AS the president of the most powerful nation in the Euro-American world meets with the king of the most influential nation in the Arab world, on an official visit slated for late next month, we are reminded of how auspiciously relations between Washington and Riyadh had initially begun.
These relations, we all know, began on an even keel, almost exactly 69 years ago, on Feb. 15, 1945, when King Abdul Aziz and President Franklin Roosevelt, in a three-day landmark meeting aboard the cruise ship Quincy in the Suez Canal, discussed ties between the two countries. The encounter took place at a critical time in the world’s history: The immediate aftermath of the pivotal Yalta Conference, at which Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin agreed on an outline of what post-WWII Europe and much of the Third World should look like.
King Abdul Aziz stressed the centrality of the issue of Palestine to the Kingdom and the paramount significance Arabs in general attached to how Arab rights there should not be compromised by Zionist ambitions. At the time, Britain and the US were at loggerheads over the future of the Middle East. The former, after all, was behind the release of the infamous Balfour Declaration less than three decades earlier that “viewed with favor” the creation in Palestine of a “national home” for Jews, and the latter had embraced policies in the region formulated by the so-called Arabists at the State Department who could see how the creation of a “Jewish state” in a predominantly Arab country would alienate the peoples of the Middle East, indeed perhaps even the entire Islamic East, against the West.
President Roosevelt made it clear that “no action” would be taken or policies adopted by the US that would jeopardize the rights of Arabs or the national integrity of Palestine. The meeting ended amicably. Three months later, Roosevelt died. The promises he had made to the king were never honored by his successors in the White House. For those Arabs in touch with their modern history, a lot of water has since gone under the bridge.
Fast forward to 2014, where a majority of people in the Arab World has come to evince great resentment toward the United States — a truly ironic development. The irony deepens when you consider that historically Arabs really do not have a beef with the US. Americans, unlike their European counterparts, say the British in Palestine, the French in the Maghreb and the Italians in Libya, never colonized Arabs, degraded Arabs, regrouped their lands in response to imagined strategic interests, hanged their patriots in town squares, or issued (behind their backs and against their pleas) the Balfour Declaration and the Sykes-Picot Agreement. There’s no reason, in fact, why Arabs should harbor any hatred for Americans in their historical archetype.
Heck, the two wars, fought in the early 19th century involved a US Naval fleet bombarding, on orders of none other than benign President Thomas Jefferson, various fortified pirate strongholds in North Africa, whose aim was merely to extract concessions of fair passage for American merchant vessels. They were hardly a confrontation between Arabs and Americans that resonate to this day, as do confrontations between Arabs and their haughty European colonial overlords.
Yet, since that meeting aboard the Quincy 69 years ago, following which America went on to become the putative “leader of the free world,” Washington has taken Arabs for granted — especially when it came to the issue of Palestine and more recently the issue of Syria.
Consider this telling quote: “To brush aside America’s responsibility as a leader and — more profoundly — our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are. Some nations may be able to turn a blind eye to atrocities in other countries. The United States is different.”
The author? No, it was not some progressive human rights advocate writing for the liberal Nation magazine in New York. It was none other than President Barack Hussein Obama himself, speaking in late March, 2011, soon after the onset of the Arab Spring, and soon after he called his predecessor’s invasion of Iraq a “dumb war.” The American chief executive was saying, effectively, that henceforth America would pursue a more muscular approach toward oppression, more morally directed policies in how to use military might in defense of the human rights, the human dignity and the human hopes of less privileged human beings around the world.
Today, while Syria bleeds and its people go through purgatory — displaced, starved and massacred by a ruthless dictator’s military forces who are not above using chemical weapons to kill civilians or dropping “barrel bombs on them — the president of the US has claimed that the carnage in that tormented land is “someone else’s war.” And while the US-sponsored peace talks in Palestine stagnate, and Israel continues to brazenly expropriate more Arab land there and transfer to it (in violation of the Geneva Conventions) more of its colonists, all that the State Department could come with is the refrain about how it is all “not helpful to the peace process.”
