The Daily Star, Lebanon
March 32 2005

An ideal U.S. checklist for promoting freedom

By Rami G. Khouri
Daily Star staff

The United States has recently appointed two able officials – Karen
Wright and Liz Cheney – to revamp two of its persistently enigmatic
and largely failed policies: promoting global public diplomacy and
democracy throughout the wider Middle East region. Having spent the
last 35 years of my professional life deeply engaged in both those
arenas, I venture to offer some thoughts here that folks in
Washington might ponder if they aim to do a better job than their
predecessors of grasping why this noble American mission to promote
freedom and democracy is received with such skepticism, scorn and
even resistance around the world, and not just in Arab-Islamic lands.

Here’s a quick list of eight issues the U.S. should ponder:

1. Style – As that great British thinker Mick Jagger of the Rolling
Stones once said: “It’s the singer, not the song.”

The noble policy to promote freedom and democracy is often resisted
because Washington’s manner tends to be aggressive and threatening.
It uses sanctions, the military and a unilateral laying down of the
law that others must follow, or else they will be considered enemies
and thus liable to regime change. People don’t like to be bullied and
threatened, even to change for their own good.

2. Credibility – The U.S. simply does not have much credibility in
the Arab-Islamic Middle East in terms of consistency or fairness.
Instead, its long policy track record has hurt, angered or offended
most people in this region, primarily by backing Arab dictators and
autocrats, or supporting the Israeli position on key issues of
Arab-Israeli peacemaking. The priority freedom issue for most Arabs
is freedom from foreign occupation and subjugation, whether it’s the
Palestinians, Iraq or other situations. If Washington uses war and
active pressure diplomacy to implement UN resolutions in Lebanon and
Iraq, but does nothing parallel to implement UN resolutions calling
for the freedom of Palestinians from Israeli occupation, it will
continue to be greeted with disdainful guffaws in most of the Middle
East.

3. Consistency – The United States could promote freedom and
democracy without waging war in Iraq, spending $300 billion, leaving
over 1500, Americans dead and more than 10,000 injured, and perhaps
100,000 Iraqis killed, and creating a massive anti-American backlash
throughout the world.

It can better promote democracy and rally Arab democrats by telling
Presidents Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and Zine al-Abedin ben Ali of
Tunisia, for example, that over 20 years of being president without
any meaningful legal opposition is enough. It can support term limits
for Arab presidents and promote democracy among its Arab allies and
friends, such as Morocco, Jordan, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Tunis
and, now, Libya, whose leader has been in power for 36 years.

4. Motive – A perpetually rolling motive for the American war in Iraq
is not good for American credibility. We’ve been told Iraq was about
weapons of mass destruction, links with Al-Qaeda, imminent threats to
the United States, homegrown brutality against the Iraqi people,
stopping Iraqi threats to neighbors, and, now, spreading freedom and
democracy throughout the Middle East. Some of these rationales may
one day prove to be correct. In the meantime, the collection of half
a dozen is crippling to the trust placed in America.

5. Context – The Arab world’s very vulnerable states suffer massive
internal pressures due to issues of population, identity, demography,
economy, environment, ideology, crises of citizenship rights vs.
statehood obligations and secularism vs. religiosity, and the
perpetual pressures of foreign armies. In this wider context, the
issue of promoting freedom and democracy is dwarfed by the more
pressing imperatives of stable statehood, liberation from foreign
occupation, meeting basic human needs, and stopping the tradition of
foreign armies coming at us every couple of generations and redrawing
our map and reconfiguring our systems. Freedom and democracy
certainly would help resolve many of our indigenous problems, if they
were applied across the board. If the U.S. and others abroad promote
these values selectively and self-servingly expediently, as is the
case now, they will continue to elicit resistance and rebuke.

6. Legitimacy – There is no global consensus that the United States
is mandated to promote freedom and democracy, or that this is
America’s divinely ordained destiny. There is such a mandate, though,
in the charter of the United Nations, Security Council resolutions to
end foreign occupations, and international legal conventions – most
of which the U.S. resists, ignores or applies very selectively. No
surprise then that virtually the whole world resists the United
States.

7. Militarism – The American use of pre-emptive war for regime
change, already applied in Afghanistan and Iraq, creates more
problems than it resolves. It shatters the concept of peace and
security through international law, and asserts the triumph of the
law of the jungle, where the strongest rules. Promoting freedom and
democracy through the guns of the U.S. Marines is not credible with
many people outside of Republican and neoconservative Washington
circles.

8. Relevance – The value of individual freedom as defined in American
culture runs against the grain of the concept of freedom as it is
understood in most of the Middle East and the developing world, where
people sacrifice certain individual liberties for the protection, the
identity, the sense of hope, the well-being, and the communal
expression that comes from belonging to a larger group. Such groups
include the family, tribe, religion, or ethnic or national group (for
Kurds, Druze, Armenians, Circassians, and others), along with the
Islamic umma or the Arab “nation.” All these collective identities
dominate the issue of personal freedom, at least at this stage of
development in the region.

These are real concerns, derived from modern historical experience,
not from imagined threats or Arab psycho-social deviancies. They are
very relevant in the context of Washington’s desire to promote
freedom and democracy, because they act as the primary constraint to
any meaningful Arab cooperation with the U.S. More important, though,
is that they can all be overcome and removed from the scene through
better communications between Arabs and Americans, and more
consistent, lawful policies by all concerned. All this is just food
for thought from the Middle Eastern battlefield of ideas and
perceptions that is littered with both the corpses of failed American
initiatives and the burdens of distressed Arab societies.

Rami G. Khouri writes a weekly commentary for The Daily Star.