1. U.S. support for Israel occupation forces has created enormous resentment throughout the Middle East.
The vast majority of Middle Eastern states and their people have belatedly acknowledged
that Israel will continue to exist as part of the region as an independent Jewish
state. However, there is enormous resentment at ongoing U.S. diplomatic, financial
and military support for Israeli occupation forces and their policies.
The U.S. relationship with Israel is singular. Israel represents only one one-thousandth
of the world’s population and has the 16th highest per capita income in
the world, yet it receives nearly 40 percent of all U.S. foreign aid. Direct
aid to Israel in recent years has exceeded $3.5 billion annually, with an additional
$1 billion through other sources, and has been supported almost unanimously
in Congress, even by liberal Democrats who normally insist on linking aid to
human rights and international law. Although the American public appears to
strongly support Israel’s right to exist and wants the U.S. to be a guarantor
of that right, there is growing skepticism regarding the excessive level and
unconditional nature of U.S. aid to Israel. Among elected officials, however,
there are virtually no calls for a reduction of current aid levels in the foreseeable
future, particularly as nearly all U.S. aid to Israel returns to the United
States either via purchases of American armaments or as interest payments to
U.S. banks for previous loans.
Despite closer American strategic cooperation with the Persian Gulf monarchies
since the Gulf War, these governments clearly lack Israel's advantages in terms
of political stability, a well-trained military, technological sophistication
and the ability to quickly mobilize human and material resources.
Despite serious reservations about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians,
most individual Americans have a longstanding moral commitment to Israel's survival.
Official U.S. government policy supporting successive Israeli governments in
recent years, however, appears to be crafted more from a recognition of how
Israel supports American strategic interests in the Middle East and beyond.
Indeed, 99 percent of all U.S. aid to Israel has been granted since the 1967
war, when Israel proved itself more powerful than any combination of its neighbors
and occupied the territories of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and other
Arabs. Many Israelis supportive of that country's peace movement believe the
United States has repeatedly undermined their efforts to moderate their government's
policies, arguing that Israeli security and Palestinian rights are not mutually-exclusive,
as the U.S. seems to believe, but mutually dependent on the other.
As long as U.S. military, diplomatic and economic support of the Israeli government
remains unconditional despite Israel's ongoing violation of human rights, international
law and previous agreements with the Palestinians, there is no incentive for
the Israeli government to change its policies. The growing Arab resentment that
results can only threaten the long-term security interests of both Israel and
the United States.
2. The United States has not been a fair mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For over two decades, the international consensus for peace in the Middle East
has involved the withdrawal of Israeli forces to within internationally recognized
boundaries in return for security guarantees from Israel's neighbors, the establishment
of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and some special status for
a shared Jerusalem. Over the past 30 years, the Palestine Liberation Organization,
under the leadership of Yasir Arafat, has evolved from frequent acts of terrorism
and the open call for Israel's destruction to supporting the international consensus
for a two-state solution. Most Arab states have made a similar evolution toward
favoring just such a peace settlement.
However, the U.S. has traditionally rejected the international consensus and
currently takes a position more closely resembling that of Israel's right-wing
government: supporting a Jerusalem under largely Israeli sovereignty, encouraging
only partial withdrawal from the occupied territories, allowing for the confiscation
of Palestinian land and the construction of Jewish-only settlements and rejecting
an independent state Palestine outside of Israeli strictures.
The interpretation of autonomy by Israel and the United States has thus far
led to only limited Palestinian control of a bare one-fourth of the West Bank
in a patchwork arrangement that more resembles American Indian reservations
or the infamous Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa than anything like
statehood. The U.S. has repeatedly blamed the Palestinians for the violence
of the past year, even though Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and
other reputable human rights group have noted that the bulk of the violence
has come from Israeli occupation forces and settlers.
Throughout the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the U.S. has insisted on the
two parties working out a peace agreement among themselves, even though there
has always been a gross asymmetry in power between the Palestinians and their
Israeli occupiers. The U.S. has blamed the Palestinians for not compromising
further, even though they already ceded 78 percent of historic Palestine to
the Israelis in the Oslo Accords; the Palestinians now simply demand that the
Israelis withdraw their troops and colonists only from lands seized in the 1967,
which Israel is required to do under international law.
The U.S.-backed peace proposal by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at
the 2000 talks at Camp David would have allowed Israel to annex large swaths
of land in the West Bank, control of most of Arab East Jerusalem and its environs,
maintain most of the illegal settlements in a pattern that would have divided
the West Bank into non-contiguous cantons, and deny Palestinian refugees the
right of return. With the U.S. playing the dual role of the chief mediator of
the conflict as well as the chief diplomatic, financial and military backer
of Israeli occupation forces, the U.S. goal seems to be more that of Pax Americana
than that of a true peace.
