Address by The Hon Richard Armitage, President, Armitage International L.C., former US Deputy Secretary of State

 

 

 

 

Good morning excellencies, ministers, general and flag officers, ladies and gentlemen,

 

I can’t tell you what a thrill it is for me to be back in Bahrain. As I was mentioning to His Excellency the Foreign Minister, thirty years ago almost King Hamad introduced me to the Middle East and I’ve been hooked ever since. So if you don’t like what I have to say blame it on His Majesty, it’s actually his fault!

 

Now I’m sorry that the administration folks weren’t able to come. I certainly understand their reasons for staying in Washington and really trying to get their arms around not only the question of Iraq but more broadly the question of the Middle East and whither the US policy in the Middle East. So what you’ve got instead are a couple of out-of-work republicans and at least in this case a former regime element with you today.

 

As Secretary Cohen has mentioned, this election was about in large measure Iraq, and about the dissatisfaction the American people have with the way we’re handling our portion of it, notwithstanding the fact that this is going to be won or lost by Iraqis. But it was also, we have to face it, a referendum on President Bush himself. And it was also a referendum, to some smaller extent, on corruption in the US Congress. This popped up toward the end, in a large way, in the last six-eight months of the election cycle and that had an effect. But at the end of the day the Republican Party got what President Bush described as ‘a thumping’, which is pretty powerful language in the US.

 

But to some extent what was underlined, the anxiety in the American public, was the fact that I think they’re tired. Now not so much tired of war, but they’re tired of exporting something which is not normal for Americans. In our anger and fear after 9/11 we turned a very angry face to the world. We were exporting that anger and that fear; we were snarling. Rather than exporting what is a much more normal export from the United States, and that’s hope, and enthusiasm and opportunity.  I think it’s implicitly recognised in the American public now that it’s time to turn back to a time where we export things that are more traditional for the United States; step away a bit from our fear and anger and start being more open again, hospitable and enthusiastic toward embracing the world, notwithstanding the fact that Americans at best are reluctant internationalists. I mean many Americans would like to rest carefully behind their two great oceans, but they realise they’re not immune from the pushes and pulls of international society, so we will engage.

 

Now John has asked me to give a few personal views on the Middle East and I shall. I’ll start with Iraq but I just want to say that I think that at least for American audiences we’ve been a little unfair to Iraq. We’ve talked about democracy in Iraq as if it were as easy to put in place as democracy in Japan or Germany after the great war. Well it’s a little unfair to try to put that burden on our Iraqi friends. Iraq is not a homogeneous society as Japan and Germany were. And Iraq didn’t have an industrialised economy before the war; and Germany and Japan did. And Iraq didn’t have world-class bureaucrats like Germany and Japan – firemen, policemen, tax-collectors, tax-assessors; they had corrupt cronies under the Saddam Hussein regime. Iraq does not have a memory of democracy and of course Germany and Japan did – Taisho democracy and Weimar democracy in Germany. They were flawed democracies but the process and the theory and the practice of democracy was broadly understood in society, and this was not the case in Iraq.

 

Probably most importantly, the biggest lesson that we didn’t learn is that in Germany and Japan the people who took up the mantle of democracy were people who had suffered in the country during the war: The Emperor; Konrad Adenauer in Germany’s case. And we tried initially to put diaspora Iraqis, who had no political standing broadly in Iraq, into positions of power. And this delayed us in my view for at least eighteen months to getting a leg up on governance in Iraq and turning things more rapidly over to elected Iraqis. But I think in the breakout sessions today clearly we’ll look forward to hearing from our friends from Iraq and most of us will spend some time discussing it, so I’m going to talk about two other matters very briefly.

 

I’m going to talk about Lebanon. I will describe myself in this audience as a friend of Israel and as a friend of Israel I was appalled at what happened in Lebanon. I think Israel had every right to respond militarily to the kidnapping of her two soldiers but the manner in which she responded did not learn the lesson that we didn’t learn in Iraq, that it takes a soldier with a bayonet to bend an enemy to our will. And so Israel tried to respond to the kidnapping of her soldiers in an antiseptic way, primarily from the air, from long distance, and the end result was we now have a non-governmental organisation called Hizbullah, which is empowered in Lebanon right now, and as the prime minister of Lebanon said this morning, trying to foment a coup against the government. It was able to fight the Israelis for six weeks while simultaneously handing out goods and services to the people: something the government of Lebanon was either unwilling or unable to do.

 

So as I say, I’m all for the use of hard power, particularly when you’re grievously attacked, as Israel was with the kidnapping of her soldiers, but it has to be applied in a proper way, else you have outcomes that are very unsatisfactory for all of us: it’s unsatisfactory for the democratic government of Lebanon; it’s unsatisfactory I think for many of our friends in the Gulf, because we are seeing a very enervated or energised, if you will, Hizbullah. And it also of course has energised Syria and Iran as well.

 

Now I think we really need to spend some time thinking about what went on in Lebanon. It was not the birth pangs of a new Middle East, which our Secretary of State indicated; it was a further aftershock after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, some eighty years after. And if these aftershocks are going to continue I believe that we have to be willing to face them in this region for some time to come. And if we do understand that these are aftershocks I think we’ll be better able to position ourselves as a GCC more broadly in the Middle East and as the United States to handle these.

 

Finally something that has and will have a huge effect on the Middle East, but we don’t always talk about it when we have meetings in the Middle East: that is the question of Afghanistan. I was delighted when Secretary Cohen mentioned this this morning, as I would argue that in the short term Afghanistan is a much more important issue for the United States, for South Asia and for the Middle East than anything else. The question of Iraq will take some time to sort out, but if we’re not successful, the international community is not successful in Afghanistan, I believe our friends in Pakistan will have a very difficult time. What General Ehsan ul-Haq and President Pervez Musharraf are trying to bring about, enlightened moderation in Pakistan, will be very difficult if we’re not successful in Afghanistan. And if those gentlemen and their colleagues fail in this effort then it’s a whole new ball game. Not just the effect that that Pakistan would have on India, but the effect of 160 million citizens, who are not enjoying enlightened moderation, might have back in this region itself.

 

So I think that we’ve got plenty to talk about. I think the good news, at least from our point of view – and I hope some of you would think it’s good news – is that the administration in Washington is spending much needed time trying to figure out how to move forward and embrace the entire region; trying to have an all-encompassing policy. And I think that’s much to be wished for, particularly at a time when we have a relatively weak government in Israel and as the Foreign Minister said, almost no government with the Palestinians. This is the time when we ought to have a peace process; this is a time when we can be useful.

 

One time several years ago, I was visiting the Gulf and a Gulf friend who is not in attendance today, said to me ‘You know, you Americans are very interesting’, he said ‘You engage in consultations’. He said ‘Ah, we know what consultations are. You come, and you ask us our views, and you tell us your views, and then you go away and do exactly what you want’. I didn’t really disagree with him. I didn’t like hearing it, but he was saying it in good humour. But at the end of that sentence, he said ‘But do you know what? We understand that, but we’ve come to expect more rational decision-making from you’. And I’ve got a feeling that you’re going to find very good rational decision-making for the last two years of this administration. I think having sat down and tried to look at the whole Middle East you’re going to find an administration that comes out with much greater understanding that things that happen here, have an effect over here, and rebound over here. That’s been missing, it seems to me, from the US approach to the region. We’ve been treating many things as if they were one-off, and they’re not necessarily one-off.

 

So John, I thank you for the opportunity and I thank you all for the opportunity to be with you this morning.