The United Nations is trying to get Gulf countries to channel more foreign aid into global multilateral institutions and away from Arab/Islamic-specific bilateral projects.

John Holmes’ the UN’s Emergency Relief Co-Ordinator has been having talks in the Gulf and he seems optimistic, according to the Financial Times today, that the Gulf States are moving in this direction, although the process will take time.

The Gulf Arab Decision

This is very significant because decisions by Gulf countries, singly or together, will dictate whether they are going to remain with traditional models of giving (essentially the zakat writ large where aid almost exclusively assists the Arab and Muslim community).

The alternative model being proposed by the UN is that the Gulf Arabs become part of a more global liberal vision of the West. The probable outcome is some token hedging of bets to get the West off their back to the degree that Gulf Arabs feel that they need or do not need to do this.

There is a political dimension to this, of course. This is not just about charity but what charity means in the world.

For example, some funds have gone to Islamic educational investments that have reinforced conservative traditionalism. If not directly contributing to insurgency, such investment is seen by many in the West as maintaining cultural conditions from which radicalized elements emerge.

This really irritates hard-line Westerners and especially secularists associated with a pro-Israel stance.

This group, in particular, has developed increasing influence within the formal ‘international community’ on the back of a neo-conservative US Administration and is keen to press its current but waning advantage as its sponsor, the US Presidency, changes ownership.

The Moral Dimension and 'Spin'

The ‘moral’ dimension (basically the PR spin) is that the profits of high energy should be redirected to cover the costs of high food prices. 

This suggests to the public that there is some simple implicit exchange between Arab luck or greed and the serious problems of the non-Arab developing world.

In fact, the issue is far more complex than this. Many Arab and Muslim countries are in the front line of the food crisis, notably Egypt, Pakistan, Bangla Desh and Indonesia, while Gulf countries themselves are suffering from serious and potentially destabilizing food inflation.

The issue here is whether the Western liberal ideology of universal provision and of implicit world governance is better than traditional charity given within a culture zone whose customs are based on revelation.

A traditionalist might easily turn around to, say, the Philippines and say, “Of course, we can help you if you join us in sharing the Prophet’s revelation”.

Of course, most significant Gulf Arabs are highly modern in their own thinking but they have to consider cultural expectations in their community and Holmes' persistent lobbying works against hundreds of years of ingrained habit.

Traditionalism Versus Modernism

Muslims are not alone in looking after their own – families, tribes, Jews, Catholics, trades unions and nationalists all adopt similar strategies.

It will be a momentous political and cultural development if the Gulf Arab community switches tack and diverts substantial funds (rather than token bribes) to the universalist, multilateral and essentially secular-liberal model of giving.

Before we assume that the modern way is better than the old way (which it is in dealing with the super-excluded without direct access to a community with resources), we should note the disadvantages of the secular liberal approach.

It is bureaucratic, it creates an expensive middle class of administrators, ‘experts’ and fund-raisers and it becomes subject to political manipulation by the largest universalist power (currently the UN but soon the EU).

More important politically, it abandons the prime directive of national governance, social cohesion, by shifting funds from the lower middling sort or poorest in a rich area to the poorest in far-away places.

This can happen within nations, of course. The growing sink-pits at the heart of Southern English towns contrast with the over-development, against market common sense, of degraded Northern Towns that just happen to be more likely to be New Labour voters.

This redistribution from communities that are integral (including nations) to regions away from the source of funds is ‘progressive’ but it leaves behind three legacies.

First, an emotionalism that debases political debate because only through emotion can a constituency be created to legitimise transfers. We have called this Clooneyism elsewhere.

Second, there are less funds for local and national community infrastructures, creating ‘conservative’ resentments.

And, thirdly, a prejudice against democracy develops amongst international progressives because it is influence over elites rather than a democratic mandate that permits the redistribution to take place at all.

The Ambiguity of the United Nations

But the UN has other problems and we have referred to these before.

The UN and the entire panoply of multilateral aid has, over the last two decades, increasingly become seen – in our opinion quite rightly – as highly ambiguous in its claims to universalism.

The system is redistributive and progressive (broadly a good thing, subject to the long term anti-democratic political effects on the giving nations) but it is also an instrument of the West.

The ‘international community’ (as it likes to style itself) is not all nations but only the wealthier nations who created the UN at a time of collapsing empires.