3. The United States has played a major role in the militarization of the region.
The Middle East is the destination of the majority of American arms exports,
creating enormous profits for weapons manufacturers and contributing greatly
to the militarization of this already overly-militarized region. Despite promises
of restraint, U.S. arms transfers to the region have topped $60 billion since
the Gulf War. Arms sales are an important component of building political alliances
between the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries, particularly with the military
leadership of recipient countries. There is a strategic benefit for the U.S.
in having U.S.-manufactured systems on the ground in the event of a direct U.S.
military intervention. Arms sales are also a means of supporting military industries
faced with declining demand in Western countries.
To link arms transfers with a given country's human rights record would lead
to the probable loss of tens of billions of dollars in annual sales for American
weapons manufacturers, which are among the most powerful special interest groups
in Washington. This may help explain why the United States has ignored the fact
that UN Security Council resolution 687, which the U.S. has cited as justification
for its military responses to Iraq’s possible rearmament, also calls for
region-wide disarmament efforts, something the United States has rejected.
The U.S. justifies the nearly $3 billion in annual military aid to Israel on
the grounds of protecting that country from its Arab neighbors, even though
the United States supplies 80 percent of the arms to these Arab states. The
1978 Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt was in many ways more like a
tripartite military pact than a peace agreement in that it has resulted in more
than $5 billion is annual U.S. arms transfers to those two countries. U.S. weapons
have been used repeatedly in attacks against civilians by Israel, Turkey and
other countries. It is not surprising that terrorist movements have arisen in
a region where so many states maintain their power influence through force of
arms.
4. The U.S. maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East.
The United States maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East,
including longstanding military bases in Turkey, a strong naval presence in
the eastern Mediterranean and Arabian Sea, as well as large numbers of troops
on the Arabian Peninsula since the Gulf War. Most Persian Gulf Arabs and their
leaders felt threatened after Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait and were grateful
for the strong U.S. leadership in the 1991 war against Saddam Hussein's regime
and for UN resolutions designed to curb Iraq's capability to produce weapons
of mass destruction. At the same time, there is an enormous amount of cynicism
regarding U.S. motives in waging that war. Gulf Arabs, and even some of their
rulers, cannot shake the sense that the war was not fought for international
law, self-determination and human rights, as the senior Bush administration
claimed, but rather to protect U.S. access to oil and to enable the U.S. to
gain a strategic toehold in the region.
The ongoing U.S. air strikes against Iraq have not garnered much support from
the international community, including Iraq's neighbors, who would presumably
be most threatened by an Iraqi capability of producing weapons of mass destruction.
In light of Washington’s tolerance -- and even quiet support -- of Iraq’s
powerful military machine in the 1980s, the United States' exaggerated claims
of an imminent Iraqi military threat in 1998, after Iraq’s military infrastructure
was largely destroyed in the Gulf War, simply lack credibility. Nor have such
recent air strikes eliminated or reduced the country’s capability to produce
weapons of mass destruction, particularly the most plausible threat of biological
weapons.
Furthermore, only the United Nations Security Council has the prerogative to
authorize military responses to violations of its resolutions; no single member
state can do so unilaterally without explicit permission. Many Arabs object
to the U.S. policy of opposing efforts by Arabs states to produce weapons of
mass destruction, while tolerating Israel’s sizable nuclear arsenal and
bringing U.S. nuclear weapons into Middle Eastern waters as well as rejecting
calls for the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the region.
In a part of the world which has been repeatedly conquered by outside powers
of the centuries, this ongoing U.S. military presence has created an increasing
amount of resentment. Indeed, the stronger the U.S. military role has become
in the region in recent decades, the less safe U.S. interests have become.
5. There has been an enormous humanitarian toll resulting from U.S. policy toward
Iraq.
Iraq still has not recovered from the 1991 war, during which it was on the receiving
end of the heaviest bombing in world history, destroying much of the country’s
civilian infrastructure. The U.S. has insisted on maintaining strict sanctions
against Iraq to force compliance with international demands to dismantle any
capability of producing weapons of mass destruction. In addition, the U.S. hopes
that such sanctions will lead to the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime. However,
Washington’s policy of enforcing strict sanctions against Iraq appears
to have had the ironic effect of strengthening Saddam’s regime. With as
many as 5,000 people, mostly children, dying from malnutrition and preventable
diseases every month as a result of the sanctions, the humanitarian crisis has
led to worldwide demands -- even from some of Iraq’s historic enemies --
to relax the sanctions. Furthermore, as they are now more dependent than ever
on the government for their survival, the Iraqi people are even less likely
to risk open defiance.
Unlike the reaction to sanctions imposed prior to the war, Iraqi popular resentment
over their suffering lays the blame squarely on the United States, not the totalitarian
regime, whose ill-fated conquest of Kuwait led to the economic collapse of this
once-prosperous country. In addition, Iraq's middle class, which would most
likely have formed the political force capable of overthrowing Saddam’s
regime, has been reduced to penury. It is not surprising that most of Iraq’s
opposition movements oppose the U.S. policy of ongoing punitive sanctions and
air strikes.
In addition, U.S. officials have stated that sanctions would remain even if
Iraq complied with United Nations inspectors, giving the Iraqi regime virtually
no incentive to comply. For sanctions to work, there needs to be a promise of
relief to counterbalance the suffering; that is, a carrot as well as a stick.
