Friday, Nov 07, 2003
Take a look at the top secret report prepared for the president. America's strategic interests, the National Security Council document says, demand that the administration use all its political muscle to secure a Middle East peace. Now glance at the confidential cables sent to his masters in Washington by the state department's ranking diplomat in Baghdad. The propaganda battle for hearts and minds is all well and good, he observes. But only a political settlement between Israel and the Palestinians will erode the visceral mistrust of the US.
Who could disagree with the conclusion of another of this ambassador's dispatches when it says that a priority of policy in Iraq must be restoration "of confidence in American good will and good faith" through the adoption of a more even-handed approach to Israel and its neighbours? "A dramatic way to bring this home," he adds, "might be by insisting on enforcement of United Nations resolutions on Palestine."
Then there is the telegram from the US envoy to Saudi Arabia about the clash between the rhetoric of freedom and the realpolitik of oil interests. America's self-projected image as a beacon of liberty, he cautions, sits unhappily alongside its support for despotic regimes in the region. The NSC paper picks up the same tension. Its report - US objectives and policies with respect to the Arab states and Israel - warns of the disaffection of urban intellectuals and professionals barred from any form of political expression by the ruling cliques.
It would be nice to say that these were the sane and candid assessments that led George W. Bush to promise yesterday an important shift in US foreign policy. After all, if the president is true to his word, and the spread of freedom henceforth takes precedence over the illusion of regional stability in America's Middle East policy, the dilemma of the ambassador in Riyadh will be solved at a stroke.
We shall see how closely reality follows rhetoric. The sad truth is that each of the dispatches and reports cited above was written half a century ago. In 1952, Harry Truman was in the White House, Iraq had not yet heard of Saddam Hussein, and the conflict then unfolding was not the fight against terrorism but the cold war against the Soviet Union. In those days, Islam was seen as a weapon against godless communism - the US was already paying for Arab radio stations to beam the message into the Soviet Asian republics.
Assembled by the independent National Security Archive* as part of its treasure trove of documents on US foreign policy, the papers tell a dismal story of lessons unlearned. Almost everywhere, you can find an echo of America's present troubles in a failure either to pay heed to past warnings or to add substance to good intentions. It is as if successive US administrations have been trapped for five decades in the same Middle East maze.
Of course, the advisers of the 1950s did not always get it right. George Kennan, the author of America's cold war policy of containing communist expansion, sometimes spoke with a distinctly Rumsfeldian voice. The US should not expect to be popular or liked in the Middle East, Kennan suggested. Power was what mattered: "We should demonstrate that we are prepared to act and that we mean business in the protection of our strategic interests." You can almost hear the words fall from Donald Rumsfeld's lips.
There are many reasons for the present insurgency against US forces in Iraq, not the least of them Mr Rumsfeld's abject failure to make adequate preparations for post-conflict security and reconstruction. But behind them all lies that fatal miscalculation that America can impose its will in the Arab world through military might.
Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary, of defence, must take his share of the blame for the hubristic pre-war predictions that the Iraqis would shower occupying American forces with nothing more lethal than garlands. But he remains the most thoughtful of the administration's senior policymakers. A leading neoconservative, he at once intrigues and frightens Europeans. I recall Chris Patten, the European external affairs commissioner and an eloquent critic of present US foreign policy, lauding Mr Wolfowitz's unflinching belief in liberty and the rule of law. The only trouble, Mr Patten added, was that he became distinctly nervous at the thought of the neoconservatives' armed missionaries imposing democracy around the world at the point of a gun.
Mr Wolfowitz draws his own parallels with the 1950s. In a speech last week he remarked that: "Like the cold war, the global war on terrorism is a war of ideas." So, in a phrase borrowed from President John F. Kennedy, America should expect a "long, twilight struggle". Coming from Mr Rumsfeld, such sentiments sound like excuses for his failure to deliver. Mr Wolfowitz seems genuinely interested in changing things.
Yet all routes in the maze lead back to the Israel-Palestine conflict. The perception of the Arab world - and, it should be said, of most Europeans - is that America's enduring support for Israel now amounts to a blank cheque for a government led by Ariel Sharon that will never make an enduring peace. The president endorses a two-state solution; Mr Sharon builds settlements and walls in the occupied territories that guarantee such an outcome is impossible. The most he can expect from the White House is a mild rebuke.
To be fair, Mr Wolfowitz goes further than most in the administration in making the case that the atrocities of Palestinian suicide bombers cannot be an excuse for Israel to deny all Palestinians a viable state. Last week, for instance, he offered striking public support for the burgeoning grassroots peace movement of Israelis and Palestinians led by Sari Nusseibeh and Amit Ayalon. I suspect Mr Wolfowitz would agree too with the judgment of that former ambassador in Baghdad when he wrote back to Washington in 1952 that "until the US is again respected in the Middle East for the justice of its position, our local friends will not risk raising their voices to support us". No one then was listening. Are they now?
*www.gwu.edu/nsarchiv/ philip.stephens@ft.com
By PHILIP STEPHENS
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