Its legitimacy is extremely dodgy by any sound philosophical principle and derives, in practice and ultimately, from a de facto right of conquest as do all rights to make law and regulation that are not revolutionary. 

However, instead of moderating its claims through democratic revolution, UN claims are moderated through bureaucratic negotiation in order that the fiction that the UN is universal (based originally on aspirational texts rather than facts on the ground) can move into the realm of fact.

Just as the ‘international community’ operates in defiance of national democratic politics in the cause of world peace and social justice, so those same institutions of world peace and social justice get twisted into meeting the demands of the primary originators and backers in the West.

This is not to minimise the contribution of, say, China or Russia - or developing countries - but the mismatch of interests and the source of primary funding always skew the UN to the softer end of the Western interest. Bureaucrats, NGOs and multinationals bend in the same direction.

This is not just perception, it is reality. Every non-Western potential donor from the Gulf to China knows that it would have to contribute an awful lot to get even a smidgeon of the global influence exercised by the US and EU, let alone Canada and Japan.

The Palestinian Case Study

An example of the real life politics of multilateral donation can be found in the case of Palestine.

For years, Gulf Arab (notably Saudi but also other GCC) funds flowed into relief for the Palestinians, not always to the levels required, but based on some sense of ‘brotherhood’.

These funds still flow into Palestine but they are now routed through UN bodies for political reasons – to deal with Western and Israeli claims that the funds were used for liberation purposes and not just relief.

To old-style traditionalists, liberation was a form of welfare relief but the West has decided otherwise after 9/11 and conservative leaderships in the Arab World shared their assessment that they may have been nurturing a revolutionary viper.

So, the UN became the convenient tool for getting funds away from the liberatory model and into a pure welfare model where, to be blunt, for all the claims of neutrality, it is largely used to buttress, in effect, one faction and one model for Palestine rather than another.

Whether this is the right or wrong policy is not the point – the ‘international community’ thinks it is and ‘insurgents’ will think it is not - but the general thrust is the point.

Universalism in aid and the multilateral system have not yet reached the point where they actually represent the global population in any accountable way but represent only one vision, detached from direct democratic control by several removes, of what is good for the global population as a whole.

The Vision

This vision is one in which charity is directed at specific political crisis points (like Palestine) or points of absolute deprivation or disease (like famine or plague).

It still sees the world in terms of the infection of prosperous and stable areas by weak or damaged areas – hence the obsession with ‘failed states’ – and charity for the most destitute is offered along lines that would be familiar to Victorian reformers like Charles Dickens.

Unfortunately, like Victorian reformers and certainly like Dickens’ wonderful satiric character, Mrs Jellaby, it often leaves problems untouched in the homelands so that a universalism that seems progressive abroad also seems to leave collapsing social cohesion at home.

If the Gulf Arabs do start supplying funds in significant quantities to multilateral institutions, we may take it as a significant political act.

It will strengthen the liberal progressive system dominated by the ‘West’ but also, ultimately, raise questions about these States' traditionalist legitimacy.

The next step will have to be that these States must modernize rapidly and undermine domestic conservatism through rapid economic growth and policies of social inclusion or remain very repressive until they 'crack' from the strain.

Domestic conservative thinking is certainly not going to like the loss of charitable preference for its own culture - while radicals are not going to like any more explicit and 'transparent' denial of liberation as a component of welfare.

A Nagging Doubt

We leave with one nagging oddity in John Holmes' briefing to the Financial Times, published on 30 April. It was noted that local Gulf rulers will give funds privately and quietly.

Holmes then said that this was “not enough to meet the demands and requirements of transparency needed these days”. Apart from the tradition in Muslim giving that you do not shout about what you do, this statement says a great deal about Western priorities.

Surely, we would think, if the funds are coming through to benefit the poor (and keep bureaucrats in jobs) that should be enough. The only question should be, how do get more out of the Gulf Arabs. But, no, the givers have to be ‘transparent’.

Is this because certain parties fear that Arab giving is ‘political’ and need reassurance or is it because the international community does not just want the funds to help the poor?

Is it that conservative Sunni Arab political endorsement of the multilateral system as the best one for global poverty relief, better than faith-based or nationalist solutions, is now necessary in the war against traditionalist insurgencies?

