Middle East Social and Political Analysis - Essay Example

Middle East Social and Political Analysis The Middle East in a Global Context Although the Middle East has long been an economic laggard, it will remain of paramount importance for global stability, owing to its massive oil reserves and its status as the cultural hub of the Muslim world. Two of the three Muslim countries we consider most dangerous to regional security should they become radicalized – Egypt and Saudi Arabia – are in the Middle East. It is believed that the evolution of these will be crucial for the future of political Islam. Although only 15% of the world Muslim population lives in the Middle East, the region has the highest percentage of Muslim-majority countries and sets the tone for the Islamic world. As Hoffman and William say. A further reason why the Middle East is becoming more important is high oil prices. Although oil prices are far below their 2008 peak of US$147/bbl, they are expected to remain high due to rising demand from China, India, and other emerging markets. Despite efforts by international oil companies to tap into new sources, such as the Caspian Sea, West Africa, and Brazil’s offshore deposits, and despite moves to develop alternative energy sources, oil is likely to remain paramount. Meanwhile, the windfall of high oil prices should continue to boost investment in the Middle East, making it an important economic region. Political Repression and Uncertain Political Evolution Apart from Israel, Lebanon and Turkey, no Middle Eastern state has an entirely democratic political system. Iran has competitive elections, but ultimate power rests with the ruling clerics. The other countries are all absolute monarchies or led by authoritarian presidents, although there are varying degrees of parliamentary representation. As a result, most leaders have questionable legitimacy. Opposition groups tend to be suppressed, and governments maintain powerful security services to keep their populations in line. This system of government has fostered patronage and corruption, in turn adding to public dissatisfaction. Arguably, the biggest question for the Middle East is whether it can continue to be an exception to the spread of democracy worldwide or whether democracy will eventually take hold. As per Wunderle openion. Over the coming decade, we expect several Middle Eastern states – notably Egypt and Saudi Arabia – to face succession issues, as incumbent heads of state pass from the scene. In Egypt, the outlook is highly uncertain, amid signs that President Hosni Mubarak is grooming his son Gamal to succeed him and opposition to this. In Saudi Arabia, the succession procedure is clearer cut, but a power struggle within the al-Saud family is not out of the question. With the exception of Iran, none of the countries in the Middle East has a tradition of popular uprisings against the regime, and any change is likely to be internally driven. However, the scope for instability is high. The United States Should Promote Democracy in the Middle East Perhaps more importantly, the United States seen in the region as being on record, at least rhetorically, as supporting democracy. Human rights and prodemocracy movements in Middle Eastern countries look to Washington for support, despite American unwillingness to criticize the many undemocratic U.S. allies in the region. Yet when real elections do occur, American policy goals can be set back. Islamist parties that do not hide their opposition to American political and cultural influence in the region frequently do well. Persian Gulf security and progress on the Arab-Israeli peace process rank far ahead of promoting participatory politics in the list of Americas real goals in the Muslim Middle East, and that is as it should be. However, there are an increasing number of elections, of more or less legitimate provenance, occurring in Muslim countries to which the United States has to respond. Since November 1995, Algeria has held a presidential election; Egypt, Turkey, Iran, Lebanon and Kuwait have had parliamentary elections; and Palestinians elected a legislative authority. Says Wunderle. American officials have been called upon and will be called upon, to pronounce upon the fairness and openness of such elections. In a number of cases, the United States faces the difficult task of balancing between its principles--support free and fair elections--and its particular interests in supporting some incumbent regimes and delegitimizing others. When elections stand in the way of securing American security and economic goals, Washington drops its normal rhetoric of "democratic enlargement." When countries that oppose the United States on these issues, such as Iran, have elections, those elections are ipso facto seen as undemocratic. When countries that support the United States on these issues have sham elections, or ignore their own constitutions in prohibiting or postponing elections, Washington remains silent. There is a pervasive sense in the Middle East that the United States does not support democracy in the region, but rather supports what is in its strategic interest and calls it democratic. Moves toward greater democracy in any of these Middle Eastern countries (including the Palestinian Authority) would undoubtedly increase the power of Islamist political groups, as recent elections demonstrate. For the first time in the history of the Turkish Republic, a party with an explicitly Islamist platform received a plurality of votes in a legislative election. The Welfare party polled