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 White
House Nonchalance
A too narrow focus on the Middle East?
[by
Daniel Pipes] 3/22/06
Expect
the Bush administration to continue to make the Middle East the
center of American foreign policy. Also expect its strategies
to remain basically unchanged despite their mixed record
so far.
That's the
message in a major foreign policy document issued last week
by the White House, The
National Security Strategy of the United States of America.
Mandated by law to appear every four years, the NSS, 49 pages
long, was written by the national security advisor, Stephen
Hadley and his team.
The Middle
East's outsized role comes across in various ways. In a cover
letter, President Bush opens the report by stating "America
is at war" and describing the enemy as "terrorism fueled by
an aggressive ideology of hatred and murder, fully revealed
to the American people on September 11, 2001." The report singles
out the Middle East as the region that "continues to command
the world's attention" because for too long, many of its countries "have
suffered from a freedom deficit. Repression has fostered corruption,
imbalanced or stagnant economies, political resentments, regional
conflicts, and religious extremism."
Contributor
Daniel Pipes
Daniel
Pipes is director of the Middle
East Forum, a member of the presidentially-appointed
board of the U.S.
Institute of Peace, and a prize-winning columnist
for the New York Sun and The Jerusalem
Post. His most recent book, Miniatures: Views
of Islamic and Middle Eastern Politics (Transaction
Publishers) appeared in late 2003. His website, DanielPipes.org,
the single most accessed source of information specifically
on the Middle East and Islam, offers an archive and
a chance to sign-up to receive his new materials as
they appear. [go to Pipes index]
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Other indications
point to the centrality of the Middle East. and Gulf states.
Iraq is mentioned by name 57 times, while China is named just
28 times and Russia 17 The most dangerous state? "We may face
no greater challenge from a single country than from Iran," asserts
the report. And the Syrian regime, which "has chosen to be
an enemy of freedom, justice, and peace," will be held to account.
This focus
on the Middle East makes sense, given the region's many urgent
threats to America Unfortunately, the NSS then insists on a
rosy-tinted outlook, either understating the region's problems
or approaching them too optimistically.
Circumstances
in Iraq are presented as a mere challenge to be overcome. "We
will work with the freely elected, democratic government of
Iraq our new partner in the War on Terror to consolidate
and expand freedom, and to build security and lasting stability" as
though the specter of civil war were not looming.
That "every
time an American goes to a gas station," as Gal
Luft puts it," he is sending money to America's enemies," is
a rude problem absent from the NSS, other than a vague acknowledgment
that "oil revenues fund activities that destabilize [the producers']
regions or advance violent ideologies."
The report
minimizes the threat of radical Islam via the fiction that
a "proud religion" has been "twisted and made to serve an evil." Not
so: Islamism is a deeply grounded and widely popular version
of Islam, as shown by election results from Afghanistan to
Algeria. Reliable opinion polls are lacking from majority-Muslim
countries but repeated surveys in Britain give
some idea of the harrowingly extremist attitudes of its Muslim
population: 5 % of them support the July 7, 2005, terrorist
attacks in London and say more such attacks are justified;
20% have sympathy with the feelings and motives of the July
7 attackers and believe that suicide attacks against the military
in Britain can be justified. These results are probably typical
of Muslim populations globally, as recent polls of Indonesians and Palestinian
Arabs confirms.
The NSS omits
any mention of Turkey and Bangladesh and it refers to Saudi
Arabia only in passing, suggesting that the Islamist leadership
in these states poses no particular concern. The administration's
grievous error in helping a terrorist organization, Hamas,
reach power in January 2006 is glossed over with soothing words
("The opportunity for peace and statehood … is open if Hamas
will abandon its terrorist roots and change its relationship
with Israel").
Thus does
the NSS accurately reflect the yin and yang of the Bush administration's
Middle East policy: a much-needed, relentless focus on the
region's sick political culture and the threats it poses to
Americans, mixed with an insouciance that current policies
are just fine, thank you, everything is on track, and problems Iraq,
terrorism, and the Arab-Israeli conflict in particular will
soon enough be resolved.
Significantly,
only the Iranian drive for nuclear weapons does not inspire
that glow of confidence. Here, the administration is frankly
worried ( "if confrontation is to be avoided," states the NSS,
diplomatic efforts must succeed in convincing Tehran to restrict
its nuclear program to peaceful purposes). This observer wishes
that comparable doubts accompanied other American policies
in the region. -one-
This
piece first appeared in The New York Sun
copyright
2006 Daniel Pipes
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