You sense the Gulf Arab rulers being quietly drawn into taking sides in a war about which their instincts are to remain more neutral - opposing the methods of traditionalist extremists but not wanting to abandon traditional values as much as many Westerrners would like.

Holmes adds that, working through the UN means that “it is very clear where the money is going” (yes, through a bureaucracy as well as to the recipients) and that this is a “fundamental” benefit.

This seems to give the game away, doesn’t it? The West does not like flows of capital it cannot see and touch because cash is king in politics as everywhere else in life.

This is really very close to PR blackmail: if you want a good image and you do not want sniping that this or that bit of cash has landed in the hands of a terrorist supplied to order by a Western intelligence service, then you will give us the cash and we will spend it wisely on strengthening the system that we wish you to be part of.

This is not charity, this is high politics.

www.tppr.co.uk

P R E S S R E L E A S E

Eurocom Worldwide PR:
Strong increase in global network activity

Eurocom Worldwide marks a year of record growth, as new member agencies join in four markets

April 15 2008

Eurocom Worldwide, the Global PR Network, has announced another year of significant growth in PR projects across the network. In the last year, the number of joint activities among network members increased by over 50%.

Operating as an independent platform for shared market and client activities, Eurocom Worldwide is a network of highly experienced, independently owned communications firms in 64 key locations around the world. The network has been operational since April 2002. Since then, the network has recorded year-on-year growth, both in levels of activity and numbers of international projects across all continents.

Network Director Mads Christensen explained: “Increasingly, companies are looking to promote their activities to a multi-lingual and multi-cultural audience, whilst retaining overall control of both the messages and the programme. Eurocom Worldwide offers unique access to highly committed and experienced international PR resources. Clients are able to reach a global audience through a single and mostly local contact. This operational model has demonstrated its strength year after year, leading to a growth of over 50% in 2007, compared to the previous 12 months.”

Mr. Christensen added: “An increasing number of companies appreciate how member agencies co-operate with a high level of integration and integrity, delivering measurable PR results. Moreover, proven reliability and excellence help to grow the network’s global reach.”

New Member Agencies

Growth was also evident at the network’s recent annual conference, where new member agencies in a number of markets were welcomed:

• Poland: Imago PR – A well established mid-size agency with offices in Katowice and Warszaw, Imago PR conduct media and communications programmes for clients in a number of industries, including technology, real estate, retail and public utilities.
• Greece : ValueCom – a PR agency formed by experienced communications professionals, with particular strength in the technology and fashion markets.
• Finland : Comteam – From its offices in Helsinki, Comteam is an established provider of a range of communications disciplines to Finnish and international companies across a wide range of industries.
• Spain : Ariadne – an agency which was founded in Madrid in 1995 where it has established a leading position in the PR market, with clients across a wide range of industries including technology, manufacturing, entertainment and public government.

Like all existing members, the newly joined agencies have committed to adhere to the Eurocom Worldwide Service Level Standards, which ensure reliability and operational consistency across the network.

Mads Christensen commented: “Companies looking to enhance their international profile, will find that our member companies are able to deliver results second to none, anywhere in the world.”

About Eurocom Worldwide

Eurocom Worldwide is a global alliance of independent, privately owned communications agencies offering unrivalled expertise in international communications campaigns executed by local people. Eurocom Worldwide has 29 member agencies comprising over 1,400 communications specialists and consultants in 64 national capitals and centres of commerce around the globe. For more information, visit www.eurocompr.com

[TPPR subsidiary, Pendry White, is a member of Eurocom Worldwide.  For more information, contact Roger White, Managing Director of Pendry White: +44 (0) 1892 506923 or at enquiries@pendrywhite.com ]

www.pendrywhite.com

General David Petraeus has now been chosen to head US Centcom, This oversees military operations across the Middle East and North East Africa.

Not only does he now take care of Iraq but also Afghanistan and Somalia. This suggests a new integrated ‘boots on the ground’ approach to insurgencies.

The Primacy of Asymmetric War on the Periphery

The ‘war on terror’ (really a war on a traditionalist insurgency against the West) is now to be fought according to a ‘doctrine’. Petraeus can now deploy troops and resources in each theatre according to need (assuming he is given adequate resources).

