What to Think of the American Project Called “Initiative Greater Middle East”

Immediately the expression “Greater Middle East” is completely improper in the French language. Firstly, because the French terminology, more exact than English, puts the Near East to the Far East and sets Maghreb as the subject of this “initiative” in a Middle East, which is in the middle of nowhere, it makes no sense! The term “East” was designed for Europeans to encompass all that covers the great cultural air of Islam with its immense diversity of people, but it seems more appropriate to use the term “Greater East” in order to design a geographic space spanning from the Atlantic to the foothills of the Himalayas. The “initiative” has immediately stirred up the rise of shields around the Arab world. Oppositions judged provocative in Washington but which had the merit to unveil a bit more of the American plans: the Washington Post did not denounce the 10th of March “these Arab autocrats ducking in their bunkers, such as the Egyptian Hosni Moubarak and the Syrian Bachar El Assad” who had the nerve to expose the vast project of “liberalization” of the “Islamic orient because he would be ‘forced to the exterior’” and conditioned by the “regulations of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict!”
Firstly, the cancellation of the summit of the Arab League by Tunisia in February did not have as a principle reason various disagreements never to be resolved on the Palestinian question or the eventual representation of Hamas. This report last March was in reality due to profound divergences regarding the role that America pretends to play in the geo-political Arab-Muslim air, from Morocco to Pakistan—Maghreb, Machrek, Sachel, the Near East and Central Asia. President Bush wishes to enter full-force into Europe.
Secondly, the notion of “liberalization” of this immense space is nothing more than a curtain of smoke, gossip to mask the intentions of the absence of all visible content of the project. This certainly exists in the cartoons of the Pentagon, Langley and at the State Department, or even at the Department of Foreign Affairs, under different forms according to various scenarios or versions (for example with or without the strategic alliance with Shiite Islam in substitution of Sunnite Islam) but the “project” itself in its substance, its finalities, are only evidently known as single great initiatives.
However, the only questions that is posed then is: what are the real objectives of the “democratization” that the United States wishes to impose through the diplomatic constraint or through the force of arms in the Islamic East?
What goals of strategic order do they pursue under cover to provide the light of democracy to the Muslim people still submitted to the obscure forces of the reaction or of the Baas fascism? [Let us note that the Washington Post uses a terminology of Marxist inspiration as it relates to the emphasis of the tares of the regimes of the Muslim East: on the subject of the Arab League, we speak willingly of “their leading reactionaries.”] America departs therefore on a crusade for the “liberation of the Muslim woman (the Afghan women who, it should be said in passing, 3 years after the liberation of Kabul are still kept under veils,) for the universal suffrage (that Saddam Hussein put twice into practice—better than Algerian democracy—before the arrival of the American tanks from their militia and their mafia-like tendencies,) and for the “human rights,” that is to say the right to live periodically in refugee camps that the humanitarian industry has established at the outskirts of battlefields.
In so many words, in so far as empty publicity slogans and tools of propaganda serving as pretext to intoxicate western as well as eastern opinions: “We offer you Liberty and progress.” This is without saying which price this merchandise will pay without identifiable content—rather with virtual content. It is because the integration in the planetary market dominated by the economy of North American has a price and a human cost which is constantly rising. Russia, in a decade despite human potential and immense natural resources, constantly struggles to the end of an unsound social and economic abyss. The example of structural adjustments imposed upon certain third world States equally shows to which price the formatting pays to the standards of the New World Economic Order.
“Democracy” is but an empty title and an empty word without meaning in the mouths of American order givers, but also a powerful concept which through its capacity could create the illusion and paralyze through its mirages the natural defenses of societies still governed by standards that are largely of traditional norms.
In order to illustrate this purpose, we have had confirmation of the confession of American strategies of counter-terrorism such as that of Ramsey Clarke and the planners of the invasion of Iraq, or even of Jay Gardner, the first administrator of the new Mesopotamian colony, that: “the installation of democracy was only one of several goals of the operations.” Indeed nothing was foreseen outside of the required methods for an armed occupation accompanied by the taking of control of infrastructures and petroleum deposits, including the pillage of archeological museums and libraries plundered of anything relevant to the inheritance of Humanity.
Finally, it is not a true “democracy” in the eyes of the aparatchiki Americans than those who open without restriction their interior market and align themselves unconditionally on the politic of the United States. The true democrat according to dominant criticism is he who renounces the exercise of complete sovereignty and accepts to occupy the only position authorized: that of the tributary condemned to see his interior market inundated with products of the American sub-culture bought at high prices—at black prices.
Nevertheless, if today the people of Washington do not refrain from firing red bullets upon Syria and Egypt in denouncing with virulence “the nationalism and the socialism upon which these regimes are based” (but of which the American Administration is strongly accommodated in Egypt during the 23 years of the reign of Moubarak) they will have already given a good report of figures to Jordan and to Morocco particularly evident of the democratization of the Arab world! Let us add to the heart of this vanguard Bahrain, which shelters the 5th American fleet, Kuwait, advanced rear of the war against Iraq, Qatar, logistic base where methods were redeployed up to those pre-positioned in Saudi Arabia, without counting the Emirates, active in the struggle against the financers of terrorism.

