In recent times, few new years have dawned on the Middle East with more foreboding. Iraq is in chaos. Lebanon stares once more at the ogre of civil conflict. Palestinians have reached a new pitch of despair and humiliation. Iran seems set on becoming the second regional nuclear power, while Israel, the first, remains as obdurate and aggressive as ever.
But US President Bush is even now working on a new plan for the Middle East, to be announced within the coming days. Should we all be holding our breath? Almost certainly not. The bloodshed and enmities now disfiguring the Middle East are largely born of the White House’s severely limited thinking, based upon zero understanding of the region.
It is a misfortune not simply for the Americans that the United States currently has a president so lacking in both insight and wisdom. Short of reversing his slavish support for his ungrateful Israeli ally and apologizing convincingly for the great harm his bovine interventions have made in Iraq and the wider Middle East, Bush’s new plan will achieve nothing.
It is a different matter with the new United National secretary-general, former Korean Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon. He succeeds Kofi Annan a man who, for all his failings at reforming the UN administration, nevertheless raised the moral stature of the office to a new height. In the face of Bush’s abject failures, neither Russia nor China has sought to take a leading role in fashioning an alternative worldview. They have preferred to let Washington continue to pay the high price of its misjudgments. Unfortunately that means that the victims of American incompetence also continue to pay in blood and misery. Ban could now move to fill the vacuum by offering a carefully considered rallying point for all men of good will who wish to undo the damage done by Bush’s policy. Annan left his successor a high moral stock, which in the early honeymoon period of his secretary-generalship he could exploit with perhaps dazzling success.
The one definite advance to be expected in this new year will be on climate change. Ironically this progress will only happen because the Bush White House has incredibly been persuaded to change its mind. While still not admitting — with some reason — that the climate is not actually going through a natural cyclical change, he has nevertheless agreed that man-made pollution is adding to its speed. No doubt the devastation of Hurricane Katrina finally persuaded Bush that the very first thing he did on becoming president — tearing up the Kyoto Protocol — was not after all such a good idea.
The old argument was that since America was the worst polluter, it would cost too much for industry to clean up its act. Now, however, corporate America has woken up to the fact that there is money to be made out of pollution control. The country that has virtually made smoking a crime is now likely to become equally radical on carbon emissions. Tragically however, Bush is unlikely to start changing his mind on other no less important policies.
