Trump sets out Mideast vision

‘This is a battle between good and evil’

Mohamad Bazzi is a journalism professor at New York University and former Middle East bureau chief at Newsday. He is writing a book on the proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The opinions expressed are his own.

I— Editor

By Mohamad Bazzi

n his speech before dozens of Muslim leaders who had gathered in Saudi Arabia on Sunday, President Donald Trump toned down his harsh rhetoric against Islam and urged the leaders to “drive out” Islamic extremists from their societies.

Trump even distinguished between the majority of the world’s 1.8 billion Muslims, and the Islamic militants who wreak havoc, at one point noting that most of their victims have been Muslim.

“This is not a battle between different faiths, different sects or different civilizations,” he said in the Saudi capital. “This is a battle between barbaric criminals who seek to obliterate human life and decent people, all in the name of religion, people that want to protect life and want to protect their religion. This is a battle between good and evil.” groups — failed to address one of the root causes of extremism: the very monarchs, autocrats and strongmen who assembled to hear Trump.

For decades, America pursued the path that Trump seems to favor in the Middle East — stability and security cooperation, at the expense of democracy. And that approach failed.

Previous US presidents, including Bush and Barack Obama, had urged Arab and Muslim leaders to adopt political reforms and respect human rights.

But on Sunday, Trump changed course and pledged a new approach: he would no longer chide authoritarian US allies for failing to advance democracy and safeguard political rights in their societies.

Security

“Our partnerships will advance security through stability, not through radical disruption,” he said. “And, wherever possible, we will seek gradual reforms — not sudden intervention.”

Trump declared that defeating extremist ideology and terrorism “transcends every other consideration.” That’s the kind of rhetoric the authoritarian leaders in the room longed to hear from the Obama administration, which urged its Arab allies to respect the desires of their people.

Obama inherited a decades-old US policy of supporting autocratic regimes — like Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and several other Arab monarchies in the Arabian Gulf — in exchange for political stability, security cooperation and access to oil.

Virtually all governments in the Middle East rely on vast security agencies to keep them in power, using the US-led “war on terror” as a cover to silence any opposition. These regimes put on a veneer of stability for the West, but their political systems are corrupt and calcified.

Obama took up the lofty oratory of

opened fire. (AFP)

Israel, India sign deal:

Israel announced Sunday it had reached a deal worth $630 million to provide India’s navy democracy promotion in a much-celebrated speech to the Muslim world he delivered in June 2009. “America does not presume to know what is best for everyone,” Obama said at Cairo University. He expressed his belief that all people yearn for certain things, including freedom of speech, confidence in the rule of law, an independent judiciary and a transparent government.

Reform

He was right: If the United States has any hope of nurturing political reform in the Arab world, it must support an impartial judiciary, civil society movements and a free press — the institutions that help democracy thrive. But just months after his speech, the Obama administration became remarkably quiet on democracy promotion and was reluctant to criticize US allies like Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

Obama also fell into the trap of favoring stability, partly because he was trying to withdraw US troops from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was a political realist who became reluctant to disrupt American alliances with the region’s authoritarian rulers.

For a short time, it seemed that the era of rule by strongmen in the Middle East was coming to an end.

After the popular Arab uprisings in late 2010 and early 2011, the strongmen of the Arab world began to teeter and fall, one by one.

A new generation of revolutionaries had fostered a revitalized sense of Arab identity united around demands for broad political and social rights.

As the protests that began in Tunisia spread to Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria, each uprising was inspired by the others. The protesters no longer accepted a social contract in which they effectively made peace with government repression, arbitrary laws, state-run media and censorship, and single-party rule, in exchange for security and stability.(RTRS)

with missile defence systems, following a record weapons sale between the two countries last month.

The new contract will see state-owned Israel Aerospace Industries supply LRSAM air and missile defence systems for four Indian naval ships, a statement from the company said.

IAI said the contract will be carried out with India’s Bharat Electronics Limited, which will be the project’s main contractor.

“The new contract adds to other deals signed in the last decade by IAI with India’s defence forces, reinforcing IAI’s global leadership position in air and missile defence systems,” IAI president and CEO Joseph Weiss said in a statement. (AFP)

Turkey seeks 144 people:

Turkish police said on Tuesday they are seeking 144 people including police, soldiers and prosecutors, over suspected links to the network of a US-based cleric blamed by Ankara for orchestrating last year’s failed coup.

In raids across 42 provinces, 35 of the 144 wanted people have already been detained, the police said in a statement, adding that the suspects were thought to be using ByLock, an encrypted messaging app the government says was used by preacher Fethullah Gulen’s followers.

Turkey accuses Gulen, who has lived in self-imposed exile for almost 20 years, of running a decades-long campaign to overthrow the state through the infiltration of Turkish institutions, particularly the military, police and judiciary. (RTRS)