While President Bush’s inaugural speech for the second term prompted speculation and anxiety for many people around the world, his State of the Union speech put an end to these speculations pretty well. America was never so willingly resolved and determined to proceed with its agenda with the ultimate goal of achieving global supremacy and implementing its hegemony in the name of freedom and liberty. The pretext, this time, is not regime change in its fight against terrorism but rather the dismantling of global tyranny and the removal of tyrants in the darkest corners of the world. This dark and gloomy corner happens to be still in the Arab and Islamic world.

Both speeches put specific emphasis on freedom, liberty and equality. But these are ideals widely accepted and appreciated by people all over the world, since all human beings needed to be free, have equal rights and share equal duties.

So why aren’t we gloating over what the president is promising? It is simply because America is distorting the reality of its intentions, its capabilities and its interests. America is a highly consumer society. The Americans have been importing a lot of goods and services and thereby have been suffering in trade balances and deficits. Most of all, their gravest problem has been energy consumption and their greatest fear has been either a sudden disruption in the supply of energy or a spike in oil prices and its effect on their economy and prosperity.

This phobia started in the seventies and has been lately aggravated with the increased global consumption of energy, particularly by the two most populous countries of the world — China and India. Since the seventies, the United States has decided to move on progressively to the Gulf region to guarantee the control of its huge oil reserves. By asserting different roles, from the policeman of the Gulf against Arab nationalist movements in the seventies to the defender of the Gulf from the spread of communism in the eighties to the protector of the Gulf from voracious neighboring tyrants in the nineties, America projected its military power in most of the regional states to secure its economic, political and strategic objectives. In other words, America tried to take over the role the British had played prior to their withdrawal from the region in 1971.

By doing this, America had weakened the sovereignty of the Gulf states, interfered in their relations with each other, put enormous pressures on their budgets with huge arms sale contracts consigned to US companies, while imposing low oil prices and ensuring unrestricted energy supply to America. These policies did not face tremendous difficulties in their application on the Gulf oil producing countries simply because these countries suffered from political, economic and social underdevelopment. All the same these policies devastated the Gulf states’ economies, burdened them with huge deficits due to regional wars resulting from such US policies — not to say anything of the undesirable effects on the stability and security of the region and the rest of the world.

Today, America’s capabilities have changed. America’s economy is stagnant with record high deficits. Its cultural influence has declined and though its military power is strong there are constraints on military expenditure. America’s military power will never be so strongly displayed as it was during the 1991 Gulf War when the Pentagon dispatched 500,000 US military personnel within a short time and was given the chance of a lifetime to display to the world its might simply because the Gulf states were paying the bills. Today, the US is unable to dispatch more troops to Iraq simply because Iraq is unable to cover the expenses of the US military and the coalition forces.

By proclaiming itself the policeman of freedom and the guarantor of democracy the United States is now trying to retain and increase its international leverage. In the Gulf the US is trying to regain its influence by declaring support to the slowly emerging reform movement.

However, America is unable to sell its security policies any longer to a region where the majority of population is young, highly educated and has of late turned anti-American. Regional states and its population do not want any foreign intervention in their long delayed but evolutionary reform process. They would like to promote the basic principles of freedom, liberty and justice in accordance with their culture, religion and ideology.

Today the world questions America’s approach to the region and insistence on global democracy. The international community disagrees with America’s self-appointed police role and guarantor of these natural rights. They believe that the only logical sponsor and guarantor of these natural rights is the UN. They want to see the UN strengthened, not weakened.

America’s claim to sponsorship of freedom, liberty and democracy has been the Sept. 11 attacks and the war on terrorism. But the monster behind Sept. 11 is neither Islamic fundamentalism nor tyrant regimes. It is simply an overdated and obsolete US policy that is meeting with popular resistance in the region.

The people in the region are not enemies of America but simply peace-loving citizens who have suffered and have decided to change their future. America should avoid meddling with the internal affairs of the Gulf states. Instead there should be an open dialogue with the people of the region on future energy problems and negotiations with oil producing countries in the Gulf and elsewhere to solve such problems.

— Dr. Mariam Al-Oraifi is a Saudi academic. She holds a doctorate from Canberra University in Australia.