The Kansas City Star February 19, 2011
How much impact has America had on the Mideast unrest?
By Rick Montgomery and David Goldstein
When the determined masses of the Middle East rise up, and their revolt owes more to Facebook than to foreign relations, does the leader of the free world have any say?
Or deserve any credit — should the outcome advance freedom’s cause?
They are questions that strike many experts as typically U.S.-centric and smacking of yesterday’s paternalistic world order.
Yet given today’s partisan political reality, it should not surprise that debates are percolating as to whether George W. Bush or Barack Obama — or both, or neither — helped seed popular uprisings in places where democracy had known no home (and may never still).
The safer answer generally has the broader agreement.
“My own view is that neither President Bush nor President Obama should take credit for recent events,” said Robert Satloff, executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “though each played a certain role.”
In website postings and opinion pages, partisans have only begun to stir the pot.
Just when the Cairo demonstrations last month began to grow in size and passion, Elliott Abrams, a deputy national security adviser under Bush, defended that administration’s policies in a column for The Washington Post.
Abrams argued that “the revolt in Tunisia, the gigantic wave of demonstrations in Egypt and the more recent marches in Yemen all make clear that Bush had it right — and that the Obama administration’s abandonment of this mind-set is nothing short of a tragedy.”
Bush indeed made the call in 2003 for a U.S.-led invasion of a despot-ruled Iraq, and he gave voice to a hope that democracy would spread across the region. Subsequent images of Iraqi voters, their index fingers spotted with polling-place ink, did inspire others to believe that free elections could upend oppressive systems, said Michael Rubin of the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
Iraqi refugees in 2005 even cast votes at their embassy in Damascus, Syria, as Syrians — denied their own free elections —could only watch, Rubin said. “This certainly became a topic of conversation not only in Syria, but also on Al-Jazeera (TV). Whereas once people debated the Arab-Israeli conflict, suddenly Arabs across the region were debating democracy.”
But Rubin is critical of the Bush administration for doing little to support dissent and reform in its second term.
And the former president’s harshest critics raise what they consider a more obvious reason why his portrait is probably absent from the homes of today’s demonstrators: A bloody U.S.-led invasion preceded Iraq’s democracy, which remains fraught with sectarian conflict and last week faced its own popular protests in the southern cities of Basra and Kut.
“If you look at the transformation of Egypt and how Iraq was transformed, I don’t think anyone in the Middle East would choose Iraq,” said Ken Gude, managing director of the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank. “The history of U.S. involvement in Iraq is overwhelmingly negative among the people across the region.”
Gregory Gause, an expert on Persian Gulf politics at the University of Vermont, recalled a political cartoon at the height of the Iraq war which depicted two Iraqis commenting about a light in the sky. When one asked if it was the dawn of freedom, the other replied the light just came from the normal, everyday explosions.
“The Iraq war, if anything, gave democracy a bad name because of the violence associated with the American occupation and the transfer to democracy in Iraq,” Gause said.
The Obama administration’s sometimes straddling and overall cautionary stance to Egyptians’ demands for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, a U.S. ally, has triggered criticism, as well.
“Egypt: How Obama Blew It,” cries the latest Newsweek cover. Magazine columnist Niall Ferguson chides the “administration’s lack of any kind of coherent kind of grand strategy” in foreign affairs.
Obama should have been “lending his support to the youthful revolutionaries and trying to ride it in the direction advantageous to American interests” rather than stirring even more distrust, Ferguson writes.
Others argue that Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo, titled “A New Beginning” and aimed at healing relations with the Muslim world, did at least as much to inspire Egypt’s peaceful push for self-governance as did his predecessor’s open pleas for democracy.
For some, the pundits’ finger-pointing and credit-hawking reflect a misunderstanding of the reasons for the Mideast uprisings — which have to do with their lives and not us — and raise important questions about the steps U.S. leadership should take from here.
“Gone are the days the U.S. or any country should dictate the course of events as we did in the Cold War,” said Gude. “It’s very clear that the U.S. administration is now reacting to events, unlike the past, when we normally would be shaping events.”
The region continued to be roiled with unrest Friday. In Jordan, where demonstrations have been relatively peaceful, club-wielding thugs invaded a mosque and beat many protestors. Police did not intervene.
It was the second violent day in Bahrain as well. When thousands marched in defiance toward Pearl Square, security forces again opened fire. The result was dozens of injuries, including at least four serious ones, and many Bahrainis who once wanted just constitutional reform now call for the death of their king.
Obama condemned the use of violence against the Bahrain protesters, as well as in Libya and Yemen, where heavy crackdowns by old-guard regimes were reported. A Libyan doctor said 35 protesters were killed in the eastern city of Benghazi during a confrontation with security forces.
In Yemen’s ninth straight day of protests, four people were killed and 48 were wounded during protests called as part of a “Friday of Rage.”
“These are local events,” said Steven Simon, a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, dismissing many Americans’ notions that the region could not have birthed a drive for democracy without some embrace of U.S. ideals.
“Even to the extent that they depended on or pivoted on western technology, the fact is these technologies were deployed locally and by local people. And there was a good deal of organization on the part of the Egyptians,” he said.
Friday, the people of Cairo organized another massive celebration.
Daniel Byman, an expert on Middle East security at the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service and former aide to the 9/11 commission, said: “These were events that happened in the region that the U.S had little influence on, under either Bush or Obama…
“What happened in Egypt was not how Bush officials imagined that democracy would happen in the region. The Obama administration just thought this wasn’t likely to happen, so why put your money on it. I thought the same thing.”
Still, America can’t ignore its very real interests in places where regimes are now beating back protesters, creating what John Pike, international security expert, calls “a paradox” for how U.S. leaders react.
A U.S. naval base operates in Bahrain. “You can bet they’re sitting tight and have locked the front door,” said Pike of GlobalSecurity.org.
“Under any circumstance, we’d want to avoid a situation where American citizens get dragged into the conflict and are injured or killed in the crossfire,” he said. “You’d also not want to make the royal family appear to be American puppets.”
Attention in Washington seems to focus less on what gave rise to the demonstrations and more on where we go next.
How should Obama negotiate the tricky politics? And which Arab capital will street protests erupt in tomorrow?
It is an economically and ethnically diverse region of enemies and allies. Each country where uprisings occur requires a calculated response. In Egypt, for example, a well-respected Army relies heavily on U.S. training and support. Can America and its president convince Egypt’s citizenry the importance of those ties?
Probably, Pike speculated: “In Egypt, we might have our democratic cake and eat it, too. We can’t have our cake and eat it, too, in Bahrain. If we get a popularly-elected, Shiia government in Bahrain, they’d kick our military out of there lickety-split.”
Given America’s unpopularity throughout the region, many believe it’s best for the Obama administration to speak loudly for the safety and rights of demonstrators, but also work nimbly behind the scenes to protect our economic and security interests.
“I think the last thing any movement in the Middle East needs is to be branded as America’s allies,” said Gause of the University of Vermont. “It is easier to go out into the street when government can’t credibly say these people are doing America’s business.”
Unrest elsewhere
Jordanians took to the streets for a seventh day; Iraqi protesters blocked a bridge in the southern oil hub of Basra; and in Senegal, a man set himself on fire in front of the presidential palace.
© Copyright 2011, The Kansas City Star
