Alan George:

Spreading freedom’s blessings is the calling of our time’, declared President Bush in a nationwide radio address earlier last month. ‘And when freedom and democracy take root in the Middle East, America and the world will be safer and more peaceful’.

According to senior Bush administration officials, ‘freedom and democracy’ are already well on the way to ‘taking root’ in the region. Recent weeks have seen a cacophony of statements citing developments in the Lebanon, elections in Palestine, Iraq and Saudi Arabia and a decision that Egypt’s next presidential election will have more than one candidate as evidence that a ‘Prague Spring’ is sweeping the region - all, it is said, because of Washington’s assertive policies.

The reality is more prosaic. Each of these developments is rooted not in US policies but in specific local circumstances that have either little or nothing to do with the Bush administration’s dreams and rhetoric. The torrent of self-serving claims flowing from neo-conservative circles in Washington should not blind us to the regional realities’, said Professor George Joffe of Cambridge University’s Centre for International Studies. ‘If Western policy in the coming months is to be based on these largely unjustified assertions, then it could face even greater failure in the future’.

January’s presidential elections in Palestine were prompted not by calls for democracy from Washington but by the simple fact of Arafat’s death. The late Palestinian leader, it should be recalled, took office after elections in 1996 that were acclaimed as free and fair by international election monitors. In Iraq, the Shia leader Ayatollah Ali Sistani backed the elections. Iraq’s Shia community, dominating the south, opposes the US-British occupation but had refrained from armed resistance in the hope that elections might provide them with the dominant position in Iraqi politics that their majority status would merit. By rebuffing Sistani, the US would have prompted the Shias to resort to violence, with incalculable consequences. Following the murder in February of Leba-non’s former prime minister, Rafiq Hariri, daily demonstrations were staged in Beirut demanding the withdrawal of Syrian forces. The pro-Syrian government of Omar Karami resigned and Syria agreed to a phased pull-out. But a large question mark was raised over Washington’s stance on the ‘Cedar revolution’ after half a million supporters of the pro-Syrian, Islamic fundamentalist Hizbollah took to the streets of the Lebanese capital chanting ‘Death to America’. This didn’t quite chime with Bush’s vision of ‘people power’ in Lebanon.

Syria’s presence in Lebanon is anyway only loosely linked to the issue of democracy. The Syrian-engineered Taif Accord of 1989, which was the framework for the post-Lebanese civil war settlement and which formalised Syria’s role in Lebanon, involved a revamping of Leb-anon’s confessionally-based political system to give the country’s Muslims a fairer share of parliamentary power, and relatively free and fair elections have been staged since the end of the civil war. Arguably, Lebanon is more, not less, democratic as a result of Syria’s involvement, and certainly it is more stable than before.

While doubtless a step forward for democracy, the Saudi municipal polls are being staged mainly in a bid to defuse mounting internal tensions, manifested at their most extreme in Islamist terrorism, arising from the total absence of legitimate channels for political activity in the kingdom, not because of any urging from America. In Egypt, meanwhile, President Mubarak’s decision to permit other candidates to stand in the presidential election next September has been denounced by oppositionists as merely a ruse to assure the presidency either for Mubarak or his son, Gamal, who is being groomed for the succession. What would really transform Egypt’s democratic credentials would be a lifting of the emergency laws that have been in place for 25 years.

Behind the flawed notion that the Middle East is undergoing a democratic awakening as the result of Washington’s assertive policies and open-ended support for an Israel that continues to oppress the Palestinians, meanwhile, lies a larger — and deeply ironic — reality.

Throughout the region, and mainly as a reaction to those same policies, anti-Western Islamism is the dominant political trend. Iraq’s Shias are far from being solidly fundamentalist, but January’s elections gave hardliners closely allied with neighbouring Iran (a key member of Bush’s ‘axis of evil’) a secure foothold in the new Iraqi parliament. In March’s first round of the Saudi municipal elections, the fundamentalists were the biggest winners. In Palestine, the radical Islamist Hamas has announced that it will take part in parliamentary elections in July and, judging by its performance in recent municipal elections, will emerge as by far the strongest challenger to the secular Fatah movement headed by Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Recent developments in Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt may not have had very much to do with US. But to the extent that Washington is encouraging democratic ideals in the region, it is in fact encouraging movements deeply inimical to its own and wider Western interests. If ‘freedom and democracy’ really do sweep the Mideast’, as President Bush desires, the outcome could be emergence of a series of democratically-elected, but not necessarily democratic, fundamentalist Islamic regimes. —The Guardian