Indeed, it was the failure of both the United States and the United Nations
to explicitly spell out what was needed in order for sanctions to be lifted
that led to Iraq suspending its cooperation with UN weapons inspectors in December
1998.
6. The United States has been inconsistent in its enforcement of international
law and UN Security Council resolutions.
The U.S. has justified its strict sanctions and ongoing air strikes against
Iraq on the grounds of enforcing United Nations Security Council resolutions.
In addition, in recent years the United States has successfully pushed the UN
Security Council to impose economic sanctions against Libya, Afghanistan and
Sudan over extradition disputes, an unprecedented use of the UN’s authority.
However, the U.S. has blocked sanctions against such Middle East allies as Turkey,
Israel and Morocco for their ongoing occupation of neighboring countries, far
more egregious violations of international law that directly counter the UN
Charter. In recent years, for example, the U.S. has helped block the Security
Council from moving forward with a UN-sponsored resolution on the fate of the
Moroccan-occupied country of Western Sahara because of the likelihood that the
people would vote for independence from Morocco, which invaded the former Spanish
colony with U.S. backing in 1975.
Over the past 30 years, the U.S. has used its veto power to protect its ally
Israel from censure more than all other members of the Security Council have
used their veto power on all other issues combined. This past spring, for example,
the U.S. vetoed an otherwise-unanimous resolution which would have dispatched
unarmed human rights monitors to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In addition, the U.S. has launched a vigorous campaign to rescind all previous
UN resolutions critical of Israel. Washington has labeled them "anachronistic,"
even though many of the issues addressed in these resolutions -- human rights
violations, illegal settlements, expulsion of dissidents, development of nuclear
weapons, the status of Jerusalem,and ongoing military occupation -- are still
germane. The White House contends that the 1993 Oslo Accords render these earlier
UN resolutions obsolete. However, such resolutions cannot be reversed without
the approval of the UN body in question; the U.S. cannot unilaterally discount
their relevance. Furthermore, no bilateral agreement (like Oslo) can supersede
the authority of the UN Security Council, particularly if one of the two parties
(the Palestinians) believe that these resolutions are still binding.
Most observers recognize that one of the major obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian
peace is the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. However,
the U.S. has blocked enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions calling
for Israel to withdraw its settlements from Palestinian land. These settlements
were established in violation of international law, which forbids the colonization
of territories seized by military force. In addition, the U.S. has not opposed
the expansion of existing settlements and has shown ambivalence regarding the
large-scale construction of exclusively Jewish housing developments in Israeli-occupied
East Jerusalem. Furthermore, the U.S. has secured additional aid for Israel
to construct highways connecting these settlements and to provide additional
security, thereby reinforcing their permanence. This places the United States
in direct violation of UN Security Council resolution 465, which "calls
upon all states not to provide Israel with any assistance to be used specifically
in connection with settlements in the occupied territories."
7. The United States has supported autocratic regimes in the Middle East.
The growing movement favoring democracy and human rights in the Middle East
has not shared the remarkable successes of its counterparts in Eastern Europe,
Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. Most Middle Eastern governments remain
autocratic. Despite occasional rhetorical support for greater individual freedoms,
the United States has generally not supported tentative Middle Eastern steps
toward democratization. Indeed, the United States has reduced -- or maintained
at low levels -- its economic, military and diplomatic support to Arab countries
that have experienced substantial political liberalization in recent years while
increasing support for autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt
and Morocco. Jordan, for example, received large-scale U.S. support in the 1970s
and 1980s despite widespread repression and authoritarian rule; when it opened
up its political system in the early 1990s, the U.S. substantially reduced --
and, for a time, suspended -- foreign aid. Aid to Yemen was cut off within months
of the newly unified country’s first democratic election in 1990.
Despite its laudable rhetoric, Washington's real policy regarding human rights
in the Middle East is not difficult to infer. It is undeniable that democracy
and universally recognized human rights have never been common in the Arab-Islamic
world. Yet the tendency in the U.S. to emphasize cultural or religious explanations
for this fact serves to minimize other factors that are arguably more salient
-- including the legacy of colonialism, high levels of militarization and uneven
economic development -- most of which can be linked in part to the policies
of Western governments, including the United States. There is a circuitous irony
in a U.S. policy that sells arms, and often sends direct military aid, to repressive
Middle Eastern regimes that suppress their own people and crush incipient human
rights movements, only to then claim that the resulting lack of democracy and
human rights is evidence that the people do not want such rights. In reality,
these arms transfers and diplomatic and economic support systems play an important
role in keeping autocratic Arab regimes in power by strengthening the hand of
the state and supporting internal repression. The U.S. then justifies its large-scale
military aid to Israel on the grounds that it is "the sole democracy in
the Middle East," even though these weapons are used less to defend Israeli
democracy than to suppress the Palestinians’ struggle for self-determination.
8. U.S. policy has contributed to the rise of radical Islamic governments and
movements.