The development also suggests that the US has left the containment of Iran to the diplomats and is concentrating its military effort on buttressing allies who may be weakened by inflation and internal dissent.

From this perspective, the ‘buttressing’ operation runs from Somalia to Yemen, through the Gulf to Iraq and Jordan - and through Pakistan and Afghanistan (possibly to Central Asia). Africa is a separate command.

There is another political aspect to the appointment. A longstanding conflict exists between those resentful of the direction of resources into Iraq at the expense of the GWoT [Global War on Terror] and those concerned primarily with Iran, Iraq, the Gulf and the Peace Process.

This has been the subject of squabbles between Pentagon and the State Department and also reflects ideological differences over strategies for serving with the American national interest.

Is the American interest primarily the maintenance of control over natural resources and sea lines or is it about maintaining and strengthening Western culture?

The arrival of Petraeus now permits a counter-insurgent specialist to square the circle.

His new role makes the implicit political statement that dealing with the Mahdi Army and Hamas is part of the same process as dealing with the Taliban and the Somali Islamists – and that counter-insurgency is also a matter of securing sea lines against pirates.

Them & Us

This message will go down well in Washington, possibly across America, because it simplifies the struggle to one of ‘us’ (the West – really the US) and ‘them’ (anti-Western ‘barbarians’ of all sorts).

It also re-directs attention further from Iran as alleged inter-state threat to Iran as supporter of insurgent and traditionalist resistance which may, in itself, have some interesting implications.

As sanctions fail and the nuclear issue resists resolution, a sustained proxy war between the US and Iran will continue, even though most of the ‘enemy’ in the ‘outer area’ (from Somalia to Central Asia) is wholly unconnected to Iran.

We need to consider whether differing theses about what is best for America are being synthesized here - or whether, in practice, this is going to result in a dangerous over-simplification of complex issues.

Presidential rhetoric has a tendency to encourage over-simplification for domestic political reasons – the labeling, for example, of all resistance as Islamo-Fascist as if Guenon and Evola influenced any and all anti-Western sentiment. The rest of the world grits its teeth on such occasions.

However, a reasonable simplification of the current state of affairs would be that there is

• an inner zone of Syrian-Iranian-backed resistance movements against the West and Israel and
• an outer Sunni-nationalist insurgent resistance to military occupations (whether by NATO or Ethiopia) which have no or very minimal Syrian-Iranian involvement.

The probability is that Petraeus will recognize this difference and will seek to fund and develop counter-insurgency methods of the Awakening type in both the Horn of Africa and the West Asian theatres.

This will leave the Syrian-Iranian nexus to the diplomats and the CIA, with, outside Iraq, US Centcom assisting only on direct request.

However we look at it, except in the extremely unlikely event that ‘President Obama’ decides to withdraw from the fight for cost reasons, the war between the US and the traditionalist and nationalist insurgencies is going to remain draining and costly - and go on for some time.

The Central Core of the Problem

Meanwhile, the conduct of the twin ‘war for the defence of Israel’ and ‘war for the defence of access to energy and markets’ in the central zone remains as messy as ever.

The story of the Israeli strike on Syria last September took a new twist with senior US officials now claiming that the site was a nuclear facility being built with North Korean assistance.

The lack of information to date has damaged CIA/Congressional relations and we need to explore why one wing of the American system seems so reluctant to communicate with the other.

It seems that the State Department had been highly nervous of creating the conditions for increased tension between Israel and Syria (perhaps indicating that it fears the rhetoric that comes from the Zionist and Congressional lobbies at such times).

News today seems to confirm that the first signs of rapprochement between Israel and Syria are under way through Turkish mediation although few believe that anuthing significant will happen until a new US President is installed.

There is also a struggle between State Department realists and White House neo-conservatives over a deal with North Korea in which Cheney appears to be mobilising Congressional opinion against a dialogue with a rogue state that he dislikes intensely.

So the State Department was equally nervous of frightening away North Korea from the slowly developing ‘Libyan option’ that would reintegrate it with the ‘international community’.

Release of the data about the alleged nuclear reactor now is a carefully calibrated attempt to manage two rogue state dialogues on two sides of the world in which a peace party is engaged in open political competition with its own hawks.

Again, we see a fascinating tension between the populist and realist wings of American thinking on world affairs.

