After Cairo, deliver development, not devastation

By Terry Lacey

(June 09, Jakarta, Sri Lanka Guardian) We wanted him elected, we wish him well in the Middle East and in improving relations with the world´s Muslims. But chosing Cairo and its proximity to Palestine forced President Obama into defensive positions from which he must recover.

First President Obama is not to be blamed if both the Israelis and Palestinians have moved against the idea of a twin state, at least for now, and as originally envisaged. Something somewhat different may start to emerge soon, starting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu´s policy speech next week, while Hamas leader Khaled Meshal in Damascus also offers ways forward.

These change in political climate requires changes in US and Western policy and not to enforce upon Israelis or Palestinians what they don’t want. There will be no lasting peace between Israel and Palestine without legitimacy and popular support.

You cannot simply blot out a democratically elected government in Myanmar or in Palestine. The legacy from the Bush administration that urged a Palestinian election and then rejected its results, is illegitimate. Legitimacy must be restored through elections and Palestinian reconciliation, if possible. Legitimacy cannot be restored by the cynical repression of Hamas.

Second, the Israeli and Western obsession with Iran and the supposed black and white Middle East division between conservatives (Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan) and radicals (Iran, Syria) is not immutable. Qatar which led the Doha Summit and talked to Hamas, and Saudi Arabia which led the other camp, reportedly agreed in the Cairo talks on Gaza reconstruction to fund Gaza directly and not via the Palestinian Authority. It simply is not true that these lines of differences are rigid.

The US Statue of Liberty was donated to the US by the historical equivalent of Iran in the epoch of the American Revolution. Iran has more democracy than many Middle Eastern allies of America. The US and the West should be consistent with principle on this point, and not with prejudice. But clerics should give up their restraints on democracy. Islam is undermined when it has too close an association with too much politics.

The majority of the worlds Muslims, 80 percent of them, live outside the Arab world and most of them already support multi-party democracy, economic liberalism and progress, (especially in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India and Nigeria). The US must not throw away the global Muslim baby, that seeks modernization and a rapprochement with America, with the bath-water of the Middle East dispute.

Since the foundation of Islam, Muslim social and political culture has struggled with a parallelogram of economic, social and political forces from the conflict of interests arising between progressive urban populations, rural neo-feudalism and conservative separatist hill-tribes, all exacerbated by external interventions.

In a globalized world, getting steadily smaller, these conflicts have to be resolved by a battle against poverty, ignorance and under-development and for Muslim modernization, backed by sound development planning and massive finance.

This battle cannot be won by Chinooks and artillery. Western armies that seek to win it militarily will be defeated. This needs the Muslim equivalent of the post-1945 Marshall Plan which rebuilt Europe, but this time to modernize Muslim societies. Local people must take the primary responsibility in this, and will welcome Western support for their own development models. But not to turn the Muslim world into a Western-backed military battlefield.

There is no need to persuade global Muslim public opinion of what needs to be done.

But what is feared is yet one more historical diversion into international political chess games and that the obsessions of Israel will dictate US foreign policy, in the Middle East and the Muslim world. This would be absurd and diminish America.

President Obama must not let the fading exigencies of failed Bush policies on the Middle East, which must be changed, dictate the terms of a brighter new future in which to ally with Muslim modernization globally, now that he has helped to create the chance of a new beginning.

(Terry Lacey is a development economist who writes from Jakarta on modernization in the Muslim world, investment and trade relations with the EU and Islamic banking.)

-Sri Lanka Guardian