The United States has been greatly concerned in recent years over the rise of
radical Islamic movements in the Middle East. Islam, like other religions, can
be quite diverse regarding its interpretation of the faith's teachings as they
apply to contemporary political issues. There are a number of Islamic-identified
parties and movements that seek peaceful coexistence and cooperation with the
West and are moderate on economic and social policy. Many Islamist movements
and parties have come to represent mainstream pro-democracy and pro-economic
justice currents, replacing the discredited Arab socialism and Arab nationalist
movements.
There are also some Islamic movements in the Middle East today that are indeed
reactionary, violent, misogynist and include a virulently anti-American perspective
that is antithetical to perceived American interests. Still others may be more
amenable to traditional U.S. interests but reactionary in their approach to
social and economic policies, or vice versa.
Such movements have risen to the forefront primarily in countries where there
has been a dramatic physical dislocation of the population as a result of war
or uneven economic development. Ironically, the United States has often supported
policies that have helped spawn such movements, including giving military, diplomatic
and economic aid to augment decades of Israeli attacks and occupation policies,
which have torn apart Palestinian and Lebanese society, and provoked extremist
movements that were unheard of as recently as 20 years ago. The U.S.-led overthrow
of the constitutional government in Iran in 1953 and subsequent support for
the Shah's brutal dictatorship succeeded in crushing that country’s democratic
opposition, resulting in a 1979 revolution led by hard-line Islamic clerics.
The United States actually backed extremist Islamic groups in Afghanistan when
they were challenging the Soviet Union in the 1980s, including Osama bin Laden
and many of his followers. To this day, the United States maintains very close
ties with Saudi Arabia, which – despite being labeled a "moderate"
Arab regime -- adheres to an extremely rigid interpretation of Islam and is
among the most repressive regimes in the world.
9. The U.S. promotion of a neo-liberal economic model in the Middle East has
not benefitted most people of the region.
Like much of the Third World, the United States has been pushing a neo-liberal
economic model of development in the Middle East through such international
financial institutions as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and
the World Trade Organization. These have included cutbacks in social services,
encouragement of foreign investment, lower tariffs, reduced taxes, the elimination
of subsidies for farmers and basic foodstuffs as well as ending protection for
domestic industry.
While in many cases, this has led to an increase in the overall Gross National
Product, it has dramatically increased inequality, with only a minority of the
population benefitting. Given the strong social justice ethic in Islam, this
growing disparity between the rich and the poor has been particularly offensive
to Muslims, whose exposure to Western economic influence has been primarily
through witnessing some of the crassest materialism and consumerism from U.S.
imports enjoyed by the local elites.
The failure of state-centric socialist experiments in the Arab world have left
an ideological vacuum among the poor seeking economic justice which has been
filled by certain radical Islamic movements. Neo-liberal economic policies have
destroyed traditional economies and turned millions of rural peasants into a
new urban underclass populating the teeming slums of such cities as Cairo, Tunis,
Casablanca and Teheran. Though policies of free trade and privatization have
resulted in increased prosperity for some, far more people have been left behind,
providing easy recruits for Islamic activists rallying against corruption, materialism
and economic injustice.
10. The U.S. response to Middle Eastern terrorism has thus far been counter-productive.
The September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States has highlighted the
threat of terrorism from the Middle East, which has become the country's major
national security concern in the post-cold war world. In addition to Osama bin
Laden’s underground Al-Qaeda movement, which receives virtually no direct
support from any government, Washington considers Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Libya
to be the primary sources of state-sponsored terrorism and has embarked on an
ambitious policy to isolate these regimes in the international community. Syria's
status as a supporter of terrorism has ebbed and flowed not so much from an
objective measure of its links to terrorist groups as from an assessment of
their willingness to cooperate with U.S. policy interests, indicating just how
politicized "terrorist" designations can be.
Responding to terrorist threats through large-scale military action has been
counter-productive. In 1998, the U.S. bombed a civilian pharmaceutical plant
in Sudan under the apparently mistaken belief that it was developing chemical
weapons that could be used by these terrorist networks, which led to a wave
of anti-Americanism and strengthened that country’s fundamentalist dictatorship.
The 1986 bombing of two Libyan cities in response to Libyan support for terrorist
attacks against U.S. interests in Europe not only killed scores of civilians,
but -- rather than curb Libyan-backed terrorism -- resulted in Libyan agents
blowing up a Pan Am airliner over Scotland in retaliation. Military responses
generally perpetuate a cycle of violence and revenge. Furthermore, failure to
recognize the underlying grievances against U.S. Middle East policy will make
it difficult to stop terrorism. While very few Muslims support terrorism --
recognizing it as contrary to the values of Islam -- the concerns articulated
by bin Laden and others about the U.S. role in the region have widespread resonance
and will likely result in new recruits for terrorist networks unless and until
the U.S. changes its policies
The vast majority of Middle Eastern states and their people have belatedly acknowledged
that Israel will continue to exist as part of the region as an independent Jewish
state. However, there is enormous resentment at ongoing U.S. diplomatic, financial
and military support for Israeli occupation forces and their policies.
