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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

A choice, please

The run-up to U.S. presidential elections is always a time of relative excitement in the Middle East. This has never been more the case – with a growing American “strategic depth” and a US population hopped up on “clash-of-civilizations” silliness – than now.

The policy changes that come in the wake of new administrations have the potential to radically affect the countries of the region. Positions change vis-à-vis economic policy and free trade agreements; military planning; foreign aid packages; and the extent – always just a matter of degree – of US support for Israel.

This time around, the geopolitical situation’s particularly charged, with an ongoing war in Iraq; a global war on what is loosely called “terrorism”; the imminent Gaza “withdrawal” plan of Israeli PM Ariel Sharon; Washingtonian initiatives aimed at the political and economic reform of the so-called “Greater” – or, more recently, “Wider” – Middle East; and talk of intervention in Sudan.
US troops, meanwhile, seem to be deployed everywhere.

Fortunately, though, the US is a democracy. This means, happily, that the American people will be given a choice between differing positions on all of these issues; between the harsh “to-the-victor-go-the-spoils” worldview of the Neocons, and the – hopefully – softer, more multilateral approach of a Democratic incumbent.

But while one could point to a number of crucial differences between the two candidates’ stances on divisive domestic issues, such as taxation and gay marriage, partisan divergence on the big, scary foreign policy issues, upon closer examination, appears less stark.

On Iraq, for example, Democratic nominee John Kerry’s position has remained indistinguishable from that of the current president’s. In the April 13 edition of the Washington Post, Kerry wrote that the American military would stay in Iraq until it could be replaced with an Iraqi armed force of some kind (although he added, as if to prove his multilateralist credentials, that NATO help would be “preferable”). “No matter who is elected president in November,” he wrote, “we will persevere in that mission” to build a stable, democratic Iraq. He has even promised to leave troops in-country for his entire first term, if necessary, and has been no end of vague about their eventual departure.
As for the Palestine-Israel conflict, the treacherous reef on which all recent US Middle East policy has been dashed, the two sides’ positions look, well, kinda similar.

Kerry has, like his rival, promised not to negotiate with long-isolated Palestinian president Yasser Arafat, while repeatedly expressing support for Israel’s right to “self-defense” by launching preemptive strikes against “terrorist” Palestinian factions. What’s more, Kerry, who previously spoke against Israel’s separation barrier in a speech at the Arab-American Institute, has modified his position, now opining that the wall represents another “legitimate act of self-defense.”
Finally, Kerry supports two recently articulated pillars of the Bush administration that essentially quash the Palestinian Right of Return and any notion of an eventual reversion to pre-1967 borders, in light of “demographic realities.”

Everyone’s free to have their own opinion, but at least give the people a choice on the issues, which affect all of us, not least US expats in the Middle East.

While American democratizors rail about the corrupt one-party states of the region, they’d be better served by taking a closer look at their own electoral system, based – in theory, anyway – on notions of diversity and choice.

Adam Morrow

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