The Arab Spring at the UN General Assembly

Clockwise, Obama, Morsi, Hollande & Ahmadinejad

Obama trots, Ahmadinejad takes leave, Morsi tries

By Zuhair Qusaibati, writing today for pan-Arab al-Hayat

The Arab Spring at the UN General Assembly for a second year…

U.S. President Barack Obama addresses world leaders like reading an election statement before jogging back to his campaign.

For President Mohamed Morsi, a star on U.S. screens for a few days, the UN General Assembly is an occasion to reassure the world, especially Americans, that Egypt’s Muslim Brothers are not the siblings of either Somalia’s ash-Shabab, who are threatening to kill all elected members of parliament, or of the Jihadists described in a New York subway advertisement as “savages” who cannot be compared to “civilized man.”

The trip by Morsi to New York being his first foray into public relations with world leaders, and the rush by Obama to return to his reelection campaign, salted away the embarrassment of a first meeting between the superpower leader and the head of an Arab heavyweight country that is neither an enemy nor an ally of the United States.

In his first appearance on the global stage, the Egyptian president insisted on notifying Americans that he was no more a Muslim Brotherhood leader but the head of a non-sectarian and non-military state.

Morsi did not miss the opportunity of responding to Obama’s message complaining of protests around the American Embassy in Cairo by reminding the Democratic Administration that Egypt would no more rubber-stamp U.S. foreign policy.

The second star -- Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad -- is not running to another term in office after his brouhaha at home killed all his chances. He thus had no qualms about ignoring the advice of his host, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who seemingly reminded him that the General Assembly is not Tehran University and that bombastic slogans gain no currency in an audience of over 100 world statesmen.

While Morsi justifiably took his chances with the Americans to at least decouple the question of U.S. economic aid from Egypt’s pursuit of its traditional Arab policies, Ahmadinejad’s eclipse was evident. Only Israel exploited his rhetoric (“the destruction of Israel”) to blackmail the Obama Administration.

Obama did not ignore Iran’s nuclear ambitions despite weeklong protests around U.S. embassies over the anti-Islam film. He did not dwell much on the film controversy, which was on everyone’s mind at the General Assembly.

But Obama called on addressing the fallouts of the film controversy on relations between the West and the Arab world. He did so circuitously, putting the onus of finding a remedy on the region, in spite of his salute to the Arab Spring.

In fact, the superpower leader pledged the Arab Spring nothing – not even easing its passageway on the Syria track.

Likewise, his undertaking to abort Iran’s nuclear bomb ambitions echoed his attempts to win the U.S. Jewish vote after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ran out of efforts to drive a wedge between the Democratic Administration and American Jewish voters.

Obama hurried back to his reelection campaign after making creation of an “independent Palestine” conditional on recognizing Israel as a Jewish state and Israel agreeing to an independent Palestine. Can anyone think of a more generous promise to win hearts in the Jewish lobby that succeeded in erasing all traces of Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo?

For his part, French President Francois Hollande, who stood out in expressing his sympathy with Syrians in their slaughterhouse, is aware – like all other Western leaders – that his tears won’t save a child or a woman in Aleppo, Homs, Hama and Damascus so long as Vladimir Putin is able to raise his finger for a UN Security Council veto that would leave Syrians to their fate.

Even in the UN General Assembly, Palestine seemed lukewarm and beleaguered Syria looked destined for a long agony.

Since its inception, the United Nations was never the ideal place for agreements or for keeping world peace, despite all the noble and fair phraseology in the UN Charter.

If justice were an earthly human goal endorsed by democracies, the chase for democracy should start in the Security Council, where veto tyranny rules.  

One finger raised in the Security Council can perpetuate massacres, whether the veto expresses a veiled convergence of interests absolving other members of the big powers’ club from protecting civilians or maintaining a measure that is out of date 60 years after the demise of the League of Nations.

Westerners urging democratic reform in the stumbling Orient would do better to fix the rudder steering world affairs.

Even in the UN General Assembly, Palestine seems lukewarm and Syria looks like following suit. Children crying over other children corpses are mere images.

“Egypt is now teetering and Syria splintering”

Tariq ibn Ziyad illustration from Wikipedia 

I chose today to paraphrase this think piece on the Arab Spring, written in Arabic for the Saudi daily Asharq Alawsat. The author is Lebanese political analyst Iyad Abu-Chacra, who holds a Bachelors’ degree in Political Science from the American University of Beirut and a Masters from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London:

These are frustrating hours for all those in the Arab world who built high hopes on the spirit of revolution that gripped the Tunisian street and ousted President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011.

Today, a year and a half since our so-called “Arab Spring,” we find ourselves in the position of a deceived husband -- or should I say the husband who deceived himself.

The courage of ageing and young Tunisian activists took the country by surprise. Ben Ali fled as soon as his military and security services refused to challenge citizens who had rediscovered their voice and their will.