The increasingly emotional commitment to the defence of Israel and the prosecution of the War on Terror operate against the more measured diplomatic strategy of detaching rogue states from each other through classic ‘sphere of influence’ diplomacy.

It seems impossible for some in Congress to comprehend this sometimes but there really is a world beyond Israel, Iraq, Al-Qaeda and, indeed, the so-called 'rogue states'.

The paranoid style in American politics is now in danger of being driven by a Congressional populism which is rapidly displacing the Presidency as the most dangerous element in the American Constitution as far world peace and economic stability are concerned.

North Korea is of vital concern to Japanese and so Pacific Rim security and ideological resistance to dealing with this peculiar nation is not helpful.

There is a complex nexus of negotiation involving Japanese engagement in the War on Terror elsewhere in Asia in return for the American security umbrella and US-Chinese dialogue, almost certainly of a tortuous nature, all to deal with this dangerous piece on the chess board with a mind and a will of its own.

Congress can send some very unhelpful signals at such times.

The Nuclear Issue

Whatever the intentions of Baathists or Pasdarans, neither Iran nor Syria is yet provenly wishing to do more than develop civil nuclear power for economic development reasons.

The alleged nuclear reactor is as likely to be for academic research and civil nuclear purposes as for nuclear weapons development. It all comes down to trust and fear in making judgements about what anyone thinks the reactor (assuming it existed) actually was for.

The British, the Gulf States and Egypt can all develop new and significant civil nuclear power capabilities – indeed, the French are rushing to ‘sell’ their undoubted expertise to enable them to do so – but these countries are not objects of suspicion. How fair is this? Well, as with Syria and Iran it does depend where you sit.

Similarly, the West is privileged in being allowed to own a nuclear weapons capability, but it is presumption to believe that the West does not act covertly or in ways that work against peace. If moral conduct was a precondition for owning nuclear weaponry, then the West would have failed a long time ago.

It actively and covertly assisted in arming its allies at the two edges of the Middle East (Israel and Pakistan) in order to create a containment operation that may have been defensive but was also based on the possibility of mass extinction.

We have already commented on Hilary Clinton's own populist outburst in Pennsylvania but we have to be clear what she was saying - she was expressing a preparedness to vapourise thousands of ordinary Iranian men, women and children in order to win the vote of a few rednecks. Truly scary in terms of moral compass.

The assumption that the West is ‘good’ (i.e. does not engage in subversion and war) and the rest is ‘bad’ (is seeking to expand territorially through force) but this is a dodgy assumption to say the least.

The West has already undertaken its expansion and a far better interpretation of the situation is that the West has been seeking to hold on to influence and territory that it seized through aggression at a time of maximum technological superiority.

Why we refuse to accept that we were engaged in a global land grab for a long time and that others may not be well pleased is a text book case of what psychologists call ‘denial’.

The aim of Western policy is thus always to contain ‘resistance’ to that original land grab which is now presented as the normal state of affairs. There is one good argument for such a policy - economic self interest. Morality does not come into it.

The Need to Contain

The first move in maintaining power is to suborn local elites into support for the fact of the land grab (the ‘slice of the action’ opportunity) and, if this fails, to contain resistance, first through diplomacy and then through deterrence.

The current problem for the US is that its informal empire is under threat in multiple ways in a world in which state counter-terror is severely limited in what it can do because the global media introduces the destabilising influence of emotion and morality.

It has to deal with internal elite resistance (Syria-Iran), internal street resistance (the insurgencies) and economic competition from the East and, even potentially, from Eurasia.

The destruction of the clerical theocratic regime in Iran (not of Iran per se, of course) is a primary objective because it is a State, not an insurgency, that has expanded its influence slowly and then with quickening pace. It now threatens to develop, in the very long term:

• as a countervailing minor power bloc to the West that could theoretically extend from Caracas to Khartoum and from Damascus to Pyong-Yang;
• as a cultural model based on traditionalism rather than offering modernization through liberal market democracy;
• as a training ground for asymmetric warfare and for ethnic and nationalist insurgency that could be made applicable anywhere in the world, not excluding deep inside the West itself one day;
• as an economic model in which Russian, Chinese or other rising powers or other agents can re-direct resources into their own growing industrial bases and offer consumer markets to resister-producers.