The U.S. relationship with Israel is singular. Israel represents only one one-thousandth
of the world’s population and has the 16th highest per capita income in
the world, yet it receives nearly 40 percent of all U.S. foreign aid. Direct
aid to Israel in recent years has exceeded $3.5 billion annually, with an additional
$1 billion through other sources, and has been supported almost unanimously
in Congress, even by liberal Democrats who normally insist on linking aid to
human rights and international law. Although the American public appears to
strongly support Israel’s right to exist and wants the U.S. to be a guarantor
of that right, there is growing skepticism regarding the excessive level and
unconditional nature of U.S. aid to Israel. Among elected officials, however,
there are virtually no calls for a reduction of current aid levels in the foreseeable
future, particularly as nearly all U.S. aid to Israel returns to the United
States either via purchases of American armaments or as interest payments to
U.S. banks for previous loans.
Despite closer American strategic cooperation with the Persian Gulf monarchies
since the Gulf War, these governments clearly lack Israel's advantages in terms
of political stability, a well-trained military, technological sophistication
and the ability to quickly mobilize human and material resources.
Despite serious reservations about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians,
most individual Americans have a longstanding moral commitment to Israel's survival.
Official U.S. government policy supporting successive Israeli governments in
recent years, however, appears to be crafted more from a recognition of how
Israel supports American strategic interests in the Middle East and beyond.
Indeed, 99 percent of all U.S. aid to Israel has been granted since the 1967
war, when Israel proved itself more powerful than any combination of its neighbors
and occupied the territories of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and other
Arabs. Many Israelis supportive of that country's peace movement believe the
United States has repeatedly undermined their efforts to moderate their government's
policies, arguing that Israeli security and Palestinian rights are not mutually-exclusive,
as the U.S. seems to believe, but mutually dependent on the other.
As long as U.S. military, diplomatic and economic support of the Israeli government
remains unconditional despite Israel's ongoing violation of human rights, international
law and previous agreements with the Palestinians, there is no incentive for
the Israeli government to change its policies. The growing Arab resentment that
results can only threaten the long-term security interests of both Israel and
the United States.
2. The United States has not been a fair mediator in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
For over two decades, the international consensus for peace in the Middle East
has involved the withdrawal of Israeli forces to within internationally recognized
boundaries in return for security guarantees from Israel's neighbors, the establishment
of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza and some special status for
a shared Jerusalem. Over the past 30 years, the Palestine Liberation Organization,
under the leadership of Yasir Arafat, has evolved from frequent acts of terrorism
and the open call for Israel's destruction to supporting the international consensus
for a two-state solution. Most Arab states have made a similar evolution toward
favoring just such a peace settlement.
However, the U.S. has traditionally rejected the international consensus and
currently takes a position more closely resembling that of Israel's right-wing
government: supporting a Jerusalem under largely Israeli sovereignty, encouraging
only partial withdrawal from the occupied territories, allowing for the confiscation
of Palestinian land and the construction of Jewish-only settlements and rejecting
an independent state Palestine outside of Israeli strictures.
The interpretation of autonomy by Israel and the United States has thus far
led to only limited Palestinian control of a bare one-fourth of the West Bank
in a patchwork arrangement that more resembles American Indian reservations
or the infamous Bantustans of apartheid-era South Africa than anything like
statehood. The U.S. has repeatedly blamed the Palestinians for the violence
of the past year, even though Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and
other reputable human rights group have noted that the bulk of the violence
has come from Israeli occupation forces and settlers.
Throughout the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, the U.S. has insisted on the
two parties working out a peace agreement among themselves, even though there
has always been a gross asymmetry in power between the Palestinians and their
Israeli occupiers. The U.S. has blamed the Palestinians for not compromising
further, even though they already ceded 78 percent of historic Palestine to
the Israelis in the Oslo Accords; the Palestinians now simply demand that the
Israelis withdraw their troops and colonists only from lands seized in the 1967,
which Israel is required to do under international law.
The U.S.-backed peace proposal by former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak at
the 2000 talks at Camp David would have allowed Israel to annex large swaths
of land in the West Bank, control of most of Arab East Jerusalem and its environs,
maintain most of the illegal settlements in a pattern that would have divided
the West Bank into non-contiguous cantons, and deny Palestinian refugees the
right of return. With the U.S. playing the dual role of the chief mediator of
the conflict as well as the chief diplomatic, financial and military backer
of Israeli occupation forces, the U.S. goal seems to be more that of Pax Americana
than that of a true peace.
3. The United States has played a major role in the militarization of the region.
The Middle East is the destination of the majority of American arms exports,
creating enormous profits for weapons manufacturers and contributing greatly
to the militarization of this already overly-militarized region. Despite promises
of restraint, U.S. arms transfers to the region have topped $60 billion since
the Gulf War. Arms sales are an important component of building political alliances
between the U.S. and Middle Eastern countries, particularly with the military
leadership of recipient countries. There is a strategic benefit for the U.S.
in having U.S.-manufactured systems on the ground in the event of a direct U.S.
military intervention. Arms sales are also a means of supporting military industries
faced with declining demand in Western countries.
