The Hindu : Opinion / News Analysis : Backing despotic regimes is no answer

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Friday, Feb 09, 2007
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Opinion - News Analysis

Backing despotic regimes is no answer

Mai Yamani

The longer the U.S. and Britain support dictatorial governments in the Middle East the more explosive the region will become.

POLITICIANS, ESPECIALLY in times of geopolitical deadlock, adopt a word or a concept to sell to the public. In 1973, at the peak of cold-war tensions, United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger coined the term "detente." Such words gain a currency and become useful political tools to escape policy quagmires. As the Middle East lurches from crisis to crisis, Tony Blair, George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice compulsively repeat the word "moderates" to describe their allies in the region. But the concept of moderate is merely the latest attempt to market a failed policy, while offering a facile hedge against accusations of Islamophobia and anti-Islamic policies.

Western leaders have simply chosen a few Arab rulers they believe are still saleable to Western audiences. And, as the word moderate has been repeated by Western leaders and echoed in the international media, these rulers have begun to believe their own billing. But who are they, and are they moderate? Their selection has been fluid at the periphery but solid at the core. Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt clearly qualify, whereas Syria, an ally during the 1990-91 Gulf War, was once at the periphery but fell out of step with U.S. interests after 9/11. Likewise, after the death of Yasser Arafat and the victory of Hamas, Fatah became moderate, while Iran, moderate under the Shah, became "radical" after the 1979 Islamic revolution.

Political marketing

This minuet of political marketing may play well in the West, but not in the Arab world, where the double standards and manipulation are all too plain to see. The appalling human rights records of Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Jordan, lack of transparency, and repression rank them among the world's least moderate. Is there such a thing as a "moderate public beheading"? For the U.S. and U.K. there clearly is, because all departures from the ideals of liberal democracy and social justice are rooted in "tradition." Hence bribes, beheadings and the oppression of women and minorities are traditional, and because whatever is traditional is not radical, it must be moderate.

Nothing, it seems, is more moderate than inertia. So inertia pays. Egypt has received an average of $1.3 billion a year in military aid from the U.S. since 1979, and $815 million a year in economic assistance. Saudi Arabia relies on oil revenues and the international legitimacy provided by membership of such moderate bulwarks as the World Trade Organisation and the International Monetary Fund.

But at home, all other hallmarks of moderation are missing. Amnesty International describes Saudi Arabia as a country where "there are no political parties, no elections, no independent legislature, no trade unions ... no independent judiciary, no independent human rights organisations. The government allows no international human rights organisations to carry out research in the country ... there is strict censorship of media within the country, and strict control of access to the internet, satellite television and other forms of communication with the outside world."

The use of moderate to describe such leaders is necessary to mask the death of Mr. Bush's "freedom agenda" in the Middle East, with its lofty goal of regionwide democratisation. Indeed, Ms. Rice's visit to Egypt in January emphasised the word moderate and completely ignored the word democracy.

The moderates are not democrats, but they are politically useful because of what else they are not: they are not Persian and not Shia, not defiant and not able to act independently of the U.S. They are moderate only because they do not need to be more radical to achieve absolute power. Mr. Mubarak already exercises it, and the al-Sauds are satisfied with the current level of fanaticism in the kingdom. Some are armchair jihadis, but their Islamism serves only to prop up their domestic legitimacy.

What the moderates do need is continued Western military and financial cover. So they remain ideological stalwarts. If communism was the enemy of the U.S., then it was their enemy. If Shia Iran is America's enemy today, it is also the enemy of America's moderate allies.

The relationship with the West is a two-way street. The Saudis invest billions in the U.S., buy weapons they don't need or cannot use, and provide a thriving market for Western goods. But, like Mr. Mubarak, the Saudi rulers are old and on the defensive against their own people. The more the U.S. shelters them, the more their legitimacy erodes. And the longer Washington and London prolong the state of denial with the help of pithy and amorphous buzzwords, the more explosive the Middle East will become.

(Mai Yamani is author of Cradle of Islam, and Changed Identities: The Challenge of the New Generation in Saudi Arabia.)

— © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2006

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