The Middle East is more secure than a year ago because of positive developments both in Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict, one of the world’s top think tanks said on Tuesday in its annual survey of global security.
But the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) said Iraq remained an inspiration for Islamic militants, helping Al Qaeda to recruit and continue to pose a threat to countries around the world.
It pointed to progress in the Arab-Israeli conflict, the promise of multi-party elections in Egypt and popular uprisings against Syria in Lebanon as examples of US policy successes. “On balance, US policy in 2004-2005 appeared fairly effective in emboldening regional actors in the Middle East and Gulf to rally against rogue states and implement gentle political reforms,” the IISS said. “But the inspirational effect of the Iraq intervention on transnational Islamist terrorism remained the proverbial elephant in the living room,” it said.
“From Al Qaeda’s point of view, Bush’s Iraq policies have arguably produced a confluence of propitious circumstances: a strategically bogged down America, hated by much of the Islamic world and regarded warily even by its allies.” The report said the reopening of dialogue between Palestinians and Israelis after the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat marked a “tipping point” in the peace process.
“Stark changes have been heralded not only by Arafat’s death, but by (Israeli Prime Minister Ariel) Sharon’s conversion and Bush’s commitment to use American influence to achieve a final status accord,” it said. But success depended also on militant groups like Hamas that have rejected the peace process.
US policies: Washington’s policies of promoting democracy in Iraq and elsewhere look “increasingly effective”, and even the threat from terrorism abated slightly during 2004, the International Institute for Strategic Studies said in its report. The London-based think-tank noted however that the situation in Iraq was also creating a recruitment effect for terrorist groups, an aspect which remained “the proverbial elephant in the living room” of US foreign policy.
The report said that the improvement in the overall strategic climate was helped by factors such as the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, but it added that US President George W Bush’s foreign policies also seemed to be bearing fruit.
“Even though the Bush policy was bold, controversial and sometimes divisive, his aggressive global agenda of promoting freedom, and democracy appeared increasingly effective,” the IISS said in its 384-page “Strategic Survey 2004-05”. Counter-terrorism efforts over the period had also seen an overall net gain, the report argued, despite the seemingly “counterproductive” aspects of some of the United States’s self-declared “war on terror”.
The US-led occupation of Iraq focused the worries of many Muslims worldwide and made them “more easily seduced by Osama bin Laden’s arguments”, the think-tank said, referring to the Al Qaeda leader.
Additionally, the massive US military commitment to Iraq had drained resources from other areas more closely associated with terrorism, such as Afghanistan.
“From Al Qaeda’s point of view, Bush’s Iraq policies have arguably produced a confluence of propitious circumstances: a strategically bogged-down America hated by much of the Islamic world and regarded warily even by its allies,” the IISS said. Nonetheless, Al Qaeda and the global Islamic terrorist movement remained “physically and ideologically in flux”. Al Qaeda’s expulsion from Afghanistan had lost the group its main base, while the positive use of diplomatic “soft power” by the United States and its allies to combat terrorists was growing.
The robustness of US efforts to establish democracy in Iraq, coupled with renewed hopes for Middle East peace following Arafat’s death in November 2004, “allowed for a more optimistic counter-terrorism outlook than did circumstances at the end of 2003”, the IISS concluded. This is in stark contrast to the think-tank’s warning in its previous Strategic Survey a year ago that the Madrid train bombings of March 2004 appeared to indicate that Al Qaeda “had fully reconstituted”.
