated Christian East from the Muslim West in Beirut during Lebanon’s
civil war highlighted the risk of those voices being drowned out.
Yet, they reverberated loud and clear in the results
of recent Iraqi parliamentary elections, even if a majority of eligible voters
refrained from going to the polls.
“We
never got the democracy we were promised, and
were instead left with a grossly incompetent, highly corrupt and hyper-violent
monster masquerading as a democracy and traumatising a generation,” commented
Iraqi Middle East counterterrorism and security scholar Tallha Abdulrazaq who
voted only once in his life in Iraq. That was in the first election held in
2005 after the 2003 US invasion. “I have not voted in another Iraqi election
since.”
Mr. Abdulrazaq’s disappointment is part and parcel of
the larger issues of nation-building, democracy promotion and provision of
humanitarian aid that inevitably will shape the future US role in the Middle
East in a world that is likely to be bi-or multi-polar.
Former US National Security Council and State
Department official Martin Indyk argued in a recent essay
adapted from a forthcoming book on Henry Kissinger’s Middle East diplomacy
that the US policy should aim “to shape an American-supported regional order in
which the United States is no longer the dominant player, even as it remains
the most influential.”
Mr. Indyk reasoned that support for Israel and
America’s Sunni Arab allies would be at the core of that policy. While in a
world of realpolitik the United States may have few alternatives, the question
is how alignment with autocracies and illiberal democracies would enable the
United States to support a bottom-up process of social and political transition
that goes beyond lip service.
That question is particularly relevant given that the
Middle East is entering its second decade of defiance and dissent that demands
answers to grievances that were not expressed in Mr. Kissinger’s time, at least
not forcefully.
Mr. Kissinger was focused on regional balances of
power and the legitimisation of a US-dominated order. “It was order, not peace,
that Kissinger pursued because he believed that peace was neither an achievable
nor even a desirable objective in the Middle East,” Mr. Indyk said, referring
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Mr. Indyk noted that in Mr. Kissinger’s mind the rules
of a US-dominated order “would be respected only if they provided a sufficient
sense of justice to a sufficient number of states. It did not require the satisfaction
of all grievances… ‘just an absence of the grievances that would motivate an
effort to overthrow the order’.”
The popular Arab revolts of 2011 that toppled the
leaders of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen, even if their achievements were
subsequently rolled back, and the mass protests of 2019 and 2020 that forced
leaders of Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, and Lebanon to resign, but failed to
fundamentally alter political and economic structures, are evidence that there
is today a will to overthrow the order.
In his essay, Mr. Indyk acknowledges the fact that
“across the region, people are crying out for accountable governments” but
argues that “the United States cannot hope to meet those demands” even if “it cannot
ignore them, either.”
Mr. Indyk may be right. Yet, the United States, with
Middle East policy at an inflexion point, cannot ignore the fact that the
failure to address popular grievances contributed significantly to the rise of
violent Islamic militancy and ever more repressive and illiberal states in a
region with a significant youth bulge that is no longer willing to remain
passive and /or silent.
Pointing to the 600 Iraqi protesters that have been
killed by security forces and pro-Iranian militias, Mr. Abdulrazaq noted in an earlier
Al Jazeera op-ed that protesters were “adopting
novel means of keeping their identities away from the
prying eyes of security forces and powerful Shia militias” such as blockchain
technology and decentralised virtual private networks.
“Unless they shoot down…internet-providing satellites,
they will never be able to silence our hopes for democracy and accountability
again. That is our dream,” Mr. Abdulrazzaq quoted Srinivas Baride, the chief
technology officer of a decentralised virtual network favoured by Iraqi
protesters, as saying.
A podcast version of this story is available on Soundcloud, Itunes, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn, Spreaker, Pocket Casts, Tumblr,
Podbean, Audecibel, Patreon
and Castbox.
Dr. James M. Dorsey is an award-winning
journalist and scholar and a Senior Fellow at the National University of
Singapore’s Middle East Institute.
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