Colext/Macondo
Cantina virtual de los COLombianos en el EXTerior
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Otra perspectiva (lo mismo, pero diferente...)
PANG=======
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WHAT THE PAPERS SAY: Waiting for Washington to figure it out
Translated From The Arabic By Shira Gutgold
(November 14) (The Daily Star, Beirut, November 8-12)
The United States is needlessly complicating its own "war on terrorism" by
steadfastly refusing to clarify either the demands it has made of foreign
governments or its reasons for making them.
And on top of undermining its short-term strategy in the wake of the Sept.
11 attacks, this simultaneous failure of policy and wisdom also threatens to
compound Washington's already pronounced inability to communicate with both
Arab governments and their populations.
This is not the first time that US decision-makers have missed the mark in
their approach to this part of the world, and despite a long record of
missed opportunities and outright disasters, this latest performance shows
every sign of setting new standards for diplomatic ineffectuality.
There are few souls left on Earth who remain unaware that Americans are, to
say the least, angry. The tendencies of human emotion, when confronted with
evil, are familiar to most people, so there cannot help but be forbearance
for individuals who insist that America's plight justifies a willingness to
make its own rules, that it has no obligation to explain itself and that it
has the right to bomb, browbeat or otherwise bully anyone deemed to be
standing in its way.
Some even speak condescendingly of the rest of the world being on the
up-slope of a "learning curve" about how "things are going to be" post-Sept.
11. These feelings can and should be forgiven among individual Americans.
The same cannot be said, however, of the US government.
The Bush administration has been absorbing lessons of its own since the
attacks in Washington and New York City, one of them being the importance of
solving the Palestinian question as a central ingredient in improved
relations with the Arab world.
But some of this unnecessarily new knowledge is still not being assimilated:
The US government has yet to make the breakthrough that would see it
comprehend the confusion and subsequent mistrust it sows among Arabs when it
employs coercion against their governments.
The formula is so simple that a child should be able to perceive it,
especially
seeing as how it has been used (and abused) for so very long. Washington
makes demands (sometimes reasonable, sometimes not) but refuses to explain
its reasons; Arabs smell a conspiracy and assume (sometimes rightly,
sometimes not) that the agenda is Israeli.
The continuing flap over Hizbullah is a prime example of this. The group
that hounded Israeli occupation forces out of the South has become to the
Jewish state what Vietnamese Communists were to America until very recently:
an unlikely but persistent psychological nemesis....
THE US is anything but shy when it comes to getting involved in matters far
beyond its shores - a tendency that developed during the Cold War and
continues to this day. Many of its actions have been helpful in this regard,
a fact which its strident foes should take into account more often.
In other areas, however, the contradictions written into US policy by
lopsided entanglements with troublesome allies have stretched American
credibility to the breaking point.
This has been especially true as regards the Arab-Israeli conflict, and has
now produced yet another example of Washington trying to have it both ways:
The Bush administration has placed Hizbullah on a list of alleged terrorist
groups whose assets it wants frozen.
There are many obvious holes in the logic behind this policy, the most
striking of which is the fact that since 1996, Washington has extended a
form of explicit but unspoken recognition to Hizbullah as a legitimate
resistance group. That was the year in which then-secretary of state Warren
Christopher helped negotiate the April Understanding after Israel's "Grapes
of Wrath" offensive.
Subsequently, a five-nation monitoring group met regularly to hear
complaints about violations of the accord's rules of engagement,
specifically with regard to endangering civilians. The panel included an
Israeli delegation (representing the Jewish state and its proxy militia, the
South Lebanon Army), a Syrian-Lebanese one (representing groups fighting
occupation in the South, namely Hizbullah), and US-French mediation.
Until just before the Israeli withdrawal in 1999, this monitoring group
therefore placed the US government in the clear position of recognizing
Hizbullah's right to resist the Israeli occupation - a fact still
acknowledged by US diplomats in the region. The Bush administration
rationalizes Hizbullah's being placed on the list, however, by pointing to
its "overseas activities," which are regarded separately from its operations
in Lebanon. US diplomats are well-practiced in the rhetorical acrobatics
required to defend such double standards, but their exertions are no help to
anyone with a stake in the Middle East.
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