Freedom, yes, but only if U.S. strategic goals are satisfied

Commentary by Chris Toensing
Saturday, March 05, 2005

President George W. Bush likes to associate his administration's goals with the will of the Almighty. Witness the stirring coda of the 2005 State of the Union address: "The road of Providence is uneven and unpredictable - yet we know where it leads: It leads to freedom." As in many previous speeches, Bush lingered on the way stations of this divinely lit pathway in the "broader Middle East," the region stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan. <snip>

Bush predicted that "the victory of freedom in Iraq" would "inspire democratic reformers from Damascus to Tehran" - the capitals of Syria and Iran. In those states that are "against us," he expects that democratic change will come from the long-suffering populations, perhaps with a helpful nudge from Washington.

Saudi Arabia, on the other hand, "can demonstrate its leadership in the region by expanding the role of its people in determining their future. And the great and proud nation of Egypt, which showed the way toward peace in the Middle East, can now show the way toward democracy in the Middle East." In these allied undemocratic states, Bush trusts the regimes to lead their benighted subjects on the road to redemption, just as previous presidents have always done, and always in vain.

Exhibit A is the actual behavior of the Saudi and Egyptian regimes. A few examples: Saudi courts recently sentenced 15 people to flogging because they had demonstrated in favor of an elected government to replace the absolute rule of the monarchy. In 2004, the royal family's police arrested 13 other citizens who had merely circulated a petition calling for a constitutional monarchy with a Parliament. In Egypt, while President Hosni Mubarak called last Saturday for an open presidential election, just days before Bush addressed Congress, security forces detained three activists who were distributing leaflets at a book fair calling upon the president to relinquish his 24-year grip on power. Before Mubarak took his decision on elections, a prominent opposition politician was jailed, apparently for backtracking on a promise to vote in favor of the president in a referendum on the presidency. He remains behind bars. That fact, and the fact that the outlawed but popular Muslim Brotherhood will not be allowed to field a candidate, make Mubarak's opening appear staged for external consumption. <snip>

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