From: John Clancy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 10:01:03 -0700
To: overflow: ;
Cc: blindmice: ;
Subject: Guardian: US loses influence in Arab world
from: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
subject: Guardian: US loses influence in Arab World
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>Washington Post / U.S. loses influence in deadlocked Arab world /
Howard >Schneider in Cairo
>U.S. loses influence in deadlocked Arab world
>
>Washington's efforts as a Middle East peace broker come under fire
from>its allies as well as its foes
>Howard Schneider in Cairo
>As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the first Bush
administration, Colin L.Powell glimpsed Middle East politics at the
peak of American influence: The Cold War had ended, the Soviet Union
had nothing left to offer and victory in the Gulf War produced optimism
about Arab-Israeli peace.Powell's visit last month as secretary of
state presented a vastly different picture. Palestinians and Israelis
persisted in killing each other even as he held meetings with their
leaders. In neighboring Jordan, a U.S. ally usually touted as a model
of predictability, terrorist threats against Americans prompted 800
Marines to abandon a joint training exercise. Leaders in Saudi Arabia,
a country at the center of the Gulf War coalition, were threatening to
cut off business with U.S. defense and other contractors who also
supply Israel. And Powell's old nemesis, President Saddam Hussein,
remained in command of Iraq as U.S. efforts to rejuvenate economic
sanctions faltered in the United Nations.
The failure of Powell's "smart sanctions" proposal, in the face of
Arab opposition and a threatened Russian veto in the Security Council,
was a "necessary blow to rid the world of the evil of a professional
thief who steals human rights," proclaimed Baghdad's Babel newspaper,
which is run by Hussein's son Uday. Western and Arab analysts say
American influence and credibility in the Arab world are a far cry from
where they stood after the first Israeli-Palestinian peace talks at the
Madrid conference in the fall of 1991, and may be at their lowest in
more than a decade. U.S.standing has been diminished, they say, by the
renewed enmity between Arabs and Israelis since the Palestinian
uprising began in September, and by an increasing perception that the
United States is a cause of problems here rather than a catalyst for
solutions.
Early in the 1990s "the presence of America was something positive,
and everyone talked of a more tolerant, sustainable political culture
in the Arab world," said Simon Karem, a Beirut lawyer and a former
Lebanese ambassador to the United States. But peace has proved elusive,
terrorism remains a threat and democracy is still a dream for most of
the Arab world's quarter of a billion citizens. Since even before Egypt
and Israel signed a U.S.-brokered peace accord in 1979 - and
particularly since the Gulf War and the hopeful atmosphere of the
Madrid peace conference - American diplomacy has been built around
the premise that the United States could maintain strong support for
Israel while building alliances in the Arab world, helping to reconcile
the two sides.
Relations with Egypt run exceptionally deep. It is second only to
Israel in U.S. military and economic assistance and plays host to the
largest American diplomatic and aid mission in the world. Ties with
Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries improved in the 1980s,
culminating in the liberation of Kuwait from the Iraqi army in 1991.
Jordan's decision to sign a peace treaty with Israel in 1995
solidified its traditional pro-Western tilt. Even Syria, long a holdout
in recognizing Israel's right to exist, agreed to trade a peace
agreement for the Golan Heights land that Israel occupied in the 1967
Arab-Israeli war and formalized its decision in Madrid.
The new Middle East landscape got its biggest boost two years later,
when Palestinians and Israelis reached the 1993 Oslo peace agreement.
The first steps of its implementation, with Washington back in the
picture, gave Palestinians their first taste of self-rule, with Israel
turning over two-thirds of the Gaza Strip and 20 percent of the West
Bank in what was seen as the road to Palestinian statehood under Yasser
Arafat.
But the U.S.-sponsored peace process that has sputtered along since
then failed to yield the anticipated final agreement. The last
nine months of conflict have produced what one Washington analyst
referred to as a return to "zero-sum" conflict, in which Arab public
opinion increasingly rejects the idea that the U.S. can bolster Israel
and befriend Arab nations at the same time.
American efforts to contain Hussein in Baghdad have over the past 10
years come to be seen by many Arabs not as an effort to protect the
Gulf -whose leadership generally supports Washington's policy on Iraq -
but as a way to suppress the one country rich enough and radical enough
to challenge Israel.
"The American administration should realize that the region has
changed" since the era immediately following the Gulf War, said Taher
Masri, a Jordanian senator and former prime minister. He characterized
Powell as part of an "old guard" that has not kept U.S.policy apace
with those changes. "They have failed to realize that Arab public
opinion will never accept sanctioning Iraq while Israel squeezes
the Palestinians", he added. "In our eyes, Israel is the U.S. And the
only leverage for pressure on Israel . . . is the U.S."
By the end of Clinton's second term, criticism of U.S. involvement in
the Middle East had become widespread, and even mainstream Arab
voices criticized U.S. support for Israel and doubted that the United
States could serve as a broker. Yet as soon as the new Bush
administration announced it was stepping back from Middle East
diplomacy, the chorus went in the other direction, urging the United
States to remain engaged. Arab leaders "love to bash us," Edward
Walker, a former assistant secretary of state, said in an interview in
the Jerusalem Post. "They constantly bash us in public because that's
what they think their people want to hear, and then they constantly are
saying, 'Why aren't you more active, why aren't you more engaged?' It's
a split personality . . . I can't think of anything that hurts the
peace process more."
During the intense Israeli-Palestinian negotiations last summer, such
Arab leaders as Egypt's Hosni Mubarak and Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince
Abdullah recoiled from any role, largely out of fear of the popular
response back home. Without broader Arab support, Arafat felt he could
not reach an agreement, and within two months the situation began to
decay. Nearly a year later the Palestinian uprising has produced 600
deaths, a collapse of the Palestinian economy, and election of an
Israeli government that has put itself on a war footing.
Asked to mediate a consensus when none of the principals wants to
yield, the United States faces a "diplomatic dead-end," Robert Satloff,
an analyst with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, wrote
after touring the region recently. "The foreseeable future is about
conflict management . . . let alone conflict resolution."
>The Guardian Weekly 12-7-2001, page 28 " JC
>
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