"Dangerous democracy": Imperial America won't like the Arabia it spawned

[Bluebear]

"Imperial America won't like the free Arabia that missionary America will have helped to spawn"

David Hirst
Wednesday April 20, 2005

... The extent to which Bush is contributing to the winds of change now blowing across the world's last monolithically tyrannical region is passionately debated by the Arabs, perplexingly confronted, as they feel themselves to be, by two Americas, the new missionary one of Bush's second term and the old unrepentant superpower. The US as a promoter of democracy is a far from new idea. But the scope, fervour and lofty expectations Bush has invested in it are new. Yet, at the same time, never has imperial America, with which the missionary one is inextricably intertwined, been as rampant and detested as it is today.

For Bush didn't embark on this radically interventionist, quasi-colonial phase of America's relations with the Middle East only, or even mainly, to confer democracy on it. He did so for other reasons, too, that had far more to do with the traditional drive for strategic and economic dominance - as well as with an Israel whose influence on US policy has reached unprecedented levels. In fact, the rationale for Arab democracy comes partly from Israel itself, in the person of the rightwing zealot Natan Sharansky, whose thinking, says Bush, is "part of my presidential genes"; the thinking being that, since democracies are inherently peaceable, only a democratic Arabia will take Israel to its bosom....

The more that imperial America inflames nationalist sentiment, the more it plays into the hands of regimes that appear to stand up to it, and the more difficult it is for democrats to work against them. And anyone can see that, after Iraq, Syria has become a key target of imperial America, perhaps all the more alluring because, as some in Washington say, it is the "low-hanging fruit" that, unlike Iraq, is harvestable by merely political and not military means. Lebanon's "democratic uprising" furnished a great new opportunity to weaken or bring down the Ba'athist regime....

Already it is uneasy about the kind of Shia Muslims, Islamist-minded and Iranian-influenced, who, in the shape of prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari and the United Iraqi Alliance, triumphed in the Iraqi elections. It will be even less pleased if Hamas does so well in coming elections that it demands to form the next Palestinian government. Secular modernists, the dissident intelligentsia and human rights activists are to the fore in demanding an end to the Syrian-backed "intelligence state" in Lebanon, saying "Enough!" to the electorally irremovable Mubarak dynasty in Egypt, and chipping away at the Ba'athist monopoly of power in Syria. But Islamists everywhere would be the first to profit from their success. Hizbullah would doubtless retain some special place in Lebanon's confessional system. Egypt's Muslim Brothers have now joined the pro-democracy demonstrations as the most popular and organised opposition force in the country. Last week their heavily repressed Syrian counterparts, also sensing that opportunity beckons, in effect told the Ba'athists: with America at the gates you either convene a "national congress of all political parties" that will set up "a democratic republic" or face your own destruction, and perhaps Syria's too....

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1463725,00.html