As political, cultural or economic bloc standing against Western hegemony and as alternative cultural model, Iran has displaced China as bête noire of American intellectuals of the right. 

It is only China’s conduct in Africa, Tibet and Burma that keeps American intellectuals of the left from placing it up there at the top alongside Saudi Arabia.

But this is all ‘could’ not ‘will’.

In fact, Iran may never reach such levels of threat if only because it is really not economically strong enough to be more than a regional actor and is constrained by other neighbours, not excluding Russia.

The real reason there is a panic about Iran is regional and it comes down to fears about what it might do to Israel. Israel, always Israel!

Back to Israel

Handling this crisis of imperial retreat involves deep policy divisions within the West (though no more than such policy divisions inside, say, Russia, China or Iran). Unfortunately, in the US, these policy divisions are a very public matter.

The realist approach of the professional diplomats is constantly being second-guessed and undermined by the populism and ideology of America’s elected representatives.

Mamy elected representatives are susceptible to the prejudices of the boondocks but more dangerously to the influence of special interest groups with funding and access. The role of the Israeli Lobby is well documented but it is not the only one.

The Israeli Lobby should not always be confused with what Israel wants so much as what many diaspora Jews think Israel wants or even what Israel should want if it listened to the diaspora.

This Lobby constantly privileges the security concerns of Israel over other factors – the integration of the rogue elements into the global community, the management of economic competition with China and inter-state co-operation on dealing with insurgency.

Israel is a problem because not only is it an artificial yet fully grown and non-removable implantation on Middle Eastern soil, a symbol of ‘imperialism’ and ‘colonialism’, but it creates a reason for national-populists to hold on to power.

The bombing of the Syrian nuclear plant is typical. It was an act of war yet both the Syrians and the US declined to comment (indeed official Israel limited its information). The bombing was almost a private arrangement between powers.

Israel said to Syria through direct action that it would not tolerate ‘Axis’ co-operation on nuclear issues, even if for allegedly peaceful purposes.

The US, unhappily, accepted that this was a ‘reasonable’ position for Israel to take simply because of the immense cost to the tiny country of one of the ‘Axis’ being able to lobby fissile material in its direction. Syria made a note of its own weakness.

In fact, the current risk to Israel from a direct assault by the ‘Axis’ is limited to the point of nullity.

Israel’s problem remains insurgent anarchy sponsored by the Axis but the Axis itself is not going to attack Israel because it does not need Hilary Clinton to tell them that the US would operate a genocidal policy of revenge if it did.

All this political performance art is, in fact, about deterring Syrian-Iranian support for proxy action by Hezbollah and others when and if Israel feels it has to deal with what it sees as almost an internal order problem - the Hamas-led anarchy in Gaza.

US Diplomats Try To Steer A Steady Path

US diplomats have developed a strategy of containment that may not mean victory in the short term but it clears a space for an eventual settlement in the national interest.

Sanctions have failed with Iran, public opinion in the West can see no cause for pre-emptive strike and the US has had to fall back on deterrence (the Israeli strike in this context sends a useful proxy message). Containment is the only active strategy left.

This strategy has not turned the tide on the region-wide resistance to the West but it is has slowed down the process of resistance considerably.

Creating an alliance of convenience with Sunni conservatives also enables the transfer of resources to counter-insurgent elements (like the Awakening in Iraq) who resist the resistors.

The Americans have intensified the Sunni-Shia divide in ways that they may rue later. They have also failed yet to create much of a counter-resistance outside the half-puppet states of Abbas and Karzai and the Iraqi Sunni operations against Al-Qaeda.

And yet the model has worked once (it seems) in Iraq. Petraeus could reasonably consider importing it into Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Baluchistan if required – and so start to roll insurgency back at the periphery.

The truth is that we have an expensive and dangerous stalemate at the centre of things and only the periphery offers the option of GWoT turn-around in the short to medium term.

At the centre itself, the diplomats simply want to contain Iran until exhaustion and its need to gain the benefits that the West might bring it allows the Axis to come to terms, possibly as a bloc, possibly as the generations replace each other.

Diplomats may silently be thinking of a Nixon in China scenario in which a President can go to Tehran and end what will be forty years (by then) of conflict as if nothing had happened.

Given China’s role in the world today and the lack of compromise it has been required to make, this may be quite an attractive dream to some in the Iranian Foreign Ministry as well.

