Arabs to Bush: Mind your own Business
By G.G. LaBELLE, Associated Press Writer
siouxcityjournal.com
CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- Iran told President Bush to mind his own business Friday after he called for greater democracy in the region. Similar and equally caustic views were expressed by commentators across the region.
While some commentators stressed that most people in the Middle East genuinely want democracy, Bush's preaching on freedom aroused resentment in a region where America is accused of waging war on Iraq and siding blindly with Israel against the Palestinians.
Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi condemned Bush's speech, delivered Thursday in Washington, as an "obvious interference in Iran's internal affairs," the country's Islamic Republic News Agency reported.
"No individual, or group, has ever commissioned Mr. Bush to safeguard their rights ... and basically, keeping in mind the dark record of the United States in suppressing the democratic movements around the globe, he is not in a position to talk about such issues," Asefi was quoted as saying.
Other Middle Eastern governments and few among the public had immediate reactions, since Bush's speech came Thursday night in the Middle East when Muslims were breaking their daytime fast in the holy month of Ramadan -- and on the eve of the main weekly Islamic day of prayer.
But newspaper editorials and columnists across the region, while praising the merits of democracy, said Washington either couldn't or wouldn't help freedom flourish in the Arab world.
"Arabs want democracy. They hate their corrupt regimes more than they hate the United States," wrote Abdul Bari Atwan, editor-in-chief of the London-based Arabic daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi.
"But," he added, "they are not going to listen attentively to the speech of the American president, first, because the consecutive American administrations, in the past 50 years, supported those regimes ... And because all true democracies in the world came as a result of internal struggle, not due to foreign intervention, particularly American."
In its Friday edition, a signed editorial in the leading Lebanese daily An-Nahar described the speech as "very attractive words" but said that "before they become tangible policies that deal with the real problems, they will continue to be boring, empty rhetoric."
"Exposing the region's ills is useless. We already know them ... What is required is a realization that the underlying problem continues to be Palestine and the obscene American bias for Israel and against Arabs, their interests and hopes," said the commentary by columnist Sahar Baasiri.
Bush said in his speech that Western governments had been wrong for decades in backing undemocratic, corrupt leaders in the Middle East, and he renewed his criticism of Iran and Syria, both of which he has accused of fostering terrorism.
Iran's state-run TV did not report the speech until Friday afternoon and gave no details on Bush's criticism of Iran. The one newspaper published Friday in Syria didn't cover Bush, though Syrians were able to see him live on the pan-Arab television network Al-Jazeera.
In the capital Damascus, 37-year-old Syrian worker Ali Rida said Bush's talk of democracy didn't conceal the true U.S. policy in the region. "If they want to export democracy through wars, we do not want it," he said.
Still, many Arab commentators said that despite the bitter comments, most people in the region understood at heart that Bush was right in saying Middle Eastern governments must lay aside their autocratic, old ways and join the modern world.
Bush was careful to say that Middle Eastern democracy need not imitate America's system and praised some Arab governments -- all U.S. allies -- for taking small steps toward democracy.
But Yemeni political analyst Mansour Hael disagreed with Bush's judgment on the region's fledgling democracy and said his speech wasn't even aimed at the Middle East but at an American public growing doubtful of Bush administration policies.
"We in the Arab world have not experienced real democracy until today and our regimes and culture have not changed," he said. "The whole speech ... is a campaigning thing more than a reading of the Arab reality." |
