The New Middle East (39 page)

The chief justification for the war in Iraq began to break down when it was soon discovered that Prong Three of the Bush doctrine was missing: the Iraqi president Saddam Hussein no longer had the nuclear, chemical and biological weapons over which the US had largely made its case for the invasion. From that moment on the Bush administration had only ‘Prong Four’ to lean all its weight on. The ‘Freedom Agenda’ became the justification for everything that followed.

Its reach though was not confined to the Middle East. It was to be a global initiative. George W. Bush decided he would ‘advance freedom by supporting fledgling democratic governments in places like the Palestinian Territories, Lebanon, Georgia and Ukraine’ and supporting ‘democratic reformers’ in ‘Iran, Syria, North Korea and Venezuela’.
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He took credit for the ‘Cedar Revolution’ in Lebanon that forced out the Syrian army after it was accused of being behind the assassination of the hugely popular former billionaire prime minister Rafik Hariri. It ‘marked’, he wrote, ‘one of the most important successes of the freedom agenda’.
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But a spurt of people power in Lebanon was not going to transform the region.

Fifteen of those nineteen hijackers who inspired President Bush’s grand plan were originally from the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, but just like the man who would succeed him, President Bush wasn’t going to try to force policy on the men who pumped out the oil. So after a wobbly start in Iraq he looked to Egypt and elsewhere for the agenda’s redemption.

These were heady days for those people, described as neo-conservatives, who believed that America had to democratise the world for its own good. In January 2005, as he began his second term, George W. Bush presided over Iraq’s transitional National Assembly elections which drew up the country’s new constitution. It was the Arab world’s first serious attempt at a free and fair poll. The neo-cons thought their dream had been realised. One of their leading thinkers, Charles Krauthammer, announced, six years too early, that: ‘The Arab Spring of 2005 will be noted by history as a turning point for the Arab world.’ And he added:

we went into Iraq to liberate Iraqis, with no motives of oil or hegemony or revenge. The president said that this was a way to begin the liberation, to change and transform the dictatorial and intolerant culture of the Middle East . . . Democracy is on the march, and if we continue with the boldness and courage that we have shown during the past few years, we could see that revolution through.
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But it was downhill all the way from there. They did persuade the Egyptian regime to hold elections, and the more polls that were held the more farcical they became, and of course Mubarak got ‘voted’ back in. The ‘Cedar Revolution’ morphed into a war between Israel and the Iranian-backed militant group Hezbollah in 2006. Still believing that the Freedom Agenda could prevail, Condoleezza Rice tried to explain away that conflict by saying: ‘What we’re seeing here, in a sense, is the growing – the birth pangs of a new Middle East.’
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Her words provoked fury and a particularly disgusting cartoon of her in the Palestinian newspaper
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, wearing a blue dress and pregnant with an armed monkey. The caption said: ‘Rice talks about the birth of a new Middle East’ as blood dripped from her teeth. ‘So, I dropped the reference,’ she wrote later, ‘and started talking about a “different Middle East.” Words mattered a lot in a region that loved to say one thing and do another,’ she added.
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So did pictures. By now satellite TV channels like Al Jazeera were broadcasting into homes throughout the region, in all its vivid gory detail, the collapse of much of Iraq into a brutal sectarian civil war. Then the equally shocking images of the torture and humiliation of Iraqis at the Abu Ghraib prison did catastrophic harm to the US’s moral standing in the Muslim world. Equally damaging was the CIA rendition programme that plucked suspected terrorists from their homes in one country and dumped them into a torture cell in a friendly dictatorship to extract information for the ‘war on terror’. There was a simple formula according to the former CIA agent Bob Baer: ‘If you want a serious interrogation, you send a prisoner to Jordan. If you want them to be tortured, you send them to Syria. If you want someone to disappear – never to see them again – you send them to Egypt.’
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‘Why can’t we send them to be tortured?’ President Bush was quoted saying about al-Qaeda suspects in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. ‘Stick something up their ass! . . . Look, I just can’t afford to see any more people in America die.’
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Unsurprisingly the actions that flowed from these sentiments just didn’t square with the idea that America was promoting liberty in the region. Then the ‘Algerian Problem’ reared its head once again, but this time in the occupied Palestinian territories when Hamas beat Fatah.

The Freedom Agenda was now on the retreat.

By early 2007 the influence of the neo-conservatives, who had added intellectual substance to George W. Bush’s gut-driven decision-making, was on the wane.
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Many of them had left the administration altogether. Their ideas had been discredited by events in Iraq. In the end the neo-cons did not have the ‘boldness and courage’ of their convictions because what mattered to them more than giving people the vote was what the result of that vote was. But as the Arab Spring circa 2011 began toppling Middle Eastern dictators, some neo-cons were ready to declare: ‘The Freedom Agenda gets Vindicated’. The ‘prescient’ George W. Bush, they opined, ‘deserves substantial credit for envisioning and perhaps even helping instigate the Arab Spring as a whole’.
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‘The neo-conservatives are basically trying to rewrite the historical narrative so that their foreign policy looks much less disastrous than it in fact was, so they’ve changed what the Bush administration was trying to do,’ said Warwick University’s Dr Osman Hassan, who is a specialist on the impact of the Freedom Agenda on US foreign policy. ‘If your policy was to promote democracy slowly, in the same way that Morocco is being seen to reform at the minute, then the Arab Spring and the instability it has created has fundamentally contradicted many of the premises that the Freedom Agenda was trying to promote.’