Egypt’s case was somewhat different. Gambits to absorb the shock, which now appear to have been calculated by the army and Washington, saw Hosni Mubarak leave office as a person. But power remained in the hands of the effective “ruling party” – i.e. the army and a “security state” it has been nurturing since 1952.

Elsewhere, under conditions of a growing fragmentation of Yemen’s landscape, a recipe now known as the “Yemeni solution” was concocted. It was a prescription for a limbless body politic, where tribal and personal interests, extremist sectarian propensities and regional and international political calculations overlapped. As a result, intended “central state authority” effectively lost control over large areas of the country.

As we focus on Syria, U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, God bless her, delights in telling us – after 15 months of conflicting signals and wanting measures – the case is “complex.”

Anyone hoping to see the end of the Syrian people’s nightmare is entitled to wonder: What is the bona-fide cause of the hesitation by Washington, which was invariably eager to name the Syrian regime a sponsor of terror? Hasn’t the State Department been blacklisting Syria year after year? Haven’t successive administrations described Syria a “rogue state”? Didn’t Congress pass the “Syria Accountability Act” by a 398-4 vote in October 2004?

Remember that President Bashar al-Assad assumed office 11 years ago on the death of his father, who ruled the country for 30 years. So Washington is surely aware of the Assad regime’s nature.

For Washington and the international community to continue parroting the mantra “the Syria situation is complex” can only mean one of two things. Either they are truly incapable of confronting Moscow’s neo-tsars and Beijing’s neo-emperors, or Washington and its Western allies are in cahoots with Moscow, Beijing, Iran and Israel to parcel out influence in the Arab region.

American democracy being built on, among other things, the peaceful transfer of power, the current administration’s impotence vis-à-vis Moscow and Beijing need not be permanent. The Republicans will sooner or later replace the Democrats and change U.S. foreign policy.

What we see meantime is the Arab Spring inching in the direction of the worst-case scenario. The region today is choosing between two alternatives:

(1) “Political Islam,” which snatched, and is trying to monopolize, the fruits of the Arab Spring, and

(2) “The security state” as in Egypt, which “went with the flow” before giving the Islamists sufficient rope to hang themselves by their lack of political acumen.

The outlook for Egypt is very gloomy, irrespective of the presidential ballot outcome. Egyptian citizens who thought they had carried out a revolution were given a terrible choice between a Mubarak regime candidate and an Islamist carrying a religious agenda. This is when Egypt has a 10-million-strong Christian community, a disbanded national assembly and popular distrust of the judiciary, party leaders and politics generally.

Any hope of an imminent dawning of a “civil state” in Egypt is swiftly fading – especially and justifiably because of discontent among Copts, who had to vote for the Mubarak regime candidate to ward off the specter of the Muslim Brotherhood.

In Syria, where UN monitors decided to stop “monitoring” for self-protection purposes, the catastrophe has turned tragicomic.

The raison d'être for the United Nations Supervision Mission in Syria (UNSMIS) was to ensure Damascus’ compliance with Kofi Annan’s six-point initiative – chiefly, a ceasefire, the release of detainees and negotiations on the transfer of power. Syria approved the initiative simply to bypass and abort it.

This is exactly what happened. By this writing, the number of Syrians killed since the UNSMIS deployment had exceeded 3,000.

At the same time, there has been a quantum leap in massacres committed by the regime against it own people – massacres that have now taken a sectarian cleansing character in such places as the rural areas of Homs, Aleppo, Latakia and Idlib governorates.

What transpires from the Houla and Qubair massacres is that the regime is spearheading Iran’s sectarian design in the region. The design is based on this premise: “What is yours is to be shared between us and what is mine is mine alone.”

Having failed to regain control of every inch of the Syrian territory, the regime is now bracing to carve out its own sectarian enclave at the price of confessional bigotry, massacres and counter-massacres, displacements and population exchanges.

Time then to recall the battle cry of Tariq ibn Ziyad, the warrior who led the Islamic conquest of Spain in 711. When Tariq was informed of the approach of the enemy, he rose in the midst of his men and, after having glorified the Almighty, he spoke to his soldiers thus:

“Oh my warriors, whither would you flee? Behind you is the sea, before you, the enemy. You have left now only the hope of your courage and your constancy. Remember that in this country you are more unfortunate than the orphan seated at the table of the avaricious master. Your enemy is before you, protected by an innumerable army; he has men in abundance, but you, as your only aid, have your own swords, and, as your only chance for life, such chance as you can snatch from the hands of your enemy. If the absolute want to which you are reduced is prolonged ever so little, if you delay to seize immediate success, your good fortune will vanish, and your enemies, whom your very presence has filled with fear, will take courage. Put far from you the disgrace from which you flee in dreams, and attack this monarch who has left his strongly fortified city to meet you...”