over 21 percent of the vote and received 158 seats (nearly 30 percent of the total) in the Turkish elections of December 1995. As Perkovich says. The Islamic Action Front, the political face of the Islamist political group the Muslim Brotherhood, is the largest group in the Jordanian parliament. The arrest and military trial of about 100 Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Egypt, on the eve of the November 1995 elections to the Egyptian parliament, is a signal of where the Hosni Mubarak government sees its most threatening challenger. While Hamas [a Muslim terrorist organization] boycotted the recent legislative elections to the Palestinian Authority, it is clear that this Islamist group is Yasir Arafats major opposition in Palestinian politics. Eighteen of the 40 Kuwaiti parliamentarians elected in October 1992 were members of the three Islamist groups that fielded candidates or independents endorsed by one of those groups. Islamists held on to about that number of seats in the 1996 elections. Moreover, newly emerging Islamist opposition groups are presenting the Saudi regime with its most serious domestic challenge since the heyday of Egypts Gamal Abdel Nassers Pan-Arabism [the notion of uniting all Arab countries under a single government] in the 1960s. The democracy conundrum for the United States in the Muslim Middle East is straightforward. American interests are tied up with incumbent regimes; American values, if pursued vigorously, could weaken those regimes. The problem is not that Muslims are not "ready" for democracy, as some have condescendingly argued. It is also important that the United States not exaggerate the Islamist "bogeyman." The further away a country is from the core American interests in the Middle East--Arab-Israeli peace and Gulf oil--the more comfortable Washington should be about dealing with Islamist forces. . . . Where Islamist groups oppose regimes that Washington also opposes, as in Libya and Iraq, we should not be dissuaded from dealing with those groups by questionable theoretical arguments about a "clash of civilizations" between Islam and the West. Islamist governments, even revolutionary ones like Iran, have to sell their products on world markets. We should remember that the United States is boycotting Iranian commerce, not the other way around. The rational basis for American fears of "Islamic" political change in the Middle East rests upon specific differences of opinion on Arab Israeli issues and on the strong American ties with a number of incumbent regimes challenged by Islamist opposition. Washington must be at pains, in both word and indeed, to make clear that its policy is governed by those specific interests, not by a general opposition to political forces that call themselves "Islamic." In the opinion Perkovich. In stating its policy, Washington should also be clear that it favors efforts to allow more wide-ranging public discussion and more freedom publicly to organize for political purposes in the Muslim Middle East. One of the reasons that Islamist groups dominate the political field is that they do not need "civic space" to organize politically. The protected space, both metaphorically and physically, provided by mosques, religious schools and other religious institutions allows Islamist groups to build social bases of support. Non-Islamist political organizations lack such space. They are caught between nervous governments’ intent on dominating all aspects of public life and Islamist group’s intent on monopolizing opposition discourse and activity. The United States should use what influence it has to help open up the space for other political groups to emerge, groups that could ameliorate the growing polarization of Arab politics between American-supported regimes and Islamist oppositions. A modest American policy toward encouraging our Arab allies to emulate, in a gradual and evolutionary way, the Turkish model would consist of the following elements: Support for freedom of expression. While Islamic groups would be the immediate beneficiaries of such liberalization, it would encourage other political tendencies to enter the public arena. Logistical support for independent publishers of books and newspapers would be a good use of some small part of American and international organization aid to the states of the region. It is disheartening to note that, despite the importance of Saudi Arabia and the smaller Gulf monarchies to U.S. interests in the Middle East, very few American resources are available for exchange programs with these countries. Such exchange programs are not going to convert every Middle Eastern activist into a Jeffersonian democrat. However, they could help Washington establish lines of communication with important political and social figures in Middle Eastern countries. When Ayatollah Khomeini came to power in Iran, he was an unknown figure to Washington. That kind of thing should not happen again. As Perkovich states. The steps outlined for a realistic American approach to its Middle Eastern "democracy conundrum" are hardly a panacea. They will not dramatically change the nature of politics in the Muslim Middle East. However, they will help to remove the odor of insincerity that characterizes much official American discourse about democracy in the region. They will signal that the United States, within the limits of its interests, is serious about encouraging participatory institutions and broader based politics in its Middle Eastern allies. They might even at the margins, improve the chances for