George W. Bush’s administration reined in its crusading tendencies so much in its final years that there were bigger foreign policy changes between the first and second terms of the Bush government than there were when President Obama took over. That is because it became clear by the beginning of the second Bush administration that his big ideas had run into the sand. He spent his last term trying to repair some of the damage caused in the Middle East by the first. American foreign policy had already begun its U-turn before Obama took office. The new president didn’t have to change course much, though he did strike a fundamental change in tone, particularly when it came to dealing with adversaries like Syria and Iran. But Obama had practically run on being everything Bush was not, and so he rejected all of his rhetoric, even in the small area where their ideas about freedom and human rights might have overlapped. Promoting democracy in the Middle East slipped down the list of priorities for the new administration. Then the youngsters of the Arab world pushed it all the way back up again.

President Obama came to Cairo in June 2009 to make his famous speech promising the Muslim world in general and the Arab region in particular ‘A New Beginning’. That is what the Arab world got, though it was a new start of its own making and had nothing to do with the crafted eulogy he gave on that day to the common values and aspirations of humanity. American foreign policy did not change the Arab world because it didn’t really want change in the Arab world.

Obama’s team spent four months crafting his Cairo speech.
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That is an extraordinarily long time, and they still got it wrong. Many of those in the Arab world who heard it felt let down by it later because he failed to make progress on the Palestinian issue and did little to force change on the Middle Eastern dictatorships.

But perhaps its biggest immediate impact was in Israel, where it infuriated many in the leadership. It marked the start of Obama’s rocky relationship with the Netanyahu government. That was a well-trodden path for Democrat presidents.

‘Who the fuck does he think he is? Who’s the fucking superpower here?’
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The personalities thrown up by life in the Middle East have often been a little difficult to get along with. The Forty-Second President of the United States, William J. Clinton, found that out during his first meeting with the prime minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, in 1996 during the Israeli PM’s first incarnation in that role. The Forty-Fourth President found dealing with the second Netanyahu administration even harder, and that was partly due to how politics in Israel had changed between the presidencies of the two men.

When President Bill Clinton was dealing with Netanyahu he was dealing with an Israeli hawk. Since then the political spectrum around him has surged so far to the right that by Obama’s first term Netanyahu had become a moderate in his own cabinet just by standing still. Israeli leaderships nowadays are always going to feel more at home politically with a Republican president. Candidate Obama recognised this. He was reported as saying when he ran for president: ‘I think there is a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you’re anti-Israel.’
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But the Netanyahu government during Obama’s first term considered the disconnect to be about a fundamental re-evaluation by the president of that relationship.

‘Former President [Ronald Reagan] divided the world into Good and Evil. And we were on the good side. And if you divide the world into victims and victimisers, in the Palestinian case he [Obama] considers us as victimisers. It’s a formidable challenge for us,’ a senior member of the Israeli cabinet told me during Obama’s first term. The minister said that early on Obama relied too heavily on advisers like Rahm Emanuel, who thought they understood Israel but did not. Throughout the acrimony of the first term, during the many conversations I had with senior Israeli ministers and military commanders they all seemed to agree on the moment Israel decided Obama just didn’t get it. ‘I was shocked by the Cairo speech,’ said the cabinet minister, ‘that President Obama drew a direct line between the Palestinians as victims and American slaves as victims, as blacks in South Africa in the apartheid era as victims, as Jews in the Holocaust as victims. I felt like he doesn’t understand . . . how can you compare?’

He shouldn’t have been that shocked. President Obama had sent the message from day one that he considered a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians a priority. In Cairo he promised ‘to personally pursue this outcome with all the patience and dedication that the task requires’. And he indicated where he intended to show his mettle: ‘The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements . . . It is time for these settlements to stop.’
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The plan was that a total settlement freeze would pave the way for a new round of talks, but the settlement building did not stop, and there was never any real chance that it would. A total freeze could never fly in a coalition government where the man then in charge of negotiating with the outside world, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, himself lived on a settlement. The best Obama’s peace envoy George Mitchell could get from Netanyahu was a partial freeze from December 2009 for ten months, but only of the construction of new buildings in the West Bank. Settlements in occupied East Jerusalem were not included. Three thousand homes already under way were allowed to continue.

The Obama administration tried to make the best of it but it was never going to be enough for the Palestinians. They had listened to Obama say settlements had to ‘stop’, and that is what they held out for. President Mahmoud Abbas’s chief of staff, Mohammad Shtayyeh, told me that the Palestinians had been ‘hopeful that this administration had all the good intentions to really take us somewhere’. He said Obama had made all the right noises about ‘the linkage of the peace process and settlements’ and so ‘Obama took himself up a high tree and we went with him’. He then likened President Obama to an old man he once knew who spent his days watching pretty girls pass by. ‘Obama,’ he said, ‘he has the desire but he doesn’t have the capacity.’

Picking a public fight over Israeli settlements was a huge tactical blunder by the Obama administration. It thoroughly miscalculated the size of the challenge it had taken on. Obama quickly used most of his political capital to push through domestic policy; he had very little left to stand firm against Israel’s supporters in the Congress too. But if President Obama did not intend to win the battle by whatever means it took, then he should never have fought it. It left him in Israeli eyes looking weak. Netanyahu’s government easily swatted away the Cairo demand for settlements to ‘stop’. Two years on he was so confident that he had the measure of Obama that he felt able to publicly rebuke the president during a visit to the White House on 20 May 2011. The previous day, during his set-piece response to the Arab Spring, President Obama had said: ‘We believe the borders of Israel and Palestine should be based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.’
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Twenty-four hours later in the Oval Office, with Obama by his side and in front of the world’s media, Netanyahu said: ‘Peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle Eastern reality, and . . . the only peace that will endure is one that is based on reality, on unshakeable facts.’ ‘Israel,’ he added, ‘cannot go back to the 1967 lines.’
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