ISLAMABAD, 25 September 2004 — As Washington and its G-8 allies yet again engage with the plan for the socioeconomic reform in the Middle East and African countries, it must heed to the speeches made by two men who currently occupy world stage for differing reasons — the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Pakistan’s President Parvez Musharraf. Kofi Annan called for establishing “rule of law both at home and abroad.”

Annan who had only days before had declared the Iraq war “illegal” urged all the UN members to “start from the principle that no one is above the law, and no one should be denied its protection.” Strongly critical of those who apply double standards in invoking rule of law, the secretary-general said, “Those who seek to bestow legitimacy must themselves embody it; and those who invoke international law must themselves submit to it... Rule of law as a mere concept is not enough. Laws must be put into practice, and permeate the fabric of our lives.”

Muharraf, the more direct man, often erroneously blamed for loyalty to Washington, urged that the powerful countries “close fronts”, end political injustices against the Muslim communities, and urged that “action had to be taken before an iron curtain finally descends between the West and the Islamic world.”

While Musharraf has repeatedly argued that the West support Muslim socioeconomic development, at the UN General Assembly on Sept. 22 he emphatically complained that “the major powers of the West have yet to show movement by seriously trying to resolve internationally recognized disputes affecting the Muslim world.”

The issues raised by Musharraf and Kofi Annan do not indeed contest the validity of the US initiative, but points to its inadequacy. US President George Bush maintained at the UN General Assembly that in Iraq, beyond fighting terrorism, US wanted to make the world a better place to live in. Bush’s response on Iraq was more rhetorical than reassuring. He insisted, “Freedom is finding a way in Iraq. The liberty that many have won at a cost must be secured. The work ahead is demanding, but these difficulties will not shake our conviction that the future of Afghanistan and Iraq is a future of liberty.”

About Afghanistan Bush may not be entirely wrong. In Iraq however with more than 1000 US soldiers dead since the US declared a victory, end of war is not in sight, intermittent pounding of Iraqi towns by the US war machine and the many cold-blooded killings of hostages do not make policy-making easy. Instead it makes blundering easy.

On the home front the Democratic hopeful John Kerry’s attack on Bush’s Iraq policy indicates promises to make Iraq the “killer” issue in an election only six weeks away. On Sept. 20 Kerry had accused that Bush had “misled, miscalculated and mismanaged every aspect of the undertaking.” He accused Bush of creating “a crisis of historic proportions and the prospect of war with no end.”

Amidst all this the US administration has stayed with its idea of the Greater Middle East Initiative (GMEI). Indeed because of this major Iraq failure. Maybe such an initiative can deflect the Iraq criticism. Floated earlier in the year, it was widely criticized by the governments in the region for legitimate reasons like ignoring the political dimension of regional turmoil and for invalid reasons that socioeconomic reform without political reform is not possible and that the US was interfering in the internal affairs of these countries. How much the US has been requested to get involved by many governments in the region is no secret.

The GMEI was recast subsequently. Now it has re-emerged as the Sea Island Plan of Support for Reform covering the Broader Middle East and North Africa (BMENA) region. It intends to support political, educational and economic reform in the region. At the Sea Island meeting the G-8 endorsed a partnership approach to this plan.

In principle this is a positive initiative but as Musharraf and Annan point out, there is the difficult aspect, that of political injustices that too need to be addressed.

The G-8 support for socioeconomic and political development which indeed should have been the mandate of the governments of the BMENA countries is a positive development; also shameful for the BMENA countries that the “hated” US and other Western countries need to prod them to focus on what is the absolute basic for any people to prosper as a nation.

The BMENA initiative may or may not work. The idea is positive, the motives are multiple yet the fact is that the US remains caught in the vortex of past follies, of the urge to “overpower” the states and groups it believes are “erring” ones, the desire to “solve” problems and not least of all Israeli influence. America is acting unilaterally, breaking agreements, bullying others, bombing some and generally opting away from reflection. Washington’s power managers need to alter this way of doing things. Many within the US also recognize what Musharraf and Annan stated unambiguously.

— Nasim Zehra is a fellow of the Harvard University Asia Center