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| Volume IX, September 2002, Number 3 |
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| EXCERPT: The Paradoxes of U.S. Policy
In the Middle East |
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| Mahmood Monshipouri |
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Dr. Monshipouri is chair and professor of political science at Quinnipiac University. He specializes in Middle Eastern and European Studies. He is author of Islamism, Secularism, and Human Rights in the Middle East (Lynne Rienner Publishers, 1998). His most recent articles have appeared in Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal, Human Rights Quarterly and Journal of Church and State.
During the second half of the twentieth century, U.S. foreign policy toward the Middle East centered on protecting the oil flow, supporting Israel and the region's pro-Western governments and maintaining political stability – not just to keep the status quo, but largely to deter, contain and, if necessary, confront communism. Today this list has expanded to include other objectives such as combating terrorism, brokering a truce between the Palestinians and Israelis, and preventing the spread of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). In the pursuit of these objectives, the United States has relied on the use of force, covert intervention, economic and military assistance, arms sales, military presence and diplomacy.
The Middle East has been beleaguered by conflicts: intra-regional (Arab-Israeli wars and the Iran-Iraq War) as well as inter-regional (the U.S.-led war against Iraq and the U.S.-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan). Other dramatic events that have shaped the region's political landscape include foreign invasions (the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1980, Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990), civil war in Lebanon and the subsequent stationing of U.S. marines there in the early 1980s, Iran's Islamic revolution, uprisings in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, a growing Islamic radicalism and associated terrorism, and a U.S. military presence in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.
Today the Middle East is home to repressive regimes, an oppressive Israeli occupation, human-rights abuses, economic disparities, unelected governments and corrupt political systems. The Arab defeat in the wars with Israel and the failure of parliamentary democracy to make ruling elites and the military electorally accountable have precipitated a deepening sense of disillusionment and crisis in many Muslim societies, culminating in the resurgence of political Islam by the late 1970s.11 This resurgence has come to be seen as a potent backlash against the failure of secular states and ideologies such as liberal nationalism and Arab socialism, and against secular processes and institutions.
Following the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan (1988), the secular regime in Kabul was abandoned; the United States had no reconstruction plan. As a result, chaos and poverty provided a fertile ground for the measure of stability the Taliban brought to the country.12 While the U.S. focus had been on confronting and deterring communism, in the post-Cold War era, that fixation has been replaced with the Islamic threat. In the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, U.S. domestic scrutiny of Muslims has raised the concern that the war against terrorism would be seen as a war against Islam.13 U.S. foreign-policy makers have warned against such proverbial fault lines, as they have shifted their focus to the threats posed by radical Islamic movements. In the wake of the tragedy, two central questions arise: How can global terrorism be explained? What is the best way to prevent and ultimately eradicate it? The ironies and flaws in U.S. foreign policy are a legitimate place to focus.
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11 John L. Esposito, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? Third Edition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 73.
12 For a stimulating analysis of U.S. foreign policy, see the opinions expressed by Melani McAlister, Stephen Baker, and Richard Ebeling in Josh Burek, "Searching for Foreign Policy Lessons," September 25, 2001, http://www.csmonitor.com/2001/0925/p25s1-wogi.html.
13 Augustus Richard Norton, "America's Approach to the Middle East: Legacies, Questions, and Possibilities," Current History, January 2002, pp. 3-7; p. 4.
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