To link arms transfers with a given country's human rights record would lead
to the probable loss of tens of billions of dollars in annual sales for American
weapons manufacturers, which are among the most powerful special interest groups
in Washington. This may help explain why the United States has ignored the fact
that UN Security Council resolution 687, which the U.S. has cited as justification
for its military responses to Iraq’s possible rearmament, also calls for
region-wide disarmament efforts, something the United States has rejected.
The U.S. justifies the nearly $3 billion in annual military aid to Israel on
the grounds of protecting that country from its Arab neighbors, even though
the United States supplies 80 percent of the arms to these Arab states. The
1978 Camp David Accord between Israel and Egypt was in many ways more like a
tripartite military pact than a peace agreement in that it has resulted in more
than $5 billion is annual U.S. arms transfers to those two countries. U.S. weapons
have been used repeatedly in attacks against civilians by Israel, Turkey and
other countries. It is not surprising that terrorist movements have arisen in
a region where so many states maintain their power influence through force of
arms.
4. The U.S. maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East.
The United States maintains an ongoing military presence in the Middle East,
including longstanding military bases in Turkey, a strong naval presence in
the eastern Mediterranean and Arabian Sea, as well as large numbers of troops
on the Arabian Peninsula since the Gulf War. Most Persian Gulf Arabs and their
leaders felt threatened after Iraq’s seizure of Kuwait and were grateful
for the strong U.S. leadership in the 1991 war against Saddam Hussein's regime
and for UN resolutions designed to curb Iraq's capability to produce weapons
of mass destruction. At the same time, there is an enormous amount of cynicism
regarding U.S. motives in waging that war. Gulf Arabs, and even some of their
rulers, cannot shake the sense that the war was not fought for international
law, self-determination and human rights, as the senior Bush administration
claimed, but rather to protect U.S. access to oil and to enable the U.S. to
gain a strategic toehold in the region.
The ongoing U.S. air strikes against Iraq have not garnered much support from
the international community, including Iraq's neighbors, who would presumably
be most threatened by an Iraqi capability of producing weapons of mass destruction.
In light of Washington’s tolerance -- and even quiet support -- of Iraq’s
powerful military machine in the 1980s, the United States' exaggerated claims
of an imminent Iraqi military threat in 1998, after Iraq’s military infrastructure
was largely destroyed in the Gulf War, simply lack credibility. Nor have such
recent air strikes eliminated or reduced the country’s capability to produce
weapons of mass destruction, particularly the most plausible threat of biological
weapons.
Furthermore, only the United Nations Security Council has the prerogative to
authorize military responses to violations of its resolutions; no single member
state can do so unilaterally without explicit permission. Many Arabs object
to the U.S. policy of opposing efforts by Arabs states to produce weapons of
mass destruction, while tolerating Israel’s sizable nuclear arsenal and
bringing U.S. nuclear weapons into Middle Eastern waters as well as rejecting
calls for the creation of a nuclear-free zone in the region.
In a part of the world which has been repeatedly conquered by outside powers
of the centuries, this ongoing U.S. military presence has created an increasing
amount of resentment. Indeed, the stronger the U.S. military role has become
in the region in recent decades, the less safe U.S. interests have become.
5. There has been an enormous humanitarian toll resulting from U.S. policy toward
Iraq.
Iraq still has not recovered from the 1991 war, during which it was on the receiving
end of the heaviest bombing in world history, destroying much of the country’s
civilian infrastructure. The U.S. has insisted on maintaining strict sanctions
against Iraq to force compliance with international demands to dismantle any
capability of producing weapons of mass destruction. In addition, the U.S. hopes
that such sanctions will lead to the downfall of Saddam Hussein's regime. However,
Washington’s policy of enforcing strict sanctions against Iraq appears
to have had the ironic effect of strengthening Saddam’s regime. With as
many as 5,000 people, mostly children, dying from malnutrition and preventable
diseases every month as a result of the sanctions, the humanitarian crisis has
led to worldwide demands -- even from some of Iraq’s historic enemies --
to relax the sanctions. Furthermore, as they are now more dependent than ever
on the government for their survival, the Iraqi people are even less likely
to risk open defiance.
Unlike the reaction to sanctions imposed prior to the war, Iraqi popular resentment
over their suffering lays the blame squarely on the United States, not the totalitarian
regime, whose ill-fated conquest of Kuwait led to the economic collapse of this
once-prosperous country. In addition, Iraq's middle class, which would most
likely have formed the political force capable of overthrowing Saddam’s
regime, has been reduced to penury. It is not surprising that most of Iraq’s
opposition movements oppose the U.S. policy of ongoing punitive sanctions and
air strikes.
In addition, U.S. officials have stated that sanctions would remain even if
Iraq complied with United Nations inspectors, giving the Iraqi regime virtually
no incentive to comply. For sanctions to work, there needs to be a promise of
relief to counterbalance the suffering; that is, a carrot as well as a stick.
