Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Gold/Mining/Energy : Gold Price Monitor -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Richnorth who wrote (87701)	7/8/2002 1:01:04 AM
From: Richnorth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 116769

OT???? How to win friends in the Arab world By DAVID IGNATIUS THE WASHINGTON POST NOBODY who cares about the future of the Arab world could fail to be moved by President George W. Bush's call to replace the corrupt and vacillating Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat with a more open and democratic government. Mr Arafat has been a disaster for his people - valuable perhaps as a symbol of resistance once but now an obstacle to the peace and prosperity Palestinians deserve. What made Mr Bush's proposal to remove Mr Arafat intriguing was that it came amid similar rumblings in Washington for greater democracy across the Arab world - with 'regime change' in Iraq, yes, but potentially in many other countries, too. I lump these pro-democracy strategies together as part of a 'neo-imperialist' school, expressed powerfully by former officials such as Mr Robert Kagan, Mr Richard Perle and Mr William Kristol. No one who has spent any time in the Arab world would disagree that democratic change is long overdue. Ordinary Arabs know it. The fact that democratisation would benefit Israel and the United States is secondary to the overwhelming gift it would bring the Arabs themselves, who have been dying, quite literally, for a chance to break out of their impasse. But how to bring about these changes? And how to do it without severe strategic damage to the United States? Some of the policymakers who are so eager to recast the Arab world appear to know almost nothing about it. A cautionary word at the outset: Americans are never more dangerous, to themselves and to others, than when they are trying to do good. Many of our nation's greatest disasters have begun with that gush of American idealism for far-away causes that soon slows to a trickle when kids start coming home in body bags. The inescapable truth is that America is not very good at staying the course. Perhaps Sept 11 purged that feckless American attitude for ever. I doubt that, but in any event, we should be honest about America's history of unreliability as an empire-builder. Still, let us assume that Mr Bush can build a broad national consensus for a long war of liberation in the Arab world. Let us say he is ready to face an Arab oil embargo and its severe economic consequences. Let us imagine that, in his idealism, he is ready to see the Dow fall to 5,000. Assuming all that, how should the US proceed to democratise the Arab world? Change will not come about unless ordinary Arabs want it themselves. If it comes at the point of an American cruise missile, many Arabs will view it as another defeat at the hands of Israel and its proxy, the US. That would be a disaster - a recipe for military occupation of a bitterly resentful swathe of the globe. A second, related point is that if we are really talking about changing the political culture of the Arab world, then 'soft power' is as important as hard military power. By soft power, I mean the network of institutions - clubs, Internet cafes, women's groups, schools - that make up the fabric of civil society. For example, when regime change finally came in Serbia and Slobodan Milosevic gave up his hold on power, it was because of the soft power exercised by ordinary Serbs. A million of them were in the streets, and they were there largely because of a network of groups that had been created in part by open grants from Europe and the US. Right now, someone who cares about the Arab world should create a new organisation called 'The Fund for Change' that can support such experiments in civil society, from Rabat to Basra. It should be open, independent and democratic. This sort of 'overt action' may have more effect in the Arab world than the covert variety. A final point is that US military power, by itself, will not be sufficient to change the Arab world. The US sponsored a wave of coups back in the 1950s, when the enemy was pro-Soviet secularism, rather than the Islamists. And guess what? They were disasters. Reading some of the neo-imperialists, you are left with a nagging sense that they have not thought some of these issues through. The right way to start is by getting more involved in the lives of the people we propose to help.