The UN, New York, NY - March 6, 2005

based on the editorial, The Financial Times, week-end March5-6,
2005.

The given is that the Arabs know from experience of 60 years that, in
the
interest of regional stability and cheap oil, the US’s default decision
in
the Middle East, invariably, has been to shore up tyranny and defend
the
status quo ( just think of the Iranian Islamic revolution as a direct
result
of the American CIA squelching the Mosadeq attempt at democracy).

The person most responsible for smashing the status quo in the Middle
East
is Osama bin Laden. The September 11 2001 attacks made it impossible
for the
west and its Arab clients to continue to ignore a political set-up that
incubated blind rage against them. The US response to 9/11 further
undermined the status quo in ways it is not obvious the Bush
administration
has thought through, for all its laudable declarations supporting
freedom
across the Arab and Islamic world.

The reason the elections took place in Iraq, and when they did, has to
do
rather with the insistence of the Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, who
vetoed
three schemes by the US-led occupation authorities to shelve or dilute
them.
January 30, 2005, when the heroism of over 8 million Iraqis who defied
savagery and intimidation, and took to the poles, will be remembered as
the
beginning of the change in the region.

In Lebanon, Rafiq al-Hariri, the towering political figure of postwar
reconstruction. tried to play a similar role. His assassination,
almost
certainly by Lebanese-Syrian security services, was a massive error of
judgement. It was the detonator for a civil uprising, and Syria’s
isolation. As with the Iraqi voting, here the cedar flags, were
watched
live around the region, shaking the foundations of each and every
tyranny.

With above in mind, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Washington’s main allies in
the
region, and the region’s main dictatorships, are pressing Syria to get
out
of Lebanon; further, they are developing themselves some minimal
election
schemes for their own regimes. Saudi Arabia production of oil is in
from a
region heavily Shia; the Egyptian leader may find that partial
democracy is
as unrealistic as partial pregnancy. Once the democratic seed has been
planted, there is no telling what progeny it will engender.

Now, granted, all above would not have happened without the massive
American
presence in Iraq - and that is the real importance of the US war in
Iraq.

Though not mentioned in the Financial Times editorial as such, the
article
leads our thoughts to the “Law of Unintended Consequences”.
What we are seeing here is a chain of changes brought about by the US
military presence in the region in ways that were not intended by
Washington.

Mr. Bush has the lessons of his father’s Presidency to guide him. Bush
the
First envisioned in 1991 a Sadam free Iraq but failed to come to Iraq’s
help
for fear they would replace Hussein with an Islamic regime or brake up
the
country’s unity and its oil industry. The following year, he followed
up
with indifference when the Algerian army stepped in to forestall the
certainty of an electoral victory by the fiercely anti-American Islamic
Salvation Front and their “Afghanis” volunteers.

Democracy, the paper mentions, may have its time some day in the
region.
In the short term, elections in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, may favor
Islamist
parties such as Da’awa, Hamas, Hizbollah, and lead in the short term to
instability setting in train tectonic shifts by empowering the Shia in
the
whole region; the Arab states were used previously to treat them as
repressed minorities. In the longer range, these risks have to be
taken so
that eventually all Arabs can reclaim their destiny.

Harvey Morris, the Financial Times Jerusalem Bureau chief, writes in
the
same paper: “Rather than trying to limit the spread of freedom to the
export
of a democracy a l’Americaine that is Islam-free, the US will be forced
to
make a distinction between Osama bin Laden’s fanatics, who, as Mr. Bush
acknowledges, thrive on the absence of democracy, and other more
pragmatic
Islamic currents. However unpalatable that is to the US, such an
outcome
is likely to prove the best way to avoid exacerbating existing tensions
and
to satisfy the rising expectations of the people of the region”.

Will there still be in the future cheap and secure oil for the United
States? The question here is not about reserves but about the
stability of
supplies so dear to the US oil interests.

Pincas Jawetz (PJ@SustainabiliTank.info)
Please see also: SustainabiliTank/Archive - “Oil as Glue…”, July 24,
2004.