A rchive Date
[ 18-04-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/mansur_toronto.html
America's promising Mideast agenda
By SALIM MANSUR -- For the Toronto Sun
April 18, 2003
The first meeting of Iraqis convened by the Americans near Ur this week - according to legend the birthplace of Abraham who is a patriarch of both Arabs and Jews - was laden with symbolism and pregnant with possibilities.
That such a meeting should have taken place within a week of the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime in Baghdad, in the presence of Jay Garner - a retired army general designated to head the Pentagon's Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) - would have been unimaginable just a few months ago.
That is irrespective of who among the Iraqis attended and who declined to come to this ancient land where tyrants have been as common as prophets.
A paradigm shift in Mideast and global politics is now underway with the immensely successful demolition of Saddam's tyrannical government.
There is now a scramble to adjust to the new reality of American assertiveness in global security politics as it replaces UN multilateralism, which amounted to seeking and maintaining consensus on every issue by reducing it to its absolute minimum.
In the corridors of the UN, international law came to mean a compendium of rules, processes and technicalities increasingly stripped of any moral content.
In the Mideast, the fixation with the Arab-Israeli conflict became a substitute for dealing with the deteriorating condition of societies throughout the region via neglect, as well as an excuse for continued political corruption and the abuse of power.
Saddam's Iraq was the most wretched example of this rot in the Arab Mideast and as the horrid secrets of his tyranny are disclosed, the world will learn in much greater detail what some suspected and many endured for so long.
CHANGING THE STATUS QUO
President George Bush's determination not to be contained by the false pieties of the multilateralists has broken the political status quo in the Mideast, one of endlessly parsing the peace formula, by now adopting an alternative agenda of freedom and democracy for all the people in the region.
The repressiveness of Saddam's regime made it a Gordian Knot of failed and tyrannical policies that had to be lanced.
This has potentially opened Iraq to the sort of remedy that in time may see it emerge as the model of representative government and an open civil society for the rest of the Arab world.
There is no precedent for America's involvement with the world in the 21st century that provides the Bush administration with a chart for how to negotiate the many difficulties that lie ahead in Iraq - not even the reconstruction of Germany and Japan after World War II.
There is, however, a litany of complaints and a mountain of resentment in the Arab-Muslim world against America that will amplify every slip as a monumental disaster, and question every bit of progress.
It will be used by America's many critics to deny the post-Saddam evolution of Iraq as a healthy development.
The stakes are high, and America cannot allow itself to falter or fail in Iraq.
HOPES OF FREEDOM
Not since Woodrow Wilson returned in dismay to Washington from the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 after having raised great hopes of freedom for the subject peoples of the Ottoman empire, has America ventured into the Mideast with an agenda of such promise.
Wilson's specially appointed King-Crane commission travelled throughout Syria and Palestine - the commission never visited the towns and villages of Mesopotamia that would later become modern Iraq - hearing the hopes and fears of its inhabitants.
America later rode on the slipstream of Great Britain into the Mideast after 1945.
But the Cold War years followed and America's priority in the region quickly became one of defending the status quo in the Persian Gulf - given its oil resources - rather than promoting democratic change.
This is the burden of history that America now carries into Iraq. Bush and the members of his administration could usefully read the report of the King-Crane commission, and remind themselves how warmly Americans were initially received in one corner of the Mideast some eight decades ago.
Wilson's aborted mission of 1919 is now, once again, a promise to be kept and fulfilled, and Ur, from where Abraham set forth on his journey, an auspicious place to begin.
Salim Mansur is a professor of political science at the University of Western Ontario. His column appears alternate Thursdays. He can be reached at smansurca@yahoo.ca. Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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