Ryan ChartrandThe ambivalent American stance toward some governments in the Middle East continued with President Bush’s recent eight-day tour through the region, which ended with a final three-hour stop in Egypt.
The six-nation tour featured stops in the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Bush met with leaders of these countries to push his final goal in terms of a foreign policy legacy – peace between Israel and Palestine by the time he leaves office in January 2009.
Bush met briefly with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who signed on to Bush’s goal.
Afterward, the two gave statements in which Bush heaped praise on Mubarak for his government’s support in the region, saying, “I appreciate the example your country is setting.”
However, these comments contradict a speech Bush gave earlier in the United Arab Emirates, in which he said, “You cannot build trust when you hold an election where opposition candidates find themselves harassed or in prison.”
Although they did not say so directly, the comments alluded to the imprisonment of Mubarak’s main political opponent in the 2005 Egyptian presidential election, Ayman Nour, on trumped-up charges of forging powers of attorney.
While the differing views expressed in Bush’s comments seem contradictory, they are in fact indicative of an irresolute American policy concerning how to push for democracy in the Middle East while at the same time fight extremist groups.
Consider this: Hosni Mubarak has been in power since 1981 and has ruled Egypt with emergency powers for the entire duration of his presidency.
Mubarak’s government has long conducted mass arrests of members of Mubarak’s main opposition party, the Muslim Brotherhood, whose existence is illegal under Egyptian law.
Muslim Brotherhood members have thus had to run as political independents and have fared considerably well, winning twenty percent of seats in the Egyptian Parliament in late 2005 and rekindling the debate of whether or not the Brotherhood should remain illegal.
Mubarak’s rule under the state of emergency grants him wide powers to arrest and detain prisoners for virtually any or no reason as well as the authority to freeze assets and seize property, which have been the principal means he has used to keep the Brotherhood a political non-factor.
Mubarak’s means of staying in power are highly suppressive and undemocratic in nature, but the U.S. has stood by him and has yet to voice criticism condemning such actions, even though they are contrary to the platform our State Department ritualistically espouses.
One cannot help but compare this situation to that in Palestine, where the militant group Hamas took control of the country’s legislature in early 2006 and deposed the former ruling party, Fatah.
Hamas, considered a terrorist organization by the U.S., the European Union and Israel, features a charter calling for the destruction of the state of Israel and the formation of an Islamic state, although the party platform for the election did not mirror the charter.
In the wake of the terrorist organization’s election, most Western governments announced that their countries would halt all aid to the Palestinian Authority, although humanitarian aid from non-governmental organizations would be allowed to continue. The massive deficit that the Palestinian government faced after the election sparked fears that the new government might turn to Iran for financial assistance.
This is the rock and the hard place that American foreign policy has caught us between. Countries with unstable economies and radical political parties in power are bound to turn to larger sympathetic neighbors such as Iran for assistance, and in doing so Iran will have gained a new ally.
Conversely, countries such as Egypt are allied with America in that they also seek to protect the state of Israel and fight extremism. At the same time, however, the methodology of such governments can be argued to be as bad as those used by the extremists themselves. Countries such as Egypt simply have an established government to help justify their legitimacy.
We as Americans need to make a decision once and for all, and we really only have two choices to decide between. We either need to decide to fight extremism on all fronts, and in doing so accept alliances with autocratic dictators for what they are and acknowledge them as such.
Or, we need to push for democracy in the Middle East and be willing to accept the results, even if those results call for the destruction of the state of Israel – a state whose existence is largely contingent on our intervention in the Middle East.
It would be an awfully uncivil thing for America to do – creating a state only to leave it to fend for itself – but it’s clear that this global war on terror simply costs too much for one country to sustain by itself.
America needs to quit straddling the fence and ultimately decide where its priorities lie.
Aaron Gaudette is a journalism senior and a Mustang Daily reporter.