Emotionalism in American Politics

And perhaps this is where American Congress and populism comes in.

Instead of everything being seen through the eyes of the American national interest – which is really about energy and jobs at home and the preservation of a central sphere of influence based on deals with dynasts and illiberal regimes – American idealism and the adoption of Israel as de facto US sovereign territory have both conspired to make a realist solution to regional problems more difficult.

This is not to say that Israel’s security is not an American national interest but there is a world of difference between treating it like Turkey (the NATO outpost in the Middle East) or Pakistan (the US-military wedge against Russian expansion) as an allied nation covered by security guarantees and the latitude granted it in practice.

Until the uncomfortable Turkish incursion into Iraqi Kurdistan, Israel is the only ally who seems permitted to take forward military action in ways that could seriously destabilize its neighbours.

Congressional support for Israel gives it a freedom for independent action that may be positively dangerous to core American interests such as ‘containment’ and ‘roll-back’.

Emotional idealism in American politics also means a cod-progressivism being exported willy-nilly. The attempt to insert small town liberal values into an authoritarian and traditionalist world is making the lives of diplomats and military men far more difficult than they need be.

The allies of America in containing revolutionary traditionalism are conservative authoritarian traditionalists!

Recent polling showed that many regional Muslims shared Western values but hated America because it was hypocritical.

The American dilemma is that realist imperial management of the region in the American economic interest is a-moral by its very nature – it simply requires that order be maintained by friends. Yet Americans seem to want to believe that they are 'good people'.

Unfortunately, both Muslim aspirations and Congressional ideology conspire to show up American hypocrisy, made worse by Presidential rhetoric and those half-baked reforms that are made.

Congress, and progressive allies like the UK, press for ever more liberal reform which then alienates the revolutionary traditionalists even further.

Facts on the ground demand that dynasts like those in the Gulf are treated as allies and this then alienates natural liberal Muslim allies. Let us be blunt – most American allies in the region are unreformed autocracies. Live with it! Or get out!

American idealist attacks on traditionalist culture simply cut the ground from under domestic liberal feet. They remove the opportunities for compromise - such as the emergence of a specifically Islamist Democracy like that of the AKP or support for indigenous secular nationalists.

The funds allocated for ‘subversion’ through liberal intellectuals merely make these intellectuals look treacherous. Those who are arrested are left swinging in the wind. President Bush has been able to do nothing for Ayman Nour and yet Egypt is an ‘ally’.

Internal Contradictions

Executive realism and American national populism are working against each other.

Nobody believes that America is the ‘shining beacon’, the ‘city on the hill’ because the practice underpinning the maintenance of the American national interest in the region works against it - as it did throughout the Cold War.

On the other hand, American realist strategies are constantly being undermined by the need to take on extraneous factors – the defence of Israel as independent Fifty-First State, the human rights agenda, the extension of democracy, all driven by domestic opinion.

The rest of the world is mystified by these inconsistencies but only because it has still not come to terms with the fact that America really does not yet have a clear understanding internally of the costs of maintaining its economic interest.

Its population makes the category error, which comes from its ideological roots in Christian Protestantism, that the good is the real in politics, that 'should' can have equal status to 'is' once you move outside your sovereign territory.

America is engaged in a massive operation to defend a global economic informal empire that it took over in the fire sale that followed the collapse of the European and Japanese formal empires in the wake of 1945.

Because its role was liberatory – actually a matter of expanding into a vacuum - it cannot decide whether to be truly moral or truly imperial.

By trying to be moral and maintain imperial influence as resistance grows, it is ending up in a morass of distrust, national populist frustration at home and eternal asymmetric war overseas.

Foreign policy has become a matter of such emotional engagement (from Tibet through to Darfur) that the professionals concerned with the national interest are going to be constantly fighting at home for funds and understanding.

We have to be pessimistic - insurgents on one front and Clooneyism on the other. Which is worse for America?

Small wars and confrontations are going to be the stuff of international affairs for a long time, with the political problems at home made worse by the evident if temporary problems in the American economy over the next few years.

The only thing we can predict with certainty is that the professionals are going to get extremely irritated with Allies who make things worse by doing things behind their back – so, Israel, don’t push your luck.

www.tppr.co.uk