Indeed, it was the failure of both the United States and the United Nations
to explicitly spell out what was needed in order for sanctions to be lifted
that led to Iraq suspending its cooperation with UN weapons inspectors in December
1998.
6. The United States has been inconsistent in its enforcement of international
law and UN Security Council resolutions.
The U.S. has justified its strict sanctions and ongoing air strikes against
Iraq on the grounds of enforcing United Nations Security Council resolutions.
In addition, in recent years the United States has successfully pushed the UN
Security Council to impose economic sanctions against Libya, Afghanistan and
Sudan over extradition disputes, an unprecedented use of the UN’s authority.
However, the U.S. has blocked sanctions against such Middle East allies as Turkey,
Israel and Morocco for their ongoing occupation of neighboring countries, far
more egregious violations of international law that directly counter the UN
Charter. In recent years, for example, the U.S. has helped block the Security
Council from moving forward with a UN-sponsored resolution on the fate of the
Moroccan-occupied country of Western Sahara because of the likelihood that the
people would vote for independence from Morocco, which invaded the former Spanish
colony with U.S. backing in 1975.
Over the past 30 years, the U.S. has used its veto power to protect its ally
Israel from censure more than all other members of the Security Council have
used their veto power on all other issues combined. This past spring, for example,
the U.S. vetoed an otherwise-unanimous resolution which would have dispatched
unarmed human rights monitors to the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.
In addition, the U.S. has launched a vigorous campaign to rescind all previous
UN resolutions critical of Israel. Washington has labeled them "anachronistic,"
even though many of the issues addressed in these resolutions -- human rights
violations, illegal settlements, expulsion of dissidents, development of nuclear
weapons, the status of Jerusalem,and ongoing military occupation -- are still
germane. The White House contends that the 1993 Oslo Accords render these earlier
UN resolutions obsolete. However, such resolutions cannot be reversed without
the approval of the UN body in question; the U.S. cannot unilaterally discount
their relevance. Furthermore, no bilateral agreement (like Oslo) can supersede
the authority of the UN Security Council, particularly if one of the two parties
(the Palestinians) believe that these resolutions are still binding.
Most observers recognize that one of the major obstacles to Israeli-Palestinian
peace is the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. However,
the U.S. has blocked enforcement of UN Security Council resolutions calling
for Israel to withdraw its settlements from Palestinian land. These settlements
were established in violation of international law, which forbids the colonization
of territories seized by military force. In addition, the U.S. has not opposed
the expansion of existing settlements and has shown ambivalence regarding the
large-scale construction of exclusively Jewish housing developments in Israeli-occupied
East Jerusalem. Furthermore, the U.S. has secured additional aid for Israel
to construct highways connecting these settlements and to provide additional
security, thereby reinforcing their permanence. This places the United States
in direct violation of UN Security Council resolution 465, which "calls
upon all states not to provide Israel with any assistance to be used specifically
in connection with settlements in the occupied territories."
7. The United States has supported autocratic regimes in the Middle East.
The growing movement favoring democracy and human rights in the Middle East
has not shared the remarkable successes of its counterparts in Eastern Europe,
Latin America, Africa and parts of Asia. Most Middle Eastern governments remain
autocratic. Despite occasional rhetorical support for greater individual freedoms,
the United States has generally not supported tentative Middle Eastern steps
toward democratization. Indeed, the United States has reduced -- or maintained
at low levels -- its economic, military and diplomatic support to Arab countries
that have experienced substantial political liberalization in recent years while
increasing support for autocratic regimes such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Egypt
and Morocco. Jordan, for example, received large-scale U.S. support in the 1970s
and 1980s despite widespread repression and authoritarian rule; when it opened
up its political system in the early 1990s, the U.S. substantially reduced --
and, for a time, suspended -- foreign aid. Aid to Yemen was cut off within months
of the newly unified country’s first democratic election in 1990.
Despite its laudable rhetoric, Washington's real policy regarding human rights
in the Middle East is not difficult to infer. It is undeniable that democracy
and universally recognized human rights have never been common in the Arab-Islamic
world. Yet the tendency in the U.S. to emphasize cultural or religious explanations
for this fact serves to minimize other factors that are arguably more salient
-- including the legacy of colonialism, high levels of militarization and uneven
economic development -- most of which can be linked in part to the policies
of Western governments, including the United States. There is a circuitous irony
in a U.S. policy that sells arms, and often sends direct military aid, to repressive
Middle Eastern regimes that suppress their own people and crush incipient human
rights movements, only to then claim that the resulting lack of democracy and
human rights is evidence that the people do not want such rights. In reality,
these arms transfers and diplomatic and economic support systems play an important
role in keeping autocratic Arab regimes in power by strengthening the hand of
the state and supporting internal repression. The U.S. then justifies its large-scale
military aid to Israel on the grounds that it is "the sole democracy in
the Middle East," even though these weapons are used less to defend Israeli
democracy than to suppress the Palestinians’ struggle for self-determination.
