It is regrettable that the G-8 leaders have decided to promote a plan for democratic reform in the Middle East. This is not because change is unnecessary — the Arab League spoke for all member states when it recognized the issue last month — but because the G-8 countries are seeking to interfere in the region without making an equal commitment to becoming involved in what they know is the key issue: A just and lasting settlement for Palestine.
Change in the Arab world will come, but it must come from within. It cannot be imposed from without. That is one of the clearest lessons that the Americans ought to be learning from their intervention in Iraq. To seek to insist that other sovereign countries reorder themselves according to Western democratic lights is both arrogant and wrong.
With the newfound unity among the world’s leading powers, following the unanimous Security Council resolution on the future of Iraq, there is clearly an impetus to find more subjects on which they can agree. Their decision on Middle East democratic and economic reforms was an easy next step, in that they imagine it will cost them nothing. But in that they are mistaken.
By associating themselves with a key policy obsession of the Bush White House, Russia, France and Germany are also linking themselves with the American bullheadedness in the Middle East which has caused such despair among Arab countries. Gone it seems are the courage and wisdom that made them hold off from supporting the US’ latest adventure in our region. The idea that the Bush administration was persuaded by fellow G-8 members to somehow water down its proposals for Middle Eastern reform is a specious fiction. There never were any firm proposals; there was nothing to be watered down in the first place.
Their resolution may have made G-8 members feel good about themselves, but it will achieve nothing else. This is because of the Bush administration’s unilateral tearing up of the Palestinian road map, its support for Ariel Sharon’s latest Zionist land grab and the mildness of its criticism of Israeli military brutality in Gaza. Many do not believe that Washington has the good of the region at heart.
Russia, the European Union, the United Nations and the US make up the members of the Quartet charged with seeing to the implementation of the road map. If Germany and France along with Russia cannot make the Americans deliver on their commitment, they will rightly lose the respect they were able to build in the Arab world when they opposed the Iraq war. Some argue that the Security Council resolution this week gave them the leverage with which to force Washington back onto the road map for Palestine. They appear in no hurry to use it.
Thus instead of interfering at a point in the Middle East where their influence could be the key to ending oppression, bloodshed and despair, the other G-8 members have chosen to give offense and heighten suspicion by seeking to intervene where their efforts are neither needed nor wanted. Their abject failure to deliver on their commitments to the Palestinian people has been noted in the region; it will treat their attempts to interfere in other matters with the appropriate measure of respect.