With this positive discrimination of which the object are the two kingdoms policed by the Hachemites, all like the petroleum-monarchies are thus opposed to a negative discrimination against Syria and Egypt (in waiting for the measures of relation to come against Saudi Arabia,) countries held henceforth as poorly elevated at the school of the New World Order, the project of the “Greater East” being nothing more than a subset of a global design! Discrimination however completely illuminating regarding the end of the American project: if Washington today literally vomits the sovereignty of the States it is because this here makes an obstacle to their hegemonic politic which orders large agglomerates of people without unified direction (Europe?) and all sorts of mico-entities resulting from the dismemberment of State-Nations such as Yugoslavia and presently Iraq of which the dismemberment is only a question of time.
In 1999, The Yugoslavian Federation (united on the fact of baasiste Iraq and its supplier of arms) was besieged by an alliance of a principally defensive vocation, the OTAN organization, without mandate from the United Nations and the absence of any Parliamentary votes concerned, beginning with France!
Yet the Milosevic process before the International Penal Tribunal from La Haye finished by putting in evidence that which each person knew at the time: the attack of Yugoslavia was decided into order to foresee a self-declaring ethnic purification, which never took place, and an exodus of populations having been exclusively determined by the bombardments of OTAN.
Purification which has nevertheless become the harsh reality, but in an inverse sense, for the communities defeated or chastised by the arms of Right and Justice: 400,000 Albanians, Serbians, Tziganians, Jews, and Albanian Catholics fled Kosovo since the end of the offensive of the Atlantic Pact. The first on European soil since 1940 in violation of the International Right and which more is led against a sovereign State and a government several times legitimated by universal suffrage.
When it was necessary to break the Ottoman Empire, England supported and even created all parts of national Arab entities: it supported against the Sublime Gateway, since the end of the 19th century, the demands for independence of Mehmet Ali in Egypt; then between the two Wars it created all parts of the artificial entity of Kuwait City and the hachémite monarchies of Iraq and Jordan. This last remained, through the alliances and the culture, closely aligned with the United Kingdom, and remained a protectorate as Saudi Arabia was following the events of September of 2001.
But the day following the Second World War there was a changing of politics: the Arab nationalism had filled up the mission that was originally assigned; it became superfluous, even bothersome, because it could eventually constitute a threat. This was the case in Iraq when the English army broke the ephemeral national government of Rachi Ali al Kilani… It was no longer the hour of the United Nations constantly susceptible of having the world taste of nationalizing the petroleum sector like that of Mossadegh in Iran, quickly swept by a coup d’Etat.
In order to counter the expansion (in any case in order to eliminate the vigor) of this Arab nationalism which was beginning to be born and to affirm itself [compensation of the ebb of mandatory powers—France and England—vanquishers of Germany but bloodless] Great Britain invented the Arab League in order to choke indeed to dissolve the projects of edification of the sovereign States in tempting to tie them up supranational juridical lines. The treaties and the international laws essential to national law, the Arab League had since the beginning been conceived like an instrument called to restrict national emerging States.
In an analog fashion, initially the European project since Robert Schuman had no other objective: dislocate the States in sub-regions and dissolve them in the heart of a federation subdued to the control of a bureaucracy under a model (degraded) inspired by the German Landers. This was all in order to stop any autonomous politic of counter-powers such as that which drove France to the occasion of the American war against Iraq. It is so true that each time the dwarf-like European politic seems to want to equip itself with a common defense, Washington shows their fangs or that Bush wants to force entry into Turkey, in Europe, with an insupportable arrogance.
Anthony Eden is at the head of the Foreign Office which in 1941 gave the blow of dispatching the regrouping in the midst of an Arab league of state control. A federation then drafted itself with the attempt of union of Iraq and Jordan to which Syria and Palestinian would join. It was Egypt that would capsize the project, but the 22nd of March of 1945, the Arab League was still born in Alexandria with the ambition of a harmonization, even a political and economic coordination between the Member States. These are the views and thoughts similar to those which will preside over the creation of the Council of Cooperation of the Gulf and more recently to that of the Union of Arab Maghreb.
The current American project is taking back these plans on a bi-continental level in Africa and in Asia. It is no longer necessary to unite regions, but retaking the thematic of civilized surfaces of Samuel Huntington, proceeded to the political reconstruction of a vast geo-cultural ensemble, a project of which the normalization of Afghanistan and Iraq to the method of preventative wars will be the first stages.
Certain ideologies of the Islamic world will be able to adhere to the project in believing to find there their account. Those nostalgic of the Ottoman Empire will there see indeed the occasion to reconstitute the political context of an Oumma, a community of believers, put to evil by the creation of national States and the apparition of extrinsic concepts of Islam such as that of Al Watan, “the Homeland” that they judge, falsely and yet correctly, as inheritors of the colonial period. If the national ideologies, those of the Baas and of nasserism or the Sudanese Islam nationalism for example, effectively reflect a movement in idea born in Europe by Jacobinism, today through a dialectic reversal of history, it is the method of election in order to safeguard a semblance of independence and to master one’s own destiny. Certs Oumma transcends by definition the linguistic and ethno-cultural barriers, the political systems and the weight of the past. But it is to have late train than hope to reestablish a community of believers which never existed either literally or figuratively from the time of Ottoman domination. Similarly—like Khadafi has just drawn arguments in order to justify his rallying in the western camp—all Arab unions is a utopia even against nature and even the people of Maghreb and Marchrek. The political unification through the Market can obviously neither substitute nor accomplish the dream of utopia of the unification of the community of believers.