gradual and evolutionary political change in the area, the best guarantee of stability and American interests there. A little less empty talk and action that are a little more modest could go some distance to decreasing the extent to which Muslim Middle Easterners see American policy toward political change in their countries as nothing but hypocrisy. Conclusion The Middle East will continue to face multiple challenges due to several reasons in the future largely because of internal pressures. These include political repression, rising populations, and a lack of jobs and economic opportunities, all of which will mean that Islamist groups have a substantial pool of potential recruits. Other sources of instability include the absence of an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, ongoing rivalry between Iran and Saudi Arabia to dominate the Gulf region, and the deteriorating security situation in Yemen. On the external front, the US will remain a key player in the Middle East, but its ability to shape the region’s security will be weakened once it is withdrawn from Iraq. Work Cited Shahram Chubin, Bruce Hoffman, and William Rosenau, Conference Proceedings, “The United States, Europe, and the Middle East,” RAND Corporation, June 2004, p. 7. Thomas L. Friedman, “A Poverty of Dignity and a Wealth of Rage,” New York Times, July 15, 2005. George Perkovich, “Iran is Not an Island: A Strategy to Mobilize the Neighbors,” Policy Brief 34, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 2005. The majority of the world’s Muslims are Sunni, but a significant minority, about 15 percent of the global Muslim population, is Shiite. From Vali Nasr, “When the Shiites Rise,” Foreign Affairs, July / August 2006. The concept of enduring suffering and death for the sake of moral righteousness is a key part of Shiism and has been ritualized in annual mourning ceremonies commemorating Imam Husayn’s heroic death at Karbala in 680 A.D. that include marches, reenactments, and self-flagellation. Vali Nasr, “When the Shiites Rise,’ Foreign Affairs, July/August 2006. Lebanon is essentially a nonstate, for which Hizballah performs state functions (especially in the south), which include providing and social services for its constituents. The January 2005 Palestinian Authority elections resulted in Hamas—designated by the Secretary of State as a Foreign Terrorist Organization—being elected to lead the Palestinian Authority with the consequence being a government that is not recognized by the U.S. (or Israel) and near-total financial and economic isolation by the international community. There is a fundamental conflict between the realist and idealist schools of U.S. foreign policy, as well as between advocates of confrontationalist vs. gradualist implementation. Angel M. Rabasa, et al., The Muslim World After 9 / 11 (RAND Corporation, 2004). Since attacking America on 9–11, al-Qaeda–linked groups and individuals have been involved in at least fifteen different attacks. They have hit at groups of Germans (in Tunisia), French (in Karachi, Pakistan), Spaniards (in Madrid), Britons (in Turkey and Bali, Indonesia), Australians (in Bali), Pakistanis (in Pakistan), Turks (in Turkey), Saudis (in Saudi Arabia), and Jews (in Morocco, Turkey, and Tunisia). David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy (RAND Corporation, 2001). George Perkovich, “Iran is Not an Island: A Strategy to Mobilize the Neighbors,’ Policy Brief 34, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, February 2005. Since the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq had been the object of one of two major theater scenarios that drove the shape and shape and size of U.S. military force structure and had constituted a central focus of force planning. Angel M. Rabasa et al., The Muslim World After 9/11, RAND Corporation, 2004. Brown-water navy is a term that originated in the United States Navy, referring to the small gunboats and patrol boats used in rivers. A broader meaning in this article is any naval force that has the capacity to carry out military operations in riverine or littoral environments. Being a brown-water navy does not imply that it lacks offensive capability, as many small littoral-combat ships today are armed with powerful antiship missiles. Iran has several Russian-supplied systems specifically designed to defeat Aegis and the Phalanx point defense system (SS-N-22 SUNBURN and SS-NX-26 YAKHOUTS). The Pressler Amendment, enacted in 1985, specifically prohibited U.S. assistance or military sales to Pakistan unless annual presidential certification was issued that Pakistan did not possess a nuclear explosive device. The Leahy Amendment imposes restrictions on providing funds to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country that has gross violations of human rights, unless the foreign government is taking effective measures to bring the responsible members of the security forces unit to justice. Angel M. Rabasa et al., The Muslim World After 9 / 11, RAND Corporation, 2004. While the U.S does have a diplomatic presence in Syria, there is no ambassador. There is a charge d’affaires and a full embassy staff. William D.Wunderle, “Through the Lens of Cultural Awareness: A Primer for U.S. Armed Forces Deploying to Arab and Middle Eastern Countries,” DRR 3576-A, Santa Monica, California, RAND Corporation, April 2006. Hans Binnendijk and RichardKugler, Seeing the Elephant: TheU.S. Role in Global Security (Center for Technology and National Security Policy, National Defense University, 2006). Read More