April 13, 2015
So here is this week’s brainteaser about the
endearing world of American foreign policy in the Middle East. What should we
make of the juxtaposition of three dimensions of U.S. policy on display today—the
U.S. president’s sensible statement that the real threat to Arab states,
including across the Gulf, is as much from their internal political and
socio-economic stresses as it is from external sources like Iran; the defense
secretary’s acknowledgment that Al-Qaeda is expanding its areas of control in
Yemen in the midst of the current domestic and regional wars there; and, the
active American support for the war effort in Yemen that seems to promote the
first two problems?
Any
objective computer—or honest human being—would say that these three phenomena
are contradictory, and unsustainable as policies. This is because the war in
Yemen will quickly increase ideological and sectarian tensions inside Arab
states and between some Arab and Iranian leaders; it will also allow extreme
ideological and terror groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS to keep expanding in the
conducive environment created by the war in Yemen and the U.S. government’s
active support for it. That in turn will fuel the cycle of promoting new
tensions and some violence within Gulf and Middle Eastern counties, and
probably across the world.
This is
not a dilemma for the United States only, because virtually all Arab countries
face the same quandary that has been dramatically showcased by the war in
Yemen. This is simply that top-heavy, non-participatory governance systems
across the Arab world that rely heavily on indigenous and Western security
controls to maintain domestic order have generated exactly the opposite result—they
have expanded waves of mismanagement, corruption and disparities that foster
deep-rooted and wide citizen discontent, and these in turn have translated into
small groups of radical militants that attack local and foreign targets.
When this
pattern persists for half a century, as it has across the Arab region, it also
leads to a bundle of other troubling phenomena that Yemen also showcases:
domestic state fragmentation, polarization and militarization, more active
foreign military interventions, and intra-Arab military attacks and proxy wars
to try and contain the spiral of insecurity, warfare and occasional state
collapse.
You would
think that after decade upon decade of seeing this happen across our region,
local and foreign powers alike would conclude at some point that using the
world’s most sophisticated weapons to attack the world’s most destitute
societies will only exacerbate this cycle, rather than resolve it. Yet
America’s top officials this week seem comfortable continuing this approach,
even though in the same breath they acknowledge its dangerous consequences in domestic
and regional Arab terms.
This kind
of foreign policy behavior is immature and aimless. I appreciate the difficulty
of trying to fix such a destructive and failed approach to Arab realities
without unleashing total chaos and mass state fragmentation and collapse in
critical parts of the region. The same objective computer or honest human being
we could consult on this might also say, though, that total chaos and mass
state fragmentation and collapse across critical parts of the region are
exactly what we have been experiencing in the past few years (in Somalia,
Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Libya and some corners of other lands, including Egypt,
Lebanon, Palestine, Algeria, Bahrain and Sudan).
The new
U.S. Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, being the learned Harvard Kennedy School
professor that he is, noted correctly Wednesday that Al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) has taken advantage of the unfolding chaos across much
of Yemen to gain territory and expand its base of operations as it engages in
battles with several factions in the country. He added that, “We are observing
AQAP participating in that kind of fighting.”
So far,
so good. But then he noted that the United States is resupplying Saudi forces
in Yemen with weapons while also providing the Saudis with useful intelligence,
aiming to restore Yemen’s last president, Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, and
re-establish order and some kind of credible power-sharing in the country. Here
is where it gets slightly dicey, though. Carter said the United States wants
the violence to end. “The U.S. is supporting the effort to get a political
solution there that stops the violence at the same time that we’re contributing
to the Saudi effort to protect its own security,” he said.
Of
course, security for Saudi Arabia and any state absolutely is a legitimate and
priority goal. I hope the new U.S. defense secretary will ask his Harvard
graduate students, as well as the first 100 people in the Cambridge,
Massachusetts phone directory, to examine a critical policy question: Is
expanding the United States’ legacy of fighting non-stop wars from Afghanistan
to Libya for the past quarter century, while Arab domestic conditions stagnate
and AQAP and ISIS continue to grow and flourish, the most efficient way to
enhance any Arab country’s security?
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in the Daily Star. He was founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam
Fares Institute for Public Policy and International Affairs at the American
University of Beirut. On Twitter: @ramikhouri.
Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri—distributed by Agence Global