8. U.S. policy has contributed to the rise of radical Islamic governments and
movements.
The United States has been greatly concerned in recent years over the rise of
radical Islamic movements in the Middle East. Islam, like other religions, can
be quite diverse regarding its interpretation of the faith's teachings as they
apply to contemporary political issues. There are a number of Islamic-identified
parties and movements that seek peaceful coexistence and cooperation with the
West and are moderate on economic and social policy. Many Islamist movements
and parties have come to represent mainstream pro-democracy and pro-economic
justice currents, replacing the discredited Arab socialism and Arab nationalist
movements.
There are also some Islamic movements in the Middle East today that are indeed
reactionary, violent, misogynist and include a virulently anti-American perspective
that is antithetical to perceived American interests. Still others may be more
amenable to traditional U.S. interests but reactionary in their approach to
social and economic policies, or vice versa.
Such movements have risen to the forefront primarily in countries where there
has been a dramatic physical dislocation of the population as a result of war
or uneven economic development. Ironically, the United States has often supported
policies that have helped spawn such movements, including giving military, diplomatic
and economic aid to augment decades of Israeli attacks and occupation policies,
which have torn apart Palestinian and Lebanese society, and provoked extremist
movements that were unheard of as recently as 20 years ago. The U.S.-led overthrow
of the constitutional government in Iran in 1953 and subsequent support for
the Shah's brutal dictatorship succeeded in crushing that country’s democratic
opposition, resulting in a 1979 revolution led by hard-line Islamic clerics.
The United States actually backed extremist Islamic groups in Afghanistan when
they were challenging the Soviet Union in the 1980s, including Osama bin Laden
and many of his followers. To this day, the United States maintains very close
ties with Saudi Arabia, which – despite being labeled a "moderate"
Arab regime -- adheres to an extremely rigid interpretation of Islam and is
among the most repressive regimes in the world.
9. The U.S. promotion of a neo-liberal economic model in the Middle East has
not benefitted most people of the region.
Like much of the Third World, the United States has been pushing a neo-liberal
economic model of development in the Middle East through such international
financial institutions as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and
the World Trade Organization. These have included cutbacks in social services,
encouragement of foreign investment, lower tariffs, reduced taxes, the elimination
of subsidies for farmers and basic foodstuffs as well as ending protection for
domestic industry.
While in many cases, this has led to an increase in the overall Gross National
Product, it has dramatically increased inequality, with only a minority of the
population benefitting. Given the strong social justice ethic in Islam, this
growing disparity between the rich and the poor has been particularly offensive
to Muslims, whose exposure to Western economic influence has been primarily
through witnessing some of the crassest materialism and consumerism from U.S.
imports enjoyed by the local elites.
The failure of state-centric socialist experiments in the Arab world have left
an ideological vacuum among the poor seeking economic justice which has been
filled by certain radical Islamic movements. Neo-liberal economic policies have
destroyed traditional economies and turned millions of rural peasants into a
new urban underclass populating the teeming slums of such cities as Cairo, Tunis,
Casablanca and Teheran. Though policies of free trade and privatization have
resulted in increased prosperity for some, far more people have been left behind,
providing easy recruits for Islamic activists rallying against corruption, materialism
and economic injustice.
10. The U.S. response to Middle Eastern terrorism has thus far been counter-productive.
The September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States has highlighted the
threat of terrorism from the Middle East, which has become the country's major
national security concern in the post-cold war world. In addition to Osama bin
Laden’s underground Al-Qaeda movement, which receives virtually no direct
support from any government, Washington considers Iran, Iraq, Sudan and Libya
to be the primary sources of state-sponsored terrorism and has embarked on an
ambitious policy to isolate these regimes in the international community. Syria's
status as a supporter of terrorism has ebbed and flowed not so much from an
objective measure of its links to terrorist groups as from an assessment of
their willingness to cooperate with U.S. policy interests, indicating just how
politicized "terrorist" designations can be.
Responding to terrorist threats through large-scale military action has been
counter-productive. In 1998, the U.S. bombed a civilian pharmaceutical plant
in Sudan under the apparently mistaken belief that it was developing chemical
weapons that could be used by these terrorist networks, which led to a wave
of anti-Americanism and strengthened that country’s fundamentalist dictatorship.
The 1986 bombing of two Libyan cities in response to Libyan support for terrorist
attacks against U.S. interests in Europe not only killed scores of civilians,
but -- rather than curb Libyan-backed terrorism -- resulted in Libyan agents
blowing up a Pan Am airliner over Scotland in retaliation. Military responses
generally perpetuate a cycle of violence and revenge. Furthermore, failure to
recognize the underlying grievances against U.S. Middle East policy will make
it difficult to stop terrorism. While very few Muslims support terrorism --
recognizing it as contrary to the values of Islam -- the concerns articulated
by bin Laden and others about the U.S. role in the region have widespread resonance
and will likely result in new recruits for terrorist networks unless and until
the U.S. changes its policies.
