by Matthew Chavez
Daily Lobo columnist
The decline and fall of the Bush doctrine continued last week, with North Korea defiantly testing a nuclear device, confounding an administration locked in a self-constructed policy labyrinth of dead ends. Pyongyang's nuclear provocation is the final nail in the coffin of Bush's clumsy campaign against the so-called "axis of evil."
Five years have passed since the Bush administration, with congressional deference, committed America's colossal national security establishment to undermining Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein and the Iranian government. The outcomes have been incomprehensible: Iraq, mired in a civil war and the victim of more than 600,000 civilian deaths according to a new study by Johns Hopkins University, is now an Islamist ally of Iran; Iran has expertly maneuvered to power "with an apparent ease that has disturbed both regional players and the U.S. and its European allies," in the words of Britain's leading political research organization, the International Institute for Strategic Studies; and North Korea has debuted its nuclear arsenal in what is widely regarded as a "sign of the failure of the tougher approach favored by the Bush team," according to an assessment by the London Times.
Even the diplomatic overtures of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, a relative moderate among Bush imperialists, can find no traction with Washington's Middle East allies.
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Rice concluded her five-day tour of Arab capitals on Oct. 8, but it was clear before liftoff her agenda was dead on arrival.
Described by Gideon Levy, an Israeli journalist, as a "visit by an especially annoying relative from overseas," Rice sought to rally what obedient journalists call "moderate Arab states" to action against Iran, but the effort promptly met a "brick wall," in the words of Robin Wright, the Washington Post's chief Middle East correspondent.
Rice was dispatched to the region in a desperate drive to halt Washington's unraveling grip on its erstwhile sphere of influence. Rice's efforts, however, were fruitless on "four issues pivotal to the future of the world's most volatile region," Wright reported - namely, the Iraq War, Arab-Israeli diplomacy, advancing democracy and creating consensus on Iran among Washington's despotic allies.
In an apparent attempt to isolate independent and Islamist forces in the region, Rice introduced a dichotomy reminiscent of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's 2003 division of "old" and "new" Europe, a rhetorical outburst met with laughter across the pond. Rice characterized U.S. allies in the Middle East as moderates and official enemies as extremists, evidently overestimating the power of words to shape reality.
"When (the 2006 Israel-Lebanon War) happened, I think we got in very stark relief a clear indication that there are extremist forces and moderate forces," Rice explained en route to Saudi Arabia. For Rice, Hezbollah is extremist for resisting moderate Israel's killing of more than 1,500 Lebanese civilians, displacing one-fourth of the country and causing what Amnesty International declared "destruction on a catastrophic scale" and "war crimes that give rise to individual criminal responsibility."
Similarly, Rice depicted the eight Arab foreign ministers she met with in Cairo, Egypt, as "moderates" who "can be quite powerful in resisting extremist forces," presumably forgetting that none of the eight states represented, including Egypt and the Gulf monarchies, are democracies and routinely attack and imprison domestic opponents who pursue moderate democratic reforms.
Rice's trip not only revealed the depth of U.S. illegitimacy in what President Dwight Eisenhower called "the most strategically important area in the world," but also revealed the Bush administration's abandonment of even rhetorical support for democracy in the Middle East, evidently shaken by the prompt and broad rise of Islamist political parties where elections were allowed to take place. Every indication of Rice's visit suggests the U.S. has abandoned its brief and nominal brush with Middle East democratization and is returning to the status quo policy of ensuring the power of dictators.
"Democracy is one of the interests and goals of the U.S.'s foreign policy all the time," said Abdel Monem Said Aly, director of the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo. "The issue is, where is it in (the U.S.'s) priorities? It really got a higher priority after Sept. 11, but not right now - that's now old news ... The neocons in the administration thought it would work ... and at the same time, they were leading a unilateral American effort to defeat fundamentalism. But it did not work. Even in countries where they have full command, like in Afghanistan, they failed to do it."
Last year in Cairo, Rice said the "conditions that produce extremism" in the Middle East are a "lack of hope in terms of political and social growth."
If recent history is a guide, continuing Washington's long-standing alliance with the region's tyrants will do little to remedy that persistent lack of hope.
