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"I think it's preposterous. From the beginning this is a plan that cannot be achieved," said Maher. |
CAIRO — US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's vision of a new Middle East she expects to emerge from the Israel-Hizbullah war is nothing but chimera and will backfire at the end of the day, former Arab diplomats and experts have agreed.
"I think it's preposterous. From the beginning this is a plan that cannot be achieved," Egypt's ex-foreign minister Ahmed Maher told Reuters.
"In fact what the United States wants to have is a tame Middle East," insisted Maher, who served for years as ambassador to Washington.
"That's what they call a new Middle East."
Rice, leading the first high-level US diplomatic mission since Israel unleashed its military juggernaut against Lebanon on July 12, reiterated on Tuesday, July 25, her new Middle East cliché.
"It is time for a new Middle East," she told a joint press conference with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.
"It is time to say to those that don’t want a different kind of Middle East that we will prevail. They will not."
On Friday, July 21, Washington's top diplomat rejected international calls for an immediate ceasefire, saying the world is witnessing "the birth pangs of a new Middle East" in the current fighting between Israel and Hizbullah.
More than 400 people in Lebanon, the overwhelming majority are civilians, have been killed in unrelenting and shambolic Israeli strikes since July 12.
The hard-won infrastructure of the tiny Arab country has been left in ruins, with Israel knocking out Beirut international airport, bombing ports, destroying bridges, setting power stations set ablaze and reducing houses to rubble.
Retreat
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"What kind of Middle East will be born from this destruction?" Said wondered.
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Emad Gad, an expert in the Arab-Israeli conflict at the Cairo-based Al-Ahram Center for Strategic Studies think tank, said he took the new Middle East to be a retreat from the democratic Middle East Washington said it wanted.
"That's because the (old plan) brought Hamas in Palestine, brought a large percentage for the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt," he said.
"The peoples in the Arab world now are more radical and more hostile to US policies than the regimes."
Legislative elections have brought the Palestinian resistance group Hamas to the helm of power and saw the Muslim Brotherhood and Hizbullah make major political gains.
For the past five years, the Bush administration has been championing a "democracy" drive worldwide and a global "war on terror."
It launched the Greater Middle East Initiative – which was renamed later to the Broader Middle East and North Africa, provoking an outcry from many governments in the targeted countries where anti-American feelings were and still running high over the US-led occupation of Iraq and Washington's bias towards Israel.
A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll showed in April that nearly half of Americans believed their government should mind its own business internationally.
A December Gallup poll, conducted in 10 nations that comprise 80 percent of the world's Muslim population, found that an overwhelming majority of Muslims strongly doubted the United States was trying to establish democracy in the Middle East.
Oil, protecting Israel and dominating the region were seen as US goals, according to the survey.
Backfire
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"I don't see where the benefit is for the United States, or even to Israel," said Youssef.
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Mohamed El-Sayed Said, deputy director of the Ahram Centre for Strategic and Political Studies, said a project born from such horrible destruction in Lebanon is doomed to failure.
"What kind of a Middle East will be born from this destruction? The only new thing we can get is new determination on the part of Hizbullah or the people of Lebanon to resist Israel and cause it as much pain as possible," said the expert who spent years working in the US.
Hesham Youssef, the director of Arab League Secretary General Amr Moussa's office, said the US policy on the Lebanese crisis was incoherent.
"I don't see where the benefit is for the United States, or even to Israel, because Israel has succeeded in creating a whole generation, if not more, of people who would continue to hate Israel much more than they can imagine," he told Reuters.
Said ruled out any possibility of Hizbullah going along with the US proposals of disarmament, unconditional release of the two Israeli soldiers and the deployment of the Lebanese army or an international buffer force along the border with Israel.
"Why should they accept such a silly thing? They don't have internal pressure inside Lebanon to accept this ... They still have an enormous fighting capability."
Top Lebanese officials, including Prime Minister Foad Siniora and Parliament Speaker Nabih Berri, have rebuffed the package Rice offered during her Beirut visit.
Pundits further believe that the Bush administration saw Lebanon conflict through its blurred "war on terror" mirror, ignoring any nationalist goals of Hizbullah, which could re-emerge strengthened by the crisis.
"Israel's current onslaught has unwittingly provided Hizbullah with the opportunity to demonstrate both that Israel remains Lebanon's gravest enemy, and that Hizbullah is the only force capable of confronting it," American University in Beirut professor Amal Saad-Ghorayeb wrote in a column published in the Washington Post on Sunday, July 23.
"Hizbullah is to serve as an inspiration, as an exemplar of bold action against Israel and, by extension, against Arab regimes that have allied themselves with the United States and Israel."
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