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Editorial Business as usual
July 7th, 2005 -- Six months into the second term of the Bush Administration, interpretations differ as to its broader foreign policy objectives and the likelihood of it attaining them. The balance of opinion sees the neoconservative ideologues and the quest for unshakable hegemony which they espouse forced to take a back seat, at least for the time being, as Washington falls back on a more traditional foreign policy approach: cooperation with its allies abroad on matters of international concern. The compromises struck on African debt relief and investment and on environmental policy in the run-up to the G8 summit in Scotland are proffered as illustration. But with his domestic policy agenda in some disarray, the president’s popularity at home has been in spectacular decline in recent weeks (although he is still far more popular in the United States than he is anywhere else in the world), which has given rise to a fear in some quarters that judgment on foreign policy might be clouded by a need to divert domestic attention away from the Administration’s failings on the home front between now and the mid-term congressional elections next year. In terms of broad policy goals, the clearest indication yet of the central theme of this Administration’s foreign policy was given by the president’s address to an audience of Marines in North Carolina on 28 June to mark the anniversary of the handover of power to a native administration in Baghdad. Despite it having been established some time ago that the regime of Saddam Hussein had neither weapons of mass destruction nor any connection to the events of 11 September 2001, Bush had no qualms about declaring to his audience and the world that Iraq was the “latest battlefield in the war on terror”, that US forces were engaged in a mission to “prevent al-Qa’ida and other foreign terrorists from turning Iraq into what Afghanistan was under the Taliban — a safe haven from which they could launch attacks on America and our friends”. Aside from the spurious logic, such remarks leave little room for doubt that the Administration will continue wherever it can to ascribe its policies to the “war on terror”. Policy formulation in such terms grants the US an easy label with which to identify its enemies — in effect, anyone Washington happens not to like for whatever reason can be marked out by words like “terrorist, totalitarian, hateful ideology” — and an easy hook on which would-be allies can hang their quest for US support in crushing domestic opposition — as in Algeria and Mauritania, or even Afghanistan. But there is more to the “war on terror”, Bush again reminded us, than “hunting down the terrorists”. What the US achieves in Iraq, the president said, will be felt across the Middle East, where “people are claiming their freedom”. Elections in “the Palestinian territories and Lebanon” are “inspiring democratic reformers in Egypt and Saudi Arabia”. While the omission of “terrorist” Iran from the “democratic list” was expected, that of Afghanistan, where US involvement has been instrumental in bringing about elections, was not. Perhaps the fact that the Americans are still taking casualties at the hands of the Taliban three years after driving them from power had something to do with it. It must have come as a relief to the people of Iran that Bush did not mention their country at all in this address, neither to comment on its presidential elections (“rigged”, said the State Department) nor to give the slightest hint that the overthrow of its regime might become a major foreign policy objective in the course of his presidency. While the indications are that the Middle East may yet be spared an expansion of Washington’s regime change campaign beyond Iraq, the people of the region can have little confidence that the example of the “new Iraq” will bring about any great improvement in their own circumstances. However central it is to achieving peace and justice in the region, a resolution to the Israel-Palestine conflict is not viewed as urgent by this Administration. The US has barely reacted at all to the fiasco of Mahmud Abbas’ meeting with Ariel Sharon. After the recent brief revival of interest in the conflict, Washington seems to have gone back to “business as usual” where the Middle East is concerned. |
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