Why the West cannot win in the Middle East

The Arab world is in turmoil with despotic government attacking rebels from Yemen in the east to Libya in the west.

This follows the forced exit of long-standing military dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, both without any direct involvement by western powers.

Democracy and civil rights are elusive values in this part of the world, yet the western media insist on treating public reactions there as much the same as in their own countries.

This produces a highly distorted view of what's happening and always casts the deepest aspersions on the motives of the US, in particular, and Europe in general.

It leads to some odd interpretations and swings in how these breaking stories are presented, if not the pictures of rioting and shooting (these are generic wherever they happen) but certainly the explanations.

Since the first outbreak in Libya of resistance to Colonel Gaddafi’s regime, we were informed of the domino effect – that he was a goner like Ben Ali and Mubarak before him.

But when he was prepared to use his military to put down the rebellion, the pressure went on for the so-called "world community" to kick him out, with force if necessary.

The UN duly came in behind, with a reluctant Russia and China playing along. But as soon as the no-fly zone and arms embargo was imposed on Libya, suddenly the slant moved to the oft-heard criticism of Israel when it retaliates against Palestinian or Lebanese rockets.

The US-led forces knocked Libya’s air force and other defences without taking a single hit. This was portrayed as “disproportionate” and soon, once again, the Americans were playing the role of aggressors against helpless Arab civilians. Go figure.

What makes Arabs rebel
The role of the Arab League in the Libyan conflict should come as no surprise to anyone who follows events in the Middle East.

This 22-member grouping (now 21 since Libya was expelled) has more resemblance to the United Nations than to any organisation that is made up of mainly of democracies. Another comparison would be the African equivalent, which Gaddafi also once tried to run.

The Arab League called for the “no-fly” over Libya when it became obvious Gaddafi was intent on using African mercenaries to put down the rebellion and neighbouring Arab states were over-run with refugees.

But the league quickly changed its tune when US rockets and bombers showed what a real war is all about.

Once again, instead of seeing themselves depicted as freedom fighters against aggression, Arabs witnessed the humiliation of a hopelessly unprepared and ill-equipped Gaddafi.

It was all too much the league, whose spokesman quickly backtracked and trotted out the western media’s oft-repeated view (expressed in this report from the Washington Post), that “the leaders and people of the Middle East traditionally have risen up in emotional protest at the first sign of Western intervention.”

This, of course, is exactly what anti-western groups want you to hear: “This opens the way for foreign interventions in every Arab country. It brings us back to the days of occupation, colonisation and partition.” declared Hasan Nasrallah, Hezbollah’s leader, quoted in that same report.

Raising the double standard
It is hard to trust any view of what is likely to happen in the Middle East, as the Arab world is never held to account for its double standards and the western media condone this by putting the blame back on their own countries.

Israel’s prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, has a closer perspective and in a rare appearance (at least for NZ viewers) on CNN’s Piers Morgan show reveals why an Arab rebellion was inevitable:

“Because the spread of information technology creates an inevitable conflict … in many ways the 20th century passed by a lot of the Arab world and the Muslim world, and then in comes the information technology of the 21st century and is telling all these people what they missed out on. And this creates the turbulence. Will it end quickly? I doubt it.”

He goes on to explain why the outcome is unknown, though there is one great downside:

“You had a revolution five years ago in Lebanon. A million Lebanese, that's equivalent to 20 million Egyptians, walked in the streets of Beirut chanting for freedom, chanting for secular reformist, liberal Lebanese state.

“Five years later, Lebanon is controlled by Hezbollah which is controlled by Iran. That's what we don't want to see. We don't want to see the stark medievalism that represses women, that crushes the rights of people, that rolls us back a millennium, that fosters violence and does everything that we abhor that it would take over.

“And I think these are the two poles. One is real democratic change and the other is a descent to militant Islamism that squashes all freedoms and threatens the peace of everyone.”

How proportional representation cheats voters
The pending referendum on MMP has been largely ignored of late and little seems to be changing that. From the other side of the world comes a contribution from Finland, which has a 200-seat Parliament, eight political parties and no hope of voters being able to choose a government.

Eero Iloniemi is managing editor of the Finnish weekly newspaper, Nykypäivä makes his case at Spiked Online and is writing for a British audience that is faced with the prospect of first-past-the-post being dumped.

First, he rubbishes the notion that PR “would most likely allow for the greatest variety of political outlooks and differences to be expressed and create an opportunity for minority opinions to gain a hearing,” as a Spiked contributor had earlier written.

If only this were so, Iloniemi writes.

"In multiparty proportional democracies, all parties campaign on their platforms, but none get to implement them. As the government is forged by compromise, parties constantly trade campaign issues for cabinet posts…

"These musical-chair governments soon become indistinguishable from each other. No wonder one senior Finnish politician has already proposed that the next government be an all-inclusive rainbow coalition. Thus multiparty proportional representation can evolve into a single-party government – which sounds very similar to a single-party state."

He concludes:

“FPTP is indeed unfair to political parties, but it was designed to serve voters, not parties. In Finland, a country with one tenth the population of the UK, dozens of candidates resort to TV advertising. As for door-to-door canvassing, it doesn’t exist. The problem with electoral reform is that it is always the pet project of politicos and seldom that of voters. When issues no longer matter, process becomes all.”