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America Should Pick Up the Ottoman Burden

(Beirut Daily Star) - Simon Karam Simon Karam was Lebanon's ambassador to the United States. The American military presence in Iraq will last for 10 years or more, U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz recently told Congress. This may be an understatement according to Washington insiders. The truth is that for the foreseeable future the United States is the dominant power in the Middle East, a strategic development swiftly recognized after the Iraq war by the major regional actors. In Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, a few weeks ago, U.S. President Bush chaired an "Arab summit" that sanctioned the American presence in Iraq. In Iran, former President Rafsanjani recently stated that his country recognized it "now has a frontier with the United States." All those who count in the region have accepted America's new status. However, no clearly defined political order has emerged that matches America's remarkable power. For America's enemies, events in Iraq strengthen their belief that the U.S. may be heading toward what it faced in Lebanon in 1983-84, when it withdrew in blood and defeat. These states and groups believe the U.S. is especially vulnerable because of the 2004 presidential election, and think now is the time to reverse history by provoking a U.S. collapse in Iraq and a retreat from the Middle East. Two ways to achieve this are through an intensification of attacks in Iraq, and also by ensuring the failure of the road map. Despite such doomsday scenarios, Arabs do not necessarily regard the American Imperium as something bad. Against the backdrop of the general failure of the Arab order, the majority of people in the region see a Pax Americana in the Middle East as potentially beneficial, whether politically, economically, or socially. Caught between the U.S. and Islamists, Arab nationalists see that the order they established after World War I and consolidated after World War II has little chance of surviving. In the contest for the hearts and minds of the Arab world, the U.S. is far better equipped than they to provide Arab peoples with a desirable political and economic future. Democracy, pluralism, and economic partnership are valid slogans the U.S. is raising at a time when the discovery of mass graves in Iraq is exposing the hideous face of the current Arab order. Yet all this provides no answer to the conundrum of Islamic identity, central to societies where political regimes - since the assassination of Ali, the fourth caliph - have been unable to fully establish themselves without successfully passing the legitimacy test vis-a-vis Islamic law, the Sharia, both as definer of a social order and a way of life. The only alternative today is to revive the Ottoman tradition recognizing the region's different cultural identities - religious, ethnic, and regional - and integrating it into a concept of modernization that incorporates American notions of gradual democratization and open Middle Eastern markets. In achieving this, the U.S. will come to play a neo-Ottoman role in the Middle East. However, once they have taken on this burden, the Americans have a slim chance of success unless they can add an acceptable Islamic reference point to their new order.
2003-07-11 00:00:00
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