[lbo-talk] The New Saddam

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

<http://www.tompaine.com/articles/2007/01/25/the_new_saddam.php>
The New Saddam
Issandr El Amrani
January 25, 2007

Issandr El Amrani is a Moroccan-American independent journalist based
in Cairo. His work about Middle East culture and politics regularly
appears in American and British magazines and newspapers. A former
editor of two independent liberal weeklies in Egypt, he also publishes
a collaborative weblog on the Arab world, www.arabist.net.

Making a renewed appearance in the State of the Union address this
year was Iran. Bush set out an agenda that puts the U.S. on a path of
confrontation with Iran—the latest installment in the haphazard
collection of ideological fads that passes as Middle East policy in
Washington these days.

Having made a mess of Iraq, continuing to refuse to play a
constructive and even-handed role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
and having gotten bored with democracy promotion, the Bush
administration now appears to be fanning the flames of sectarian
strife region-wide. Since September 2006, Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice, Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior
administration officials have made trips to the Middle East to rally
the support of what Rice has described as the "moderate mainstream"
Arab states against Iran. This group has now been formalized as the
"GCC + 2," meaning the six members of the Gulf Cooperation Council
(Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and
Oman) as well as Egypt and Jordan.

I suggest that this new coalition be renamed to something less
technocratic: the Sunni Arab-Dominated Dictatorships Against the
Mullahs, or SADDAM. I have to confess I was inspired by historical
precedent. In the 1980s, some of you may remember, there was another
Saddam who proved rather useful against Iran. Saddam invaded Iran
without provocation, sparking an eight-year-long war that was one of
the 20th century's deadliest. Along the way, the U.S. and the Arab
states listed above provided much in funding, weapons and turning a
blind eye when Saddam got carried away and used chemical weapons
against Kurds (it did not raise that much of a fuss when he used them
against Iranians, either).

By forming SADDAM, the Bush administration hopes to do several things.
Firstly, encourage countries with ambivalent policies towards Israel
to accept a new regional security arrangement with the Jewish state
firmly as its center—the holy grail of the neo-conservatives who,
despite reports to the contrary, continue to craft U.S. Middle East
policy. (Otherwise, why would Elliott Abrams still have his job?)
Secondly, it is securing the support of these countries against Iran,
in preparation for a possible strike against its nuclear facilities or
some other form of military action, or at least to ensure the recently
announced United Nations sanctions against Iran are effective. One
tactic is getting the oil-producing SADDAM countries to up production
and bring the price of the oil barrel back to under $50, as Saudi
Arabia is obviously doing by boycotting calls by fellow OPEC members
to cut production.

At stake is limiting one of the biggest effects caused by the
administration's decision to invade Iraq (and subsequently failing to
maintain order): the rise of Iran as a regional power. Long
under-represented in the regional balance of power for a country of 70
million souls with large oil reserves, Iran has seen two hostile
neighboring regimes fall (the Taliban and Saddam Hussein) and has
become an important player in the internal politics of Iraq, Lebanon
and Palestine, where it is supporting political actors who threaten
clients of Israel, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. There is good reason to
worry about Iran's ascent: The regime has a track record of fanaticism
and has made several distasteful pronouncements against Israel and
Jews, particularly under the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. But
before Iran topped the news agenda, most SADDAM countries had begun to
recognize that Tehran had an inevitable role to play in regional
politics and had begun diplomatic negotiations aimed at formalizing
relationships severed since 1979.

The new SADDAM is much more collaborative (and less mercurial) than
the old Saddam. The aging autocrats and puppet kings that make it up
are getting some nice trade-offs for their support, most notably the
abandonment of the Bush administration's last policy du jour, the
"Forward Strategy for Freedom." You may remember another Bush
speech—delivered at his inauguration in 2005—in which he said: "All
who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: The United States will
not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors.  When you stand
for your liberty, we will stand with you."

Well, with the new SADDAM policy, you get something more along the
lines of "I know we previously encouraged you to stand for liberty and
all that, but if you live in tyranny and hopelessness we will ignore
your oppression and excuse your oppressors. When you stand for
liberty, we will look the other way."

Just ask Ayman Nour, the Egyptian opposition politician who in 2005
was the darling of the "Arab Spring" but now lingers in jail on
trumped-up charges, being denied proper medical treatment for
diabetes. Egypt used to top the list of countries under pressure to
democratize from Washington—President Bush mentioned it specifically
in several speeches—but when Rice visited Cairo earlier this month,
the talk was all about Iraq and Iran. There was zilch about democracy,
or even Nour's condition. A few days later, when interviewed by The
Washington Post , which has campaigned for Nour and other Egyptian
democrats, she meekly protested that the policy still stood, but that
"it's not easy and it's not going to be concluded on our watch and
there will be ups and downs."

The new anti-Iranian alliance with SADDAM appears to be deliberately
reviving an old divide in the Islamic world between Sunni and Shia
Muslims. To convince their populations, which are generally aghast at
U.S. policy in Iraq and Palestine, that Iran is the real enemy
(although, unlike say Israel, it has never in modern history been the
first to attack an Arab country or threatened to use nuclear weapons
against them), the SADDAM regimes are engaging in anti-Shia
hate-mongering. State-backed clerics and journalists are recuperating
the poisonous anti-Shia language typically heard from Iraqi jihadists
to lure public support away from Iran and its allies (notably
Hezbollah and Hamas, which are widely admired for their resistance to
Israel occupation and aggression) and prepare the ground for a
confrontation with Tehran.

This policy will have disastrous consequences. Not only will it
further discrimination against the already downtrodden Shia minorities
in SADDAM countries, but it will encourage the adoption of exactly the
kind of intolerant ideas Osama bin Laden and his ilk have tried to
spread for decades. The perennial losers will be those Arabs (and
Iranians) who struggle for a more tolerant and democratic political
culture. We've been down this road before.
-- 
Yoshie
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